Beachhead Series Collected Adventures Volume One: Invasion Earth series box set

by Chris Lowry

  “I would see him gone,” she said. “And you in his place.”

  He rippled again. She shared his dream, but again, it was her skill, her training to do so.

  Yet, he pondered. They were far enough from the home world that he could rule this sector, this galaxy with the thousands of habitable planets to seed, to colonize and conquer.

  He could imagine himself at the head of it all, an Imminence of his own.

  But before the dream could capture him, before he got lost in the what if of it all, he turned away from her.

  “It is as you wish,” he told her. “Things move fast and there is still much to be done before we reach that point.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Shit,” Jake screamed.

  He wasn’t sure if any of the others heard him, but he saw Lt go down and dropped to his knee again to return fire.

  Laser blasts shot over his head and sliced into the crowd. The others had seen too.

  The tents caught on fire as the bolts seared through the dry canvas. People screamed, men yelled and over it all the rat a tat of automatic weapons shooting back at them.

  Weber stooped next to Jake.

  “Advance in a line,” he shouted an order. Jake turned his visor and saw Renard line up next to him on the other side, blaster raised.

  Crockett and Waldo exited the woods on the opposite side, lasers skewing across the smoke covered battlefield.

  Jake stood and marched forward with Weber and Renard, his gloved finger depressing the trigger again and again.

  Everywhere he aimed, death followed.

  He tried to concentrate on the men, or male looking figures, though it was hard to tell with most.

  Each figure in his sights was a cloth covered moving mound of clothes, faces hidden by scarves or heads hidden under hats.

  He aimed at the ones with weapons. Guns that were firing back at him.

  The trio advanced in orderly fashion, shooting as they moved. Bullets bounced off his chest plate, off the armored arms and thighs of his suit. Once or twice, a ping rocked his head back, sending a searing headache bouncing around his skull.

  They reached Lt’s fallen body.

  The tip of the spear was a triple blade, barbed with hooks so that any attempt to remove it would rip skin and gouge muscle.

  It was buried inches in the armored chest plate, testament to the force thrust of the crossbow used to shoot it.

  Weber stepped to one side to move around the body, still firing as he moved.

  Lt sat up.

  “Son of a bitch,” he yelled.

  It wasn’t much of a yell, but the torrent of curse words he released on the tail end of the yell matched the staccato tempo of the machine guns shooting at them.

  The bullets slowed down when he rolled to his knees, and stopped completely when he stood up.

  Jake quit shooting too as he stared at the Lt like he was rising from the dead.

  The rest of the squad paused as well, blasters held ready just in case. Except for Babe.

  Babe shot eight more men, their heads disappearing into puffing mists of blood and smoke.

  “Babe!” Lt screamed.

  It was more like a rasp than a scream, but it cut through to his crazed soldier and made him stop.

  “I thought you were fucking dead,” Babe snarled.

  “Fuck me, I thought I was too. Never been hit with an arrow before.”

  Lt looked down at the six-foot shaft wiggling in his chest plate.

  “That was a good fucking move you did there, Weber. Didn’t need you to save my bacon this time, but it’s nice to know you’ve got it in you when I need it.”

  Weber nodded.

  “Standard formation training,” Renard said, weapon still nested into his shoulder.

  “Standard huh? That shit works on Mars, but if those fuckers use a grenade, you’re toast.”

  “Are you hurt?” Crockett and Waldo jogged up from their flank position.

  Lt reached up and wrapped his glove around the shaft of the arrow, yanked it out.

  He dropped it on the ground and used the tip of his fingers to explore the rent in the chest plate.

  “Didn’t get through,” he said. “Huts like a son of a bitch though. That’s gonna leave a mark.”

  “Fireproof,” said Jake. “Bulletproof. Arrow proof.”

  “Ain’t idiot proof though,” said Lt as he turned back to the camp. “So, let’s go get our fill of dumb ass’s.”

  He started marching toward the camp again.

  “Come on boys, before they get a chance to reload that fucking crossbow contraption.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The escape plan was simple.

  As simple as something Lt would come up with, thought Lutz.

  “Tonight?” Pomona breathed out of the side of her mouth.

  He was surprised it sounded more like a question than a statement.

  The plan was to create a distraction on one side of the camp, draw the Lick guards to that point, and make a break for it on the other side.

  The main worry was hidden guards. Hidden traps.

