And a second one, motionless within the nearest dome. Jack moved the sled into position and damped down the hovers, letting it settle near the air lock. He opened it, waited for the cycle, and damn near tripped over the bulk of K’rok, facedown on the dome flooring and tied up like an interstellar delivery. The Milot wiggled vigorously.
Jack took off his helmet and breathed deeply. The air in the mini-dome was the best he’d breathed in months, even with the rankness of the Milot’s body oils. K’rok’s helmet lay a few feet away.
The Milot glared at him and thumped his boots on the flooring. Jack smiled. “I think you’re better off that way. Who got you? Stash?”
The Milot’s eyes flickered, slightly reddish. The jowls tightened stubbornly.
Jack shrugged. “All right. Have it your way. He’s out there somewhere, planting charges even now. He’s been hired to blow this place sky-high.”
K’rok huffed.
Jack bent down and pulled the gag off. “Better?”
“Yes. The warrior does not fight honorably.”
“I’d say that. But what about you and me? If I untie you, is it going to be another battle? I’ve got business here and I don’t want you in my way. Stash is mine, and you’re going to have to ally with me if you want to save this dig.”
The Milot considered him. “We were allied once before, you and I.”
“Yeah, and as far as my memory goes, that didn’t work out too well.” Jack turned to go. “Maybe I’ll do this on my own.”
“Wait!” K’rok fairly bounced inside his ropes. “I will help you.”
“Swear on it?”
“By the destiny of my people,” the Milot said.
Jack smiled gently. He knew that was as good an oath as he was going to get, but he also knew that the Milot would stand by it. He bent down to loosen the bindings. He almost had K’rok loose when a tremendous boom shook the entire dome. Jack tossed K’rok’s helmet at him as the Milot kicked free. The mini-dome’s clouded interior hid the outside and Jack ducked through the air lock and waited impatiently for the cycle to let him outside.
They hit the ground and rolled as a second blast sent shock waves over the horizon. He looked up to see the Thrakian warship screaming out of orbit, a second ship at its heels.
K’rok tapped him on the shoulder as the view of the space battle drew Jack in and he tried to ID the second vehicle. The Milot pointed, and Jack saw the silhouetted form of Stash as he paced along a bluff and he recognized the stop, drill, and implant routine. The Thraks breezed down, front lasers firing. Stash dove for cover behind a steeplelike boulder, and Jack could hear the crackle of a com line not on his frequency but close enough to cause interference. The second warship came whistling in on the tail of the Thraks, firing back.
Jack looked back up. The warships played tag on the far horizon. Stash looked up and then stood, either unnerved or—
Supported by the second ship. The ID of that ship nagged at Jack. He almost knew it…
The Milot made a sound that Jack recognized from his months of duty in the Sand Wars. In spite of himself, he grinned at the curse.
K’rok began to crawl forward, stalking the terminator. He ducked down as sleds veered suddenly into view, crawling with deepsuits, and Jack did not recognize them as either friend or foe. The sleds hovered to a stop by the far dome.
A man got off. “Hello,” he broadcast toward Stash, unaware of his danger.
Jack recognized Colin’s sainted tones. He vaulted to his feet, yelling, “Colin, get down! That man’s a killer!”
Bogie pumped him. He bounded across the landscape and barreled into the deepsuit, pushing Colin out of harm’s way as Stash aimed and fired.
The lightweight pocket laser beam merely grazed the battle armor. Jack righted himself and faced Stash across the excavation, his heart pounding and ears roaring, and a deadly calm pervading all his decisions.
“What is this, Jack?”
Over the lines, he could hear Stash tuning in as he answered the Walker, “His employers don’t intend to let you view the site, Colin. Or to let you live to leave Lasertown.”
“Now, mate,” Stash soothed. “You might be givin’ the saint here a prejudicial viewpoint of me. Besides, you’re a bit too late. I’ve planted all the charges I need. But I can always make a deal.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Jack warned. His long-range tracking screen flashed a gentle warning. The warships were heading back. He had no time for words.
