“Oh.” She seemed to accept that. “Can you really kill off the cops with some kind of gas?"
Hands poised at the controls, Hammer grinned at the tall blonde evilly. “Freaking-A, lady, they're already history! This Omega shit dissolves ya like sugar in water. Pft! You're gone. Super dead."
“Wow.” A sparkle came to her eyes. “Then there's no danger to us. You're still in charge?"
“We're in charge of the world!” Drill roared, raising a clenched fist into the air like the revolutionaries on television always did. “King Deckers!"
The lovelies whispered among themselves, and the gang preened under their fearful respect. Yes, the Bloody Deckers were kings of the world.
“King of the World,” Amanda said reverently. “But a king needs a queen.” She drew herself close enough to Hammer so that a warm breast lightly brushed his cheek.
“Queens,” he corrected, his attention drawn away from his controls and to her cleavage in a momentary rush of lust. “Lots of'em. At least a dozen."
“But one's got to be his first lady,” she murmured, stroking his astonishingly clean mane of hair. “Can I?"
The street tough smiled. “Can you what?” he asked in return, thinking of a thousand things this hot bitch could do. And he read Penthouse Forum.
“The cops,” she said breathing deeply, which produced spectacular results. “Could I kill the cops? Please? I always wanted to off a bunch of pigs.” The ganglord hesitated. “Pretty please with sugar on top?"
With a laugh, Hammer slapped her on the bottom and she squealed in delight. “Okay fox, you off the pigs. You just gotta press this button here."
Amanda's expression showed her amazement. “Really? Just press that button?"
The street tough nodded. “Yep. That's it."
“Why, thank you, shit-for-brains."
It took Hammer a good second to react to that. Surging with anger, he spun the chair towards her and she raked the boy's face with her nails, digging bloody furrows in his flesh, just barely missing the eyes.
With a curse, the ganglord lunged at her, swinging a haymaker that would have caved in her skull had it connected, but she swayed out of the way and gave him a short punch in the throat. Hacking for air, Hammer stumbled backwards.
Now painful cries from his companions showed that they too were also under attack. Blind from the blood in his eyes, the man shot a fist out, accidentally connecting with Amanda's pretty nose, shattering the bone. The girl went down, her face ruined. Kicking her aside, Hammer vaulted from his chair and turned, just in time to avoid having a spike heel driven into his brain by the long leg of Joyce. With murderous intent, he grabbed for his laser only to discover the weapon was gone.
In suddenly realization, he saw that the women had split into teams. Three babes in black lace and fishnet stockings were piled on top of Drill, pounding him with their fists. Three blondes in peek-a-boo mesh body suits had surrounded a bewildered Chisel, who apparently had a patch of his hair yanked out.
Standing with his back to his console, the disheveled kid swung his left hand in a glittering defensive pattern, while he sucked at a vicious bite mark on his right wrist. Hammer judged that the boy was in shock, but even as he watched, Chisel's face took on a feral look and the knife began to slice instead of defend. The half-naked lovelies hastily moved away from him. Luckily, they seemed to know nothing about serious fighting.
Not bait in the trap, the ganglord realized, correcting his previous appraisal, but decoys! Trojan whores sent to protect the invaders downstairs. Hammer contorted his face into a snarl. Well, tough tittie bitch, it hadn't worked!
Vindictively, the seething street tough punched a button on the console and his chair sank out of sight, the floor closing over the hole. He blinked and glanced at the bank of identical white buttons. Shit-fire, he'd forgotten which one it was! In desperation, Hammer raked his hands across the control board, pushing dozens of buttons at once. Pictures of different planets appeared on the viewscreens. Wall panels opened and closed; laser rifles tumbling out. Ion clusters got a ring job. The turbo lift went into reverse. Toilets flushed. Dinner was started. Starch was added to the laundry. An unnamable alien device stopped doing its unnamable alien function, and the ship was renamed Ezrlptxy.
In short order, Trell had come to some disquieting conclusions about Dirtling mating practices and discreetly took refuge behind a small pile of stony rubble that had once been Gasterphaz. Even in death, the Choron protected.
