Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Read online

  I awoke to the sound of graviton rays. I’d fallen asleep on the cot I’d installed. I’d also looped the video some time ago so I didn’t have to restart it. As I raised my head, I saw a moth-ship’s eyes glow like a lava pit and then the beams burned outward. The Kargs—

  Before I could finish my thought, N7 entered. “It is urgent, Commander. Admiral Venturi demands an immediate conference with you.”

  “Pipe it in right here,” I said.

  “No. He wants a face-to-face meeting.”

  That brought my head up. “You’re kidding, right? Venturi swore an oath that he’d never—”

  “In my estimation, the admiral is terrified. Something has happened to change everything.”

  I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear my head. I needed some coffee. “When and where does he want to meet?” I asked.

  “He will come to our quarters with a three-man escort. He asks you do the same.”

  “Done,” I said. “Do you have any idea what this is about?”

  “I do not, Commander. He is waiting outside our corridors. He desires an immediate conference.”

  “Right. Now where’s some coffee?”

  “I will bring some,” N7 said.

  “Don’t bring that scalding stuff you drink. I need regular coffee.”

  N7 nodded brusquely. “You must hurry, Commander. The admiral is urgent.”

  I didn’t like this insistence. What did it portend? Nothing good, I bet. “Okay. Let’s go, and get me the coffee.”

  Ten minutes later, I sat at the same long table as before. I had N7, Ella and Rollo with me. A haunted Admiral Venturi entered the room. Doctor Sant had joined him, together with two extremely tough-looking tiger guards. They wore orange chevrons on their collars and bronze biceps bands, showing that these had thicker arms than the others did.

  I sipped from a cup, black coffee that put dirt on my tongue. I still felt foggy, but with an unnatural alertness.

  “I’m glad we can talk, Admiral,” I said, rising to my feet.

  Venturi stopped short. His eyes were red, and if ever the tiger looked hangdog, this was the moment. The normally crisp uniform was rumpled, the military cap sat at an awkward angle and he seemed dazed and confused.

  “Commander Creed…” he gestured helplessly. “I have broken my solemn oath to meet with you here. I am foreworn and useless now. But what I have just seen and heard…” He shook his head. “We are doomed. We are all doomed, everything. The end has come.”

  “You mean the Kargs?” I asked, with urgency in my voice. “Have they found us?”

  “It is much worse than that,” he said. The tiger lurched and almost stumbled to his chair, collapsing into it.

  I sat. I’d never seen any of them like this. What had happened?

  Venturi produced a glass chip. “The Kargs are the Great Enemy. It is unbelievable. The ancient writ spoke of this time, but I never realized until Abaddon spoke to us that it was so. How could any of us have known?”

  I waited. He was obviously stricken to the core. He’d have to tell this at his own speed. All the same, I’d wish he’d hurry up for once.

  The raspy tongue appeared, and Venturi aimed his red-rimmed eyes at me. “I must play the message. Perhaps you’ll understand then. Perhaps you can…” The Supreme Lord Admiral shoved the glass chip into a slot. He pressed a button, and a holoimage appeared. “The Kargs sent us a message,” Venturi whispered. “This is it.”

  “Did they beam it directly to you?” I asked.

  “The message was broad-beamed,” he said. “I do not think they yet know our precise location. It does not matter, though.”

  “Hello, Lokhars,” a gravelly voice said.

  The holoimage was fuzzy like bad analog TV reception. There was the outline of a possible head within the grainy fuzz. Those might have been shoulders and possibly red glowing eyes. For a second, I thought I could see. Then the image distorted again.

  “We captured your dreadnought, the one you laughably call Glory,” the Karg said. “Some fought, as useless as the pitiful gesture proved. Let us show you their fate.”

  The fuzzy distortion quit. I saw a Lokhar strapped down onto something. A knife appeared held in a metallic tentacle, and it committed unspeakable atrocities that made the tiger captive rave. Blood and gore, and torn organs tossed onto the floor—it was a wretched and ugly sight.

  “Some died even harder, mewling like wounded kittens,” the Karg said in his ear-hurting voice. “All provided us with limited sport, as you too will provide us when we find your pathetic ships.

  “I now know you by name, Supreme Lord Admiral Venturi, of the Avenging Arm of Lokhar. You belong to Orange Tamika and are here to halt our invasion. That is ironic, don’t you think? As your frail ship has given us the means we’ve sought for jumping the last lap into your space-time continuum.”

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  No one seemed to have heard my question. They kept staring at the distorted holoimage, glued to the Karg’s words.

