Dark Dragons (66 page)

Darren fired his laser rifle, aiming everywhere and looking
for a soft spot.  However, the being’s repulsor field seemed to shield
every part of its anatomy.

The Guardian continued to advance, its jaws of incisors and
fangs bared and clenched. 
“I wish to extend greetings and friendly
wishes to all who may encounter this Voyager spacecraft and receive this
message.”

“Nate, run!” Darren screamed.

“Mitotic duplication of deoxyribonucleic acid in cellular
nucleus, dual genders, polychromatic heterotrophs, symbiotic with
photosynthetic autotrophs”
——now it was describing humans and their
environment——
“surface dwelling omnivores, oxygen breathers, iron-bearing
corpuscles in circulatory fluid——”

Nate was still backing up, firing everything he had.

“——fossil fuels, progressing nuclear and solar energies,
astronautical chemical propulsion . . . greetings from a human being of the
Earth, please contact . . . how are you?”

The being brought its fists down like mighty hammers and
bashed the deck in a rage directed at everyone, everything.

Brutus was up in the air before anyone registered the
movement.  The bridge lit up in crimson when the battle drone fired its
disrupter cannons.  The crimson bolts struck the Guardian, the kinetic
energy stored in the blasts slamming it back against the broken portal, its
force field sparking but still holding.  The behemoth lunged forward after
regaining its balance and swatted Brutus to the side before the robot could
line up a BAS shot.  He crashed into the bridge tower hard, and Darren
heard Jorge shout, “Oh shit!”  It sounded like damage.  Brutus’s
right disrupter arm hung uselessly and his head had twisted at an odd angle.

Nate had momentarily paused to watch the huge alien and
Brutus clash before turning away for the safe confines of the tower, but Darren
saw helplessly that the beast was too close and too fast.

The alien lunged forward, its powerful limbs outstretched
like a frog’s, and clipped Nate’s legs out from underneath him as if a bear had
just brought down a fawn.

“I will kill you now!”
  It repeated its threat
in German, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, then back to English. 
“I will
kill you now!”

Darren ran forward to save his friend.  He saw Tony and
Jorge racing toward the thing looming over Nate.  It began to maul him
like a rabid pit bull, growling, trying to tear through the armor suit.
 Nate was screaming and firing his weapon uselessly up into the alien’s
face.  Carruthers, Middleton and the remaining SAWDOG’s were firing their
.50-caliber assault rifles to absolutely no effect.

The Guardian seized Nate by the legs and began to hammer
invisible nails in the floor with his limp body, making deep guttural
sounds. 
“We are sending greetings from our world——”

Smash!

“——wishing you happiness, good health——”

Smash!

“——and many years.”

Darren raced forward, knowing Nate had to be dead by
now.  Without regard for his own life, he leaped onto the creature’s
back.  The energy field enveloping its body equaled the kinetic force of
Darren’s collision and bounced him away.  He landed on his back and
scrambled to get on his feet, his nose assailed by the creature’s dank, musty
odor.

Tony brought the end of his rifle down on the Guardian’s
head, and the recoil soundlessly deflected the weapon to the side. 
Snarling, the alien looked up and batted him with the swipe of a mighty arm,
and Tony landed on his chest ten feet away, laser rifle sliding across the
floor.  The creature returned its attention to Nate’s mangled body and
resumed the attack, even though Jorge continued to smash the side of its head
with his rifle in angry futility.

Darren fired his pulse rifle, cursing, screaming, trying to
hurt this fucking animal any way possible, but his weak laser blasts simply
vaporized against the alien’s repulsor field.  Tony rejoined the attack,
but the beast ignored their harmless assaults.  It was going to finish the
job on Nate without interruption.

Darren suddenly discovered the Achilles’ heel.  A laser
pulse found the inside of the Guardian’s mouth, blasting out a row of teeth and
flesh in a spray of amber blood and smoke.  The creature inhaled sharply
and jumped back, knocking Darren to the floor.  There came a wild scream,
high-pitched, and it backed against the bulkhead, then its repulsor shield
bounced it off again.

Brutus rejoined the attack and put the Guardian up against
the wall with another twin disrupter blast, and this time it screamed in agony,
the force field slowly beginning to fail.  Sensing Brutus the immediate
threat, the beast lunged for the robot again, this time to finish him.

