The Mothership (43 page)

“Not very sociable, are they,” Beckman said.

“We should get out of here.” Markus said, wary
of being trapped.

Beckman jumped down from the mound. “Let’s
move!” He ordered, already running toward the end of the chamber.

They ran along silvery slag tracks between
mounds of twisted honeycomb structures, close enough to support each other, with
Nuke in the middle, and Markus staying close to the torpedo Nuke carried.

“Anyone see an exit?” Beckman yelled as
they approached the far wall.

There were at least a dozen blast doors
evenly spaced along the far wall, all closed. Beckman was about to give the
order to fall back to the last hull breach when Xeno called out from the right.

“That one’s open!” She pointed to the
second last door. At first glance, it appeared to be closed, but the bottom was
obscured by debris, concealing a meter high opening near the deck.

“Incoming,” Tucker called as he raised his
special. “Six o’clock.”

Two spinning top shaped trackers floated
down through a hull breach in the ceiling. They’d barely cleared the opening
when three weaponized seekers flashed past them, free falling into the chamber.
Each seeker was equipped with a pair of short cannons where their upper arms
should have been. The upper section rotated as before, only now to aim weapons.
In their lower arms, the seekers carried miniature disk-shaped copies of the
battloid’s shield emitters.

Tucker fired at one of the trackers. The
open space above the scrap metal filled chamber allowed Conan’s intelligent
aiming system to lock onto its target. The blast caught the tracker squarely,
illuminating its ovoidal shield which sparked on the brink of collapse.

Not as tough as the thing at the mine
, Beckman realized,
but too many to
fight!
“Run!” he shouted as he started toward Xeno’s blast door.

They sprinted as one, keeping formation
around Nuke, even as they scrambled over piles of debris. Nuke ran straight for
the exit, not looking back, relying on the others to cover him and listening
for the order to detonate. If Beckman went down, that would be the same as an
order to trigger the device. The others fired as they ran, using a mix of specials
and M16s, forcing the faster seekers to take evasive action.

The large trackers landed on the chamber
floor and began gliding toward them above the piles of twisted metal, while the
faster seekers spread out, leaping from one mound to the next, keeping low to
avoid the team’s suppressing fire. They fired their twin cannons when they were
airborne, and again when they landed on the mounds, but they never got a clear
shot.

Beckman fired at the nearest seeker, then
glanced at Markus. “Do they look helpless to you?”

“They look desperate!” Markus replied as he
fired a burst from his sub machine gun.

Virus spotted a seeker leap toward a mound
to his right. He fired a grenade from his launcher into the wreckage, which
exploded as the seeker landed, burying it. A moment later, Virus jumped clear
as one of the trackers fired its cannons, blowing apart the mound he’d been
standing on.

Nuke reached the blast door, finding it
pried open by an emergency jack put in place during the initial rescue
operation. Without slowing, he rolled under the blast door into a short
corridor, then ran on several meters before opening his pack and connecting the
GE power supply. “The package is hot,” He radioed with his finger over the
detonator button.

“Standby,” Beckman yelled, running toward
the blast door.

Xeno rolled under the blast door and took
up a covering position on the far side. Virus stumbled weakly, and fell. Markus
hesitated, then rolled under the door, leaving Virus to his fate. On the other
side of the door, Markus spotted the emergency jack holding the blast door
open. He considered blasting it, trapping Beckman, Tucker and Virus on the
other side, but Xeno was kneeling behind him, covering the base of the door
with her M16. She’d see everything.

“Back here, Markus,” Xeno yelled.

Looking down the barrel of her assault
rifle, he moved back to her position. He knelt, aiming for the gap beneath the
blast door, but watching Nuke with his finger over the detonator button. If the
order came to blow the ship, Markus was ready to shoot the young lieutenant
before he could detonate the warhead.