He jumped Stash. The man in the deepsuit went rolling, bounded back to his feet, and responded with a lashing kick that rocked the battle armor back. Jack knew then that he’d gravely underestimated Stash all the time he’d spent with him. Under the cocky, abrasive New Aussie veneer lay a quiet and efficient killer.
Battle armor or not, Stash was not afraid of him. Before Jack could gather himself, the terminator had lashed out again, and the Flexalinks groaned under the assault. Jack swung, ready to fire, then saw that the overspray would set off the demolitions. He hesitated, and Stash lunged at his ankles.
With every spin and blow, Jack had to give way. The pounding on the armor reverberated throughout his barely healed and wracked frame. The suit ground low on power as the two circled each other, and he heard Stash’s low laugh.
“Got to think of yourself as invincible, eh, mate.”
“Maybe. How do you think of yourself?”
“Good at what I do.” Stash lashed out. Jack responded with a short burst that singed the side of the deepsuit helmet, but its effect was more visual than harmful. The weight of the armor began to hang on him.
Stash laughed. “Get me and you’re still done for, all of you. The timers are set. Who’s going to be defusing them? You’re running out of time. My friends are headed back this way. I’ve got what they want and they’re not likely to leave me here alone.”
Colin interjected, “Give up and come back with us. Is this worth your life?”
“It’s not going to cost me my life, mate. You, maybe.” And with that, Stash dodged and fired, passing Jack by.
***
But Jack had leaped and the white armor collided with the black deepsuit, sending the beam awry as Jack grasped Stash’s wrist and squeezed, pinching the weapon out. The man let out a cry of anguish, going to his knees. Blood gushed from the punctured deepsuit which was no match for the strength of Jack’s gauntlet.
The warships came screaming over, the rocks vibrating with their speed and massive power. Locked together, they tumbled and fell, then the Thrakian ship broke away, firing, and the second ship exploded into fiery scrap above them in a deep velvet sky.
Colin let out an involuntary gasp. Jack looked downward at Stash, who lay writhing in the ash as both his air and his blood bled away. He aimed and lasered off the end of the wound, sealing flesh and suit. Stash fainted dead away.
Colin got to his feet, and his aides unfroze from the sleds. “The Thraks, at least, want this site. We have work to do and not much time to do it in. I want those mines defused.”
The aides scattered to do his bidding.
K’rok’s massive bulk ranged up beside Jack. The Milot touched face plates with Stash and then removed something from the outside mining pouch. It was a small, gray leather square. Jack started to say something, then saw the Thrakian ship wheel over the horizon.
Over his com lines, he heard another frequency crackle once again. He homed in on it. He did not understand the Thrakian language, but he knew a firing sequence and coords when he heard it.
“They’re coming in! Get those sleds moving and get out of here.”
“What?”
Jack picked up Colin and threw him bodily on the sled. He grabbed at the Milot. “Come on, K’rok. This is going to blow one way or another.”
“But-but,” stammered the Walker. “Why?”
“It appears that, if the Thraks can’t have it, no one can. And, after having blown a Dominion needier out of the sky, they don’t seem to want any w
itnesses,” Jack answered, his memory clicking back into place and finally identifying the second warship. “Come on, move it!” His blood chilled as Bogie fought him desperately, not wanting to leave the site.
K’rok jumped the sled. It hovered into power. The first two sleds took off, but the third bowed under their weight. Jack picked up Stash and slung him over his shoulder.
“Jack! Amber will have my hide if I leave you out here.”
“I’ve got a sled by the domes. Get going!” His com lines began to vibrate with the noise of the Thrakian ship moving in.
He began to run, taking the dead moon in leaps and bounds, death itself on his heels. The first mine went off, showering him with rocks and gravel. He jumped the sled and kicked it into power.
As it flared on, he swung it out after the Walkers and followed them out of the valley, to the ridge beyond.
Bogie keened in his mind. Colin stopped the second sled at the ridge and Jack slewed to a stop behind him.
