Star Force 12 Demon Star (27 page)

“Turn off the grav-plates where they’re working,” I told the controllers, and soon the work went more quickly. Kwon simply grabbed boulders and flung them out into the void until the Raptor could get through.

The private with the grenade leaped forward, up into the crater formed by the first blast. “Pull it back a bit,” I told Kwon. “Have him plant it inside the shaft, not in the crater.”

“Why do you think they’ll come this way?” he asked. “They already got booby-trapped.”

“What would you do if you were them? You’d assume all the airlocks were mined, right? So it makes sense to go to the same place rather than a new one.”

“Okay,” he said doubtfully, but he did as I told him.

“Get back. More Demons are on the way. Sector four, close the blast doors as they return.”

This time there were three vessels—an assault cruiser, a cruiser and a battleship. The two capital ships systematically blasted the surface all over sector four until it was a bubbling mass of melted rock and metal. Undoubtedly they were trying to destroy any more grenades, which was why I’d had the Raptor plant the new one a little way back in the shaft. No lasers reached down there.

Next, the big ships began boring their way in with massed beam fire on two axes and at angles to the access tunnels.

“Crap,” I said. “They’re going to try to bypass our defenses. Sector four, extrapolate the courses of the shafts they’re drilling and display.”

I watched the Elladan screens. The two shafts would come in roughly parallel to the access passage, and if they could be bored deep enough, would eventually rip their way into our command center. The only reason they could cut their way in like this was because there was absolutely nothing to interfere with their warships.

“How long?” I asked.

“Approximately six hours,” Galen said. “It will become progressively more difficult as they go deeper, of course, because the gasses have to vent back up the drill-hole, interfering with the lasers.”

“Is there anything we can do?” I asked. “Ideas?”

“Sneak out and hit them from the side?” Kwon suggested. “We could use our surfboards to land with grenades on their hulls.”

I eyed him. “When you’re a hammer-man, everything looks like a nail, right?”

Kwon looked confused. “What?”

“Never mind. Good idea, but it’s a last resort.” I looked around at the rest of them. “Anything else that’s got a better chance of succeeding? Anything at all?”

Cybele spoke up. “Can your two ships launch a missile strike or otherwise delay them?”

I mulled that over. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Having
Valiant
and
Stalker
move in would delay their repairs and expose them to risk unless they simply launched missiles, which would probably expend valuable munitions for little effect. I examined the whole station again, looking around the room at all the displays. “Can this base move?”

“Normally, yes,” Galen said. “It has repellers to change its orientation. It also has a fusion engine to push it to alternate orbits, but that has been destroyed.”

“All the repellers are down?”

“Yes, though number six has merely lost its associated generator.”

“You mean if we got power to it, it would function?”

“Theoretically.”

I stood up. “That’s what we have to do. Galen, get that repeller working. Put your two best technicians on it. Kwon, you take over here. Assign me a squad for security, but I don’t think they’ll be landing any more troops until they’ve drilled as far as they can.”

“Okay, boss, but we’re blind outside of sector four. Nobody here in the command center can see the ships if they do something else. You sure you don’t want me to escort the technicians instead?”

I knew Kwon would rather take the mission, but there was a distinct possibility that my own technical knowhow would be needed to get the repeller working, something Kwon would be useless at. “Sorry Kwon, not this time. I need you here. All right, squad. Let’s go.”

I sealed up my suit and led the two Elladans and the Raptor squad through the corridors, using my HUD for reference. Those blast doors still intact opened in front of us, showing that our little command staff was on the job.

“Cybele,” I said conversationally as we walked, “how many marines did you have to defend this station?”

“Marines?”

“I mean soldiers—close-combat warriors.”

“Forty-eight, divided into eight squads of six.”

“That’s about what I have, yet your people didn’t seem to put up much of a fight.”

“The lower orders must be compelled to risk their lives. It’s a difficult task to force them to fight.”

I stopped short, causing the others to do the same. “You mean your soldiers don’t want to defend their homes? I would think that even your ‘lower orders’ would be motivated, at least to avoid being eaten or killed.”

