Dark Dragons (38 page)

“Where did this ship come from?” Towsley asked.  “Who
sent it here, and why?”

Darren went deep into his mind, artificial memories
beginning to flicker beyond his consciousness before welling up from the
abyss.  “Eta Cassiopeia.  A binary star system nineteen light-years
away.  The second planet orbiting the primary star is similar to
Earth.”  Darren paused to let other memories gather strength and reveal
themselves.  He was almost in a trance.  “They’re all dead,” he
whispered.  “The Xrel.  That’s what they called themselves. 
They were destroyed by the Vorvons.  Where they came from, nobody knew.”

“Vorvons?” Towsley asked.

“The bad guys.  They appeared from the direction of the
Xrelmaran constellation named after the Third Prophet of Revenge, Vorvon. 
The Xrel were a very religious race.”

“These . . . Xrel . . . obviously didn’t speak English,”
Taggart said.  “So how do you come up with these names?”

“They mainly communicated telepathically but were also
capable of physical speech.  Linguistically, their language was similar to
human-speech believe it or not.  They had a twenty-three letter
alphabet.  I’m very fluent in it actually,” Darren said with a smile.
 
“En’rev’k Y’rid Zet
.”

“What’s that?” Taggart asked, with just a slight irritated
tone.

“It’s my Xrel name,” Darren said, pleased he was causing the
general irritation. 
“He Who Greats With Fire.”

Taggart smirked
.  “Dances With Wolves,”
and gave
Towsley a smile which was not returned.

A-ha,
Darren thought. 
Good cop, Bad cop.
 
“I hope you and I are going to get along,” he asked, making direct eye contact
with Taggart.  “This Q and A won’t get very far if you keep the sass
going.”  Darren really wasn’t offended by the general’s cute
wisecrack.  He just wanted to play off the Bad Cop machismo building in
the room.  Find a soft spot.

“Don’t let the sass bother you, Mr. Seymour,” Taggart said.

Towsley rocked a bit on the corner of Taggart’s desk. 
“Why did the Xrel send this ship to Earth?”

Darren went back to the alien memories swirling around in
his head.  “Our sun was their polestar.  Nineteen light-years away,
it was barely visible to them, but the Xrel held it to a very devout status in
their scriptures.  Ancient Xrel believed their gods and prophets lived on
our sun.  Can you believe that?  Anyway, I think the ship was sent
here as a sort of . . . sacrifice, or an offering.”

“Do you think this ship specifically choose you and your
friends?”

“No, but I don’t think it had any choice.  It crashed,
and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Why do you say that?  Why don’t you think you were at
the
right
place at the
right
time?  Haven’t you accepted
your new status?”

“What’s that?  A brainwashed looser with the violent
streak of a chimpanzee?  No, not exactly.”

General Taggart cleared his throat.  “Well, there’s a
wonderful way to look at yourself.  A reluctant monkey doesn’t win the
war.”

Darren played with his shoestring again.  “Who said I
was reluctant?”

Taggart gave him a long stare before speaking.  “You
don’t appear to be approaching our dire situation with steely-eyed
enthusiasm.  Morale and motivation is something you learn in boot camp
with a drill instructor screaming in your face.  Not a twenty second
brainwashing by a machine.”

“Believe me, it works.”  Darren noticed a little smirk
on Taggart’s face.  He had seen this picture before.  Like sitting in
Barstowe’s principal’s office, firing off quick answers and dodging conceited
verbal shots from tyrannical adults.  He could take it, though.

Towsley went back to the Q and A before tensions could
escalate.  “I want to talk about your fighters.  Our engineers say
there are no external seams or fasteners they can undo and gain entrance into
the interior.”

“And you won’t,” Darren said.  “The Xrel made sure
their tech could not be reverse engineered.  If anyone, other than me,
made it into the guts and tried any kind of physical analysis on any component,
the security VI would shut down the magnetic field controlling the
micro-singularities in the generator.”

“Which would do what?” Taggart asked.

“About ten kilotons of ‘curiosity killed the cat.’ 
Gravity of atom-tearing proportions would suck everything within a thousand
feet or so, including the bedrock underneath, and smash everything into a
pinpoint.  The heat and kinetic energy in the rebound would flatten
everything within four or five miles.  Effective fail safe.”