  Hell, Lutz could make a list of a million ways this could go wrong. Lt would tell him that’s the wrong way to think about it.

  Any time you start concentrating on things going wrong, Lutz told himself in Lt’s raspy voice. That’s all you’re going to see.

  He even squinted his eyes in a fair imitation.

  Try to see what will go right and do more of that.

  Lutz remembered sharing an eyeroll with Babe over that one, but Lt had been right. The more they focused on killing Licks and doing it the right way, the better they got.

  The more he focused on staying alive, the more alive he stayed.

  It stood to reason that if they focused on what could go right during the escape, then things would go right.

  He tried not to think about the slaves sacrificing themselves so others could get away.

  That tended to freeze him up, as his mind turned the problem over trying to find a way to save everyone.

  Every human at least.

  But their sacrifice would buy many others a chance.

  A chance to die in the woods, being hunted, or starving, or being killed in the attempt.

  He shook his head.

  Too easy to think about the wrong.

  The way it was going to go down, six people would die.

  He had a small head count of thirty making the escape.

  Thirty people running to the woods, running through the trees.

  It was stupid to even try, he thought. They were going to die.

  But Pomona had a plan for that too. Break up in pairs.

  No idea where they were in the world, not sure which way to break once they were beyond the fence.

  She told them find the North Star and follow it.

  Lutz didn’t know what was North, and if the pairs had a half mile between them, if they got separated in the woods, they could walk a parallel track and never know the other was there.

  But as far as half assed plans went, he thought it wasn’t too bad.

  For his part, he was going to keep the herd close together if he could.

  It’s what Lt would do.

  He finished up the work in the hanger by twilight, still worrying and working over the plan in his head.

  Lutz made his way back to the warehouse cell block in a line of other slaves. All of their heads hung low, all shuffling.

  He matched them step for step all the way to the door. They entered under the watchful eye of a single soldier, tongue dancing in and out of its snout, as if tasting their defeat, their exhaustion.

  Searching for defiance, thought Lutz, eyes still down.

  There was no set space on the floor, no designation to wander back in, so he moved to the center of the room where no one else was and sat with his back to the wall to wait.

  His brain wouldn’t work the way he wanted. He couldn’t figure out to keep all of them safe. />
  He was just one man in this plan, just one man trying to get away, get back to Lt and get back to killing.

  He needed his weapon, or any weapon to do that.

  I’d be better out there, he told himself. Better for any one of these survivors.

  I could do more good for them out there, he thought.

  He realized he was trying to rationalize their deaths. When there were so few of them left, even the death of one was a big loss.

  But he was just one man.

  Twilight melted into darkness and the absence of ambient light made the stars pop out and twinkle against a velvet sky.

  It was almost time.

  Lutz tensed and clenched his muscles, first stretching out one leg, then the other. He wanted to be limber when it was time to move.

  Then it was.

  A glass bottle shattered at the entrance to the room, showering the wall with gasoline.

  A second bottle sailed through the air, the brilliant yellow orange flame burning the back of his pupils and popping blue flashes as it seared the darkness.

  It smashed against the wall, spreading more gas and fire across the wall.

  Weak screams echoed through the warehouse, and Lutz felt a surge of bodies press against him as they sought to escape the flames.

  He lunged into a run, pelted across the warehouse, bouncing off bodies as he ran.

  The Lick soldier at the rear lifted his blaster as four bodies swarmed on top of him, carrying him down with their weight.

  The laser blast was brighter than the flames, searing a red streak across his vision as it ripped through two of the men piling on the Lick.

  Then he was through the door, into the darkness in a crowd of people who broke for the fence.

  The hidden guard, the one Pomona had feared leaned out and began picking off the runners one by one.

  But again, sacrificial lambs piled on top of him, five this time, trading their lives for an opportunity for others.

  Three of them took it out of his perch, and thudded to the ground, where four more piled on top.

  One of the men grabbed the alien blaster and tried to use it.

  Lutz could have told him it wouldn’t work, not for human fingers anyway. Maybe it was DNA coded, they never found out. But Lick weapons wouldn’t work for humans.

  The same could not be said for vice versa.

  A .50 Cal machine gun opened fire on the rest of the humans as they sprinted toward the fence.

  It was older machinery, the thud thud thud of the belt being fed sounding more like a movie than real life.

  But the bodies sputtered, and twisted and fell, just like the movies too, the dark earth growing darker in the starlight as blood blossomed in fountains or leaked out of the fallen.

