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  Task Force 7

  (Doom Star 7)

  A Novella

  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.

  Author’s Note: The novella originally appeared in the anthology Planetary Assault under the title of CYBORGS!

  -1-

  Day 752: Sub-sergeant Mule and Sergeant Chen sweated in a workout room aboard Mothership Slovakia.

  Like a caged rat, Mule ran on a circular wheel. He had short hair, hard eyes and harder muscles. Indications of a ruthless fighting mentality showed in his demeanor. He was the squad’s sniper and scout. Today, he sweated as the odometer clicked onto six kilometers.

  Chen performed curls, using an excessive amount of cable resistance. The Marine’s biceps swelled with blood. He had wide, flat features and possessed enormous strength. After finishing the set, the sergeant mopped his face with a towel.

  “Have you heard the latest?” Chen was privy to more information than most. He went into officer country at times, which was on a different part of the mothership.

  “Earth news?” Mule asked.

  “Yeah, right,” Chen said sarcastically. “I have Task Force 7 news. Are you interested?”

  They were part of Task Force 7: two Engels-class strike cruisers and a Trotsky-class mothership. They headed for a cyborg-occupied planetoid named Tyche. It was in the Oort cloud and they had already taken two years travel time to reach this far. That made this the longest combat mission in human history.

  There had been a monstrous, destructive war in the Solar System until Marten Kluge had ended it by using the sunbeam. Thousands of near-Sun mirrors had fed a gigantic focusing lens that fired a massive, annihilating ray. Because of Kluge, the newly-forged Alliance had won, but still mopped up stubborn cyborg strongholds throughout the system.

  Task Force 7 had a singular and dangerous assignment to perform in the distant Oort cloud. They were going because the sunbeam couldn’t reach past Pluto.

  “Any time you’re ready to talk,” Mule said, as he continued to run on the wheel.

  Mule was a strange one even for a Marine. His passion ran deep, to the very fibers of his soul. During the war, the cyborgs had killed or converted everyone on Mars, an entire civilization. Mule’s people were gone, including his wife, kids and parents. Mule had survived because he’d been a Martian secret service agent once. He’d protected a Martian diplomat on Earth. That had ended with his planet’s death. He’d joined the Alliance Space Marines because he wanted one thing: to hunt cyborgs, and especially, to kill them. Doing so wouldn’t bring back the dead, but it would stoke the fires that raged in his heart.

  “I don’t know when Command intends telling the rest of the Marines,” Chen was saying. “So you’ll have to keep this quiet for now.”

  Mule nodded.

  Chen hesitated, maybe reconsidering. He glanced into various corners of the workout chamber, as if searching for eavesdroppers.

  Mule waited. He was patient.

  Finally, in a low voice, Chen said, “Strike Cruiser Ashurbanipal has left the flotilla.”

  “What?”

  “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  A cold anger tightened Mule’s features. These were elite crews and the best Marines. The Alliance didn’t have many ships left. Everyone knew that sending three warships all the way to Tyche had caused bitter debates among the leadership. Now one crew had broken and mutinied?

  “Is this information reliable?” Mule asked.

  “Command fears to tell the boys,” Chen said. “But they’ll have to say something soon before word leaks out and starts a panic.”

  With his thoughts in turmoil, Mule began to sprint on the wheel. He was the lone Martian among the Earthers who made up Slovakia’s Marines and crew. The Earthborn practiced different customs than he did and sometimes he rubbed the others the wrong way.

  His physique highlighted much of that difference. He was lean like all Martians—lean as they used to be. Despite his muscles, his ribs showed, making him seem like a starvation victim.

  Most of the Earthborn Marines took synthetic, performance-enhancing drugs that changed the body. One was called Dense, a muscle-building aid considerably more powerful than old-fashioned steroids. Another was Quake, which speeded neural impulses, making the user faster, if more irritable. The worst sin in Mule’s view was the posthypnotic hate-conditioning given to the Marines. Because of the enforced emotion, he feared his fellow warriors would act too rashly in combat and unnecessarily get themselves killed before completing the task of destroying the enemy.

  Mule hated the enemy too, but his was a cold and lethal thing guided by intellect. He would do anything to kill cyborgs, but he intended on staying alive a long time so he could destroy more of the foul melds.

  The wheel’s odometer clicked onto seven kilometers. Mule slowed down and he noticed a droplet of sweat floating before him. He picked up a towel and wiped himself down. He didn’t want more sweat to detach from his skin, float around the chamber and clog the recyclers.

  “When did Ashurbanipal mutiny?” Mule asked.

  “Five days ago,” Chen said. “The ringleaders contacted our captain and told him this was a suicide mission. We learned three days ago that the mutineers killed Ashurbanipal’s captain and his Marine guards. But they began braking five days ago. They’re already hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind us.”

  “Didn’t Belisarius attack Ashurbanipal?” Mule asked.

