Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (20 page)

“Wha—” was the only half word that the Führer spoke before his whole body stiffened, before he had a chance to even try to squeeze the trigger. He began convulsing wildly as his face twisted into the most painful expression that Col. Heinrick who was standing a few feet away watching it all with horrified eyes, had ever seen. Within ten seconds, a purple slime came rushing out of the man’s ears, nose, mouth, as his spine and brain just melted into flesh-jello. It gurgled out boiling as if alive. The Führer’s corpse crumbled to the floor and twitched wildly like an electric current was passing through it. Then it stopped moving and lay there as slime continued to pulse out from every orifice, making the whole body shrink in on itself like a vacuum was sucking out its innards.

“Col. Heinrick,” Killov said, letting his hand fall to his side as he turned and addressed the subordinate. “You can die right now like him, or you can become my second-in-command of all space forces. You are a smart, ruthless man. I need men like that.”

“I—I—will work for you,
Führer
Killov,” Heinrick said loudly, throwing his arm up in Nazi salute, his head stiffly bent, staring down at Killov’s feet.

“Good, good,” Killov said, as he turned his back toward the Earth projection, which beckoned him like a victim does the murderer. “And remember, I know all that goes on. I am more than human, Heinrick. There is a dark force directing my life. A force I serve. Do not betray me, or even think of betraying me for one second—or I will know and your end will be even more terrible that your late Führer’s.”

“Yes, Great One,” Heinrick stiff-armed again. “You need not worry on that account. I shall never betray you.” He saluted again for good measure.

The Führer had been too weak anyway, too spineless, Heinrick thought. This Killov was very strong, he would take them to the top, make his own version of the Fourth Reich
live.
Yes, Heinrick could see without question that Killov was a mega-killer. His dark visions made the deceased Glock’s plans look like a minor operation.

“Now—what I have been waiting for, whetting my appetite for,” Killov said as his frigid eyes stared into the spinning hologram. “Moscow—the Premier. Vasiliy will be there in the Kremlin. I will burn him to ashes and the entire Politboro as well. I don’t need their selection as the one to run the world. I have selected myself!

“Laser Control,” Killov screamed into the mike hanging above the spinning Earth. “Target Moscow. All ground-directed lasers, set to full intensity, widest beam. I want to leave this city nothing but a solid sheet of fire.”

“Yes sir,” the command post Nazi shouted back as he ordered his men to adjust all dials to target the coordinates.

The Wheel turned slightly in orbit as the angle was corrected for proper laser targeting. It took about five minutes as Killov stood staring at the Earth with Heinrick behind him stiff as a board, he couldn’t bring himself to look at the oozing swamp that had been a man just minutes before. It smelled real bad, too.

“Target locked in,” the laser commander snapped back. “Firing to— Wait, Colonel! We’re getting a reading. There’s an attack force coming in from low Earth orbit. Spaceships, hundreds of them—and some sort of immense structure in their midst . . . We’re being attacked, I repeat attacked!”

Suddenly alarms were going off all over the place as the Wheel’s automatic defense warning systems went into operation. The Wheel’s computers picked up the Frenchie fleet at last, having separated its image from all the space debris.

“Forget Moscow,” Killov shouted at the mike. “Turn all laser batteries around. Turn the Wheel now. We’ll wipe out these stupid bugs who dare attack. It has to be the damned French Frogs! It’s good that it’s happening. We’ll destroy them now. Then reign free in the skies to destroy below as we please.”

He slammed some dials at a panel set on the outside of the hologram globe and suddenly the image of the Earth vanished and in its place, coming from around the eastern side of the planet almost at horizon level—the image of a thousand odd objects closed in. A fleet of garbage, filthy mishappen strings of junk metal balls connected by plastic tubing. There were all in an immense phalanx, coming up from low orbit, like a spear. And at the very lead was some bizarre kind of structure that looked like the Eiffel Tower. And it was coming straight toward him.

Killov wondered if he was going mad. There
couldn’t
be an Eiffel Tower up here, could there? Perhaps, finally, he had taken too many drugs. He was hallucinating completely now.

He dropped two SuperNorms—huge neutralizing agents—to absorb some of the other chemicals he had in his blood. The horse-sized pills got stuck in his throat and he began coughing violently, leaning over the globe as Col. Heinrick stepped forward and began slapping him on the back, trying to help him get it all down like a baby who’s having trouble with his formula.

