Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series)

by David VanDyke

  While fire raged back and forth at close range through the wreckage of the base’s big rooms and wide tunnels, Bull hunkered down to look over the tactical situation on his HUD. His squad leaders were doing a good job of fending off the tanks, keeping them under continuous fire, blinding their sensors and burning off their secondary weapons while the enemy kept firing main guns at point-blank range, hoping to get lucky. Unfortunately, they had, too often. A quarter of his Marine icons showed KIA already.

  Bull keyed the general freq. “We need to get plunging fire on the tops of those tanks. Rocket teams, look for places up high and jump. Massimo –”

  “Firing now, boss.” On cue, a bright orange beam stabbed through the smoke from Bull’s left to strike the turret of the nearest tank. At the same time, a heavy rocket slammed into the same armored vehicle from the side, mangling its treads.

  Bull heard Massimo call, “Mobility kill on target one. Keep that beam on the gun, Jock. If you can get it hot enough…” Just then, the turret exploded. Either the laser had burned its way through to the ammo, or the stabbing light had damaged the mechanism enough so when the enemy fired their next HEAT round, it had jammed and detonated inside. In either case, that tank was dead.

  “Good job. Squad leaders, keep the pressure on. Take them down one by one. Flank them and finish them.” Confident the company could run itself for a moment, Bull checked his HUD for the Ryss. They had landed last, covered by the Marines, and their pilots had set them down as far to the right flank as possible. If this base was laid out the same as the one they had taken on Afrana’s moon, there should be subsurface tunnels connecting to the Weapon there.

  Bull wished them luck.

  ***

  Slask had snarled in embarrassment as War Leader Bull insisted he follow the dishonorable “plan” and leave the first attack. Instead of allowing Ryss warriors to fight alongside the Apes on the battle line, Slask and his young males had been sent away like kits, good for nothing more than nuisance raids on the enemy’s rear. Still, orders were orders, and though he had no fear of death, the dishonor of disobedience was greater still than the shame of his assigned role.

  He knew why Bull had given the Ryss this task: because he considered them weak and inferior. Without the life code tinkering and the nanomachines and the cybernetic implants, the Apes would be punier than Ryss. When Slask had pleaded with Trissk to allow him to receive similar upgrades, the elder warrior had cuffed his head like a kit.

  But Slask wanted to be strong, like the Ape warriors. What did tradition matter when honor and victory were at stake? Warriors of the older generation were too inflexible, set in their ways from the ages they had spent aboard Desolator. The future belonged to the young, those who could change with modern times.

  The one consolation of this mission was that their females had been allowed to enter their seasons, and his warriors had been glorified once more before combat. That was a proper sendoff! The memory of his mate’s yowls of pleasure as she received him threatened to distract Slask from his mission, and he cuffed his wandering mind back to the task at hand.

  Leading his six paws of warriors from the front, Slask hurried down the side tunnel until its end, and then turned left, in the direction of the Weapon. If this corridor led to the huge laser as he hoped, the Ryss would erase their shame with a great triumph. If the One above All smiled on him, he might even seize it intact and functional, enshrining his name in the Paradise of Heroes.

  If not…Slask thought of the egg of atomic destruction heavy on his back. That was another route to immortality. He would show the Elders and the Apes just what it meant to be Ryss.

  His hope of victory was based on the layout of the Weapon the Apes had seized in the Gliese 370 system. This corridor should lead to a maintenance tunnel, which in turn might give access to the interior of the fortified laser base.

  Before him loomed an armored door, a seldom-used connector between the Weapon complex and the Meme command center.

  “Burn through,” Slask ordered the equally young warriors with the laser cutter, another shameful necessity. They should be using hotblades, but the metal was too thick. Warriors were not technologists, to employ such workers’ tools. That was the province of females. Still, the two with the cutter had been trained to use it, cudgeled by War Leader Bull’s meaty naked paws when they complained. That one was strong; terrifying, the Ryss admitted to himself. Even without the cheating technologies he used, the big Ape would be one to fear.

