Invaders: Dreadnought Ocelot (Invaders Series Book 4)

by Vaughn Heppner

  “I do not give us a high probability of—”

  “Can it, Rax. I’m feeling funky enough about this mission as it is.”

  I kept staring at the Soyuz-2 rocket and telling myself this was the safest rocket in human history. It was hard to believe. I remembered as a kid watching the Shuttle blow up with Sally Ride in it. My teachers had told us how important it was sending a woman into space. Then, the Shuttle blew up, and my teachers hadn’t known what to say afterward.

  Jenna must have seen something on my face. “You can do this, Logan. It will be a piece of cake after everything else you’ve done.”

  “I used Polarion equipment before,” I said, stopping there. The curious colonel was leaning an ear toward me again.

  It was weird thinking about this. The entire world was going to be helping, giving Argon and me cover by launching ballistic missiles at the city-killing GGS vessel. I wondered then, as the vehicle came to a screeching halt, if this was going to be my last ride into space.

  -50-

  Argon and I went up alone into the Soyuz capsule. A Polarion had been waiting in there. He rose and nodded to Argon. Argon patted him on the shoulder, and the man left, taking the elevator down.

  That left just Argon, Rax and me to get ready.

  Now that we were alone, Argon turned and stared at me. He made it uncomfortable, and his eyes took on that shine of power that Nerelon Brontios had shown from time to time.

  “There are many things I could say,” Argon began in his superior way of talking. “You…”

  “Hey, look,” I said, “just so we’re clear, nothing happened between us.”

  “Excuse me?” Argon asked. It was one of the first times he seemed confused.

  “Uh…” I said, wondering if I’d put my foot in it.

  “Between whom?” he asked.

  I hesitated, and I decided that Argon was no idiot. He was deliberately choosing to ignore… How did he know anything had gone on between Ailuros and me? Or did he know his wife had the hots for strong men, world-savers like me? Likely, the man—the Polarion—knew his wife. Maybe she’d given him grief for centuries. Maybe he’d done stuff to her to make her this way. I didn’t know. Right now—I was going to say I didn’t care, but I did care. If anyone one person could kick my butt, it was Argon.

  “It is time to get ready,” he said.

  “Where’s the Ultimate Annihilator?” I asked.

  “We will assemble it in space.”

  “Shouldn’t we put it together here?”

  Argon shook his head.

  “Care to tell me why not?”

  “Logan,” Rax said. “It is better if we proceed in a linear manner. There are factors here you do not understand.”

  “So, clue me in,” I said.

  “That would be…unwise,” Argon replied. “The crystal understands… Firstly, Logan, I believe you should know that Nerelon Brontios and I are siblings.”

  “Brothers?” I asked in amazement.

  “I find explaining anything to you distasteful,” Argon said. “However, in the interests of Galactic survival, I feel I should ‘clue you in,’ a little. Nerelon is exceptionally clever. He has developed sensors of extraordinary sensitivity. Once we assemble…it, he will know. He will act swiftly, as that is what I would do. That’s why I’m here. I have the highest chance of keeping him at bay long enough.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Argon’s majestic features tightened as if in pain. “You have a gift, Logan. You can upset any Polarion, and in quite a short time. I’m unsure how you achieve this, but there it is.”

  “Why are you all butt-hurt at me?” I said. “I saved you from the Gigantopithecuses, remember?”

  “Oh-oh,” Rax said softly. “That was the wrong tack to take.”

  Argon’s lips pressed against each other and his brows thundered. Then, abruptly, he laughed. It wasn’t a belly laugh, but it was more than a snort. It was also a tension-reliever.

  “You saved me,” Argon said. “You acted nobly, in fact. Although it pains me to say this, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Argon cocked his head before regarding me again. “It’s time to suit up. Liftoff is in ten minutes.”

  For the next few minutes, neither of us said a word. I donned a similar spacesuit to the one I’d worn while sledding from the Antaran Asteroid Belt base to the Polarion one. This spacesuit lacked any foul smells, and it was easy to put on.

