by Saxon Andrew
Tal stared at the small generator and thought aloud, “This will easily fit inside a missile. And it could power a pulse cannon to more than five times the power it currently fires.”
Duncan nodded, “It could also power your new ship. The ship would only need one reactor to power the generators instead of six it currently uses.”
“Which will make room for more missiles to kill aliens!” Jan added brightly.
Ka spoke up, “We don’t have any of these generators.”
Jan was still smiling, “Mom! I built this one from spare parts in the lab. Just duplicate it and you’ll have all you need. This generator isn’t rocket science? You can use frictionless parts for the moving elements inside the generator, including the turbine wheel. I couldn’t find a frictionless wheel in the spare parts but the parts list in the computer say you have some available.”
Dr. Meier turned to Jan and asked, “How much power would a larger generator make?”
Jan smiled, “A lot more than you’ll ever need, Doctor!”
Tal turned to Duncan, “I want enough missiles for my ship made using this technology, Duncan. Build them by hand if you must but I want them ready before we ship out.”
Duncan nodded, “I’ll bring the engineers in to study this generator and have them include it in your vessel. We might be delayed a week or so, but it’ll be worth it.”
Tal looked at Jan, “Good job!”
Ka said quickly, “We should consider that she’s too important to allow to go out in a warship. We need her expertise in building this.”
Jan laughed, “Mom, there’s nothing else for me to show you. You have a working copy and I don’t have any more information than what you see right here in front of you. Your engineers are fully capable of building it.” Ka rolled her eyes and Jan smiled, “That was a nice try though.”
Duncan said forcefully, “Dr. Meier, I want this generator tested and then duplicated. Start the process of producing them in large numbers immediately.”
“Will do, Admiral.”
Ka walked over and stood beside Tal. Both were staring at the scientists gathered around the generator and Tal said quietly out of the side of his mouth, “I think you and I have it wrong.” Ka looked up at him, and he continued, “I think they will be protecting me.” Ka turned back to the gathering and nodded. “I also want you to do something for me.”
Ka turned back to him. “I want you to teach Jan everything there is to know about the current state of our scanning systems.”
Ka nodded, “I’ll put her with Dr. Mercid; he’s forgotten more about scanners than anyone here ever knew. What about Jee?’
“I’m assigning him to take part in the production of the missiles we’re taking with us. I’ll let Duncan handle getting him set up with the team doing it. He’s the one that will have to use them.”
“What about you, Tal? What are you going to do?”
“I’ve asked Duncan to assign his best warship commander to teach me space battle maneuvers. We have about four-weeks before we start training on the new Epy-Class Warship and we must make the most of that time.” Ka nodded and turned back to watch Dr. Meier start getting the team set up to duplicate the new generator. She fought her tears. Ste’s children were as brilliant as their father.
Tal watched the proceedings and saw Sha’s face in his mind. Oh, Sha! The universe is not as beautiful without you in it. He missed her smile most of all.
Chapter Three
Tee sat in his chronide shielded room under a tall parking garage and watched the wall-monitor. He kept his hand on the dial beside him on a table and listened to the news channel. He was surprised any of the stations were still on the air, most of those in the larger cities had been shut down by the aliens. But there were thousands of small communities that were still broadcasting. The aliens must have better things to do than take the time to shut them down.
He turned up the volume and heard a news announcer, “The aliens’ landing operations have continued on Australia and thousands of large troop carriers are still landing in the largest cities. We’ve estimated that more than a hundred thousand of their troops are now taking control and are instituting curfews allowing no one on the streets from an hour before dark until an hour after sunrise.” Tee shrugged, the curfew would be enforced by the alien warships in orbit and anyone seen on the streets would be hit with a blaster beam from space. It didn’t take long before the streets were deserted at night.
The aliens had forbidden all air-traffic the moment they arrived above the planet, and they shot down any aerial traffic with no warning. This caused the streets and roads to be clogged with ground transportation during daylight hours. The aliens ordered that everyone on Australia continue with their normal day-to-day activities and anyone not following the directive would be punished. No one had a clue on what was going on. The aliens weren’t telling and stories about what they planned were too numerous to count. At least the Aliens hadn’t started wholesale killing of the citizens. That could change at any minute.
Tee thought about what would happen if he went out and killed some of the aliens. It could lead to wholesale reprisals, but that wasn’t his problem. The Guild Master promised 50 thousand credits for each alien killed by the assassins and that was his only concern. Ric, the highest ranked assassin on Australia, had sent out a message over the guild’s frequency before the aliens shut down all communication channels in the larger cities. No one would be authorized to attack the aliens until today. Tee was glad Ric made the restriction; the aliens needed time to settle down and lower their guard.
Tee turned off the power to the antenna on top of the tall parking structure. It had been installed when the building was under construction and the shielded cable was hidden in the poured concrete structure. The power to the antenna was miniscule and detecting it would be next to impossible. It was the advanced receiver that allowed Tee to listen in on what was happening around Australia.