Twenty-Six

“T
here it is,” Rajat shouted out, as the Dynasoar came flaming up out of the low near Earth orbit and he spotted the immense five-mile-wide Wheel which turned slowly. Their low orbit maneuver had worked—though not for all of them. One of the junk ship strings had gotten caught down a little low and suddenly was glowing red hot and being pulled down by the Earth’s atmosphere. It now disappeared below them, and exploded into fiery fragments with all five-hundred-eight aboard, a warning of the fate that awaited them all if they didn’t watch their every move.

“It’s firing, Rock, it’s firing,” the Indian screamed out from the console. “Laser beams are coming from the Wheel.”

Even as he spoke, one of the outer junk sphere-ships of the phalanx suddenly burst into flame and exploded out in all directions, the people within its red-hot sphere shot out like hornets from a sprayed hive. The unlucky Frenchies floated afire into space spinning like meteors.

Then lasers were dancing all across the sky everywhere near them. Another light-beam made contact with a sphere ship on the far side of the phalanx and this too just evaporated in the center, and the pressure differential shot the other nearby spheres all out in every direction, like they were being fired from rifles.

The flaming garbage ship disappeared spinning off in a tight spiral heading toward the Earth, as flames poured out from numerous openings.

“Eiffel Tower tugs, get her going toward the Wheel!” Rock screamed out. “And then get the hell out of there!”

“Tugs mouvez le Eiffel,” Louis XIV began, translating to the Tower pullers. They began accelerating, pouring on the power from all four sides. They doubled, then tripled their speed, throwing their scavenged rocket engines units to the max so the whole tower vibrated like it was going to come apart. They drove the huge tower to within thirty, than twenty miles of the Wheel, accelerating with every mile, firing small makeshift impact missiles toward the giant Nazi space wheel all the while.

“Tell them to detach themselves,” Rockson screamed out as he saw the scene unfolding on the video monitor. “They’ll never get out of there in time—”

“They’re not going to detachment,” Louis XIV shouted back as his ship raced alongside Rock’s, about a hundred yards away. “They’re attackez avec their lives.
Kamakazee
Francais.”

“Christ,” Rock groaned. These foul-smelling French son-of-a-bitches were even braver than he had given them credit for. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion right next to the Dynasoar and the whole ship shook violently. Rajat checked a wild spin-off towards planetside.

“Damage?” Rock screamed.

“Nothing bad, Rock,” Connors shouted back above the din of all the sound of war being picked up by the ship’s audio-relay sensors. But the Frenchie garbage ships were being picked off like so many flies all around them as laser after laser snapped up from the immense Wheel some fifteen miles away now, and closing fast.

The ships spread further apart so the fire wouldn’t take any of the others out if they got hit.

“Fly,
fly,
you bastard!” Rock screamed wildly as he saw the huge Eiffel tower closing on the huge Wheel as white lasers shot out from everywhere on the Nazi donut, trying to track it. Suddenly one did hit the Tower and the huge slowly turning tower took a hit in one of its lower struts. The whole thing tipped violently to the side but the spheres acting as tugs got it straightened again after a few seconds by pouring on more power.

And now the Eiffel Tower came at the tremendous lit-up Wheel even faster, aiming right for the center, the command post of the wheel.

Killov stared into the hologram and saw the huge tower coming. It
was
real. There was no question about it. Even Colonel Heinrick by his side looked down and gasped out the word “Eiffel.”

“Get that thing,” Killov shouted hoarsely into the mike, his throat so dry he could hardly speak. “They’ve planted something in it. Explosives.” Beams shot all across the sky but somehow couldn’t quite track it. The systems were set to seek heat, and the tower was cold. And with a final burst of power the four Astro Frenchie tugs pushed the huge monumental structure like a spear right into the
hub
of the wheel, right in its dead center—out of which a dozen elevator spokes branched out to hold the Wheel together. Killov saw it coming and screamed out, “No! I won’t die! I can’t. The Earth is still—alive!”

The point of the Eiffel Tower bent as it slammed into the thick steel of the outer Wheel hub walls, and the top fifty feet of it snapped off, floating away. But then it went in, penetrating right through the two-foot-thick curved wall.

It was quite an incredible sight to see from Rockson’s vantage point as the immense tower sank into the Wheel’s command center, the shock tearing apart the “spokes” too.

