Comrades in Arms (6 page)

— 14 —

They flew away from Fixion, diving at breakneck speed and without a course into the scramble of drifting asteroids. Click quickly became adept at maneuvering the cargo shuttle.

“The military will be tracking us. We have to get far enough away,” he announced over the intercom.

Rader still lay on the lower deck, trying to get his uncooperative leg to function. He was sure the survivors of the hunter squad would be commandeering their own pursuit ships. Click accelerated as much as he could tolerate, and his tough alien body could withstand severe gravitational stresses. Rader’s Deathguard armor protected him.

“Once we are in the densest portion of the Belt, I will cut the engines,” Click continued. “Then our signature becomes identical to that of the other small asteroids.”

Taking a moment to assess his own malfunctions, Rader propped himself against a bulkhead. The cyborg leg had suffered no obvious damage, but the neural pulses from his brain no longer made it move as he intended. Unavoidable glitches, the start of what would be a cascade of breakdowns, and he knew how to do only the most basic repairs. He breathed silent thanks that his systems had functioned long enough and well enough to get him and Click off of Fixion. Now, if he could only find a plan that would get his Jaxxan comrade to safety.

One problem at a time.

Working with enforced patience, still feeling the afterwash of the synthetic adrenaline that had poured through his systems, Rader removed emergency tools, cracked open the primary circuits, and performed a standard reset procedure twice before his armored leg would twitch again. He swung himself back to his feet and tried to walk. He took painstaking steps at first, then limped forward. The metal ladder to the upper deck proved quite a challenge, but he eventually made his way into the control chamber.

Click flew the ship among a cluster of high-albedo icy asteroids. To confuse any systems tracking them, he matched the orbits of random stony asteroids of approximately the same size as the cargo ship, and the glaring sunlight masked their thermal signature after Click shut down the engines.

“We wait half a day,” the Jaxxan said, “then alter course slightly to take us closer to the observatory asteroid. We are patient.”

“Yes, patient.” Rader silently ran thorough diagnostic checks of his systems, his power sources, the alignment of neural conduits, and found many domino-effect malfunctions; his last battle and escape in the Jaxxan base had strained his components, running out the service life. “Take as much time as you need.”

One way or another, he doubted he had more than a week. Click didn’t need to know that, but his empathic senses would probably tell him anyway.

“With the ship’s life-support levels, we can survive for three days. Breathe as little as possible.”

Rader realized it was a joke. “Nobody’s been to the observatory asteroid in ages. Better hope their systems are functional. We won’t make it to anywhere else.”

Click said, “We have nowhere else to go.”

“That’s the next thing I have to figure out.”

While they drifted, Rader tried to implement repairs to his cyborg systems in order to buy a little extra time, but most of the systems were beyond him. And the failings were in his mental interface, not in the large-scale mechanics. He experienced a persistent headache that seemed to be growing worse. His eyesight suffered from double vision, as if the images from his real eye and artificial eye did not align properly.

For two days, they made their cautious, tedious journey across a stepping-stone course. Click monitored the cargo ship’s passive sensors. They were surrounded by far too many datapoints, which was good—a swarm like identical needles in a very large haystack. “I see no indication that pursuers have followed us through the numerous blips.”

Rader’s hope grew as the image of the observatory asteroid grew on the viewscreen before him. It was a domed rock less than two kilometers wide, moving among the rubble in the Fixion Belt. In less than an hour, if Click kept up his improved navigational abilities, they would arrive.

Rader almost smiled for the first time since … since that final day with his squadmates. He should have died then, and
that
day could have served as his final flash of glory, not this awkward encore. With so much time to think aboard their ship, he could not escape the conclusion. Even after they reached the observatory, Click had little chance of going much farther. He had not managed to come up with a viable plan.

He felt dismayed that this abortive “second chance” as a Deathguard had accomplished nothing—not for himself, not for his people, not for Click either. It was just a delay. And when Rader’s cyborg systems finally broke down, Click was not likely to last long alone on the observatory asteroid. He’d wait there until food supplies and life support ran out, like a man stranded on a desert island.

Short-term thinking. But it was better than
shorter
-term thinking. They were still alive. Rader had to hope they would find some other ship, or supplies … or a miracle once they got to the asteroid.

In the pilot seat, Click seemed satisfied. If he detected Rader’s troubled thoughts, he did not show it.

As they made their final approach, Rader studied the enhanced images, saw the framework of bowl-shaped radio telescopes reflecting starlight, the automated tracking mirrors of optical telescopes gazing out into the universe to gather astronomical data.

And he saw the recently installed military fuel depot, large tanks of spacecraft fuel, as well as Earth League stockpiled missiles, a forest of javelin-shaped warheads ready to be launched. He stared, realizing that this asteroid was not as forgotten and abandoned as he had hoped.