  Soon they had sliced through the metal as they had been taught and the door swung open, its locking mechanism severed. In front of him Slask could see dim lights glowing here and there. “Use vision enhancement,” he growled, and switched his own HUD’s function to help him see. Now this kind of technology he liked. It reminded him of the nighttime raids he had performed as a kit under the moon on New Ryss, the world the Apes called Afrana, creeping through the tall grass to within marking distance, and then slashing claws down the haunch of some unsuspecting comrade.

  Shouldering the cutting team aside, Slask prowled forward among pipes and conduits. He expected to see steam leak or water drip from condensation, but all here was clean and quiet. From his briefings, that meant robot maintenance. Machines did not get lazy or careless, or dislike the work they were assigned. Machines had no honor.

  “Be vigilant for repair drones,” Slask said. “These spaces are cramped, but well kept. If you see one, try to kill it with your hotblades. Do not fire unless you must. This is a raid, until they notice us. Then it becomes an attack.” There. That rationalized their actions well enough. Bull had said a leader must pay attention to the thoughts of his warriors, and inspire them.

  “Your troops are not machines,” the great Ape had explained. “They must be led. When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Slask was not entirely sure what that meant, for there were no females waiting as rewards for bravery here. The Apes’ manner of speech was often peculiar. Still, Slask found he very much wanted to show himself worthy of War Leader Bull’s approval.

  A moment later Slask heard the whine of a hotblade, and then the sizzle of something meeting an electrical death behind him. “Follow me,” he snarled. “The Purelings and their masters will begin to wonder why their maintenance drones are malfunctioning.” He jogged forward, his armored body brushing against the machinery, until he found another door.

  “This is the access,” Slask told his First Paw. These five warriors he had placed before the rest – the bravest and boldest, if not the brightest, and likely the first to be killed. For a moment he saw the contradiction inherent in this arrangement, and then the odd thought fled him in the heat of imminent combat.

  Unlike the other hatch, this simple door seemed thin, though it was code-locked. Hotblades would do. “Cut through, quickly.” Slask hefted his own hotblade in one paw, his pulse-gun in the other. A compromise weapon, it used laser fusion to ignite pellets of tritium, powering tiny penetrators from its barrel at inconceivable speeds. The resulting plasma also blasted forward like a short-ranged flamethrower. Between the two effects, armored Purelings and small war drones should fall.

  For anything else, they had grenades and rockets.

  Two of his First Paw cut along the edges of the frame, high to low, while Slask shifted his pulse gun to his other hand and sliced the top. When finished, he kicked the door in with a crash and bounded through. He found himself in a transverse curving corridor, a section of an outer circle.

  “First through Third Paws, follow me rightward. The others, go left. We meet at the Weapon.” Slask raced ahead, looking for a way toward the center, which should be on his left.

  Suddenly, figures poured out of doorways ahead and turned toward him. He didn’t hesitate, but fired bursts on automatic, accompanied by a feline killing scream. To his left and right, his warriors did the same, filling the wide corridor with death.

  Purelings fell, chopped into meat as ferrocrystal penetrators slice
d through their lightweight armor. But the slaughter was not all one-sided. Return fire from the fanatical defenders, shooting over the mass of bloody bodies, cut down two of his warriors with high-powered lasers. If they lived, they would have to fend for themselves, relying on their suits to pump them full of stimulants and healing drugs. Again Slask cursed the conservative traditions of his elders, wishing for the bloodborne combat nanites or even the disease the Apes called the Paradise Epidemic. That was another nonsense name, and Slask wondered if something wasn’t lost in translation.

  Slask led his remaining twelve warriors to leap and scramble easily over the pile of bodies, hotblades executing all who moved beneath them. Even were mercy a Ryss battle trait, these Purelings were genetically programmed never to surrender. They may look like Apes, but they were really cloned Meme mitoses, Blended into similarly cloned Human bodies. The killing stroke was pure warrior’s joy.