Australia was one of the last colonies established before Earth stopped supporting the colonies and left them to fend for themselves. It started late but rapidly became one of the most prosperous colonies rather quickly because of the abundance of metals and rare ores. Tee suspected that was the reason the Aliens attacked it first.
He looked at the camera feed from the top of the building and saw it was getting dark. He stared at the monitor until the power grids under the streets that powered the ground transports were shut down. That was a dumb move on their part. By shutting down the power grids, they also shut down all the street lights. There were internal lights in the buildings, but the streets were pitch-black; just right for an assassin. He already had his legs in his insulated-black-suit and he inserted his arms and wiggled his fingers into the gloves that were part of the sleeves. He folded the front flap and sealed the suit.
He immediately stood up and started walking around the room getting his muscles to start the dynamic cooling system operating. His muscles pumped the cooling fluid through the suit and prevented him from overheating. The black suit was invisible to infrared scanners and was virtually impossible to visually see in shadows or dark places. He began running in place to get the cooling system operating at its maximum and stopped after a few minutes. Ahhh…that was better!
He went to a drawer in a cabinet against the wall and took out his audio-ear-inserts, pushed them in his ears, and closed the drawer. He took the night vision goggles off a wall hook and put them over his head. The state-of-the-art glasses built on New Asia would not be detectable underneath his head covering. Night-vision goggles were known as assassin’s eyewear. Every assassin learned how to use them from the first day of training and didn’t even notice them most of the time when they were used; the night was the assassin’s day.
Tee looked around, went to the gun cabinet, and took out the Cyclone Air Rifle. He took a high-powered air container and slammed it into the stock of the rifle and pulled the black covering over it. Next, he slammed a dart-magazine into the
rifle’s receiver and pulled the black cover over the magazine.
Tee raised the rifle and held it snugly against his shoulder; it was light and felt like an extension of his body. The arms manufacturers on Deutschland were the absolute best at building small arms. The Air Rifle’s scope was a part of the frame and was sighted in at the factory. You could throw the rifle against the wall and the scope would not be affected; it would maintain its accuracy. It was incredibly expensive but was well worth the price. It was silent, accurate, and deadly.
Tee slung the rifle over his shoulder and walked quickly over to the back of the room. He bent over and turned a wheel on the floor several times and lifted a metal cover off the floor. He pulled his night goggles over his eyes and then pulled his head covering over his head. There were no openings in the headcover for eyes, nose, or mouth. Where his eyes were located, the head covering had thousands of tiny holes, which allowed him to see out without difficulty, but prevented anyone for seeing through it. He sucked the mouthpiece into his mouth and began breathing normally. The Black Suit was designed to pump air through tiny holes scattered around his body to the mouthpiece. No power was used, his muscles provided the pumping action.
Tee moved the rifle over his back and put his feet on the first rung of a ladder just below the metal covering. He climbed down, pushed a button just below the cover to turn off the lights, closed the cover, and moved quickly down the ladder. Forty feet later, he reached the bottom rung and held on to it with his right arm before dropping the final three-feet into the pipe below him. He looked in both directions and saw nothing in the pipe. He turned to his left and started walking. The pipe was six feet in diameter, but he still had to stoop slightly to move through it. He kept the Air Rifle slung over his shoulder as he continued moving through the pipe for a mile. He came to an intersection where the pipe joined a much larger pipe. He slipped into it and stood up straight. He was in great shape, but it still felt much better to stand fully erect.
Tee had spent years studying the underground pipes that were once a vital part of the city. Waste, used water, and excess rainfall once flowed through the pipes long ago before the colonies developed on-site processors that could turn the waste into materials the colony could use. Even the excess water was rerouted to surface stations where it was converted into purified drinking water. This eliminated the need to transport the water and waste over great distances to be purified.
The pipes were no longer used and abandoned after a hundred years, then they were forgotten. Tee found one that was exposed near a former collection point and he began exploring them. He took more than two years to map them and another year to mark them with identifying numbers.
He purchased the necessary equipment to cut through them to the surface and install exits around the city. Most of the heavy lifting had to be done robotically but it was worth the price. He had an undetectable means of moving around the city. The robots were programmed to install pipes to the surface where they would not be detected. They made some initial mistakes, like putting an opening inside a building, but they grew better over time. He eventually shut them down and left them in one of the larger pipes. Tonight, he was going to use one of their mistakes.
He walked a mile north in the larger pipe and then moved into another pipe at another junction and headed Northeast. He walked two miles and pulled himself up into another six-foot pipe. He walked five hundred yards and kept his eyes on the top of the pipe. He suddenly saw the dark hole slightly ahead and above him. He walked under the hole, tightened the sling on the rifle, and jumped. He gripped the lower rungs of the ladder and pulled himself up. He climbed to the top of the ladder and stopped just below the cutout cover made in the surface by the robots. He turned up the gain on his audio earplugs and listened intently. He heard nothing for five minutes, reached over his head, and pulled a handle on the cover to the left.
