Dark Dragons (65 page)

Darren was trying to appraise the functions of the controls
scattered around the bridge, but he knew he would have an easier time trying to
guess equally confusing functions in NASA’s Mission Control room.  Every
Vorvon looked like they were doing the same thing:  pushing buttons,
reading computer schematics, walking around from post to post.  Human
designs favored a helm to be located under a forward window or at least in
close proximity to one, but none existed.

“Here we go,” Middleton said.  “Up on the top floor of
the tower.  See that ugly little bastard sitting down?”

“They’re all ugly, captain.”

“The one closest to us in the red suit, manipulating that
sphere.  Check out his screens.  Looks like flight patterns. 
Trajectories, orbital windows, navigation corridors.  I think that’s the
helm.”

“Are you sure?”

Middleton shrugged.  “No.”

Darren turned back to the rest of the people in the air
duct.  “Okay guys, game plan.  Jorge, bring Brutus forward. 
He’s going to be the first one to punch in and drop those two guards.  The
rest of us will clear out the rest and secure the portals on both ends of the
bridge.  And for God’s sake, don’t damage the helm.”

The guys leaned against the air duct’s opposite wall and
fired their pulse rifles into the grate.  The twenty or so unarmed Vorvons
screeched in surprise and turned to see big, angry Brutus emerge from the hole
and pump several laser shots into the troopers guarding the two
entrances.  As Brutus vaulted in the air for the tower, everyone else
spilled out and landed on the floor ten feet below the duct, laying down a
methodical arc of weapons fire.

The bridge was suddenly thrown into chaos.  Darren kept
the trigger down, sweeping his weapon left-to-right, cutting the enemy in
two.  Jorge brought down three of the green-suited creatures and pumped a
single blast into the chest of a Vorvon trooper that had been hiding behind the
tower.  Another trooper appeared from an enclosure and crouched down
behind a computer console against the tower wall to return fire, but Tony
charged his gauss gun and blew an armor-piercing slug through the machine,
clipping the alien’s body in half.

After about five seconds, the bridge was clear.  Dead
Vorvons were strewn about, a few not so dead, trying to crawl away.  Tony
and Nate took a stroll around the room, blasting a single shot into each head
for good measure.

“Tower’s clear!” Jorge shouted from above.

Darren waved Vanessa out of the duct.

“I hear an alarm,” Tony said, looking up at the ceiling.

“I hear it, too,” Darren replied.  It was faint,
high-pitched.  “Here come the bad guys.  Button up that portal,
Nate.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.  Look for a switch.”

Darren went to the opposite side of the bridge, and just as he
guessed, found a three-button panel on the wall next to the circular
portal.  The far left button moved the door out of its recess and sealed
the portal shut.  He pressed the second button and heard a dull
clunk
inside the door followed by a hiss of pressurized air.  “Press the far
left button to shut the door and the second to lock it,” he called to Nate at
the other portal.

Darren headed for the bridge tower’s elevator lift.
 “Jorge.  Captain Middleton.  Come with me up to the helm.”

The top level of the tower had more computer consoles,
bright buttons and hologram monitors than any other section of the
bridge.  In the center of the room sat the helm, which looked like a
flight simulator or an elaborate arcade game.  The machine had a padded
recliner with a control board mounted on the floor in front of it and a
metallic sphere imbedded into the board.

Brutus blasted the recliner out of his way and used his
omni-interface tool to manipulate the metal sphere in the center of the helm
console.

A long, thin line of light glowed atop the control board,
and a bright dot no bigger than a dime materialized in the air above it. 
The dot abruptly expanded into a bright square in front of them, about a meter
across.

“Another hologram,” Middleton said.

Darren put his hand through it.  “A hologram to what,
though?”

Strange data rendered in the Vorvon language scrolled up on
the hologram, followed by a series of computer graphics which looked like
trigonometry diagrams.

“We’re in,” Jorge said.

“Yeah, look at this.”  Middleton pointed to a computer
box where a group of status lines wavered rhythmically across a grid in the
hologram’s corner.  “I recognize this pattern.  These are power
feeds.  They use magneto-fusion technology.  Only NASA meters its
mag-fuse experiments in minicycle increments.  Looks like the aliens
measure their feeds in macrocycles.  It would have to be a heavy-duty
engine to push a ship this big.”  Sock shook his head.  “Wow. 
Wish we had time to copy all of this shit down.”