  “They couldn’t risk it,” Chen said. “The ringleaders knew what they were doing and had every missile and gun radar-locked on Belisarius. If the other strike cruiser would have attempted battle, the best we could have hoped for would have been mutual annihilation.”

  “They were supposed to be an elite crew,” Mule said. “Ashurbanipal was our best ship.”

  “The odds are getting longer, that’s for sure.”

  Mule’s stomach tightened. This had happened five days ago. Five days… Slovakia hadn’t begun braking maneuvers yet. That meant they were still heading toward Tyche. Would Captain Han suddenly quit and decide to turn around?

  “This is a disaster,” Mule said.

  “Agreed,” Chen said. “We need Ashurbanipal’s firepower to tackle the cyborgs.”

  “What?” Mule asked. “Oh. Right, you’re right, we need more firepower.”

  Chen stared at him and finally shook his head. “You’re worried this will jeopardize our mission and that we’ll go home. You’re not really thinking about what this means: that we’re lacking a badly needed warship.”

  “Do you want to turn back?” Mule asked.

  “When I’m in the right mood in my bunk and thinking clearly, yeah, then I realize I’d love to go back home. This is a suicide mission. The rest of the time th
e hate-conditioning takes hold and all I can think about is crushing cyborg skulls.”

  “You don’t own your hate,” Mule said.

  “What?”

  Your hate owns you. For maybe the first time since heading to Tyche, Mule felt sorry for his brother in arms.

  “As long as we have surprise we’ll be okay,” Mule said.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Chen said. “Maybe you’ll actually believe it.”

  Mule continued running. The Marines exercised for hours every day. Otherwise, the extended weightlessness would leech their strength and stamina and leave them too weak to destroy the cyborgs.

  The reason for the task force had come from the last Neptunian humans alive—scientists on Tyche. A scientist on the Oort cloud planetoid had sent a distress signal. It had been one word long, a scream of, “Cyborgs!”

  Mule had heard a recording of the message; they all had. He’d heard the terror in the man’s voice and it had sent his heart pounding. He’d envisioned his wife and children screaming like that when the cyborgs had invaded their underground city on Mars. Just like on Mars, the cyborgs had slaughtered or converted every human living in the Neptune gravitational system, including the various moons and space habitats.

  Mule had seen gruesome videos of what happened to men and women caught by cyborgs. It was brutal, sick and irreversible. To a cyborg, a human was a meat-sack of valuable body-parts.

  The cyborgs, or melds, had it down to a science, an assembly-line horror. They used skin-peelers to pull away the outer epidermis and fine-tuned saws to tease off the muscles of a captured human. It was the spine and the brain that counted to the cyborgs, and the eyes and other hard-to-manufacture parts. The melds married human material to machines as if it were cloth, making synthetic demons, more cyborgs. His wife and children—

  Mule shook his head.

  One word screamed from the scientist on Tyche, from one of the few survivors of Neptunian civilization. Mule had heard a recording of the short message. The first time, he recalled staring at the speakers, waiting for more. There had been heavy breathing, a background explosion, an intake of air from a living being and then hard static. “Cyborgs!” had been the only and last word to transmit from the science station on Tyche concerning the subject of melds.

  Because of the stellar distance, the one-word message sent by laser beam had almost been a year old by the time Marten Kluge received it.

  Over two years ago, Slovakia and two strike cruisers had peeled away from the Alliance Armada headed for the Jupiter gravitational system. Humanity was on the offensive, hunting the cyborgs. With Kluge sun-beaming anything that moved in space, the armada could concentrate on each meld-controlled Jupiter moon and habitat. If the cyborgs proved too stubborn in a particular place, the sunbeam sliced and diced the moon into tiny chunks. Io at Jupiter was already gone, as was Triton in the Neptune system.

  Task Force 7 had built up sufficient velocity and over a year ago, each ship had shut off its fusion drive. The ships were coasting the rest of the way to Tyche, cloaked in silence and stealth. The idea was to surprise the cyborgs.

  “You’re certain we’re continuing the mission?” Mule asked.

  “If we were going to stop,” Chen said, “the captain would have already begun to brake.”

  Mule’s stomach began to loosen.

  Not only did Marten Kluge possess the sunbeam, but also the giant interferometer that swept the Solar System searching for stealthy cyborg ships. If that wasn’t enough, the Alliance had deployed over a hundred drones throughout the Outer Planets to watch for secretive cyborg stealth craft, for the hated Lurkers. That was the cyborg signature: to sneak in close and attack out of the darkness.

  Despite the drone surveillance and the giant interferometer, at least one Lurker had reached Tyche. Because of that, the rulers of the Solar System feared for the future. Task Force 7 was the answer, and despite losing one-third of the flotilla to mutiny, it looked as if it would continue to be.

  -2-

  Day 993: Two hundred and forty-one days after learning about Ashurbanipal’s defection, Mule rested his forehead against the plexiglass of a ship observatory. He raised his hands, pressing his fingertips and palms against the cold plastic.