It stabbed right through the steel and plastic mile-wide hub, slowing, but pushing on, the tower piercing through, then coming out the other side as the junk spheres kept driving on from the base, pulling it with a million guy-wires.

Reaching for the detonation controls of the smart bombs he had set in among the Frenchie explosives, armed for radio detonation, Rock prayed hard and turned the small dial. The entire center of the Wheel, with the Eiffel Tower embedded cleanly through it, suddenly disappeared in a blinding flash of white sparks.

It made the whiz kids and Rockson wince and turn their eyes for a second even from watching it on the video monitors. But within moments, the fiery explosion died down, though many smaller ones were popping up all over the place like Roman candles being launched from all around the body of the Wheel into the velvety purple blackness of space.

The entire Wheel was shattered, the command center severed from the spokes. Within seconds ten separate pieces of it went slowly floating off like the smashed spokes of a bicycle wheel hit by a Mack truck. Men could be seen pouring out of the twisted openings, some in spacesuits—most not—as the internal life support systems had been fully turned on. A Nazi armband caught for a second on the Dynasoar’s razor nose cone, then moved on.

“I’m taking us in,” Rajat shouted as he threw the Dynasoar into forward thrust. The rocket moved ahead about five miles from the disintegrating Wheel.

What was left of the Eiffel Tower was still somehow continuing to press on, even after it burst apart its target like it was an arrow going through a bulls-eye, and still flying forward searching for a tree to lodge in. Only there was no friction or gravity in space, so this “arrow” kept moving forward finding no resistence and slowing not an inch. The Eiffel Tower, with the smoking ruins of the junk ships whose crews had sacrificed their lives in its twisted frame along with it, headed, bent but proudly, toward the very furthest reaches of space.

But it had sure as hell done its damage. As the Dynasoar, on full thrust closed in, Rock opened up with his own assortment of firepower, shooting into the Nazi ships which danced through the debris all around the floating pieces of the “great” Wheel.

But the space Nazis were already demoralized and many ships merely tried to flee. Rockson sent out lasers, rockets, smart bombs and magnet mines—sent out every goddamned thing he could find to blow everything he could track to smithereens.

The rest of the junk spheres came in now, too, sweeping out of the blackness. It was an instant madhouse of Frenchie death beams and missiles soaring everywhere. He hardly knew where he was or who he was firing at. But whenever he saw something strike up toward the Dynasoar Rock swung the guns around and sent out a hail of some form of death unto the attacker.

Then they were all in too close together—Nazis and Frenchies—for rockets or laser fire. The Astro Frenchies and the Nazi fleet, with the separated pieces of the huge space wheel spinning among them still sending out its own firepower as well, all sort of mingled together. And it was time for phase two—hand-to-hand combat—or the space version anyway.

Out of the junk fleet came the insanely garbed Frenchie combat squads. They just appeared, clinging all over the sides of their crafts like roaches on a garbage bag, and threw out long steel cables with magnetic hooks. Within seconds they had attached themselves to many of the enemy vessels, or the sections of the broken-up Wheel itself, boarding the way they did when scavenging.

They pulled themselves over, hundreds of them, even as the airlocks of the enemy ships opened up and Nazis poured out in their distinctive all black spacesuits and helmets with red swastikas painted across their tops.

Then it was Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal
and
D-Day all rolled into one. Only a hundred miles above the Earth, in the silence of space. They went at it tooth and nail, with laser pistols, hatchets and swords, taking laser
and
small arms fire.

Spacesuits were ripped apart and men were frozen inside of them within three seconds as the frigid cold of space rushed in. Pressureless their cold blood boiled out of their eye sockets and became blood globules.

Bodies went flying off everywhere like so many bowling pins as the two enemy forces met head-on.

Rockson had just sighted up a big section of Wheel that was still functioning enough to be sending out a laser beam every few seconds when the Dynasoar took a hit from somewhere. The whole control cabin shook and Rajat screamed out, “We’re losing air! Get your space-helmets, throw them on.” He slammed a button on the panel and sirens rang out through the ship, “
ATTENTION, EMERGENCY
—
PUT ON ASTRO SUITS, LIFE SUPPORT WILL FAIL WITHIN THIRTY SECONDS. REPEAT THIRTY SECONDS. ATTENTION, EMERGENCY
—”