“Get out of here!”
“No. Not quite yet.” The Walker swiveled on the seat, looking back at the dig. “There is something there, just below the surface. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to see it yet.”
Bogie wailed in Jack’s thoughts.
He geared the sled down and held it in idle beside Colin and the two silent Walker aides flanking him. The Thrakian ship swept over and two massive blasts shook the moon.
The bluff opened up, a layer of wall just sliding away from it.
And there, cut into the rock, imprisoned by time and death, reared a creature. A massive, gray, leathern creature as different from a berserker as a man was from a monkey.
Bogie wept.
“What, in god’s name, is that?” whispered one of the Walkers.
“Something,” Colin said, “that we may just have gone to war over.”
Jack saw K’rok move. “Something,” the Milot field commander said, “to make even the Thraks afraid.”
One of the aides murmured, “It called us to our deaths.”
*No, Jack,* Bogie sobbed. *It called to be free, to live again.* Jack stirred, driven by Bogie’s torment. “What is it, Bogie,” Jack asked. “What is it?”
*I think—me,* the sentience answered.
The Thrakian ship looped and came down again, and as the ground erupted from the chains of mines planted below, the Thraks blasted it from above, powdering the bluff and all the area around it. The thing, whatever it had been, was gone. A high keening noise cut through Jack’s mind like a cold wind, and then Bogie, too, was silent.
K’rok was the first to stir. He reached from Colin’s sled and thumped Jack. “There be no time to lose,” he said.
“Why?”
“They will not stop here. They will take out Lasertown, too. No witnesses. They will blast until nothing is left of this moon but a cloud of dust.”
“Good God,” Colin said.
But K’rok’s words struck Jack through the blackness of his mind that Bogie had left.
He shook his head. “Amber!” He kicked the sled into gear. “We’ve got time before they re-charge and set up.”
“Jack, my warrior friend. The laser cannon is down. There be no way to defend the domes against a direct attack,” K’rok sympathized.
“Not if I can help it!” He punched in the homing coords and the sled shot off, flying toward Lasertown. The broken landscape of the dead moon flashed below him. He didn’t care if Colin or the others followed him. What he had to do, he would do best alone anyway.
Alone except for Bogie, and that touch was dead, cold, gone beyond his reach. Jack probed gingerly for it even as the sled whined and dodged as he bullied it beyond its top speed. He felt alone without Bogie and knew now what Bogie had not had the ability to tell him.
The alien had not been a killer, after all, not even in the selfish, instinctive way a parasite kills to live. He had been something more, perhaps as novel a creature as was mummified in that cliff. Growing from a scrap of skin, who knew what Bogie was destined to be? Not a berserker. Jack knew that now. K’rok’s berserker had no more been capable of thought or feelings than a rock. That was not Bogie.
Just as Amber was not, consciously, capable of being a terminator as Stash had been, though she shrank from her mental abilities. Bogie was gone now, because Jack had not understood and responded in time.
He’d be damned if he was going to lose. Amber as well!
By the time he reached the laser-scored air lock, he had his course of action mapped out.
He jumped the sled and left it nosed up to the dome. He picked up Stash’s limp form. Groans filled his com line as he shouldered the weight. He patted the New Aussie down.
A bulky knot in the right thigh pocket. Jack opened it up. A tiny, but deadly, explosive. He gave a satisfied nod, slapped it against the norcite seal, backed up and blew the air lock.
He heard the thin whine of alarms as he walked back through the smoking hole. Stash stirred as Jack dropped him. The terminator rolled over, whining, cradling his ruin of an arm.
Jack picked up the laser cannon.
Stash sat up. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your worthless hide. I suggest you crawl back through the bay and see if you can find someone to help you. The other sleds are due here any second. I don’t think they’re going to slow down if they find you in their way.”
Jack hefted the cannon over his shoulder, turned on his heels and left through the gaping hole in the air lock bay. The Thraks knew the cannon had been taken down. They knew they would be coming in for a shot at a helpless dome community.
