Dark Dragons (67 page)

“We have to go this way!” Darren shouted over the machine
din.  “Toward that particle accelerator!”

“Are you sure this is the way?” Middleton asked. 
“We’ve been running through mouse traps since the bridge.”

“If this schematic map is correct, yes.  The walls of
that accelerator run across the hull, and our rides are waiting for us on the
other side.  You still got a fix, Tony?”

“Roger . . . two thousand, seven hundred feet at one
o’clock.”

00:47:22.  “We got forty-seven minutes.  Let’s
pick up the pace!”

At the end of the tunnel, the hovering rings deposited their
balls of energy into a buzzing machine jutting out like a giant finger. 
The rings disappeared into a slot in the ceiling.  Stray electricity arced
away from the machine, nearly reaching a slender walkway that vanished into the
wall next to it.  The noise level was nearly unbearable.

“This looks dangerous!” Tony exclaimed.  “Don’t touch
the railings and stay against the wall!”

The eight of them passed through without incident save for
one SAWDOG who received a nasty shock to the left arm.  The dark corridor
led into a room with more large machinery pumping, twisting and revolving
about.  Immense surges of electricity could be heard thrumming all
around.  Mindless squid drones took no notice of them, focused solely on
their banal tasks.

00:35:50.  Darren took point and watched his RCS
screen.  His last scout, about fifty feet ahead, found a corridor beyond
the machine room which ended at a portal that, according to the schematic map,
opened into the particle accelerator.  Or whatever it could be.

Still no bad guys.

“Either they’re laying a trap for us up ahead or they lost
us,” Darren said.

“Trap,” Jorge said.  “I bet they got a whole division
of hover knights, shocktroopers and tentacle tykes waiting to pop us . . .
damn, I wish Brutus was here . . . and Nate.”

“And Nate,” Darren repeated with a murmur.

Jorge used his welding gel to open a hole in the locked
portal just big enough to send three scouts through.  The control room
beyond was open to the inside of the great machine which curved off several
miles away in each direction.  Several more control room platforms lined
the inside of the tunnel along its length which the scouts measured to be over
three hundred feet in diameter.  A few walkways spanning the tunnel’s
width near the bottom connected the control rooms.  The most prominent
feature was a bright stream of what looked like blue-white neon gas shimmering
inside a huge coil running down the tunnel’s core.  Darren guessed the gas
was actually a plasma stream contained within a magnetic field.  The
crickets read an ambient air temperature of 94-degrees F and the stream
5,240-degrees F.  Definitely plasma.

There were lots of squidies walking around but no troops
with guns.  If this was an ambush, the Vorvons must have shrunk themselves
down to insect-size and were hiding in the cracks.

“The hull is on the other side of the tunnel,” Darren said.
“We’re almost home.”

“My Dragonstar is three hundred and seventy feet at twelve
o’clock,” Tony said. “Redhawk One, this is Space Cowboy, you still copy?”

“Roger, Space Cowboy,” the Andromeda’s pilot radioed. 
“Holding position next to your fighter.”

Jorge cut a six-foot hole into the circular portal and
kicked out the chunk.  It landed with a loud clang on the metal floor of
the control room platform.

Darren went with his pulse rifle to the left, Tony to the
right.

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

Middleton and his three SAWDOG’s took center and knelt at
the platform’s edge.  It was a long, one hundred foot drop past the
railing.  Jorge and Vanessa brought up the rear.

Darren scanned the far wall.  “Let’s look for a point
where we can aim our gauss guns together.  Full acceleration.”  He
suddenly became aware of something humming behind him, and he turned around.

One of the squidies was looking at him, its black shiny eyes
sunk into slimy sockets.  Darren quickly noticed that the creature had no
cybernetic implants.  Nor did any of the others, and he cursed himself for
not noticing it earlier on his RCS screen.

The squid was growling at him.

“Oh shit.”

It puffed out like a hissing cat and bent down on its
tentacles as if were about to pounce him.  Darren pumped two blasts from
his pulse rifle before it could.

A whirl of motion exploded from every platform all around
them when the squids reacted.  The creatures called out in a chorus of
gaggles like honking geese, and began bouncing in their direction.