  Argon in his spacesuit and helmet pointed at a crash seat. I strapped in. He did likewise. We waited several minutes.

  “Logan,” Rax said. “If you would connect to the equipment…”

  “How?” I asked.

  Rax told me, and I used my tongue to depress a few interior helmet switches.

  “Can you hear me now?” Argon asked.

  “Yeah, boss,” I said.

  “Turn on your HUD. You might find this interesting.”

  I did as he suggested, and the inner visor acted as a mini-TV screen. I saw the words NORTH DAKOTA above the shot of a silo field. A second later, American ballistic missiles began rising from the open silos. The scene switched as British and then French ballistic missiles began rising from their respective fields. Secret Israeli missiles left their launch sites. Indian and Chinese ballistic missiles also began rising from their silos.

  The world’s nuclear powers were attempting to hit back at the alien dreadnought that had sent two meteors against two great cities.

  “What’s Nerelon going to do about this?” I asked.

  “Assess the situation first,” Argon said. “We have forty-seven seconds to liftoff.”

  I saw a scene shift inside my visor. Russian missiles began rising. And then I saw space lightning appear from orbit and zigzag toward the planet. On the HUD, a bolt of lightning destroyed the first human-built ballistic missile. More lightning flashed. More missiles exploded as they climbed for space.

  My spacesuit conditioner began to hum. I realized I had begun to sweat. “Argon,” I said.

  He did not answer. A second later, I understood why.

  A gigantic roar sounded, and I felt the first Gs pressing against me. That roar grew into a thunderous sound, and the Gs pressing against me grew, too.

  We had begun liftoff, leaving launch site 31/6 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. I briefly forgot about the plan as the Soyuz-2 rocket really began shaking and roaring, gaining velocity to take the two of us—the three of us if you count Rax—into low Earth orbit.

  -51-

  This was a three-stage rocket. The first stage quit, fell away, and the second stage took over. We went through that again until Argon took over manually.

  “Logan,” he said in my helmet speaker.

  “Yeah, boss?” I asked.

  “Speak normally,” he said. “This is a terrible event. I hope I never have to do something like this again.”

  “You have more siblings?” I asked.

  He turned his helmet toward me. Even though he had a mirrored visor as I did, I felt his stare burning into me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I was just trying to bleed off nervousness.”

  “I’m rerouting your HUD to my scanner,” Argon said. “Now, look.”

  I studied my HUD. I saw a few ballistic missiles heading at the now-visible dreadnought. It was a huge ship. It wasn’t built as you’d think, symmetrical and cool like on a sci-fi show. Instead, it seemed the builder must have dragged a huge magnet over a junkyard, collecting hundreds of random pieces to make a supposedly invincible GGS warship. No wonder Nerelon had wanted to cloak it from human eyes. It was not sharp-looking, but according to Rax and the two meteor strikes, it was deadly as all get out.

  As I’d said at the beginning, I’d been waiting to join the Galactic Guard, thinking I was finally going to leave Earth for an alien service. Instead, Nerelon Brontios and Company had pirated the ungainly Ocelot, and with it, threatened to lay waste everything I held dear.

  “Debby,” I
whispered.

  “I can sympathize with your feeling,” Argon said.

  That surprised me. I looked at him as I shrank the HUD image and sent it to the lower left visor corner. He did not turn to look at me again. He seemed busy gathering stuff or unpacking—

  Abruptly, our Soyuz capsule stopped spewing exhaust. We drifted, and weightlessness came to our little space vessel.

  That helped Argon unpack. He pulled out a glowing ball with sparkling motes inside it—the Prometheus Stone. He released it and the ball floated in place.

  “Have you ever been to the giant golden ziggurat?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Argon said. “I built it.”

  “Using native help?” I asked.

  “No. We brought our own impressed workers.”

  “Humans?”

  “You saw the High Slith. We used the regular Slith.”

  “How are the high and low Slith different?”

  “In countless ways,” Argon said. “The Slith—they are not called Low Slith—lack wings and heightened intelligence. They made excellent workers. That was a good time,” he said, as if reminiscing.