“Brutus can’t find any kind of scuttle mechanism. 
Sorry, Darren.”

“Then we go to Plan B.”

“Well Plan B means Brutus has to set up a virus in a server
room that ties into the other bridges.  That will close off the auxiliary
bridges and prevent them from altering the moonship’s course.  Problem is,
this virus is going to take several minutes for Brutus to create, plus he has
to set up about a thousand firewall nodes to protect it.”

“Well get him on it.”

“He already is.

Down below, Nate shouted, “You better hurry up with whatever
you’re doing!  My sensors are detecting Vorvon troops massing outside
nearby!”

*

Nate stood at the main bridge entrance with Vanessa when he
heard a loud thump against the sealed portal at the end of the corridor.

Vanessa heard it too.  “What was that?”

“Darren!  I think the bad guys are here!”  He
leveled his laser rifle at the portal.  “Darren!”

“I heard you!  Just give us one more minute!”

“I don’t think we have a minute!”

Whump!

Nate and Vanessa backed away from the portal.

“You better go hide somewhere,” he told her.  She
accepted his advice wisely and ran to the other side of the bridge.

The portal suddenly plumped out like a ballpark frank, and a
small tear ran down the length of the seal.

“Darren, I think——”

“Just hold them off, Nate.  We’re almost there!”

“I don’t think these are Vorvons!”

Whump!  The portal came off at the bottom.  A deep
growl made Nate step back.  He caught movement through the expanding tear
in the door——something black and fleeting.  A pair of huge, impassive eyes
like ghostly fog lamps peeked through the hole, blinked once, and withdrew.

Nate felt both testicles shrivel when he realized the devil
himself was at the gate.

*

Nate yelled something again, but Darren couldn’t make it
out.

“You better hurry,” he said.  “Something’s going down
and we may have to bug out of here quick.”

“Almost there,” Jorge responded as he read Brutus’s data
feeds on his visor.  On the hologram, a blinking red circle appeared with
a yellow dot in the center——the nav computer’s icon for the sun.  The red
circle around it represented the limit of the star’s gravity well.  Lines
indicating approach vectors came up on the hologram next, and Brutus quickly
selected one with his omni-interface tool.

Jorge turned to Darren with a frown.  “Brutus found
your timer, Darren.  It’s used for delta-v propulsion . . . not for warp
ignition, but Brutus can tie it in so that it does.  The only problem is
that the timer has a max of one hour and thirty-five minutes.”

Darren felt the blood drain out of him and saw it on Middleton’s
face, too.

“Is that enough time for us to make it back to the
Andromeda?” the captain asked.  “It’s seven hundred bloody miles away.”

Darren shook his head.  “I don’t think so.”

“We’re going to have to leave Brutus here to fly the ship,”
Jorge said with hopelessness.  He did not want to lose his pet.

“He’ll never make it,” Darren said.  “The Vorvons are
massing to overtake the bridge, and we need to cripple the helm before we
leave.”

Middleton closed his eyes and turned away.  “And I
actually began to get my hopes up.”

Darren scanned through the schematic map of the bridge
superstructure, quickly studying all seven miles of its interior, looking for
an escape route.  They certainly couldn’t back out the same way they came
in.  That was blocked by the enemy.  Darren spotted a couple of
possibilities.  “Have Brutus set the timer, Jorge.  I think I found a
way out.  Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“The SAWDOG’s comms are shot.  I need you to relay a
message through your Dragonstar to the Andromeda pilots.  Have them follow
your fighter out of the landing port to our position outside the
superstructure.”

“How are we going to get to our ships?” Tony asked.

“Easy.  We’re going to demo through the hull.”

Tony nodded, chuckled.  “Righteous, Seymour.  I’m
on it.”

“Jorge, get Brutus to open the landing port airlock.”

“Got it.”  Moments later, Jorge let out a defeated
sounding exhalation.  “Damn it!”

“What?” Darren replied.

“It appears the computer doesn’t allow premeditated
collision courses.”