“Aw, you gotta be kidding me?” Middleton said.

Tony fired his EPG across the walkway, disintegrating five
of the squidies before they could cross.

One bounced in the air from an adjacent platform and landed
in the middle of their group, spraying black ink in every direction from a
squirming proboscis.  Short pulses finished it off before it could empty
its bladder.  The dark substance turned sticky, and before long, it turned
to a hard epoxy.  One of the SAWDOG’s had his left shoulder plate cemented
permanently to his chest piece.  He couldn’t move his arm.

A two-tone klaxon began to boom around them, as the squids
advanced.

“Everyone zero-g up!” Darren said.  “Tony, Jorge! 
Hit that blue light on the opposite wall!”  He raised his left arm, put
the reticle on the mark and fired his gauss gun.  His shot instead struck
a point several feet away.  Tony’s and Jorge’s errant slugs also missed
their target, none of their rounds doing significant damage to the tunnel’s
skin.  Darren cursed and fired once more, but again his tungsten-carbide
round failed to strike the blue light.

He looked up at the giant coils generating the intense
magnetic field above their heads and shook his head.  “We have to get to
the other side to take our shots!”

However, the swarm of squids converging on their position
forestalled any attempt to cross the walkway at the moment.

“How?” Tony shouted back. “We got calamari in every
direction!”

“Clear ’em off the crossway!”  Darren fired his weapon
as he moved forward toward the bridge spanning the tunnel.  He cut down
three aliens bouncing at him like crazy characters out of a kiddie video
game.  If it wasn’t for the debilitating, black resin they squirted,
Darren would have thought their audacious but benign manner comical.  He
was a third of the way across when his suit sensors zeroed in on several bogeys
speeding up the tunnel from his right——hover knights.

Darren had no cover in which to protect himself.  He
switched on his invisibility and clambered back to the control room platform,
but a long range shot from a laser cannon struck the crossway in front of
him.  A shower of blazing metal burst forth, and the structure gave
way.  Darren reached out and seized the thin railing as the bridge fell
with a grinding metallic squeal.  It seemed to fall forever, and he
gritted his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut when his boots rose above his
head.  One hundred feet from where it began, the descending crossway
smashed down onto the floor of the tunnel.  Darren was upside down before
he realized it and landed hard on his shoulder, his pulse rifle flying out of
his hand.  A broken crossbeam came down across his chest, and he heard his
suit’s integrity warning sound in his ear.  A hairline fracture spread
diagonally over his cuirass just under the echolocation projector, but the
device did not falter.

He pushed the crossbeam, a damn heavy chunk of rent metal,
off his chest and rolled away.  His head swiveled to and fro as he looked
for his missing weapon.  It was lying about fifteen feet away in a fold
that separated two large tubes running along the tunnel’s bottom.  Darren
got to his feet, his eyes still swimming, and vaulted forward.

To his left, he spotted shadow spawn skittering down the
tunnel toward him.  Hundreds of them!

Darren reached his rifle and snatched it up.  He
ejected the empty grenade clip from the EPG and slammed a fresh magazine home
while he trotted back to the smashed crossway.  His Incoming Fire Sensor
detected a hand grenade arcing away from the platform above him.  The weapon
detonated over the first formations of shadow spawn just a hundred feet from
him.  Darren let out a war scream when blue-white bolts of electricity
coursed through their ranks, connecting over a dozen mutants in a
flesh-scorching embrace.  The survivors scrambled away, many clambering
over one another like panicky ants trying to avoid a flood.

Darren struggled over twisted beams of rent metal before
racing up the crossway’s other end still connected to the opposite wall. 
He looked over his shoulder to see the action on the control room
platform.  Everyone was pinned down behind consoles and machines. 
All the squidies were dead, but they had inflicted some alarming damage. 
A SAWDOG had one of his boots glued to the floor and had to unlatch it to escape,
and Tony had removed his right forearm and shoulder plates.  His gauss gun
lay useless on the floor.

The hover knights, his sensor counting sixteen of them, were
levitating in stationary positions several feet from one another, negating a
lucky grenade blast.  Darren did not open fire, respecting the assurance
he would be spotted by their own IFS if he did.  Instead, he remained
cloaked and patient.