  The curving corridor now revealed the tunnel he wanted, to the left toward the center where the Weapon must lie. Another group of fanatical Purelings fell before Ryss pulse-guns and hotblades. This time the fight turned hand-to-hand as the enemy burst out of side corridors, firing railguns and lasers. The Ryss’ Avenger armor stood them in good stead, as did their blazing crystal swords, heated white above the melting temperature of steel. Even so, Slask had to leave two more wounded warriors behind to live or die as they would.

  There was no time. The Weapon must fall. War Leader Bull had made that clear.

  Ahead, the corridors curved ever more sharply as Slask and his ten blasted their way past Purelings determined to die for their masters. Nine remained, then eight, before the Ryss burst into the great room housing the massive interface between the generator and the Weapon. A structure the size of a building large enough to hold a thousand Ape dwellings, Slask knew below lay the generator that converted volcanic heat into exawatts of power, which poured upward into red crystal tubes in their array of thousands. After that, the coherent light was manipulated and focused into domes or beams or anything between, in strength sufficient to vaporize any material known to Ryss, Hippo, Ape or Meme.

  Across the way, Slask saw a firefight in progress as the other half of his force fought its way into the vast room. One sight of the backs of his enemies was all his warriors needed to charge forward, spreading out into a bounding line. Unfortunately, that put the Purelings precisely between the two Ryss forces, and stray shots blasted chunks from the concrete near his feet.

  “Flank them left!” Slask roared. “Kill none of your fellows this day!” The Ryss scrabbled obliquely until they had the defenders in a crossfire, and continued to advance.

  And then there were seven, then six. Five…and all the Purelings had fallen. Seven from the other group joined Slask and exulted, celebrating by firing toward the ceiling high above until he made them stop. “Follow me. We must disable the Weapon. Prepare rockets.” Turning toward the center structure, Slask wondered at how easily they had won through. He had hoped, but given the odds… Perhaps all the defenders had been sent to deal with the Apes. Perhaps that had been War Leader Bull’s intent.

  Slask’s curiosity and hope died together as openings in the vast machine appeared. Silvery spiders with turrets on top, each machine the size of three Ryss, swarmed out of the structure in their dozens, then their hundreds to aim down at the pitiful band of warriors below. Yet, they did not fire.

  Now Slask understood. Purelings with outdated armaments had been used as cannon fodder to slow down the Ryss advance, while these advanced war drones were activated and positioned to defend the prize. Perhaps they held fire to capture him and his warriors for vile Meme enslavement, or to rip operational knowledge from his mind.

  Bull had been clever after all, for of course he would preserve his own kind while expending Ryss lives on this suicide mission. Sadly, Slask would not live to pass this admirable lesson of cunning to his kits.

  “I do not care,” Slask said aloud. His warriors’ advance had ground to a halt at the array of firepower in front of them, and they looked to him.

  “Command us, and we will die like heroes,” one said, his eyes hot with the nearness of oblivion. The rest murmured agreement.

  “Yes,” Slask said. “We shall be remembered by our ancestors in the Halls of Paradise, so let us die together, as warriors.” Activating the device he carried and setting it for ten seconds, he drew a great breath, waved his hotblade and roared a challenge to his enemies.

  “CHARGE!”

  ***

  Jill Repeth felt the shock through her feet as the floor rippled like a live thing, flinging dust, debris and wreckage into the air to drift slowly downward in the low gravity. “Finish them off!” she yelled, dragging an unsteady digger to his feet and shoving him into firing position. “Massimo, where’s that rocket?”

  As if in response a bang and a whoosh came from her left, and a streak of flame crossed in front of her to blow the turret from the last tank they faced. “Anyone see any more?” she asked over the general comm freq. “Squad leaders, report!”

  “Negative,” came the first reply, echoed by several more.

  Repeth still couldn’t see anything optically except billowing dust, made even worse by the last heavy shock she had felt. She thought she knew what that was: tactical nukes at close range had a distinctive feel. “Bull, was that the Ryss bomb?”

  “Think so, Reap. Either that, or something just as big.” Repeth could hear Bull’s labored breathing over the suitcomm, and then he went on. “Get the wounded back to the sleds. I need all effectives to confirm status on HUDs and rally on me.”

