Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Read online

  SF Books by Vaughn Heppner:

  DOOM STAR SERIES

  (In chronological order)

  Star Soldier

  Bio Weapon

  Battle Pod

  Cyborg Assault

  Planet Wrecker

  Star Fortress

  Cyborgs! (Novella published in Planetary Assault)

  EXTINCTION WARS SERIES

  Assault Troopers

  Planet Strike

  INVASION AMERICA SERIES

  Invasion: Alaska

  Invasion: California

  Invasion: Colorado

  Invasion: New York

  OTHER SF NOVELS

  Alien Honor

  Accelerated

  Strotium-90

  I, Weapon

  Visit www.Vaughnheppner.com for more information.

  Planet Strike

  (Extinction Wars)

  by Vaughn Heppner

  Copyright © 2014 by the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Prologue

  After the Great Death, humanity lived on the knife-edge of extinction. If we made the wrong choices, there wouldn’t be any more mankind. The reality of that made every one of my decisions hard.

  In terms of offensive starships, Earth had a single captured Jelk battlejumper thanks to yours truly. The problem was that we were too ignorant about many of its functions. In technological understanding, we were like stainless steel rats in an alien factory. In awe, we crawled past gleaming conveyers, robotic stampers and hydraulic presses. Everything was gigantic and bewildering, far beyond our rodent understanding. If you want to take the metaphor another step, like the rats, we also had a limited time to figure things out before exterminators showed up to slaughter us.

  The “we” in this instance were one hundred and sixty-eight space-assault troopers. My name’s Creed, by the way: just Creed. I’d never liked my first name. The “we” also included the last few million humans left on Earth, the sole survivors of a brutal alien sneak attack.

  Does that sound melodramatic? It wasn’t. The harsh truth of the universe was that it had turned out to be a very dark place indeed. Let me explain:

  Under my leadership, the assault troopers had wrestled the Jelk battlejumper from its owner. Yeah, and we only had a few days to evacuate what was left of Earth. Hmm…maybe I’d better take another step back so this will make sense. But I’m going to make this quick so you’d better pay attention.

  A little over a year ago, a spaceship the size of Rhode Island arrived in Earth orbit. It launched thermonuclear warheads on the biggest cities. Just like in Los Angeles and Kiev, giant mushroom clouds billowed over the targeted cities, loading the atmosphere with trillions of dirty particles. Later, the aliens dusted the planet with a global bio-terminator to kill everything that survived the first strike. The visitors killed ninety-nine percent of humanity and left. We didn’t know it then, but another race showed up afterward, the Jelk. They ran an interstellar corporation of fantastic scope and they made the Mafia seem like church girls.

  The Jelk Corporation’s original plan for Earth had been simple: take several hundred million humans and train them as space-assault troopers. Some they would use in their corporation wars. Others they would sell as slave mercenaries. It turned out the Jelk figured people were animals or beasts, ones they could train like smart attack-dogs. The trouble was that after the thermonuclear attack, hardly anyone was left. So the Jelk gathered twenty-three or twenty-four thousand people and told us if we won our fights, the last humans could continue to exit.

  The Jelk landed several dozen of their oldest, most decrepit freighters on Earth. They had brought over two thousand with them. The things were the size of a small city, able to hold several hundred thousand survivors each. With the bio-terminator drifting in the atmosphere and burrowing underground, the space freighters were the only place where people could hope to survive for any length of time.

  Naturally, we agreed to the corporation’s terms. Either that, or die.

  Then the screw job continued. Along with grafting neuro-fibers into our bodies and shooting us full of steroid-68, the Jelk put mini-bombs into the assault troopers’ heads, so if we tried to escape—boom. The top of the spinal column became jelly, along with the brain.

  I was one of the chosen, and I fought in several crazy places and saw wild sights. The last fight was in the Sigma Draconis system, and it proved hairy in the extreme. The assault troopers took out a planetary defense station, and the battle nearly wiped out our formation. A nova bomb, or something there, shorted the circuitry in our heads and fused the mini-bombs.

  To my way of thinking that meant it was time to risk everything, and we did. Through dangerous teleportation-tech, we returned to a Jelk battlejumper in the middle of the space fight. Once on board, we killed the alien crew and took the warship through a jump point, leaving Sigma Draconis and heading for home.

  That’s how all the aliens beat the speed of light, by the way. They used emplaced jump routes. Think of a connect-the-dots picture. Each dot would be like a solar system. Each line would be like a jump route. Some dots had more lines running through them. Some star systems had more jump routes connecting them with other places. Anyway, it took us ten jumps to get from Sigma Draconis back to Earth.

  My plan was simple. I wanted to save the human race. I figured we couldn’t trust the Jelk to do it. They didn’t even think of us as people. We had to trust ourselves. That’s why I’d needed a warship, hijacking the alien vessel.

  And that’s where the factory image comes in. We handful of assault troopers wandered through the vast battlejumper like stainless steel rats, poking here, prying there, twitching our wire whiskers as we attempted to figure things out.