With a grim smile, he ran across the death-pocked field of gray stone between the dome and the power base for the cannon.
The difference between a good soldier and a dead one was the ability to know the limits of your suit and weapons—and the ability, as well, to strip down and repair what you had as quickly as you could.
His long-range screen blinking danger, Jack worked as quickly as he could. There was no time to reinstate the base, but he stripped down the power cables and hard wired them. Then he stood and reset the cannon on his shoulder. He got firing coords from his suit computer. A little bit bigger than a field pack and with a hell of a lot more power, but the firing trajectory shouldn’t be much different. He stood and waited for the Thraks to come within range.
The two sleds zoomed past, and he saw St. Colin skew around on the seat to look at him.
“Good-bye, Jack. God be with you,” came the man’s voice faintly over the lines.
Jack did not reply. He kept his gaze on the horizon and his tracking screen, praying only that the Thraks did not reverse their direction and come in from the other side.
He wished that he were not quite as alone as he had to be.
About the time adrenalin shock set in, the Thraks showed up in his visual. He began to squeeze his finger on the firing trigger. The fact that the cannon might well blow up and take him with it as well as the Thraks bothered him not a little.
So he thought of Amber as he took aim. Streetwise, beautiful Amber, alone and vulnerable in that dome, waiting for him to come back. Amber, like all of Lasertown, as perishable as a flower on a Thrakian sand planet.
The Thrakian warship swooped in, fearless, sure of its target.
Jack’s hand closed. The laser cannon fired. He was aware of only two things: his own cannon’s explosion and the explosion of the Thrakian ship a split second after, knocking him on his back.
Then all went still and dark. As he went under, he grabbed one last time for Bogie’s sentience, asking it for help.
Chapter Twenty Two
Don’t you ever try anything like that again.”
Amber’s face faded in, bleached white by the hospital lights surrounding his gaze. He blinked, then pried heavy eyelids open one more time. He croaked, “That thing packs a kick.”
“Yes, I imagine it does. The Thraks thought so, too.” Colin perched on the end of the sterile crècheli
ke bed. “Thank you once again for saving this somewhat overrated hide.” He patted Jack on his knee. “They’ve got you wired up here, but I’m told you’ll be out tomorrow. Pepys has sent an escort ship to bring you back.”
Amber broke in, “You may patronize him if you wish, but I intend to kick the crap out of him the minute he can get out of bed.”
“Amber!”
Jack found a chuckle even though it hurt. “It’s all right, Colin. She’s usually a lot tougher on me than that.”
The Walker looked down at him as he stood. “Well. All the same, I owe the two of you a lot. I have some work to do, or I’d not be saying good-bye now. Pepys ordered me home as well, but I take orders from a higher authority than his.”
“Work?” Jack found his mouth was about the only part of him that did not ache beyond tolerance.
“I have to make sure the site has truly been destroyed. That means I have a few square kilometers of dust and ash to sift. A few weeks, perhaps. Not much more than that.” He sighed. “I still don’t understand all that happened here.”
“I’m not sure I do either. Stash was working for a group that wanted the site destroyed. His cover was contract labor. Sooner or later, he’d have been on a crew excavating the site. That same group brought in the Dominion needier to harass the Thraks after Governor Franken lost control of the site and Lasertown to the Bugs. From there, I don’t know. This is pretty far out for a Dominion ship. At the same time, the Thraks were intensely interested in gaining access to the site themselves. Plus, the mining operation and norcite ore would help defray their expenses.”
“But why take me out?”
“Perhaps, St. Colin of the Blue Wheel, for the same reason Pepys fears you. A religious empire can be built just as easily as a political or a military empire. Walkers have the capability of stringing a web of influence.”
Colin grimaced. “The last thing we want.”
“Ambitious men see ambition in others. It’s what they’re familiar with and fear most.”
“Mmm. And the Thraks, of course, once they’d lost the site and destroyed the needier, feared the political backlash themselves. It would be better to destroy this moon than to face an inquiry.”
Lasertown Blues Page 19