Their long blonde, black and red hair streaming in the air behind them, several of the women dashed over to snatch the rifles that fell out of the wall. But they were dismayed to find that only the lasers taken from the Deckers were activated. They tried pulling this and twisting that to no avail.
Barking a warning, the three women with working laser rifles assumed a firing stance, holding the weapons with anything but trepidation. The other girls drew aside, modestly drawing the remnants of their ripped clothing together, their voluptuous bodies smeared with blood. Instinctively seeking protection, Hammer grabbed the dazed Amanda and held her in front of him as a living shield.
“Try it, and the slut dies,” he growled threateningly, and then added a few phrases that people in polite society would never utter in front of a lady.
The blonde awoke at his shouts and smashed a high heel directly onto Hammer's instep. With a howl of pain, the ganglord released the woman and she threw herself to the floor. Without hesitation, Wilma, Alice and Melissa fired their lasers. Triple beams of searing energy lanced out from the rifles, and the polychromatic rays struck and clung to the sparkling defense fields. But the earlier scene repeated itself as the fields shrank, trembled and then expanded; the women just as surprised as the Deckers had been when the lasers shut down rather than consume their own beams and be destroyed.
Now switchblade knives snapped into action, and the gang moved in for the kill with no thought of mercy for the fairer sex entering their minds. They had been betrayed and the women would die. Their blood would be just drops in the ocean already spilled by the New York street gang. It was four-to-one odds, and the women were virtually naked and unarmed. No contest.
As the Deckers attacked, the three women in bikinis expertly dodged the clumsy knife thrusts and jabbed out with their appropriated rifles, the butts smashing male teeth. Small fists smacked into pockmarked faces, breaking noses and jaws. Shapely knees met elbows. Bones cracked. Switchblades dropped from nerveless fingers and were kicked away. Drill's squirter was brutally wrapped around his neck. Alice and Wilma punched opposite sides of Hammer's head at the same time, scrambling what little brains he had. The ganglord slumped to the floor. Chisel was dropkicked on top of him by the beautiful, but deadly, Wilma Fisher, U.S. Secret Service.
The fight over, Lt. Amanda Jackson of the New York City SWAT team, fired off orders to her mixed bag of commandos. “Fisher, Webbert, guard these morons. Kill them if they move. Hutchings, Bentley, find Trell and have him turn off that gas. Everybody else, with me."
Through sheer force of will, Trell tried too make himself turn invisible, failing that he prayed, but the women found him anyway crouching behind his makeshift barricade.
“I am not of your species!” he shrieked as they hauled him wriggling into view. “I didn't mate with you! DON'T EAT ME!"
NSA field operative, Alice Bentley bared her teeth at the alien crewmember. “If you don't turn off the Omega Gas and stop that robot immediately, I'll bite your head off and then mate with you. Twice!” the petite blonde snarled.
Trell turned a nauseous shade of aquamarine and lunged for the control panel. Wildly slapping buttons, he reversed the Omega Gas process. He then turned to Gasterphaz's tech station and froze. The controls were destroyed; wires, switches and relay cubes melted into an unrecognizable mess. A laser must have splashed its beam across the panel. There was nothing anyone could do to effect repairs outside of a week of hard work.
Dejectedly, he faced the crazed female Dirtl
ings. “I hope I taste just rotten,” Trell said as his last great act of defiance.
Melissa Hutchings grabbed a fistful of the alien's uniform. “Just what do you mean by that?” the InterPol operative demanded, her bedroom eyes now spitting fire.
“Stop the robot?” Trell's translator squeaked. “Hot Void, I can't even talk to it."
“Try anyway!” Melissa ordered, licking her chops suggestively and the little alien obediently fainted.
Shifting to Plan B, the women efficiently stripped the gang of their clothing and distributed the items among the female warriors. Everybody was given at least two knives from Chisel's seemingly endless assortment. The huskier of the females wore the gang's leather jackets, and were armed with motorcycle chains. The three women in ripped bikinis had donned T-shirts to cover their nakedness. They also sported the stolen laser rifles. Lt. Jackson, in her peek-a-boo black lace body suit, stuffed torn bits of handkerchief into her nose to stop the bleeding.