  Soon Repeth and Bull were surrounded by a loose tactical formation of thirteen Marines and three remaining Recluse battle drones. The machines had taken losses heavier than the troops, exposing themselves to more danger and thus drawing more fire, as intended.

  Nine wounded showed on Repeth’s HUD tracker, and the rest were KIA. She quickly reorganized the surviving effectives into two squads, one a man short.

  Two squads left out of six.

  “Shit. Two-thirds casualties, boss,” Repeth said over a private channel.

  “Yeah, Reap. I can count. We knew it would be hard, but not this hard. The Ryss just gave their all, though, so I’m having trouble with comparisons,” Bull replied bitterly.

  “They were good kids, those cats. You trained them well.”

  “We trained them well. Damn straight we did. Then we used them up.”

  “You can’t blame yourself. You stuck up for them. You gave them the easier mission. Slash was supposed to get in, set that thing and get out. Maybe he did. We don’t know they’re all dead.”

  Bull turned away, visible only on active sensors as a fuzzy blob with an icon, and his voice hardened. “If they’d gotten out, we’d see more of them on the HUD. I can only find a couple of intermittent contacts.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll find out soon enough. Fortunes of war. Now let’s finish this party, ’cause it may not be over.” He gestured with his plasma rifle. “Command center should be that way. Stay alert.”

  ***

  “Hard rad and thermal spike on the Weapon’s position, Captain,” Scoggins cried exultantly. “Detonation consistent with Marine tac nuke.”

  “I’m not celebrating until I know that wasn’t a Final Option scenario, Commander.”

  “Of course, sir. But even if it was…”

  “I know.” Absen didn’t want to think about the potential cost. “Move in carefully. I want to be damn sure that monster is down. Scoggins, send a sensor drone to take a look, no stealth. Let them see it.”

  Five minutes later the high-velocity sensor drone crossed over the Weapon’s position, drawing no fire. “Readings show subsidence on the surface. Looks like the laser is toast, sir,” Scoggins reported.

  “Outstanding. Bring us in low over the command center. Johnstone, try to punch a signal through to the Marines. Ford, have your gun crews keep a sharp lookout on point defense. We still have Sentri
es, mines and active orbital platforms out there.”

  “And if the orbitals fire on us?” Ford asked with upraised eyebrow.

  “Defensive fire only. In a very short time, those may be our allies.”

  Chapter 8

  “Any chance he’ll stop that pacing?” Ezekiel Denham asked Bogrin across the chessboard.

  The Sekoi Blend chuckled. “Who?” He moved his queen’s knight to threaten Ezekiel’s king’s bishop.

  On the other side of the room Trissk prowled randomly, poking at brass and wood controls, which Ezekiel had ordered Steadfast Roger to disable, of course. Along the opposite wall, Spooky Nguyen paced a more deliberate course to and fro in front of a row of viewports, smoke trailing alternately from his lips and cigar.

  “Trissk, I meant. I wonder if a ball of yarn would distract him?”

  The gray-skinned alien stared at Ezekiel for a moment and then shrugged. Ezekiel realized that human reference was probably a bit too obscure for the Sekoi. “A traditional plaything of the domestic felines of Earth.”

  “Ah. It is your move.”

  “So it is.” For want of something better to do, the human Blend took Bogrin’s knight with his queen’s bishop, a sacrifice initiating a series of poor trades.

  “Your mind is not on the game.”

  “I know. This trip is taking a long time. Maybe we shouldn’t have brought Trissk along. His brain doesn’t mesh well with the bio-VR we’re in, so I can’t slow our time senses further, and he doesn’t want to fight any more illusionary opponents.”

  “You could put him to sleep.”

  Ezekiel shook his head. “Not against his will, I won’t. Start down that road and I’ll be no better than a Meme Blend. It’s already hard enough to convince people I’m human without playing godling.”

  Bogrin moved a rook. “Check.” He stood up. “I have an idea, which should have come to me before.” Walking over to Spooky, he spoke a few words in the slim Vietnamese highlander’s ear and then returned to the chessboard.