  The giant star Sirius ahead of Slovakia had become the brightest object in space. This far out, the Sun was only the third-brightest star. Alpha Centauri off below the ecliptic and to the side had become the second brightest.

  Task Force 7 traveled in the Oort cloud, the great halo of objects around the Solar System. Tyche was an anomaly here, a freak. The dirty little ice balls making up the halo were comet-like things, floating or orbiting in the most frozen reaches of the Solar System, varying from 2,000 to 200,000 AUs from the Sun.

  The Oort cloud was the last frontier, the final place under the influence of Sol’s gravity.

  These distances meant that once Task Force 7 reached fifty thousand AUs, they would be one-quarter of the way to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Sol.

  It means we’re all alone out here, with no one to help us.

  Tyche orbited about 56,000 AUs from Earth, almost a light-year away. One light-year was a little over 62,000 AUs.

  Mule often came to the observatory to think about his dead wife and children. He still desperately missed them. He was alone now, a mote of breathing life burning for vengeance. He wanted to mouth, “I love you,” to his departed wife. Today, he couldn’t do it. She was gone, and so far away on Mars, so far…

  Unable to bear the ache of loneliness, he turned to go. The simple act of turning his head saved his eyesight. A blinding flash lit up the observation deck and cast Mule’s shadow against the far wall.

  Instinctively, he threw himself onto the floor, surging to the hatch, slithering through and shutting it behind him.

  Klaxons began to wail with loud and piercing noises. Did it signal a cyborg attack on the task force?

  Ship speakers crackled into life. Through them, a man cleared his throat. “This is Captain Han speaking. Every crewmember and Marine will immediately report to his quarters. I say again, report to your quarters. This is no drill, report to your quarters at once.”

  Mule grabbed a float-rail, pulling himself along the steel corridor. Other Marines around him did likewise. His heart hammered and he found himself short of breath. We can’t be anywhere near Tyche yet. What just happened?

  From within his quarters, Mule heard the captain’s explanation several hours later. Over loudspeakers, Han assured the crew that no enemy drone or missile had struck them. Sabotage from within Strike Cruiser Belisarius had caused that vessel’s destruction.

  Chen sneered at that. Mule silently agreed with the Marine’s sentiment, finding the news hard to believe. Command was covering up something.

  During the next few days, Marines talked about Belisarius’s faulty fusion core. The men had known about it beforehand, even though Command had tried to keep it a secret. Keeping anything quiet was hard to do when they were all alone out here. Maybe the faulty core had finally ruptured and gone critical. Whatever the case, everyone aboard the strike cruiser was dead and gone.

  Through the process of elimination, Mothership Slovakia had become the sole vessel of Task Force 7. There wasn’t any question of turning back, not in the chain of command’s minds. Mule heard Marines whispering the idea to each other, but nothing came of it; certainly no mutiny brewed.

  Perhaps as bad—although Captain Han didn’t mention it—the cyborgs on Tyche might have detected the blast. If the melds had seen it, they might know someone was approaching their base. The Alliance mothership was still months away from Tyche and extremely small in stellar terms, less than a pinprick. It was very possible the cyborgs hadn’t noticed the explosion and still had no idea of the coming attack.

  Mule lay on his cot thinking about it. His knowledge of combat tactics had matured from his late-night studying. Space battle was quite different from secret service details.

  He’d
come to realize that the right way to conduct this assault would have been with battleships, heavy cruisers and dropships. The battleships and heavy cruisers would fight their way past enemy missiles, lasers and gun tubes. A battleship’s giant particle shields would absorb damage while the long-range beams took out the enemy’s offensive weaponry. Then, and only then, would armored dropships bring Marines near, racing down to gain a foothold on the surface.

  Instead, Task Force 7 had a mothership, which they dare not risk to enemy fire. If Slovakia exploded like Belisarius, they had no way back home. Would Kluge send a badly needed cruiser for Marines stranded on Tyche? That would mean the warship would be out of action for six years. The conflict back home was still too bitter to detach a cruiser for six long years just for the sake of a few men.

  How many cyborgs were on Tyche anyway? How heavy were their defenses? Did they have missile launch pits? Did the melds possess laser batteries or proton beams?

  Mule had no idea. No one did, but he figured he would find out in another few months.

  ***

  Day 1089: Mule played Fist Ball against Hayes, one of his squad-mates. They stood in a centrifugal chamber, each man wearing padded gloves.

  “Nine to two,” Hayes said.

  The high-pitched whine of the churning centrifugal chamber changed suddenly, slowing.

  “Wait a minute,” Mule said.

  Hayes looked up. He was big and beefy with the customary wide Marine features. “Who’s doing that?”

  “I am,” Chen said over a loudspeaker.

  Mule and Hayes traded glances.

  Soon, the chamber stopped rotating and everything became weightless. The hatch opened and Chen beckoned them outside.

  “What’s up, Sarge?” Hayes asked, pulling himself into the corridor.

  Chen pointed at a wall speaker.

  “I hope I have everyone’s attention,” Captain Han’s voice said from it.