“Override it!”

“Brutus is trying . . . but he’s not having much luck.”

Nate:  “Darren, get your ass down here!”

The hologram switched to a computer schematic of what
resembled an immense spider web of circuit lines.  Brutus probed inside
the main navigation computer, looking for another route to the primary warp
controls.  Diagrams swept past with hypnotic velocity, too fast for a
human to read.

“Virus and firewall nodes uploaded,” Jorge intoned. 
“Still looking for that override.”

“Darren!”  Nate shrieked.

He turned for the railing and shouted, “What is it Nate?”

“There’s a fucking giant monster outside the portal! 
It’s almost inside!”

Darren couldn’t see the portal from his vantage point. 
He ran down the walkway and spotted huge, black fingers with crazy claws
peeling one side of the heavy portal out.  The Guardian.  The
Invicid’s watch dog had followed them all the way from the life chamber. 
“Jorge, we gotta go!” he screamed.

The scrolling schematics suddenly stopped, and a single
circuit line glowed.  Jorge shouted, “Gotcha!  Here comes a nine
second burn!”

Brutus activated some unknown control from within the helm’s
circuits and avionics systems, and Darren heard a deep rumble rise from the
depths of the moonship.  The primary delta-v engines had fired.

He could feel the thrust pushing against his body,
practically leaning forward to stay on his feet. 
Five . . . four . . .
three . . . two . . . one. . . .

Brutus’s omni-interface tool danced across the metal sphere
on the helm, and the rumble stopped as the robot cut out the engines. 
Darren straightened himself after the thrust abated.

“Abandon ship!” Jorge shouted, turning around for the tower
elevator.

“Is that it?” Darren called after him.

“The moonship is pulling out of its L2 orbit and heading for
a warp point two hundred thousand miles away.  We have an hour and a half
to get off this ship or we’ll start developing a serious tan.”

Darren charged his rifle and pumped a long volley of laser
blasts into the helm, crippling the controls beyond use.  “Ninety minutes
should be plenty of time,” he said with a matter-of-fact snap.  He
activated a stopwatch countdown on his visor——1:30:00.

There came the piercing sound of rending metal below. 
A terrifying bellow from a creature full of wrath and bloodlust reverberated
off the bulkheads.  One and a half hours suddenly felt like one and a half
minutes.

A grenade launcher fired.  Nate screamed.

Darren jumped on the elevator pad and aimed his pulse rifle
down.  What he saw squeezed out the last ounce of confidence he still had
left while the gloom and horror of this place finally overwhelmed his
resolve.  He couldn’t take much more of this shit.  Darren stood
there for another few heartbeats before lowering the elevator.

The Guardian, a dark monster bred from a childhood
nightmare, stood in front of the ruptured portal.  The being was a
cyborg——an atrocious, surgical union of living flesh and machine that looked
like it still hurt.  It was bipedal and tall, at least twelve feet high——
cumbersome in appearance, but its muscular body moved fluidly.  It had the
hooded neck and head similar to a cobra’s, only metallic.  In fact, both
legs, the right arm and its long neck had been replaced with mechanical
replicas.  The only organic components visible were the torso, the bottom
of its long neck and the jaws, but even there, wires just under the skin
twisted around like metal veins.  Its real eyes were gone, replaced with
electronic sensors of similar function.  Darren wasn’t able to imagine
what it looked like before the surgery, but it couldn’t have been any more
attractive.

This thing certainly looked like it could kill an
elephant.  The huge jaws opened to release another ghastly roar while it
lumbered toward Nate who continued to back away from it, cursing in defiance
and terror.  He pumped round after round from his grenade launcher with no
effect.  The creature had some kind of repelling force, Darren unable to
tell whether it projected the field mechanically or biologically.  Maybe
both.  Only a shimmering static pulsated outward at the point of
deflection.  Lasers seemed to disintegrate, while solid matter merely
bounced off.  Most of the ricocheted shrapnel zipped around piercing
bulkheads and computer consoles.

The Guardian continued to advance rapidly, and it spoke with
a deep and eerie monotone through a translator imbedded into the top of its
metal head. 
“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United
States of America.  We are a community of 240 million human beings among
the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth.”