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  Bio-Weapon

  ( Doom Star - 2 )

  Vaughn Heppner

  Humans are the warheads in a lethal contest of missiles vs. long-range beams in deep space.

  The desperate Homo sapiens of Earth launch their experimental beamship. It’s ultra-tracking and breakthrough technology allows it to out-range the Doom Stars.

  The Highborn want that ship. They send swarms of missiles, knowing few will reach it. In the nosecones are their secret weapons—Free Earth Corps heroes from the Japan Campaign.

  Launched from the giant missiles like shells in a shotgun, Marten Kluge and his friends must ride their torps into the particle shields and storm aboard the beamship or die in the cold vacuum of space.

  BIO-WEAPON is the story of a suicide-ride to hell through a techno blizzard. BIO-WEAPON is a full novel, 85,000 words in length by Vaughn Heppner, Writers of the Future winner, Vol. IX.

  Bio-Weapon

  Book #2 of the Doom Star Series

  by Vaughn Heppner

  “To be vanquished and not surrender is victory.”

  ― Marshal Pilsudski of Poland

  Neutraloids

  1.

  “We’re hunting dogs, Omi, nothing more.”

  The Korean ex-gang member shook his bullet-shaped head, clearly not liking that kind of talk.

  Marten Kluge rolled back his sleeve to show the meaty part of his forearm and a bluish-purple barcode tattoo.

  “Branded like cattle,” Marten said.

  “In case you die,” Omi said. “So they know your blood-type when they resurrect you.”

  “You believe that?” Marten was a lean, ropy-muscled man with bristly blond hair. He wore a brown jumpsuit, the shock-trooper training uniform. It had patch of a skull on his right shoulder and another on his left pectoral pocket.

  Omi wore a similar shock-trooper jumpsuit. Both uniforms showed sweat stains and both men had circles under their eyes. Their grueling training surpassed anything they’d ever known, and they’d known plenty of bad.

  “They also use the barcode to track you,” Omi said. “We’re little blips in the station computer.”

  Marten’s expression didn’t change as they strode down an empty corridor, a utilitarian steel hall with emergency float rails on the sides. This was sleep-time, but Marten had convinced Omi to slip from the barracks so he could show him something.

  “Watch,” Marten said. He unlatched a secret wall panel and withdrew a recorder.

  Omi frowned before leaning near. The recorder was small, square and compact, voice activated. It was something HB officers used when watching their drills.

  “Is it stolen?”

  A wild light flashed in Marten’s eyes. Then it was gone, giving him the sleepy obedient look most of them wore around the Highborn. “Admitting a theft gets you five in the pain booth.”

  Omi glanced about the deserted corridor.

  “It’s clean,” Marten said. “No listening devices.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I searched until I found them.”

  Omi lifted a single eyebrow.

  “I borrowed a bug and set it in a different corridor, one the HBs use. Then I piped it here.” Marten tapped the recorder.

  “Dangerous.”

  A hard smile was Marten’s only reply.

  “You might as well play it,” Omi said.

  Marten set the recorder on the steel floor. Then he sat cross-legged and looked up. Omi raised an eyebrow, a trademark gesture he’d perfected in the slums. Finally, he shrugged and sat on the other side of the recorder.

  Marten reached out. Click.

  There wasn’t anything at first. Omi leaned closer, so did Marten.

  “I thought—”

  “Shhh,” Marten said. He glanced at the recorder as the sounds started.

  There were footfalls in a corridor, someone wearing boots.

  “It’s hard to hear at first,” Marten said, an edge to his voice.

  Omi closed his eyes. The sounds of boots striking metal grew louder. He imagined huge Highborn. They always radiated a weird vitality and had eyes like pit bulls about to pounce. Their skin was pearl-white, their lips razor thin, almost nonexistent. Any Highborn could take out a five-man maniple. An HB, he was…Omi didn’t hate their superiority the way Marten did, but he couldn’t say he liked it either.

  A hard voice, authoritative, full of vigor, spoke. But the garbled words were still too far from the hidden mike.

  “I can’t hear him,” Omi said.