The battle drone was not built for combat strength, only to
serve as a heavy shield and stand-off weapons platform——it could do little to
ward off the alien’s savage strikes to its failing armor.  A point blank
BAS shot momentarily stunned the Guardian, staggering it back a couple of
steps, but did nothing to its protected skin.  Brutus fired several laser
pulses up at the being’s mouth, but the alien had learned to keep it shut this
time.

Darren spotted Vanessa emerging from cover behind a computer
console, his needle pistol still in her hand, and he shouted her over. 
“Come on!”

A swarm of hover knights appeared from the shattered portal,
preventing them from recovering Nate’s body.  Darren fired his gauss gun
at one, and the Vorvon exploded.  He fired again . . . and again, but
still more hover knights were pouring in.  Darren trotted backward toward
the opposite portal and laid down a volley of fire to cover their escape.

“Come on!” he screamed at everyone.  “This way! 
This way!”

The Guardian snatched up an unlucky SAWDOG trying to back
away from it.  The man screamed, and Darren saw that it was
Carruthers.  The CO fired one last burst from his useless CAR15 before the
cyborg propelled its mighty jaws forward and bit the man’s head off, helmet and
all.  The alien flung the headless body over its shoulder and searched for
more victims.

Stomach turning, Darren turned away from Carruthers’s
mutilated form and lobbed an electricity grenade at the other side of the
bridge.  The 2,000-amp ball of destruction burst outward and fried several
hover knights taking flight from the broken portal.  All of them crashed
smoking and sparking like dead birds from atop a transformer.  Through the
haze of smoke and combat, Darren spotted Brutus laying in an undignified heap
on the floor next to Nate, both of them still.

Darren gritted his teeth, sending out a cry of hate and pain
between them as he stole a last look on his friend’s body, knowing that they
could not retrieve him, more hover knights and shocktroopers pouring in. 
Middleton surely must have felt the same for his fallen commanding officer.

The angry behemoth started after them.  Darren watched
it move, aghast a creature with its size and bulk could move as fast as it
did.  He glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw everyone had left the
bridge through the second portal.  He turned his back on the thing and
followed suit.

“Where are we going?” Middleton asked.

“This way!” Darren screamed.  “This corridor leads to
what could be a faster escape route out of here!  Just keep going!” 
He kept his back to them, aiming his rifle at the portal from which they
came.  “What’s the status on our ships, Tony?”

“My fighter’s got a lock on my beacon!” Tony said. 
“Andromeda’s right behind her.”

Behind them, the Guardian roared.

“Go!” Darren said.

The alien ducked its head, bending over to squeeze itself
into the corridor.  It moved much slower this time, hunching down on its knuckles
and lumbering forward like a gorilla in the confined space.

Darren thought-fired the recoilless gauss gun on his left
forearm, the weapon emitting a high-pitched whine.  The kinetic pellet
failed to pierce the Guardian’s repulsor field but did slam the cyborg
backward, hard into the bulkhead, its head bobbing like a
Jack-in-the-box.  The dense-metal round ricocheted into the opposite wall,
and a cloud of high-speed shrapnel exploded.

He turned and ran after his friends, searing Nate’s face
into his memory so that he would never forget it.  The counter on his
visor read 1:17:05.

The corridor turned and dipped down into a monitor room of
computer consoles.  Giant machines of some unknown utility lay on the
other side of a long window.  There was no way out other than through the
glass.  A couple of laser pulses shattered the window, and Darren leaped
on top of a console and took a peek into the machine chamber.

“We’re going to have to repel down,” he said. “There’s a
catwalk about a hundred feet below us.  You SAWDOG boys have enough length
for that?”

“Roger that,” Middleton replied.

“How am I going to repel?” Vanessa said.

“It’s in your belt, missy.”  Middleton pressed a blue
button pad on his suit’s hip piece.  A grapnel hook popped out, and he
gave it a yank.

“You got to be kidding me?” she said.

“You want to stay here?” Darren asked.  “You can do
this, Vanessa.”

She put Darren’s needle pistol in her suit’s holster
compartment and unspooled the grapnel line.  “Okay . . . where do I hook
up?”

“Right here,” Darren said, pointing to a console under the
shattered window.  “Jam it into this gap.”

Darren fired his hoist-cable gun into the same console and
put his back to the machine room.  “Let’s go people!”  Before backing
out, he tossed a thermobaric mine into the room on a twenty second timer. 
“Move!”