Outside the blast door, Tucker stopped and
aimed at a seeker leaping on a low, fast trajectory to the left. The armed
reconnaissance machine raised one of its mini shields as Conan fired. The blast
caught the edge of the shield, but still cut the slender machine in two. Tucker
then turned and ran again, as the seeker Virus had buried pushed wreckage
aside, and leapt into the air.

Beckman caught Virus by the shoulder and
pushed him under the blast door. Virus crawled weakly through as Tucker
sprinted the last few meters. To their right, the third seeker leapt forward,
rotating its twin cannons towards them, but Beckman and Tucker rolled under the
blast door together as it fired. When Beckman saw the jack supporting the blast
door, he pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it on the squat machine as the
first seeker landed on the other side.

“Fire in the hole!” he yelled as he and
Tucker raced away from the door jack.

Everyone in the corridor fell back as the
seeker outside crawled under the blast door. When it was half way through, the
grenade exploded. The door jack folded and the blast door crashed down on top
of the seeker, crushing it. Beckman expected to hear the machines outside
blasting the door, but there was only silence. They knew their weapons were no
match for the super dense armor.

Beckman turned to Nuke. “Stand down.”

Nuke disconnected the power pack from the
detonator. “Package disarmed.”

Relief swept across the faces in the
corridor.

“We cut that close,” Virus said.

“I’ve seen closer,” Tucker said,
unimpressed.

The tiny speakers in their ears sounded
with a voice distorted by static. “Nuke, is that you?”

They all exchanged surprised looks as they recognized
the voice of someone they thought dead.

“Vamp, this is Beckman. Report.”

“I’m with Timer and Dr McInness, sir. We’ve
got the ship’s schematic. Can you identify your position?

“We just came through a blast door on the
north side of a huge room, several kilometers long.”

“It was the second door from the eastern
wall,” Xeno added.

There was a long silence before Vamp spoke
again. “Got it. We’re about thirty levels above you, and half a kilometer
north. Follow the corridor you’re in. I’ll talk you up.”

“Affirmative.”

“Hurry, Major. There’s something up here
you’ve got to see.”

* * * *

For the first time
since they’d started, Laura saw the ridge ahead, rising above the forested
plateau. It overlooked the Walker River, east of Parson’s Range, and provided
clear line of sight to the shield dome towers.

Another hour or two
, she thought, anguished by the knowledge
that if they succeeded, it would mean her husband’s death.

They’d been moving fast, with Liyakindirr
in the lead, carrying the short wave radio and guiding them along a narrow
track that was invisible until they were upon it. Behind her, Hooper limped
steadfastly on, holding his fatboy special in his left hand while his blackened
right arm hung limply by his side. Sweat dripped from his pallid face, but his
innate fitness and the painkillers he swallowed every few hours kept him going.
Bandaka’s wife and daughter followed Hooper, moving effortlessly through the
forest in the oppressive heat, keeping an eye on the sergeant in case he
faltered, while old Mulmulpa brought up the rear.

Liyakindirr stopped for the first time and
tilted his head, listening. He turned and yelled urgently in Yolngu, then
Djapilawuy and Mapuruma ran into the bush while old Mulmulpa ambled off in a
different direction at a pace befitting his age.

Liyakindirr turned to Laura and Hooper.
“They found us!”

Laura looked back, but saw nothing. She
turned to ask Liyakindirr what he’d heard, but he’d already vanished into the
bush, leaving the radio pack alone on the trail. Behind her, Hooper raised his
special in his good left hand, turning slowly, scanning the trees.

“Hide,” he growled as he strained to hear
what Liyakindirr had detected.

Laura drew the sidearm Xeno had given her,
then took cover behind a tree. She waited, barely breathing, until a flash of
sunlight reflecting off a polished silver surface caught her eye. Two silver
blurs raced toward them through the trees, changing course every few seconds,
crisscrossing back and forth across each other’s path.

A search pattern?
Laura wondered.