  The exterminators were the Jelk Corporation or whatever butt-boys they sent to do the dirty work. We had to get the few landed freighters running for space voyage, and then we had to lift off and hide the last few million humans in a different star system. After that, I could proceed with step two of my long-range plan.

  Stainless steel rats had their advantages. Exterminators had theirs. The universe was a dark place, but the truth was I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

  I wish I could have a do-over. I would have done so many things differently. For instance, in hindsight, I should have parked our stolen warship near the jump point by Neptune. I should have, but I didn’t, and shortly thereafter, the you-know-what hit the fan.

  -1-

  I wore coveralls and boots and floated before an observation deck. I had a terrible decision to make, one with no good answers. I’d come here to mentally wrestle with the issues.

  It was three o’clock ship time. I floated because the grav-plates were down again, as engineers tinkered with the main system. We were still trying to figure out all the angles concerning the alien tech, and it was taking longer than I liked.

  Our captured battlejumper orbited Earth about three hundred and sixty miles above England. I remember because of the wispy clouds high above the shallow cratered lake where London used to be. Like most of the great cities of Earth, London was gone, a radioactive pool of cobalt-colored water. I was looking at a dead world and it made me angry.

  A scowl creased my features. I could faintly see my face reflected off the inner glass of the observation port. That wasn’t what made me upset.
In the reflection of the glass, I saw a man floating toward me. I’d told the others I needed to be alone to think. They understood the importance of the decision. It was such a tough one that no one else wanted to make it. Anyway, what was the man doing here?

  I turned around, and I realized I didn’t recognize him. That should have given me a clue about what was going to happen.

  He looked ordinary enough, a little under six feet with dark hair, a round face and slightly protruding frog’s eyes. He wore an engineer’s coveralls and seemed to be having trouble in zero gravity. He carted a toolkit in one hand and pulled himself along a rail with the other, showing the grace of a seal humping across ice.

  “Commander Creed?” he asked, in a stilted way.

  Something about his speech, about him, felt wrong. On general principle, I drew my laser pistol, aiming it at his head.

  “Do not be alarmed,” he said.

  The way he spoke… Something jarred in me, turning my spine cold. “You’re not human,” I said. “You’re an android.”

  Instead of answering, he pulled the toolkit closer to his chest, unlatching it with a snap.

  I’d learned bitter lessons this past year. They had turned me into a paranoid killer. Shoot first; ask questions later. That sounded like good advice about now.

  I aimed between his eyes and listened to my trigger click as I pulled it. To my shock, no laser beamed from the pistol’s orifice. I clicked the trigger several more times and came up just as empty. Either my gun was defective, which I doubted, or… The android had something in the toolkit that shorted electronics. What else made sense?

  Without any change of expression, the android told me, “Shah Claath sends you greetings, beast.” Then he reached into the kit.

  His words caused a small shock at the base of my skull. Then fury erupted in my heart. I’d never be anyone’s slave again, certainly not the little red-skinned Rumpelstiltskin of a Jelk named Claath. If my laser didn’t work—

  I grabbed a float rail and pulled myself toward the android. As I moved, I let go of the useless pistol and slid my Bowie knife from its sheath.

  I’d kept a blade on my person ever since my stint in prison as a youth. In those days, it had been a shiv with a cloth handle. The Bowie was bigger and better than that. It was my baby, a razor-sharp instrument of high-grade steel.

  As I flew in the zero G, I noticed the android snapping something together in the toolkit. Was it a gun? If he’d already had it pieced together, I wouldn’t have had a chance. He must have figured he’d have enough time so he’d left it unassembled. And this way, if someone had looked inside the toolbox too soon, he wouldn’t have suspected the android. Very clever.

  I grabbed the float rail two more times, giving myself greater velocity. I had to get to him before he assembled his weapon.

  He pulled out a long-barreled gun with an oversized chamber in front of the trigger. He raised it, and his eyes widened.

  I was there. I stabbed. His head shifted impossibly fast so the steel hissed against his cheek, making a hairline scratch but nothing more. Since I was speeding by, I didn’t have time for another stab. Instead, with my other hand, as he turned to fire at me, I grabbed the barrel of the gun. The tip of the iron sights dug into my palm. I yanked the weapon out of his grip.

  I laughed in an ugly way and twisted my body so my feet aimed in the direction I traveled. Sometimes my Jelk-induced training came in handy. Reaching a bulkhead, I used my legs to absorb the shock and brought myself to a stop about forty feet from him. I lined up the long-barreled gun and pulled the trigger. The weapon hissed, and it shivered slightly each time a thin sliver sped from the tube. They stitched against his coveralls, shredding the synthetic material. Unfortunately, they crumpled against the android’s toughened skin, failing to penetrate and do damage.

  I could solve that. I switched targets, aiming for his eyes. They’d have to be soft enough, right? He lowered his head, taking the slivers against the hardened skull. Then he latched onto a float rail with his left hand, grabbed the toolbox-handle with his right and hurled the thing at me.

  The box opened all the way and tools floated out. They still sped at me, coming like a cloud of meteors. I crossed my arms over my head and endured the box, wrenches and power drills. Something knocked my hand hard enough so the gun tumbled out of reach.