He turned to see Vanessa was already repelling out, a look
of determined grit on her face.  A hard pump from his legs vaulted him
into the air, the reel motor whining.  Vanessa faltered a couple of times
but quickly regained her footing.  Seconds later, eight humans landed on
the catwalk almost simultaneously and unhooked.

Darren’s mine signaled that it had armed.  “Down here
and to the right,” he said, studying the map revolving on his visor.  They
were inside a monstrous installation with humming silo-like objects arranged in
long columns, similar to the inside of a ballistic missile submarine. 
Electricity arced and jumped from rotating transformers at the top. 
Darren guessed them to be generators or power relays.

“We’re less than a mile from the hull.  Tony, how’s our
evac looking?”  He glanced at the counter.  1:11:23.

“Redhawk One, this is Space Cowboy, do you copy?” Tony
asked.

“Go ahead Space Cowboy.”

“What’s your status?”

“We followed your fighter like you asked.  It stopped
at a position outside the alien ship at the center.  We’re holding
position and awaiting further orders.”

“Continue to hold position, Redhawk One.  We’re coming
to you.”

The air around them gave a lurch.  The catwalk shook
under their boots.

“There goes the mine.”

Their RCS’s scouting ahead found the portal Darren saw on
the schematic map.  The entry led into a labyrinth of corridors and access
ways which serviced another machine chamber, this one a long ring-shaped device
that looked to Darren like a particle accelerator.  It spanned the entire
seven mile length of the bridge superstructure.  Whatever it could be, the
machine was the last stop before sweet everlasting escape.

Jorge was already on the door with his welding gel. 
The Vorvons had locked down every access in the area.  In the distance,
the alarms continued to blare.

“Do we have any idea how thick the hull is?” Tony
asked.  “This schematic doesn’t say.”

“I would assume it’s not thin,” Jorge replied. 
“Welding gel probably isn’t going to help us.”

“Maybe if we use all three gauss guns at once, it will open
a hole big enough for us to zero-g out,” Darren said.

“Speaking of which,” Vanessa said. “What am I going to do
about this?”  She pointed to the jagged hole in her suit.

“Oh shit,” Darren said.

“Everything’s fine,” Middleton said.  He opened a
compartment on Vanessa’s belt and took out a small canister and a square mesh
resembling window screen.  “This ‘Cheese-Wiz.’ will patch you up.” 
Middleton stuffed the mesh inside the hole and worked it under the torn
bodysuit above her skin.  “You’re going to feel a slight burn, but it
won’t hurt you, okay?”

“Let it rip,” Vanessa said.

Middleton squirted the contents of the canister into the
hole, and it did look like yellow Cheeze-Wiz as it puffed out like foam
insulation.

“Ow!” Vanessa cried.

“It’ll go away in a couple of seconds.  That’s the mesh
melting into your bodysuit and sealing it shut.”  Middleton gave the
yellow material a hard rap with his knuckles.  Solid.  “There you are
then . . . right as rain.  The red sliding lever over your neck will seal
your helmet to the bodysuit, and you’ll be ready for zero-g.”

“Wonderful,” she replied. “I can’t wait.”

“Now that’s the spirit!”

Jorge kicked in the chunk of portal he cut out and vaulted
to the left.  “Clear!”

Tony followed him in and went to the right.  “Clear!”

Darren tossed another invisi-mine behind him, this one set
for ultrasonic flesh burst.  Something to instill a little psychological
panic in their pursuers.  He turned and bust into a dead run when he saw
that everyone else had left.  “Hey, wait up!”  The cold thought of
being left behind was nearly paralyzing, and his mind went back to Nate lying
dead on the bridge.  Again, he gritted his teeth, wishing somehow they
could have retrieved him.  He hoped the Vorvons did nothing unnatural to
his friend’s body.

*

Eighteen fruitless minutes were spent navigating the empty
corridors which turned out to be nothing more than spaces separating storage
cubes resembling shipping crates.  It went on and on, frustrating everyone
and sapping their hopes of a timely escape.  Finally, they came out to a
platform that spanned the entire length of a straight tunnel which, according
to the map, terminated at the particle accelerator more than half a mile
away.  The platform had several machines and computer consoles all along
its length, all of them monitored by more harmless squid drones.  In the
middle of the thirty foot tunnel, several ring-shaped devices were levitating
in the direction of the accelerator with bright crackling balls of electricity
in their centers.  It was loud as hell, and Darren could smell the burn of
ozone.