“They didn’t believe we could lose. In fact, I didn’t believe it myself.” Her ridiculously perfect face twitched. “It’s terribly inconvenient.”

I guffawed. “Inconvenient? You need to get a grip on reality, girl.”

She leveled a stare as patrician as any Adrienne had ever given me. “I’d rather die with my composure firmly in place than run around uselessly like some hysterical plebian work-wench.”

My smile leached away. “Okay. I can respect that, if you’re not simply denying reality.”

“I deny nothing, and I’m doing my best to help. Shall we go now?”

“Sure.” My estimate of the Elladans went up a tiny notch.

Soon, we reached the repeller. Galen was right, the mechanism seemed intact. It was the size of an old hydroelectric turbine. A cave-in had crushed and disconnected the cables running through a short tunnel.

“The generator is behind the rubble,” Cybele said.

“Okay, let’s get this cleared.” I told Kwon to have them turn off the grav-plates in the tunnel and reduce the pull on the others nearby. The Raptors and I soon had the way opened, and the Elladans spliced the cables.

“Kwon, tell Galen to use the repeller to rotate the station continuously.”

“You want to start rotating now?”

“There’s no need to wait,” I told him.

A rumble went through the base as the repeller applied lateral movement to the lumpy sphere of the fortress. I could see the alignment of the Demon lasers abruptly shift, and then the beams shut down. The ships moved to try to regain their angle, but it was too difficult to maintain the precision they needed.

By the time we reached the command center again, they’d stopped trying. Unfortunately, this only bought us a half hour or so until the Demons figured out a nearly perfect counter-tactic.

They landed on the station.

It wasn’t clear from our cameras how they clung to the armor—maybe magnetics, maybe cables or external grav-plates—but once they were down, they started drilling with their lasers again.

Now it didn’t matter how we twisted and turned. Their ships remained clamped in place, always in the same positions relative to the center.

“Dammit. That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. They’ve landed.”

Kwon perked up. “Now’s the time for a raid!”

“Yeah, but how would we do it without everybody dying?”

“I got some ideas,” Kwon said with confidence.

“Hold on a minute.”

I stared at the displays, and then tapped on the screens, changing to every shot and angle we had. The enemy ships were hidden inside the clouds of billowing hot gases and dust vomiting forth from their bore-holes. Maybe Kwon’s surfboard idea could work after all. I told him about the self-generated smokescreen, pointing out the edges of it on the other sector screens.

“That’s the key, boss. They won’t be able to see us coming over the horizon.”

I pointed overhead. “The assault carrier is still hovering out there. They’ll pick us off like flies.”

“Then we create a diversion. Be back in a few minutes.” With that, he stomped out.

I shook my head. Whatever he came up with, it was bound to be simple and effective, as long as he hadn’t missed any obvious disadvantage—obvious to me, that was.

Ten minutes later, Kwon called. “Come to the sector three airlock, Captain.”

I eyed Galen. He stared flatly back at me. Could I trust him?

“Call me if you need me,” I said after a moment’s consideration, and I left the Elladans with half a squad of Raptors.

Galen nodded and stared after me.

At the sector-three cargo bay nearest the airlock, I found Kwon with six surfboards and an equal number of grenades nano-welded near their centers of gravity.

“I programmed these to fly toward the assault carrier and blow up,” he said.

I immediately saw what he intended. “Did you put in a delay?”

“I sure did. Thirty seconds.”

I wasn’t sure if that would be enough—you could get to the enemy ships, but could you escape the blast radius?

“I’ll pilot one of them,” I said.

“Hell, no!” he objected. “You’re too important. I was planning on blowing up our dumbest Raptor.”

“Kwon, I don’t think—”

He laughed loudly. “I’m kidding. I don’t trust Raptors with bombs. They’re as dumb as the goat-people with them. I’m flying this thing with the Raptors following me. Go back to the control center and watch how it’s done.”

I nodded reluctantly. “Okay. Kick some ass, but remember I need you alive to keep watching my back. Turn that detonator up to ninety seconds.”

“You think so? That’s a long time.”

“You have to get out of the blast radius.”

Kwon’s eyes lit up.

