Doom Star: Book 03 - Battle Pod (40 page)

Like ancient gods, the Doom Stars hung in the heavens and beamed with abandon, killing the last hope of Social Unity.

At the same time, the countless asteroid-appearing capsules scattered throughout the Mars System split open. Out of them like space-insects appeared vacc-suited humanoids. These vacc-suited cyborgs leaped from their capsules and engaged their hydrogen-thruster packs. They jetted for the Doom Stars. Each individually was an insignificant particle as compared to the orbitals, missiles and laser-beaming battleships. Time would tell if united on the skin of a Doom Star whether they could prove a battle-winning tactic or not.

On Mars, it was early morning as Marten Kluge and his Martian commandos skimmed fast over the red dunes. The volcanic base of Olympus Mons was before them. In the high altitudes near the peak where ice-crystal clouds drifted, several more orbitals boomed as they broke the sound barrier and screamed toward space to join the fight. Perhaps even more ominous, a heavy whine emanated from the volcano.

“The proton beam is online,” Omi crackled over the headphones.

“That’s the injured dynamos revving with power,” Marten said. He sat in front beside Osadar. The cyborg was the best pilot among them and the best driver, and thus she drove the skimmer.

As if she knew Marten was thinking about her, Osadar swiveled her helmet toward him.

“Over there!” Marten pointed. About five kilometers away, the blast doors were shut. He had studied those doors before, and for days, he’d studied the specs of Olympus Mons that Chavez had emailed him from New Tijuana.

Marten’s stomach churned. The skimmers were frail craft. As everyone had been telling him lately, this was a matter of luck. He shook his head. It was more than luck. This was the hour of decision. Logically, eyes were on the main event in space. When your enemy was distracted, that was the time to strike.

“Check your rifles,” he said over the com-unit. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. Marten turned back to Omi.

Instead of saying anything, Omi patted his shoulder a second time. Then his best friend returned to his portable plasma cannon. It was a dirty job and a risky task, but Marten couldn’t trust anyone else to do it right. Omi and he had survived many battles together. Dear God, let his good friend survive this battle, too.

In the middle of a deadly space battle where bright beams lased, huge ships passed like mini-planets and missiles zoomed and exploded with dazzling pyrotechnics, the creature formerly know as Lisa Aster rotated her cyborg body. A Doom Star with its pitted particle-shield was her entire world. She applied thrust from her nearly empty hydrogen-pack, braking. At the last moment, she rotated back and readied her legs. The asteroid-like particle-shield rushed at her. Then she crashed against a Doom Star, smashing her head against rock.

She awoke seconds or minutes later. She was never sure afterward. She clung tenaciously like a mechanical spider to the pitted surface. The surface shook and trembled constantly as beams, missiles and cannon-rounds struck it. It was badly chewed up and had craters and deep laser holes, although it was still intact. Dust, rocks and boulder-sized chunks floated before the immensely thick shield.

LA31 cocked her dented helmet with its short antenna. The radio-pulse was low-key and garbled. Radiation, EMP blasts, jamming waves: the vacuum here was thick with invisibly harmful elements. LA31 felt sick and wanted to vomit. Worse, she felt weak. Programming kept her going, and enhancement drugs surged through her system like blood. She began to crawl like an insect across the pitted surface.

If there had been an independent observer between the two fleets, between the flashing lasers and streaking missiles, they might have seen hundreds of shifting motes on the particle-shields of the
Hannibal Barca
. Like a broken nest of spider bantlings, the mechanical-seeming motes crawled fast and headed for the seams between the giant blocks of particle-shielding. Lasers indifferently burned many of them into blackened crisps. Missiles blew off even more along with asteroid-chunks and dust from the abused particle-shield. Yet for every three killed, one made it between the seams and crawled quickly for the hull below.

It was a cyborg infestation. LA31 was one of the lucky ones. She no longer felt lucky, as she had already vomited a black bile. She felt sicker than ever. Drugs, Web-Mind-programming and cyborg enhancements barely kept her functioning. She wanted to curl up and die. Instead, with fifty-three other cyborgs, she used magnetic clamps and clanged along the hull and to a main heavy laser-port.