With professional expertise, she checked the clip on Hammer's Colt .45, duly noted the number of bullets left, slammed the clip home and worked the slide on the automatic pistol, chambering a round for immediate use. On her orders, the door of the control room was forced open and Assault Team Charlie moved out. Their decorative, but not battleworthy, high heels had been discarded. However, the Decker's boots proved too large for any of the team, so they ran barefoot along the starship's main corridor. The soft floor felt oddly warm and almost alive.
Chosen by the Cray supercomputer of the FCT for their physical beauty, courage and military training, none of the women faced the upcoming fight with anything but grim resolution. The combat soldiers knew the desperate straits their male counter-parts were in, and that the laser weapons they now carried could be the deciding factor in the battles outcome. But like the street gang and Trell, they were unsure where the fight was located and at a branching corridor they paused.
“Which way, sir?” panted the Swedish airline stewardess that Dr. Malavade had personally recommended for this assignment, knowing her fondness for trying new, exciting things.
Amanda cocked her head. “The noise does seem louder in this direction.” But the sounds of battle dropped off sharply as they neared a four-way intersection.
“Damn,” a zaftig Green Beret sighed, stopping in the act of using a discarded fishnet stocking to tie off her riot of blond curls. “We're too late."
“Can it, sister,” the U.S. Secret Service agent barked, wishing that she had her trusty .357 Magnum with her, instead of this souped-up alien flashlight.
Coyly, a buxom Russian FSB spy tucked a shapely breast back into the flimsy lace bra it had inadvertently popped out of while they were running. “Perhaps if we tried the next level down,” she suggested in flawless English.
“You tell us how to get there, comrade,” snapped the poster girl for the United States Air Force, a rocket jockey of a test pilot as famous for her impatience and fabulous pneumatic shape.
Down the corridor to their left, one of the women on point position seemed to be listening to the wall. “Mandell! What in hell are you doing?” Jackson demanded, walking closer.
Stacy Mandell, a martial arts instructor and ex-Miss Nude Connecticut, removed her ear from the vibrating white wall and waved her commander back.
“Clear the area!” she shouted, in a surprisingly husky voice. “Scram! Beat feet!"
As the women staged a tactical withdrawal, a high-pitched squeal became evident. Rapidly growing in volume, it reached higher and higher in tone and tempo until the squealing drove them to the brink of screaming. But the female soldiers gritted their teeth against the horrid noise and took the punishment, unwilling to yield another foot of the corridor. Obviously, something was coming through the wall, but they were not going to retreat. The team would stand and fight, if only to avenge the brave men sent to assist them. Whatever came through that wall was going to be hit, and hit hard, by beams, bullets, knives, chains, hands, feet and teeth.
The devilish noise reached its painful crescendo and the wall violently disintegrated in a blinding flash of light and heat; the spray of vaporized metal stinging every inch of their exposed skin. A rain of fused, black robot parts closely followed the explosion, four metal arms loudly clanging off the opposite wall, a whirling blade cutting a jagged trench in the white material and the robot's head embedding in the floor like a cannonball hitting a snow bank. After a moment, the starship's hidden ventilators whisked away the pungent smoke and from the gaping hole in the wall a coughing man in a NATO uniform stumbled into view. Amanda rushed to assist him.
“Are you okay?” Weiss and Jackson asked each other.
As the women helped the bedraggled soldiers into the corridor, their respective commanders took the opportunity to report.
“The Bloody Deckers are in our custody,” Lt. Commander Jackson reported giving a salute. “We are in control of the ship. No personnel losses to report, although each of us would like to be disinfected and shower for a week.” A twinkle entered her blue eyes. “I see you got the robot."
“Don't even mention a shower,” the colonel laughed, mopping the sweat from his flushed face. “Yeah, we beat the damn thing. But I'm going to have some strong words with the scientists in the NATO weapons lab."
“Why's that?"
“They never told us that the Atomic Vortex Pistols only had a kill range of three feet. Three measly feet!"