Darren’s mind went back to Scorch and his Dragonstar. 
He wondered how the Vorvons had dodged that security feature, if they had at
all.  Did Scorch have their only Dragonstar, or had they successfully
produced exact duplicates not seen in battle yet?  Towsley interrupted
Darren’s train of thoughts.

“How would you describe your fighters?” Towsley asked. 
“What role, and so forth.”

“The Xrel referred to them as Interplanetary Multi-Target
Combat Vehicles.  They’re multi-role fighters——we can engage up to twenty
bandits simultaneously, and I don’t mean with just stand-off, fire-and-forget
missiles, I mean actual dogfighting.  They’re also ground interdiction
platforms that are very effective against hardened facilities or armor units;
triple-A suppressor, day-night, all-atmo.  It can operate in atmospheric
pressures up to three hundred bars or heavy gravity environments up to seven
g’s.  We can also single handedly engage large spacecraft like cruisers
and dreadnoughts with proton destroyers.  A single Dragonstar can zap an
entire armada of heavy ships rather quickly . . . if certain conditions are
right and the pilot is quick on the stick and suicidal enough.”

“What’s a proton destroyer?” Taggart asked, nearly a
whisper.

The general had a ghostly look of worry on his face, as well
as it should.  Darren didn’t like to think of the absolutely frightening
weapons they had racked up in the missile carriages hidden within the
Dragonstars’ bellies.  Having the power to destroy any form of matter
regardless of its size scared him too.

“It’s a disintegration weapon designed to kill large spacecraft. 
It aggravates superstring fields to a particular frequency which tear the pion
bonds that attach the particles making up protons.  Each atom of matter
becomes part of the anti-pion matrix and converges the adjacent atom it’s
connected to into the process before it’s annihilated.  So you get a nasty
chain-reaction where matter actually destroys itself.  The Xrel called the
process
R’trev Goev Wir——Creeping Underworld Demon
.  An appropriate
epithet, since it uses superstrings from another dimension to destroy matter in
our own dimension.  The Xrel scientists who created the proton destroyers
were so frightened of what they created, they committed ritual suicide to save
their souls from damnation . . . they were religious freaks.  Science was
just a hobby.”

The only sound heard in the room was the air conditioning
wafting out of the ceiling vent.  Then Taggart spoke.  “So
theoretically you could disintegrate the sun with just a single missile?”

Darren shifted his weight to the other buttcheek. 
“Theoretically?”  He thought a little bit more about that scenario. 
“Yes, but it would take a few days.  You have to consider mass to gravity
ratios and the sun’s gamma ray fields resisting the anti-pion matrix, but that
would eventually slack off after. . . .”  Darren stopped and glanced
around at the adults in the room who looked like wide-eyed Cub Scouts having
been told the scariest ghost story ever heard.  Darren could even hear the
campfire crackling.

“That’s a lot of God-like wrath for an eighteen-year old kid
to possess,” Taggart said.

“We have steady hands,” Darren replied coolly.

The general just stared at him.  Towsley twitched again
on the corner of the desk.  The guy named Nellis cleared phlegm from his
throat.

“I’d like to add that our Dragonstars’ main computers have
thought-resident, lock-out commands that prevent us from attacking a natural
object like a planet or a star, intentional or unintentional.”

“I’m glad to hear of that,” Taggart said.

“I’m glad you are too.”

“Change of subject,” Towsley said. “I want to know about
your trip to Jupiter.”

“How do you know about that?”

“The whole world saw your handiwork on the news.  An
hour or so before the explosion, we spotted four unidentified objects hauling
ass out of the atmosphere.  Wasn’t hard to put two and two together. 
What did you destroy?”

“A deuterium refinery they were building on Io.  Their
assault cruisers and troop carriers use deuterium in their anti-matter
engines.”

General Taggart gave Nellis a look.  “Deuterium?”

“An isotope of hydrogen,” Nellis replied.  “Makes
sense.  It’s a cheap and easy fuel to produce.”

“The explosion came from the orbital tanker we took out,”
Darren said.  “Along with seven assault cruisers moored to it.  That
was a quarter of their invasion force.”  Darren made sure he was looking
at Taggart.

“Do you know when the aliens will arrive?” Major Weinholt
asked.

 “No, but I have good reason to believe it’ll be soon.”