There, with breach bombs, the cyborgs gained entrance to the Doom Star. Like cockroaches, they scurried into the hull, behind the walls and corridors that made up the vast spacecraft. They had the super-ship’s specs imprinted in their memories. They had one goal, one destination—the giant fusion engines in the center of the unbeatable vessel.

***

“Sir…” a Highborn officer said aboard the
Hannibal Barca
.

“What?” Admiral Brutus shouted. On the holographic display before him, his number three particle-shield had almost crumbled into nothing. A suicidal SU missile-ship was too close, launching an unbelievable number of missiles from its tubes. Admiral Brutus had killed SU ship after SU ship, yet still these rabid premen attacked. He would kill every mother-birthing one of them.

“Sir!” another officer shouted. “We’ve been boarded.”

“What?” Admiral Brutus roared, his features turning crimson with rage.

“Take a look, sir,” the Highborn tech said.

Before Admiral Brutus appeared a holographic image of strange bionic soldiers scurrying through emergency hatches and repair corridors. Their vacc-suit emblems were nothing issued by the Highborn.

Admiral Brutus snarled orders to his security teams. They would take care of these intruders. Then he concentrated on the SU missile-ship that still dared to rush a Doom Star.

***

Blue-tattooed Neutraloid Heydrich Hansen paced endlessly in his confinement chamber. He gnashed his teeth in hatred and felt every tremor that washed through the Doom Star. He wanted out of confinement. He wanted to kill. He wanted to rend. He wanted to destroy and feel hot blood gushing over his hands.

Then a terrific blow shook the vessel and threw Hansen to the metal floor. Lights flickered and then went out so darkness filled his world.

With a roar of almost feline excitement, Hansen leaped to his feet and tore at the door. In the blackness, he opened it and snarled with joy. At the same moment, emergency lighting came on and the electronic locks snapped back into place. It didn’t matter for Neutraloid Heydrich Hansen. He was out of confinement. He was free. Now he needed weapons and he needed reinforcements. That meant freeing more neutraloids. He cackled with berserk laughter and floated toward the next door.

***

“Begin ship-shielding maneuver,” Grand Admiral Cassius ordered. He sank into his chair as the
Julius Caesar’s
engines engaged hard.

With grim concentration, Cassius studied the battlefield on his holographic display. Radiation, EMP blasts, X-rays, enemy jamming and debris meant his holographic image was fuzzy in places. He lacked full intelligence. But that had always been the nature of the battlefield. Making the right decision with only partial information had been a commander’s lot for untold millennia. They had destroyed countless enemy vessels. Finally, Cassius had come to realize that many of those kills had been shells, decoys. The heart of the enemy fleet remained: the
Zhukov
-class battleships. Even a Doom Star needed time to take out the most modern of them.

Those SU battleships concentrated on the
Hannibal Barca
. Admiral Brutus’s Doom Star had taken damage. Now it was time to relieve the
Hannibal Barca
, to shield it with the relatively intact
Julius Caesar
.

“A few more minutes, old friend,” Grand Admiral Cassius muttered. “More speed!” he ordered, keeping any worry out of his voice. In another twenty seconds, Cassius was pushed even deeper into his chair as the warship sped for war and glory.

“You’re fighting hard, premen,” Cassius muttered. “But it’s not going to be enough to give you victory over me.”

***

Aboard the
Vladimir Lenin
, Blackstone wanted to shout himself hoarse. The fight had come down to two giants grappling for a death-hold, to break the other giant’s back.

His orbital fighters were nearly all destroyed. They had never had a chance against the Doom Stars. It had been a grim order to give and still sickened him. The bulk of the decoy fleet was space wreckage. Now he faced off against the battered
Hannibal Barca
. He had maneuvered the battlewagons so the first Doom Star shielded his battleships from the other Doom Stars. It might have been a clever tactic, but Blackstone felt too sick at Social Unity’s losses to feel elated.