  My forearms ached and cuts lacerated the skin. I looked up in time to see the android sailing at me. I leaped out of the way, barely in time. Open-palmed, he clanged a magnetized left hand against the wall. His right fist smashed against the bulkhead where I’d been. With a metallic screech, a section of wall folded and broke like tinfoil, with his forearm sinking halfway in. Circuitry behind the wall sparked and made crackling sounds.

  Damn. He was stronger than I was, because I sure couldn’t punch through metal like that. The thing was deadly, a killer.

  I sailed in the zero G and bounced off a bulkhead like a ballerina, having nearly perfect body control. I’m not trying to brag. I’m just telling it like it was. The Jelk had trained me to combat perfection and I was going to use it now to stay alive. In those seconds, I realized I couldn’t give the android time to go for the floating gun, so I sailed straight back at him. You don’t win a fight by defending, but by going over to the assault. I had a feeling I had to take him down quickly, as his presence indicated other problems.

  I reached him as he pulled his fist out of the wall, with driblets of insulation foam drifting from his wrist. With one hand behind his head, anchoring me, I stabbed the Bowie, thrusting the blade into his right eye.

  That should have finished it. Instead, he shook his head and reached up for me. Despite my surprise, I pushed off and spun away, twisting free of the grabbing fingers. He ripped my coveralls, though.

  I watched as I floated away, waiting for the thing to die. Black gunk like oil dribbled out of the ruptured eye-socket, staining his nose and dripping into his mouth. To my surprise, he reached up, grabbed the bone handle and slid the Bowie out of his skull. The blade came out slowly and black-stained. How could he do that? He had pain sensors, right?

  As if reading my thoughts, he grinned with oily teeth. “I do not keep my brain where you keep yours,” he said.

  I felt a terrible sense of deja vu. Claath had said something similar once, but concerning his heart. That he kept it in a different place where I kept mine.

  The android lowered himself as if doing heavy squats. Sure, he must have magnetized his feet. He was getting ready to sail up at me.

  I waited tensely. I’d have to time my reaction perfectly.

  He jumped at me. I flew away from him but not fast enough. He grabbed an ankle with a bone-crushing grip, stopping my momentum. How much mass did this thing have? I used my free foot to hammer at his face. Once, twice, three times I struck, smashing the nose and breaking teeth with the heel of my boot.

  He released me, trying to grab my kicking foot with both hands. My final kick came in faster and catapulted me away from him. I struck the floor, pushed off, shoved against a wall and reached the floating toolbox. Welded inside it was a small black container. I felt it buzz until I flipped a switch, turning it off. This must have been the device shorting the electronics in my laser pistol.

  He stared at me with his good eye. I peered back at him for a frozen moment. He leaped. I leaped. We both went in different directions, trying to reach different objects. He touched the sliver-firing gun as my hand curled around the laser pistol. We each swiveled around. One of his thin projectiles stitched into my side. It hurt like a son of a bitch. I fired a fraction slower so I could aim, and I melted enough of his weapon to render it inoperative.

  “Surrender,” I said. “We’ll reprogram you so you can work for us. You’ll get to live that way.”

  He hurled the useless weapon, launching it like a missile. I’d expected him to say something first, so I almost failed to dodge in time. I could feel the thing lift my hair in its passage. At that speed, the melted gun wou
ld have killed me if it had struck my head.

  I couldn’t give him any more chances, so I fired the laser in a continuous beam. It put the smell of ooze in the air. Even as he magnetized his feet again, I used the laser like a giant scalpel and sliced his head free of the torso.

  That didn’t stop him, though. He jumped as his feet demagnetized, and he sailed at me. The head remained floating where it had been, gently turning.

  The surreal spectacle slowed my reactions, although I ducked the grasping hands by flattening onto the deck plates. Then I leaped away. I had to put an end to this now. Maybe more were coming. Maybe androids attacked all over the battlejumper, hunting us down one by one. The vessel was huge, as I’ve said earlier. There were still areas we hadn’t checked in detail. Could they have hidden there like vampires waiting for night to fall?

  After two more bounces, I reached the drifting head. I burned out the remaining eye, blinding it. I figured the torso had a wireless connection to the head.

  Still, the body kept attacking, following in my general direction. Did it use sound, smell or radar to locate me?

  My pistol’s battery indicator blinked red. I didn’t have enough juice left to burn through the armored chest chassis. I imagined that’s where it kept its AI. What was my goal anyway? It would be good to capture the mind, to interrogate or download it, find out what the thing knew. No. I had to disable it and find out if there were more like it aboard.

  The torso sailed at me. I jumped at it. We collided. It grabbed flesh, and its fingers crushed with heightened strength.

  I had an idea; and it came from an ugly expression I’d heard in prison from angry cons: “I’m going to rip off your head and piss down your neck.” The android no longer had a head. It had a gaping opening in its torso there instead. I shoved the gun barrel into its neck. Instead of pissing, I used the remaining juice and beamed the laser into the body cavity.