  “This way,” Pomona grunted in his ear and pulled on his arm.

  She led him away from the slaughter, at the head of a group of four more.

  They ran around the corner of the building, ran between it and another.

  “In here,” she said and hauled open a door.

  Lutz and the other men surged after her, into the pitch black opening as dark as a cave.

  He plowed into the back of her as she stopped.

  Lights popped on in exploding brilliance, bathing them in yellow incandescence, pinning them in the middle of another warehouse.

  Frozen.

  Caught.

  Two dozen soldiers created a semi-circle around them.

  Two dozen blasters aimed at the four men.

  Lutz decided to charge them. Weapon or no, he wasn’t going to die cowering on the floor. He was going to go out fighting.

  He took two steps into a run.

  “Excellent work,” Lick Commander hissed, his gaze settling on Pomona as she jittered to the line of soldier’s and slid through.

  Lutz stopped and stared.

  The men around him were dumbstruck as well.

  “These are the leaders of the escape?” Lick Commander asked.

  Lutz watched as he separated from the rest of the soldiers, and strutted toward them.

  His yellow eyes studied each of them in turn.

  “Smart?” he asked. “I do not think it smart of you to seek escape. But she knows the ways of humans more so than I.”

  He stopped in front of the last man in the row. Lutz thought he may have once been burly, but now skin sagged from his too thin face, shoulders slumped at the betrayal.

  “Are you intelligent human?” Lick Commander hissed. “I am told you are able to determine things.”

  He made a motion with a claw and the soldiers surrounding them marched forward to drag them away.

  Lutz looked around for Pomona as two Licks yanked his arms up and hauled him after the others.

  Their eyes locked for a brief moment, and he felt a twinge of sadness that she didn’t look guilty or even bothered by her actions.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lt halted at the first row of tents and squinted at the vague shadows that darted among them in the interior rings.

  “My name is Lt. William Bonney and if any more of you sons of bitches takes a shot at me, I’m going to come in there and kill every last damn one of you.”

  He lifted his blaster rifle and sent a shot seven feet off the ground, just over their heads unless there was an especially tall man among the group, but low enough to warn the rest.

  If they saw it.

  He had some doubt. The laser blast was bright, but the flames were turning some of the tents into infernos, and the thick smoke was making it difficult to see.

  “Herd ‘em into the river,” said Lt as the rest of his squad caught up to him.

  Weber and Babe fanned out in one direction, Jake, Waldo and Renard in the other.

  They worked their way around the ring, and the people inside fled toward the river.

  They huddled in a mass of shivering confusion, the row closest to the water shoving back to keep from being pushed in and pushed under.

  Either end of the group was blocked by laser toting soldiers in suits they hadn’t seen before, and one of those soldiers stood in front of them and addressed the group.

  “Which one of you is the leader of this hear outfit?” Lt drawled.

  He cocked the blaster rifle on his hip and let it drift over their heads.

  “Come on, step up now and don’t be shy. Sure as shit wasn’t shy about shooting me with a damn bow and arrow a minute ago.”

  “Cross bow,” a skinny man with a gray beard stepped from behind an even thinner woman, pushing her scrawny frame aside and resting his hand on a pistol worn cross draw.

  “That so?” Lt squinted at him.

  “Are you really Billy the Kid?”

  “Fuck you,” said Lt as he let his blaster drift lower. “Don’t call me Billy the Kid. My name is Lt. Bonney. For your purposes, you can refer to me as Lt. Bonney, though I will still answer to Lt, if we get along.”

  The blaster stopped as it reached an angle with the man’s face.

  “We are going to get along, aren’t we?”

  The man stared into the bore of the laser and gulped, his beard bouncing up and down, black eyes half glaring as if he was trying to decide how much a smart remark would get him shot.

  Then he nodded.

  “I don’t think the folks in the back can hear you,” said Lt. “Are we going to get along?”

  “Yes,” the man stuttered. “Yes!”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the people around him.

  “Don’t cause them any trouble,” he turned back to Lt. “I thought you were only fighting the aliens, not people just trying to survive.”

  “That what you call this?” Lt fingered the gash in his chest plate. “Surviving?”

  “We didn’t know you were humans.”

  Lt looked at Weber and Babe. They didn’t look human. Humanoid maybe. With the visors down, they were certainly intimidating.