  “I bet it was a blast for the Slith, too.”

  He ignored that and begun to unpack the next item. Soon, he held a glowing sphere. He seemed to concentrate and smashed the sphere with his space-suited fingers. With a wave of his hand he caused the shards to coalesce, which he put back in the box. That left a little hearing-aid-like device that floated in place. It was the Celestial Cybernetic Circuit.

  “Who made that?” I asked.

  Argon did not answer.

  “Rax?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” Rax said. “I am beginning to think it is of superior design.”

  “Polarion, you mean?”

  “Better than Polarion,” he said.

  That was interesting, and more than a little daunting. I hope I never came across the beings who built items superior to those of the Polarions.

  In his spacesuit, Argon pushed himself across the capsule. He went into a different compartment, returning with a bazooka-like weapon. I’d watched a lot of WWII movies as a kid. The bazooka had been one of my favorite weapons. In the movies, American troops used it, a hollow tube that a soldier set on his shoulder. Another shoved in the shell and tapped the first soldier on the other shoulder. The bazooka was supposed to have been an antitank weapon.

  Ours was bigger and had block parts along with range-finding devices attached everywhere. It looked far more high-tech than a mere WWII bazooka.

  “Here,” Argon said over the helmet-com. He heaved the shell of the Ultimate Annihilator—the “bazooka” toward me.

  The thing slowly sailed my way.

  “It has more mass than you would expect,” Rax told me.

  It might not have weight, but catching a small item while weightless was different from catching an anvil, say. The anvil, with its greater mass, might simply keep going and crush you against a bulkhead.

  I set myself and caught the shell of the Ultimate Annihilator.

  “You’re not going to assemble it?” I asked.

  “I must not,” Argon said. “I took a vow long ago…”

  “You’ve used it before, then?”

  “Yes,” Argon said simply.

  “Against whom or what?”

  “Logan,” Rax said sharply. “Do not ask him that.”

  “I already—sorry,” I told Argon.

  Argon had been in the process of taking off his helmet. Something about that had struck me wrong. I had a feeling it was a ritual, and after he finished the ritual, he would have tried to kill me for what I’d asked.

  “Hey, it’s no big deal, Argon,” I said as lightly as I could. “I’ll assemble this thing, and I guess I’ll fire it too.”

  “If you are able,” Argon said.

  That was a strange thing to say, but I shrugged it off. Oh, I would be able to fire it all right. I kept thinking about Debby, about San Francisco and Beijing. Tough guy Nerelon Brontios was going to learn that you didn’t screw around with Earth or its sons and survive.

  “Warning,” Rax said.

  As the crystal said it, the entire Soyuz capsule shuddered, and a bolt of purple lightning flashed through, as well.

  “Shit!” I shouted.

  Another bolt lanced through our space vessel.

  “Argon!” I shouted. “Do something!”

  The space-suited Polarion gathered himself, and leapt as a third bolt smashed through the disintegrating capsule. Argon held up his gloved hands, and I noticed a nimbus around them.

  The bolt zagged to the nimbus, and Argon seemed to absorb the shot.

  “Now what do we do?” I shouted.

  “Calm yourself, Logan,” Rax said. “Argon likely cannot hear you. He is in conflict with his brother.”

  “Those aren’t discharges from an Ocelot battery?”

  “That makes no sense,” Rax said. “Nerelon desires the Ultimate Annihilator. He doesn’t want to destroy it, but you two instead. Those are personal discharges.”

  “A fight between the gods, huh?”

  “No, Polarions,” Rax said. “You humans have always been too impressed with impressive humanoids. Your ancient ancestors likely looked upon them as gods and therefore—”

  “No more history lesson, Rax. We gotta strike back while we’re able.”

  “Yes,” Rax said. “If you would take the Annihilator and finish assembling it in the other compartment, I think we can end this.”

  I glanced back at Argon. The nimbus around him had grown. He glowed, and he absorbed yet another purple lightning bolt, or whatever it was that Nerelon Brontios fired out of his finger. Why didn’t Argon fire back? Maybe he couldn’t.