“We’re beaming into the Doom Star’s hull!” the targeting officer shouted.

“It’s so huge,” Commissar Kursk said. “A super-ship like that will take time to die.”

“It’s rotating!” the targeting officer shouted. “Damn! They’re swinging the entire ship to bring an untouched shield into our line of fire.”

Blackstone wondered if he dared to order a charge. It would likely mean the final destruction of the last battleships of his fleet. If he bored in now and kept chewing the particle-shields, he might actually kill a Doom Star. But the cost, the entire SU Battlefleet, that seemed too high a price.

As he hesitated, General Fromm’s eyes narrowed. “We must accelerate,” Fromm said in his strangely calm voice.

“…no,” Blackstone whispered. “We can kill the
Hannibal Barca
from here.”

The stout Earth General cocked his head strangely. Then a small dark object appeared in his hands. It was a needler. General Fromm aimed it at Blackstone.

“You will order full acceleration toward the Doom Star,” Fromm said.

“He has a needler!” someone shouted.

Fromm drew a solar grenade from his garments. “One flick of my thumb,” he said, “and I can destroy the command center of the Battlefleet. If you want to live, you must do as I order.”

“Why are you doing this?” Blackstone asked.

“Do not attempt any subterfuge tactics,” Fromm said. “You will obey me or—”

There was a strange sound and then General Fromm crumpled, sliding in an almost boneless fashion from the map-module and onto the floor. Commissar Kursk rushed around the module. She had a stun gun in her hand. She had shot Fromm at full power. The tall Commissar knelt beside the Earth General as Blackstone stumbled to that side of the module. He watched in shock as Kursk picked up Fromm’s needler. She pressed the tip of the needler against Fromm’s head, shooting twenty needles into his cranium, making it a bloody mass of mush and bone. She dropped the needler and snatched the solar grenade, carefully examining it.

Her face pale, Kursk looked up and met Blackstone’s eyes.

“You killed General Fromm,” was all Blackstone could say.

“I’m taking this elsewhere,” Kursk said, hefting the still live solar grenade.

Blackstone was too stunned to respond.

“Commodore!” Kursk snapped in her best PHC voice. “You have a battle to run. See to it and let me worry about security.”

A moment later, Blackstone nodded and turned back to the map-module.

The
Hannibal Barca
was vast beyond any other class of spacecraft. It contained thousands of decks, chambers, corridors, storage bays, launching tubes, laser coils, reactor space, sleeping quarters, exercise areas, weapons lockers, toilet cubicles, hatches and repair space-ways in a complex maze. The cyborgs propelled themselves through the maze like a metallic infestation. Their memories were flawless. Their execution of attack proved fast, lethal and bewildering.

Out of Hatch ATR-19 shot cyborg after cyborg. During the weightless periods, they magnetized their palms and pressed them against the metal walls to propel themselves like swimmers. When ship acceleration produced pseudo-gravity, the cyborgs magnetized their boots and ran in a
clank, clank, clank
charge.

The first Highborn to witness them was Third Rank Marco in a damage-control suit. He swiveled toward a strange sound, gawked at the cyborgs for a full second. Then he snatched up his laser-welder, roared a battle cry and died in a fusillade of red laser-light. Each cyborg in turn, including LA31, leaped over his smoldering corpse as they invaded deeper into the
Hannibal Barca
, seeking the massive fusion cores.

A minute later, interior ship-cameras recorded the slaughter of a Highborn reaction-team.

On the command deck, Admiral Brutus roared, “What are those?”

The admiral received his answer two-and-a-half minutes later. In gymnasium F-7, three Highborn in battleoid-armor opened up with .55-caliber rotating hand-cannons. A cyborg staggered backward before dodging behind a bulkhead. Depleted uranium slugs had slammed against its armored torso, but failed to kill it. Return laser-fire reflected off the shiny battleoid skin.

“The things aren’t human. They’re some kind of battle machine!” the Highborn officer shouted into his mike. “I don’t think they feel pain, and they’re faster than greased death.”