  “I know your mission, Lokhar. It is to reach what you call the portal planet. Do you think you can slip past hundreds of Karg invasion torcs? No. We know you, Admiral Venturi. We have the composition of your frail dreadnoughts imprinted on our sensors and we will obliterate your craft on sight if you dare approach near enough to the portal. The others here have your patterns. There is no chance you will successfully land one legionnaire onto the portal planet’s surface. If we find you before that, we will storm your ships, capturing you for our amusement.”

  His words troubled me deeply. Maybe we should have stood and fought to protect Glory. I hadn’t foreseen this.

  “You have once chance for life, Admiral Venturi. Come to us begging on your stomachs and we will let you live as slaves. You will be the last to perish in your universe. Yes, you will tell us everything you know and earn your final days, or you will linger in extreme agony for untold years if you persist in your useless quest.”

  “That’s important,” I said. “We still have things he wants. That’s why he sent this message. He wants us to surrender because he’s afraid. I certainly don’t believe all his boasts.”

  Venturi turned haunted eyes upon me. I had the feeling I hadn’t heard the worst.

  “Surrender to me, Lokhar, for I am Abaddon. I am the bane your worlds have feared for many millennia.”

  Venturi shuddered. So did Sant and the tiger guards.

  “I have arrived at last,” the Karg calling himself Abaddon said. I seemed to have heard the name before, but I couldn’t place it. “I have brought my multitudes with me. I have returned from the locked pit and my wrath shall not be appeased. You cannot win. You cannot harm me. Nothing can. Surrender, Supreme Admiral, and I will teach you the meaning of power as I rend your space-time continuum into smaller and smaller pieces of death and destruction. Abaddon has spoken, and my word is a promise of destruction.”

  Abruptly, the holoimage went blank. A second later, Admiral Venturi clicked a switch and took his glass flake from it.

  “Who is Abaddon?” N7 asked.

  “This is a coincidence, nothing more,” Ella whispered.

  “What is?” I asked her.

  “His name,” she said.

  “You’ve heard it before?” I asked.

  “It is written in the Book of Revelation,” she said. “Abaddon is the name of the chief demon let out of the pit.”

  “The Karg spoke about a pit,” I said. “Does he mean their universe?”

  “You have heard the name before?” Venturi asked in shock. “This is astonishing. We, too, know that in the last days as spoken in the ancient writ Abaddon will reappear to bring death and destruction. His name means ‘destroyer.’”

  I sat back, stunned. The Kargs had a leader named Abaddon, and both the Lokhars and we had that name written down from long ago? This seemed a little more than coincidence to me.

  I recalled then walking across the old cathedral in Germany. I’d squatted beside a stone
gargoyle. The statue’s face had resembled Claath’s far too precisely. Could the Jelk have more to do with the Kargs than any of us realized it did?

  “Okay,” I said. “We have to break this down one thing at a time. A couple of items strike me as important.”

  “No, no,” Venturi said. “Don’t you understand that our mission cannot succeed? We have failed. We are doomed, and our universe will perish with us.”

  “I don’t accept that,” I said. “We have two ships filled with soldiers. I breathe. You breathe. We’re far from doomed, and the Karg’s message proves it.”

  Venturi shook his head. “You are mad, Earthman. Here is the evidence before your eyes and you cannot see. We have failed the Great Maker and He has unleashed the great evil against us.”

  “That’s one way to view it. I prefer to believe we’re here to stop the evil by fighting harder than any of us ever has before.”

  “How?” Venturi asked. “I had one hope: to fly through Karg formations, to use boldness to reach the portal planet. Now Abaddon has blocked the route. The Kargs know us by sight and sensor, and will destroy our ships if we get too close.”

  I found it hard waiting for the tiger to finish talking. When he did, I said, “That’s point one in my reason for thinking Abaddon is bluffing. Why bother sending the message if we can’t do anything to him anyway?”

  “Maybe because instead of destroying us, he wants our dreadnoughts,” Ella said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Why would Abaddon want or need our paltry ships?” Venturi asked.

  “The answer is obvious,” Ella said. “He boasted, as Commander Creed suggests. He didn’t get to Glory’s core, but captured enough Lokhars to have learned about hyperspace rips separate from the portal planet. Now he needs our ships intact to get the drive.”

  Venturi sat like a statue until finally his eyes began blinking. “If you are correct,” he said, “we must self-destruct at once.”