  “Shhh,” Marten said, scowling.

  Then out of the recorder: “…can’t agree, Praetor.”

  “The Praetor?” Omi asked, fear twisting his belly.

  “Listen!” Marten said. “It’s him and Training Master Lycon.”

  LYCON: Yes, gelding has its virtues. It would make them docile, tractable and more prone to obedience. But what about their fighting spirit?

  PRAETOR: Of premen?

  LYCON: Not just premen, but trained shock troopers.

  PRAETOR: There’s no difference. Their sex drive compels them to wild, unpredictable behavior. In space, we must know exactly how they will react. This thing called fighting spirit… I’ve never really seen premen with it. Let us rely on fierce hate conditioning, combat drugs and hypnotic commands.

  LYCON: They are premen and they are inferior to us. But they are still capable of fighting spirit. The shock troops have been trained to a fine pitch. Why ruin it with gelding?

  The voices in the recorder had grown stronger. Now they reached apogee and grew fainter again, their footfalls ringing in the background.

  PRAETOR: Perhaps as you say, well-trained, some of them even simulate an apparent viciousness.

  LYCON: All heel to my command, I assure you.

  PRAETOR: Yes, you are to be commended on your work, Training Master. It’s just that…”

  Both Marten and Omi leaned over the recorder listening, the tops of their heads almost touching. The words and even the footfalls faded into nothing.

  The two shock troopers straightened, Marten taking the recorder and snapping it off.

  “Gelding?” asked Omi.

  Marten nodded sharply, and said, “Cutting off our balls.”

  “They…They can’t be serious.”

  Marten snorted. Then he walked to the secret wall panel and sealed the recorder in it.

  “The Praetor was talking to Lycon, our Training Master?” Omi asked.

  “Yes,” Marten said.

  Omi blinked several times. “You’re talking castrated. Would they use a pair of scissors?” Omi shook his head. “The Highborn have done a lot dirty tricks to use, but cutting off our jewels like a neutered dog, that’s too much.”

  “What if I said we could leave here?” Marten asked.

  “We’re stranded in the Sun Works Factory. We’re orbiting Mercury.”

  Marten gestured farther down the corridor.

  “Forbidden territory,” Omi said. “Yeah. Show me.”

  2.

  Both Marten and Omi found themselves aboard the Mercury Sun Works Factory through a complicated set of circumstances.

  On 10 May 2350, the Genghis Khan and the Julius Caesar had entered the edge of Earth’s stratosphere. The two Doom Stars had annihilated the vast Social Unity sea and air armadas that had gone into action to help the beleaguered Japanese. Social Unity had sent up half of Earth’s space interceptors and launched swarms of merculite missiles against the Doom Stars. Then they’d fired the newly developed proton beams, a factor more deadly than the old military lasers. It had taken five HB asteroids plunging earthward to take out the five SU beam installations.

  Unfortunately, powering the energy-hungry proton beams had taken the full output of f
ive major cities’ deep-core mines. Such mines tapped the thermal power of the planet’s core.

  To house Earth’s 40 billion citizens took cities that burrowed kilometers downward. Like bees, humanity survived in vast, underground hives. The asteroids had destroyed Greater Hong Kong, Manila, Beijing, Taipei and Vladivostok, and had thus slain a billion unfortunates.

  Even so, Social Unity’s Military Arm came within a hair’s breath of destroying the Genghis Khan. As the Doom Stars were the bedrock of Highborn power, the Genghis Khan needed repairing. In the Solar System, only one place had the capacity to do so, the naval yards where they had been built: the Mercury Sun Works Factory.

  The losses of Genghis Khan Personnel had sharply brought home to the Highborn their greatest weakness. They were only a couple million versus billons of Homo sapiens. So Highborn Command had pondered the idea of putting a complement of shock troopers aboard each ship. To the Highborn, the shock troopers were premen—Homo sapiens. The initial shock trooper test-run took place at the Sun Works Factory. The Highborn had combed the FEC divisions used in the Japan Campaign. FEC meant Free Earth Corps, and it was filled with humans the Highborn had convinced to fight for them instead of fighting for Social Unity. Marten and Omi had been in Japan because the Highborn had captured them in Sydney, Australian Sector and each had “volunteered” for military duty. Both had won decorations for bravery, the reason the Highborn had chosen them as shock troopers.