“Do you know of their intentions?”

“No I don’t,” he said truthfully.  “But I wish I did.”

“We wish we knew, too,” Weinholt said.  “What other
kinds of ships and weapons do they have?”

“They have troop carriers.”  Darren paused to pull
memories out of his brain.  “They’re triangular, about a mile
across.  With a sphere in the center where the bridge and hangar bay are
located.  They have anti-spacecraft blister guns all along the hull, too.”

“Anything else?” Taggart asked.

“Like what?”

“You have to know more than that.  What other kinds of
ships do they have?  What kind of tactical weapons?  You mentioned
assault cruisers earlier.  How many troop carriers do the cruisers
support?  Do they have weapons like tanks or APC’s?”

Darren, for some reason, no longer wanted to respond to the
general and his Bad Cop act.  “I don’t know.”

“I have the suspicion that you’re not telling us
everything.”

“I’m telling you everything I know!”

Towsley pushed off from Taggart’s desk that he’d been
leaning against as if goosed in the ass with about two thousand volts.  “I
think we’re done with our questions for today.  We have what we need for
now.  You can go back to your cell if you want, Darren, or we can take you
up to the galley for some chow.”

“Look, you just grilled me for a half-hour, and I spilled my
guts when I should have stuck to name, rank and serial number.  I have a
few hundred goddamn questions I’d like to ask, too.”

Towsley folded his arms.  “What’s on your mind?”

“When are you going to let us go?”

Taggart replied, “We haven’t decided.”

“Well, why don’t you take a stab at it and make up your mind
now.”

“We’ll let you go when we feel you’re no longer a threat to
us.”

“A threat?”  Darren almost leaped out of the
chair.  “We’re not the enemy!”

“Frankly, Mr. Seymour, we don’t know that.  This ship
that brainwashed you could actually be a scout probe of some kind from the
invaders and not from another alien race as you say.  You could be a
pre-invasion strike force here to disable our communications, strategic missile
sites, bridges, oil refineries, whatever.”

“Unbelievable.”

“You might not even realize that you’re one of their
pawns.  There may be a trigger response in that brainwashed noggin of
yours that may turn you from friend to foe at any time without your realizing
it.”

“If we’re secretly working for them, then why did one of
them try to plug me the other day?”

“Sir, I don’t think these boys are part of the invasion,”
Towsley said.  “Like Darren said, they tried to kill him.  I think
the aliens perceive the boys as a dangerous threat.”

The general shook his head.  “The aliens might have
felt they choose the wrong people for the job and decided to wipe the slate
clean.  Darren even said the ship that crashed was not meant for
them.  For whom then?”

“That ship was not Vorvon!” Darren said.

“Sir,” Towsley said. “I have to agree with him.  I
think your observations are too partial.”

“Colonel Towsley, at this point in time, we know very little
about the state of affairs we are in.  As far as I’m concerned, anything
is possible, no matter how subjective or silly you may think.  Until I’m
convinced that these boys are not a national security risk, I’m not authorizing
their release.”

“You saw the explosion from Jupiter,” Darren said. “We wiped
out their only source of fuel and a quarter of their ground invasion force!”

“That’s what
you
contend,” Taggart responded. 
“Unfortunately, we here on Earth are unable to properly verify that
claim.  Maybe you were just practicing your proton destroyers on Jupiter’s
moons.”

Darren noticed Towsley shake his head ever so
slightly.  “I love this Good Cop, Bad Cop vibe happening here,” Darren
said.  “Thanks for being a friend, colonel.  By the way, you’re going
to see a big risk to national security pretty soon if you don’t let us go.”

“We’re capable of dealing with the situation ourselves,”
Taggart said.

“How’s that?”

“This complex is not only a command for surveillance and
tracking.  It’s also where we control our screen of orbital weapons.”

“Orbital weapons?”  Darren felt a grin coming on.

“There are currently fifty satellite weapons in orbit. 
X-ray lasers and electromagnetic railguns, to be exact.  Not to mention a
surface-to-air shield of ScramHawk missiles with plasma warheads that will be
waiting for our guests when they arrive, as well as capable naval forces. 
If your——
Vorvons
did you call them?——happen to get through, we have a
battalion-size unit of special operations forces that are licking their chops
for an E.T. breakfast.”