To the woman's puzzled expression he added, “I'll explain later."
SIXTEEN
Less than an hour later, in the underground Command Bunker of the FCT, the humans and visiting Gees were gathered around the green felt-covered poker table closely examining some of the more interesting artifacts taken from the All That Glitters.
Meanwhile, what remained of the Bloody Deckers was hauled off in chains to NATO HQ for a thorough debriefing and a jail sentence that could only be measured in radioactive half-lives. However in the weeks to come, a statue would be erected in Central Park honoring the gang for saving Humanity from Idow and his crew; a monument that was regularly defaced by the New York citizenry and cleaned by the local branch of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
Contemptuously smug, Sir John tossed the defense field generator onto the table with other belts, laser rifles, bits of warobot and the remains of Boztwank's squirter. “A toy,” he declared in an annoyed tone. “Useless. It was foolish of the aliens to depend on such a limited defense."
Dr. Wu took her accustomed seat between Bronson and Nicholi. “True,” she agreed. “A force shield that was proof against both energy and material weapons, similar to the dome that protects their ship, would have used a great deal of power. More than the field generators in the belt could readily supply. But since you could link either shield, or field to the starship's reactor, who cares?"
“Lack of mobility?” Prof. Rajavur guessed, fingering the woven metal hem of the belt.
“How about a compromise, then,” General Bronson suggested, grinding out his cigar butt in an ashtray. “A defense shield. Literally. A round disk, say a meter in diameter and anchored directly in front of you. Crouch down and you'd be safe from frontal attacks."
“Plus, you could stand and run, firing around the edges,” Nicholi added, smiling broadly. “I like it, Wayne. I like it!"
Using a clean cloth, Dr. Wu wiped a smear of dried blood off the translucent crystal barrel of one of the laser rifles.
“As for these devices,” she began, minutely inspecting the weapon's breech, then holding it to the overhead light, casting a rainbow pattern of colors across her face. “I wonder what a full laboratory analysis will reveal about the beam focusing mechanism? An electromagnetic prism assembly like Prof. Richard Hill of Boston University is working on, or something entirely new?"
Rajavur made a note of the name so that he could requisition any available information on the man's research for her. Then he paused. On second thought, Yuki probably already requisitioned Hill himself as a lab as
sistant. “How long before you can make a report?” the Icelander asked his scientific advisor, hiding a smile.
“Twenty four hours for the preliminary,” she replied, primly crossing her legs and wondering what the older man found so amusing. “Sooner with any luck. NATO is sending an armored truck to collect these small items and carry them to the UN laboratory in Long Island."
With fingertip pressure, Mohad turned one of the defense fields on and off several times. “The results will be most enlightening, I am sure,” the linguist quipped.
“Will you and Yuki be conducting the experiments?” Nicholi asked, luxuriating in his old poker chair and carefully stretching his arms so as not to impolitely smack any of his teammates. Czar's Blood, he was glad to be out from behind that sheet of glass.
“No,” Dr. Malavade said with a frown. “For a while at least, Yuki and I will be living in the alien starship with an international team of scientists overseeing its complete dissection. Why, the communication equipment alone..."
“I want to see those engines,” Dr. Wu stated flatly.
Prof. Rajavur countered with, “You mean the medical facilities."
“No, the shield generators,” Bronson interjected.
Eagerly, Sir John leaned forward. “Trell is what I'm really interested in,” he said in scholarly passion. “There's so much that he can tell us about Galactic society and the way it works. Why, even what he doesn't know can be informative. You see—"
Nicholi lifted a restraining hand. “Please Jonathan, no lectures today."
“Be sure to clear everything through Wayne,” the diplomat sternly told them. “He's in charge of security for the whole project. The brand new Secretary General of the UN has placed the entire matter in our, quote, highly competent hands, end quote."
The bunker rang with easy laughter as the First Contact Team relaxed after this most hectic of days. Unnoticed by the humans, the two golden beings standing over by the kitchen unit nervously exchanged meaningful glances, put down their mugs of buttered and salted coffee to briefly touch hands. Seconds later the avantor stepped forward.
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