  * * *

  Marten and Omi headed into forbidden territory. Marten knew the way. He’d been here before, and in a certain sense he’d come home. Back in the days when Social Unity ran everything, his parents had been engineers on the Sun Works Factory. Long ago, there had been a labor strike, an attempt at unionization. Political Harmony Corps had brutally suppressed it. His parents and others had then escaped into the vast ring-factory.

  Marten opened a hatch and stepped through, Omi followed.

  Black and yellow lines painted on the ceiling, wall and floor warned them to stay out. Newly placed red posters with skulls and crossbones made it clear.

  “Don’t worry,” Marten said. “I’ve already been here several times.”

  They hurried. Sleep-time would soon be over and their maniple would return to training.

  “This way,” Marten said. He wheeled a valve, grunted as he swung a heavy hatch and poked his shoulders through. The corridor was smaller here, colder.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Omi.

  “A leak lets in minute amounts of vacuum. The cold crystallizes the air, and that’s what you smell.”

  “Are you sure we’re safe?”

  “Here we are,” Marten said.

  He led Omi to a small deck, with a bubble-dome where the wall should have been. A hiss came from four meters up the dome’s side.

  “Air leaking out,” explained Marten, “but it’s only a pinprick.”

  Omi squinted at the bubble-dome’s tiny fracture. “It’s not dangerous, right?”

  “Not yet,” Marten said. He pointed outside at Mercury.

  The ring-factory rotated around the planet just as Saturn’s rings did around Saturn. The factory’s rotation supplied pseudo-gravity. They presently faced away from the Sun, but the radiation and glare would have killed and blinded them except for the dampening devices and heavy sun-filters.

  The dead, pockmarked planet filled over three-quarters of the view. Mercury wasn’t big as planets went. If the Earth were a baseball, Mercury would be a golf ball. It had a magnetic field one percent of Earth’s. A person weighing 100 pounds on Terra would weigh thirty-eight pounds on Mercury. The solar body it most resembled was the Moon. Just like the Lunar Planet, thousands of craters littered Mercury. Dominating the view below was the Caloris Basin, a mare or sea like those on the Moon. Instead of saltwater, however, well-baked dust filled the mares. The Caloris Basin was 1300 kilometers in diameter, on a planet only 4880 kilometers in diameter.

  Marten pointed at the Sun Works Factory as it curved away from them—they were inside the fantastic structure. The curving space satellite seemed to go on forever, until it disappeared behind the planet. On the outer side of the factory, unseen from the viewing deck because the outside part faced the Sun, were huge solar panels that soaked up the fierce energy and fed it into waiting furnaces. Catapulted from Mercury came load after load of various ores.

  “Look at that,” Omi said.

  Far to the left sat the damaged Doom Star Genghis Khan. It was a huge warship kilometers spherical. Blue and red lights winked around it, sometimes dipping into it. They were repair pods. Some were automated robots and some were human-occupied pods.

  Omi turned to Marten. “So how is standing here going to help us from getting gelded?”

  “Look over there.”

  Omi squinted and shook his head.

  “There,” Marten said, pointing more emphatically. “See?”

  “That pod?”

  “Correct.”

  A small, one-man pod floated about a hundred meters from the habitat’s inner surface. No lights winked from it. It sat there, seemingly dead, a simple ball with several arms controlled from within. There were welder arms, clamps and work lasers. Anyone sitting inside the pod could punch in a flight code. Particles of hydrogen would spray out the burner.

  “What about it?” Omi asked.

  “Remember how I told you I grew up here?”

  Omi nodded.

  “Well,” Marten said, “I bet most of my equipment—my family’s equipment—should still be intact. It was well hidden.”

  “So?”

  “So my family built an ultra-stealth pod to escape to the Jupiter Confederation.”

  “PHC found it, you said, over four and half years ago.”