The shadow spawn had regrouped and several were shinnying up
the crossway after him.  Darren had an alarming feeling that they could
see him.  Many still on the floor of the tunnel had their heads craned
upward in his direction, their limbs and tentacle stingers thrashing about in
wrathful desire.  Darren dropped a flesh burst mine at his feet to really
whip them into a froth.

“Incoming behind us!” Tony shouted over the comm.

“I got them!” Jorge replied.

Shocktroopers had followed them from the electric-ring
tunnel.  Jorge and Middleton bottlenecked them in the short corridor
leading out of the machine room.  Everyone on the platform was now
officially trapped.  A couple of hover knights were firing their heavy
laser cannons into the control room, doing serious damage to the computer
consoles concealing the human defenders.  Soon there would be no more
cover.

As soon as Darren reached the opposite wall, the ultrasonic
flesh burst mine detonated.  He turned around in time to see a red mist
about thirty feet across bloom off the crossway.  The surviving shadow
spawn held back and did not advance.  Perhaps they weren’t brainless
skirmishers as advertised.  Darren ran across a short deck leading to
another control room platform and knelt down behind a humming, cylinder-shaped
machine.

00:24:09.  Darren suffered fleeting visions of not
making it out and vaporizing painlessly in the core of the sun. 
Screw
it . . . Tomorrow’s Universe and the Next Life . . . Shit happens.
  He
hoped the park rangers cleaned the pigeon shit off his memorial plaque daily.

The hover knights had not changed position except for the
two making short work on the computer consoles.  It wouldn’t be long.

“Tony, is that fifty-cal sniper still alive?”

“Yeah!”

“I want you and him to start taking these bastards out when
I give the word!  I’m on the other side of the tunnel!  Let’s put ’em
in the kill box!”  Darren saw that if he moved to his left about ten feet
and crouched down, he could unfriendly two hover knights near point-blank with
one high-speed gauss gun shot and maybe hit a couple more before their IFS
dialed in his position.  He just hoped his slug’s short flight would not
be affected by the magnetic field above him.

He checked right to see no shadow spawn had yet to climb the
collapsed crossway and moved left to line up his shot.  He smiled with a
venom-filled heart. 
For Nate.

A ten thousand fps slug blew an exit hole the size of a
grapefruit out of the first Vorvon, nearly separating the torso from the hip,
before deflecting upward and decapitating the second.  Darren swung his
arm to the left, put down another hover knight and adjusted downward and tore
the leg off a forth before their IFS found him.  The moment all twelve
spun around in his direction, he rolled out of the way behind cover.

Twelve heavy laser pulses converged on the console behind
him and blew the whole device into a thunderous cloud of shrapnel.

“Now!” Darren shouted as fire and chunks of metal rattled
off his armor.

*

Tony and the sniper with the XM500 Barrett, Sergeant
Wallace, swung out from cover and popped two Vorvons closest to them. 
Tony had to use three laser strikes on the same point to find the flesh under
the armor of his target.  Wallace’s high explosive/armor piercing round
took the right shoulder and arm off the other.  Both dropped out of the
air.  Tony and Wallace quickly dialed in two more toads.

*

Darren was already kneeling on the deck when a hover knight
landed on the platform ten feet to his right and went room-broom with its
steely cannon, the alien unable to see him.  Senses heightened, nerves
pulsing, Darren shot toward the Vorvon in a low crouch and pumped a single
blast into the creature’s faceplate.

The invisibility cloak signaled that one minute remained
before it would shut down; it would suck nearly all of his suit’s energy to
recharge if it did.  Darren bent down and inspected the dead alien’s suit. 
The hover pack probably used an electromagnetic gyroscope propulsion similar to
his flying recon scouts.  It looked like a giant mechanical crab, the long
slender legs used to secure the device to the wearer’s lower back.  He
scanned the pack for some kind of control pad until he spotted what could be
one strapped to the alien’s left hand and fingers.  Darren knew he
wouldn’t be able to holster his rifle, but that didn’t concern him. 
Death
from above!