He snapped a can of lubricant off the underside of the cover and sprayed the two cables attached to it on each side. He snapped the can back in place and used one hand to push lightly on the cutout until there was a small space between it and the ground. It rose easily, and he shook his head at the skill of the robots. A large stainless-steel beam was attached to the cables and suspended below it in the pipe; it was the exact weight of the cover making it weightless. The other ends of the cables were attached to the bottom of two stainless pipes with teeth running down opposite sides that fit into two sets of cogs that held them upright. The cables were attached to the free end of the pipes and through a pulley attached next to where the tubs were attached to the cover. The counter weight of the beam hoisted the pipes upward when pushed. He stared out of the small opening and didn’t hear or see anything. He pushed the cutout and it rose five feet above the surface. He swung a bar out, from within the length-wise vertical indention at the top of the pipe, about 10 degrees that held the cutout cover in place to prevent it from closing. If that happened, he’d be trapped. The cut in the concrete surface was so exact that it could be examined by a precision scope and still not be seen. If it fell back in place, there was no way he could get a grip on it to raise it again. He left the cutout and walked over to a wall five feet to his left.
He put his right ear to the wall and listened. He turned the gain up on his earplugs and still didn’t hear anything but a flying insect outside the wall as it flew by. He began doing squats and, after four minutes, the cooling system in his black suit almost chilled him. He wasn’t going to be able to move much in a few moments and he didn’t want to get overheated. He listened to the wall again, moved a piece of metal sticking out of it next to the ground, and pushed on it lightly. A section of wall swung out slightly and he stared through the opening.
Tee had spent the previous week moving around the city on the transit system scouting out the locations of the alien landing forces. He prioritized them according to the degree of danger they represented, and this was the least dangerous of all the sites he scouted. Outside the wall, it was pitch-black, but his night-goggles made it look like day. He saw a large alien-armored-track parked in the middle of an intersection about two hundred yards away. The long blaster barrel on the vehicle was pointed down one of the main thoroughfares and the three alien operators of the track were standing outside it discussing something. He had no idea what they were saying but he could hear them in his earplugs.
He took the Air Rifle off his shoulder, removed the two-black-caps from the scope, and stuck the barrel out of the opening. The night goggles were designed to work with the scope and he pressed a button on the side of it and the aliens grew instantly in size, as the scope started recording. He wouldn’t have much time to hit all three, so he moved the scope from one alien to the other choosing the order of his targets. One of the aliens walked away from the other two and leaned against the side of the track. That was a lucky break. He was behind the other two and would be the first target. The alien was looking in his direction and his face was clear for a shot.
He moved the scope to the other two and shook his head. They were standing next to each other and the one further away was blocked. Tee waited and felt the temperature start rising in his suit. He took a breath and exhaled slowly. One of the two aliens stepped forward and pointed. Tee swept the scope back to the alien leaning against the track, placed the red-dot in the scope on the center of his face, and gently squeezed the trigger.
He swept the scope to the alien furthest from him and stopped the red-dot on his upper leg. He squeezed the trigger and the alien’s scream deafened him. No time to turn the earplugs down! He swung the rifle to the third alien, as he was frozen in place by the screaming alien next to him falling to the pavement. Tee sighted quickly and fired a third time. The third alien moved just before he fired, and the dart missed. He had to fire again, as the alien ran toward the track. The alien stopped to climb the track and Tee shot him in the back of the neck.”
Tee kept the scope on the three aliens and they stopped moving a minute later. The informatio
n given to him by the Guild Master said that a hit in the alien’s upper leg would be fatal; large numbers of arteries flowed through it and a clean hit would kill them.
Tee pulled the rifle out of the opening and closed the wall. He pushed the metal back in place and rushed to the cutout. Push9ing the bar back in place, he climbed down the ladder and pulled down on the cover. It closed, and he pulled the bar under it to the right, locking it. He rushed down the ladder to start his suit cooling and dropped into the pipe. He turned down his earplugs, snapped the scope’s caps back into place, and slung the rifle over his shoulder, as he started walking back the way he had come. He wondered if the aliens’ scanners could penetrate forty feet of surface to see him; he doubted they could. If they could…oh well. That was the perils of being an assassin. He walked for a while and turned up his earplugs. He suddenly heard the loud sounds of alarms ringing out into the night above him. Looks like he wasn’t the only assassin out tonight. He turned the plugs down and continued to walk back to his hideout. He arrived two hours later and took off his black-suit. He took a shower, leaned back in his recliner, and turned on the wall-monitor. He flipped the switch turning on the roof antenna and turned the dial on the table next to him. A screen that appeared on the monitor had a large sentence emblazed across it, ALIENS UNDER ATTACK BY ASSASSINS!!
Tee rolled his eyes. The news channels could have gone all year without turning them in! If he got the opportunity, he was going to personally take out that newscaster screaming about the assassins endangering the colony. Tee turned the monitor off and decided to wait until the morning, when hopefully cooler heads would prevail. He lifted some headphones, turned on the music, and closed his eyes. 150,000 credits earned tonight. Not a bad haul, he thought before going to sleep.