  “I’m pretty sure they found it back then. But that doesn’t matter because I could build another one.”

  “Impossible.”

  Marten managed a smile. “You’re right. Let’s stay and get gelded.”

  Omi paled. “How do you plan on going about this, a…?”

  “I need a vacc suit,” Marten said. “So I can go outside and enter the pod.”

  “Then?”

  “Then it gets hard,” admitted Marten.

  “But not impossible, right?”

  Marten checked his chronometer. “Time to head back.”

  Omi glanced at the hissing spot in the Plexiglas bubble, and then he turned with Marten for the barracks.

  3.

  On the experimental Social Unity Beamship Bangladesh, Admiral Rica Sioux sank into her acceleration couch. She wore a silver vacc suit, the faceplate dark and the conditioner-unit humming. Around her and suited as well languished the officers of the armored command capsule.

  Despite the Bangladesh’s heavy shielding, months in near-Sun orbit had leaked enough radiation so Admiral Sioux had ordered the command crew together with the Security detail into the vacc suits. There had barely been enough suits for higher command and security, a grim oversight from requisitioning. The rest of ship’s company had bitterly complained about the lack of vacc suits for them. After the first cases of radiation sickness, Security had overheard talk of mutiny. Finally, in order to regain a sort of normalcy, the Admiral had ordered drumhead executions of the ringleaders—in this instance, randomly selected personnel.

  The experimental spacecraft, the only one of its kind, had already set two hazardous duty records: one for its nearness to the Sun, two for the duration of its stay. Their greatest danger was a wild solar flare. One flare, over 60,000 kilometers long, had already shot out of the Sun’s photosphere and looped over the Bangladesh, only to fall back into the cauldron of nuclear fire. The ship’s heavy magnetic shielding, the same as in Earth’s deep-core mines, kept the x-rays, ultra-violet and visible radiation and high-speed protons and electrons from penetrating the ship and zapping everyone aboard. Not even the vacc suits would have protected them from that. Unfortunately, the rare occurrence of a giant solar flare had signaled the co
mmencement of Admiral Sioux’s troubles. Somehow, the image of their beamship sailing under the flare’s magnetic loop of hot gas had horrified the crew. If a flare should ever hit them—even with the beamship’s magnetic shields at full power— there would be instant annihilation.

  They had been in near-Sun orbit since the start of hostilities. Their ship was probably the only one in the Solar System that could have done it. The magnetic shields that protected them this near the nuclear furnace took fantastic amounts of energy to maintain—too much to make the M-shields useful in combat. The gaining of power here was simple but deadly for the personnel aboard. Special solar panels soaked up the incredible wattage poured out of the Sun. Unfortunately, they couldn’t collect when the magnetic shields were up. So they switched off the M-shield and used the heavy particle shields—millions of tons of matter—to keep the worst radiation at bay while the solar collectors collected. Then and none too soon went up the magnetic shields. Most of the radiation leakage, naturally, occurred between these switches.

  The reason Admiral Sioux had chosen the near-Sun orbit to hide was basic strategy. Social Unity Military Command well knew the combat capabilities of the enemy Doom Stars. No combination of the Social Unity Fleet could face one, and at the rebellion’s commencement, the Highborn had captured all five. So to save the Fleet, SUMC had ordered an immediate dispersion of ships into the nether regions of space. The scattering kept the Fleet in being, and just as importantly, it forced the enemy to split his Doom Stars, if he wanted to picket each of the four inner planets.

  This near the Sun was the perfect hiding spot, at least since the destruction of the robot radar probes that had long ago been set at far-Sun orbit. Neither radar nor optics could spot the Bangladesh if the viewer looked directly at the Sun. The Sun’s harsh radio signals blanketed the beamship, while the Star’s light—seeing the Bangladesh in near-Sun orbit would be like trying to pinpoint a candle’s flame with a forest fire a few millimeters behind it. The trick, of course, would be to look “down” and get a side view, with space as the background and not the nuclear ball of fire. It was the military reason for at least three, robot radar probes at three, equidistant locations around the Sun, and why the Admiral had destroyed the probes.