“Ah, right. Good thinking. I’ll see you soon.”

Two squads of Raptors began filing into the cargo bay. Eight of them carried grenades. I stuck around long enough to give a short speech and a salute to those about to die. I had little doubt there would be casualties, maybe heavy ones, but if we could damage the two Demon ships badly enough, even destroy them, we could buy ourselves more time.

That’s what this was about.

Buying time.

-22-

When I returned to the control center, my adrenalin was pumping. Cybele flashed me her Helen-of-Troy smile, but I didn’t go for it. Even if my libido wanted to go down that rabbit hole, my better judgment overrode it. Why was it that soldiers always think of sex right before a battle?

Was it really cheating if the girl wasn’t really human? Then again, she looked human enough. And if we were about to die anyway…

No.
I firmly told myself to stay focused on business.

I watched on the station sensors as Kwon and the Raptors jogged down the corridor to the airlock and opened it, easing out onto the surface in six small groups. Each picked up a surfboard and, on a designated signal, they began throwing the boards laterally into space.

Given the dust and gasses, the small objects should go undetected until their repellers were activated. I watched as they abruptly oriented themselves according to Kwon’s instructions and headed in the direction of the assault cruiser.

At the same time, Kwon and his troops skittered along the surface of the base and into the dust cloud. They would come over the horizon two hundred yards or less from the enemy, and I hoped the swirling gases and debris from the drilling would hide them well.

Of course, the reverse was also true. How were my men going to see their targets?

The carrier commander would have been wiser to stand off at a good distance, but he’d made the mistake of hovering at the edge of the cloud, which gave him very little time to react to the surfboard grenades. Even so, he shot down all but two. The last grenades detonated close enough to do some serious damage.

Kwon’s little force was angling too far to the left. He could have turned on his suit’s active sensors, but that might have given away their position.

I called him on the ansible. His suit was the only one equipped with the device other than mine. “Kwon, adjust right ten degrees. The cruiser is about ninety yards in front of you. Throw a grenade and hunker down. I can detonate it at exactly the right time.”

“No you can’t, boss. Grenades don’t have ansibles.”

“You’re right. Then tell your suit to relay my ansible signal into a radio signal.”

“Okay. Suit, do what the boss said.”

“Define ‘boss,’” I heard his suit say.

“The boss is Captain Cody Riggs, you dumb-ass machine!”

“Nomenclature updated.”

The ghostly figure of Kwon rose up and hurled a basketball-sized grenade toward the enemy. It flew straight but off-target as he couldn’t see the Demon ship. It also naturally separated from the curving surface below as the base generated almost no gravity.

When it got about halfway there and twenty feet off the ground, a laser snapped from the Demon cruiser and destroyed the mini-nuke.

“Damn,” I said.

“It must have automated point defense. We have to crawl closer and stay in the ground clutter.”

“Your call, Kwon, but not your job. Sneaking in and planting mines on things is for grunts.”

“None of my guys are expendable, boss.”

Grumbling, he sent in Raptors. Kwon was right, of course. None of my troops were expendable. But sometimes people had to do dangerous things to win a battle. This was one of those times.

I watched as a Raptor crawled forward, a grenade clipped to his back.

“Tell him to keep his tail down!” I snapped, and Kwon relayed my order, just in time as a laser cut a hole in the fog above.

“He’s made it to about thirty yards from the nearest Demon ship, the cruiser,” I reported. “As long as he keeps his tail down…twenty-five…twenty…”

Soon the Raptor had almost reached the enemy vessel’s shadow, if it’d had one. Critters appeared on the surface of the Demon ship and leaped to the ground.

“Tell him to drop it and crawl back fast!” I yelled, but it was too late. Both sides were blind in the swirling gasses, but with forty or fifty Demons spreading out for a point-blank search, I had only about three seconds to make a decision.

Gritting my teeth, I sent the detonation code. “Everyone hug the dirt!”

A bare eye-blink later, the relayed signal blew the grenade in place. Its high-effect radius of about thirty yards touched the skin of the Demon cruiser and tore up some of it, and the shockwave ripped the ship loose from its moorings, spinning it laterally into space, out of the fight.