When the seekers drew near, Laura heard the
soft machine gun patter of their footsteps and the sound of green plants
whipped aside by their metal bodies. She realized these seekers were different
to the ones they’d seen before. Their top arm sections had been replaced by
twin weapon mounts and their lower arms carried small shield emitters. When
they spotted Hooper standing alone on the trail, going down on one knee to aim
his special, they scanned him quickly, instantly recognizing the recovered
weapon in his hand. They knew the weapon’s strengths and how to exploit its
weaknesses. Seeing he was about to fire, they darted sideways at high speed,
circling Hooper in opposite directions. Hooper touched the fatboy’s firing
surface, then waited as the weapon tried to lock onto its target. It pushed
against his hand, inertially correcting his aim, then correcting again and
again, unable to fire while the seeker moved at a velocity and angle calculated
to prevent it from gaining a lock.

They’re faster than the targeting system!
Hooper realized.

He tried aiming ahead of one seeker, but
the weapon’s auto targeting system fought against him, refusing to fire,
dragging his hand back. There was a way to disable the inertial target locking
system, but the Groom Lake brainiacs had failed to discover it.

“God damn it!” Hooper growled as he dropped
the fatboy and drew his big .50 caliber pistol. He sighted on the nearest
seeker and fired. The seeker’s small shield flashed as the heavy slug glanced
off it, causing the machine to veer away into the trees as it realized it was
under attack from a different kind of weapon. Hooper spun around, caught sight
of the second seeker as it turned sharply toward him. He aimed carefully and
fired another heavy slug which flashed as it struck the shield. Electrical
force lines radiated outwards from the impact point as the shield, meant to
absorb energy blasts rather than projectiles, strained under the kinetic impact
of the massive slug.

The seeker squirted a mass of dark red nano
machines at Hooper’s pistol from one of its shield arms, then sped into the
trees to give its shield time to regenerate. The red nano stream flew through
the air towards him, but he dived sideways avoiding it, groaning as his burned
right side hit the ground. The weaponized nano machines struck a tree behind
him, swarmed hungrily into the trunk emitting wisps of gray smoke as they
disassembled its molecular structure. The truck broke with a loud crack, then
crashed down through the forest to Hooper’s left. The red nano machines ate
down through the stump, into the roots, until they’d dug a hole so deep, they
were deprived of light and morphed into red ooze.

The first seeker doubled back. When it saw
Hooper on the ground, it came to an instant stop, rotating its twin cannons
toward him and separating its shields for a clear line of sight. A moment
before it fired, a wooden spear shot out of the bushes and struck the armor
protecting its torso’s thin metal skin. The spear broke in two, but the impact
knocked the armored seeker off balance, causing its blast to flash over
Hooper’s head. It righted itself and rotated its cannons back along the spear’s
trajectory in a single fluid motion, before unleashing a sustained raking fire
into the forest. It cut down trees and bushes alike, but found it was blasting
only shadows. Hooper fired from the ground, his heavy slug passing through the
gap in the seeker’s shields and striking the machine just above its chest
armor. Sparks flashed from its upper spinal joint, then its cannons began
discharging randomly.

Was that its fire control?
Hooper wondered.

Liyakindirr suddenly charged screaming from
the bushes with his nulla nulla held high over his head. The heavy club was
almost a meter long and tapered to a point below his hands. The seeker’s three
hundred and sixty degree sensor scan saw him approach, but failed to detect any
weapon. To its artificial mind, Liyakindirr lacked even the primitive kinetic
weapon its other adversary carried. The seeker’s designers, for all their
genius, had never anticipated their machine would ever be engaged in single
combat by a naked hunter-gatherer wielding a stone age club. The seeker,
misunderstanding the attack, angled its shields towards Hooper as its twin
cannons spun towards him in short jerking movements, randomly blasting the
foliage. At the same moment, Liyakindirr leapt forward, bringing his nulla
nulla crashing down onto the seeker’s sensor disk, shattering it.