  I gathered the floating items and carried them in one arm, while I took the shell of the weapon in the other and jumped. I sailed toward an open hatch into a different compartment. This was a modified Soyuz capsule.

  “Do you think this will still work?” I asked Rax.

  At that moment, a new kind of ray must have struck the Soyuz capsule. I felt warm, looked back at Argon, and saw that he held one hand forward and one aimed back at me. I noticed that I glowed. He’d surrounded me with his nimbus.

  Then, the Soyuz capsule exploded, shredding apart as the metal of it flew in all directions.

  -52-

  Have you ever found yourself floating in low Earth orbit? I doubt it, huh? Well, that was my fate right now. There were shredded Soyuz pieces everywhere, space junk. If one of those pieces sliced my spacesuit, I would be dead.

  Argon’s glow had dwindled, but there were no more purple bolts zinging in, either. We were floating in our spacesuits. I looked down at Earth and saw a last few ballistic missiles blazing their way up.

  They never made it. I don’t think any of the missiles did.

  Argon was waving an arm, maybe to get my attention. I looked at him and noticed him pointing.

  In the far distance, something bright glowed in space. I guess that was the Ocelot coming to check out its master’s handiwork. Would Nerelon kill me out of hand? I was expecting it.

  Then, I saw the strangest thing. Argon used the glow of his right gloved hand to move himself toward me. Did that make physics sense? I’m guessing if I used some higher form of Polarion mathematics it would have. But I’d never been into higher math.

  “Logan,” Rax said. I could barely hear him.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Good, good, there is still a chance,” Rax said. “You foresaw this, too, and we prepared for it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Argon reached me and gripped my spacesuit with his left gloved hand and used the glowing right to propel us among the floating junk of the exploded Soyuz capsule.

  I recognized the Prometheus Stone, and Argon picked up the CCC with part of his nimbus. Now, we just needed the Odin Lens. I saw the carrying case Jenna had used before. It floated nearby.

  Likely, the pieces had an
unnatural connection to the shell of the Ultimate Annihilator, and that tube of mass had not blown away. That made no sense to me, but I was certain Rax would explain it later as an obvious extension of Polarion physics.

  The point was that as the Ocelot made its way toward us, I reached the bazooka-like shell. A dreamlike state began to fog my senses. It must have been the combined proximity of the three items or maybe Nerelon Brontios attempted to ray a confusion beam at me.

  In a trance, I took the Prometheus Stone. It wanted to shine as brightly as it could. I felt the beat of it thrumming through my space-gloves. I also sensed Argon containing its wonderful brilliance.

  “Hey, Stone,” I slurred like a drunkard. “Do you remember me? I helped free you from the ziggurat.”

  Did the beat, the thrum, change cadence? I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I pressed a button and a slot opened on the weapon. I shoved the Prometheus Stone into the opening. What do you know? It was a perfect fit. The opening shut, too.

  Next, I took the Celestial Cybernetic Circuit. It was like a piece of ganglia, a nerve. There was no thrum, no beat, but the thing wanted to cybernetically reconnect with my mind.

  I blocked that through sheer stubbornness. Like Odysseus passing the sirens, I could hear a song of promise in my mind. The things we could do together, we would blow the collective mind of the universe. I would become Logan the Great and Wonderful. I found myself grinning so hard that my mouth hurt. Still, there was a pragmatic part of me, the mule of the pigheaded stubbornness, my inner core. It refused the CCC’s offer.

  “Why not?” I asked myself.

  “No,” the mule of me said.

  “The girls I could have.”

  “No,” it repeated.

  “The righteous actions I could take.”

  “Lord Acton,” the mule of me said.

  “I wouldn’t become corrupt.”

  The mule of me began laughing at myself.

  Abruptly, the siren song of power quit. I found that I’d inserted the CCC into its proper location in the weapon. The ganglia, the nerve, of the Ultimate Annihilator begun functioning, using the Prometheus Stone to begin powering up.