When Click scanned the rear navigational sensors, his glassy black eyes clouded over. “Rader …”

Two pursuit fighterships swept up behind them like cruising sharks. They came straight toward the sluggish Jaxxan cargo ship.

“I cannot accelerate enough to outrun them,” Click said. “And we have very little fuel remaining.”

Rader glanced at the type of ship, knew their capabilities. “Those are the League’s fastest fighterships. We don’t have any chance of outrunning them.”

When the pair of pursuers circled the cargo ship, Rader saw the Earth League insignia, but the image blurred and shimmered in his unfocused vision. The face that appeared on the comm screen, though, was a Jaxxan, demanding their surrender.

“Why don’t they just destroy us from a distance?” Click said.

“They will want proof—or trophies.”

The squad of hunters was composed of humans and Jaxxans working together; Rader wondered if the Earth League soldiers had orders to kill their alien comrades after a successful mission—especially now that they had seen the unexpected missile stockpile hidden on the observatory asteroid. Commissioner Sobel could not possibly want the Jaxxan high command to know about the depot.

“We cannot defend ourselves,” Click said. “This cargo shuttle has no weapons.”

Rader held his laser rifle. “We can defend ourselves.”

A clang of metal thrummed through the hull as the two fighterships attached to the Jaxxan airlocks. “I have sealed the airlocks and denied them access,” Click said.

“They’ll burn their way through.” On the visual monitors he discerned a glow on the inner hull: one airlock being cut away by a powerful laser rifle, and the opposite lock rippling from a continuously applied energy-web. Even a Deathguard couldn’t defend both hatches at the same time.

Limping on his faulty leg, aligning his weapons systems with the vision from only his artificial eye to minimize errors, Rader picked a defensible position at the entrance to the cargo ship’s cockpit. He braced himself there, holding his laser rifle ready, his targeting sensors attuned. His artificial heart pumped nutrients through his cyborg and biological components, but the Werewolf Trigger remained silent. He didn’t need it. Or maybe that, too, had malfunctioned.

Both hatches surrendered at the same time, and on the visual monitors he watched the remaining members of the hunter squad move with brisk efficiency through the corridors up to the cockpit. The humans were wearing mirrored armor, which would reflect the beam of his laser rifle.

“I’ll take out as many as I can, but I doubt I’ll get them all,” he said. “Sorry we didn’t make it all the way.”

“We made it this far, Rader, and now we are dead.” Click’s voice was strangely emotionless. “But so are they.”

Rader identified an expression on the alien face that no other human would have seen. Click punched a sequence into the navigational computer, and the observatory asteroid shifted its position in front of them. “Our engines cannot outrun the fighterships, but we have enough power to drag them along.”

Rader nodded approval. “A Deathguard’s mission is to cause mayhem.”

“Yes, I believe we have caused a fair amount of mayhem,” Click said.

“I just wish we had accomplished something more than that.” He wondered if the Commissioner would take the medal of honor away from his family … but that would be admitting something had gone wrong.

The six members of the hunter squad advanced up to the control deck.

Rader darted a farewell glance at his comrade. After setting their collision course, Click crouched in motionless silence, not even trying to fight. Instead, he hunched over a shining image, studying his last holystal. The glowing shape was a dazzling, perfect sphere.

Rader took a quick breath. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we have run out of alternatives.”

The hunter squad let out a chorus of shouts as they stormed the final corridor. Rader opened fire, placing a neat, centimeter-wide hole through the head of one Jaxxan.

Now the Werewolf Trigger clamored in his mind, but as he fired on the advancing squad members, his arm jerked and spasmed, spoiling his aim. The Jaxxans took shelter against door wells in the corridor, and Rader’s energy blasts reflected off the mirrored armor, ricocheting down the hall. The fractured beams dissipated, but he kept firing.

Rader’s leg gave out beneath him, and he tumbled over like a mannequin. He tried to aim his laser rifle as momentum carried his body in a clumsy roll, and he lay face up on the deck.

An energy-web hurled by the two remaining Jaxxans engulfed Click in luminous tangles. Click cried out as the web completed itself, but his words turned to scintillating shards of sound. His holystal dwindled to a last spark of light until that, too, vanished.

The human fighters targeted the Deathguard and rushed forward, while the Jaxxans ran past him, urgently trying to reach the shuttle controls in time. Rader stared at them through his visor: A band of humans and aliens working together, to destroy a human and alien who had dared to work together. He wondered if they understood the irony.

He looked past them to the cockpit to see the observatory asteroid rushing toward them. The cargo shuttle was going to crash into the spiny missile batteries instead of the telescopes … not that it made any difference.

A short time was better than no time—and he had spent it with a friend rather than alone.