  “Come on!” I said, exasperated. “Will you listen to yourself? That makes no sense. If we fail, the portal planet will open a route into our universe anyway. He doesn’t need our dreadnoughts. His fear must be that of our successfully closing the portal. That’s the victory. That’s the game winner here. The message has one reason and one reason only: to discourage us. Besides, did you ever stop to think that maybe there are others with him?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Ella asked. “I do not understand what you’re saying?”

  “He broke his captured Lokhars,” I said. “We saw the evidence. Did he do that for pleasure? I don’t believe it. He must have done it in order to discover what they knew. Maybe these Kargs are swift-thinking bastards. In their questioning, they found the name Abaddon and his legend of the end of time. That sounds close enough to what they’re doing, right? So the Karg figured: I will call myself Abaddon in order to paralyze their will—our will. Such a thing has happened before, you know.”

  “Are you mad?” Venturi asked. “This has never happened anywhere. We are discussing the end of everything.”

  “I mean the general principle of the thing. On our world, there was a man named Cortes. He sailed to the New World with higher technology than the Aztec Indians. Early in his march inland, he got hold of an Indian woman named Dona Marina. She told him all the Aztec legends and beliefs, and she helped him trick the Indians who had sold her into slavery. They thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl, the legendary light-skinned god who was supposed to return out of the sea. Cortes played off the Aztec legends and thus weakened their desire to fight back against him until it was too late.”

  “Yes,” Ella said. “Thank you, Commander. That makes perfect sense. I think that is exactly what has happened here. The Karg acts a part by calling himself Abaddon. That makes more sense than…than the other possibility.”

  Venturi glanced from Ella to me. “I do not understand you humans. The evidence is before you. To attempt talking yourself into believing otherwise…” He groped for words.

  “No,” I said. “We’re right. The Karg isn’t Abaddon. He’s using your old legend about him to weaken your resolve to fight.” And if the Karg really is Abaddon, how does it help us fight him if we believe we’re already doomed?

  “I wish to add a comment,” N7 said.

  “Go ahead,” I told him.

  “If the Karg is pretending to be Abaddon,” N7 said, “then why is the name in both Lokhar and human holy books?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, not liking the coincidence. “That’s an interesting point.”

  “No it isn’t,” Ella said. “Abaddon simply means Destroyer. It makes perfect sense for two different supposedly holy books to talk about a destroyer obliterating the world at the end of time.”

  “This is a useless conversation,” Venturi said. “No matter if Abaddon is Abaddon or a pretending Karg, they have blocked the way to the portal planet. Surely, hundreds of the biggest Karg vessels now ring it. They will know what to look for—us. The moment they see our dreadnoughts, they will unite and overpower our paltry force.”

  That did seem to be a problem, however… “Maybe we have a bit of time before that happens,” I said.

  “Explain,” Venturi said.

  “Radio transmissions can’t go as far or fast in hyperspace as in our universe,” I said. “Maybe the Kargs at the portal planet haven’t yet heard the news.”

  “Surely they have relay ships passing the information from vessel to vessel,” Venturi said.

  I snapped my fingers. “I have an idea. We can still slip onto the portal planet even if this Karg has broadcast about us. Well, we can at least slip past the patrolling Kargs.”

  “No,” Venturi said. “It is impossible. We are doomed.”

  “If you mean attacking the Kargs head-on, I agree with you,” I said. “But we’re not going to do that. Instead, we’ll go around and come through the portal like other Kargs.”

  “What do you mean?” Venturi asked.

  “We have hyperspace-ripping equipment,” I said. “So we use it to break into the Karg universe. Then we join the other Karg vessels on their side going through the portal into hyperspace. We’ll have to hope Abaddon’s message hasn’t gone through the portal back into their universe. As those other ships pass the planet, we unload and attack.”

  “The other Karg ships—the ones already in hyperspace—will see and destroy us anyway,” N7 said.

  “They wouldn’t have any reason to do that,” I said. “They’re watching for us to come in to them, not waiting to see us come from their universe. Look, according to what Admiral Venturi originally learned, only Kargs live in their space-time continuum. If they think anything at all upon seeing us, it’s that we’re a new design, or an old one, for all I know.”

  “You are making blind leaps of speculation,” Ella told me.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but that’s better than giving up.”

  For several seconds, we all stared at each other.

  Finally, Admiral Venturi made a low growling noise deep in his throat. It reminded me an old time muscle car on Earth, one that caused the car to shake with doglike anticipation. “You humans are mad with a hope that doesn’t exist. Your wordplay means nothing. You cannot see the truth, so you foolishly persist in trying.”

  “And how is that worse than giving up and letting everything go to hell?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” the Lokhar admitted.

  “Yeah,” I said, “neither do I. So how about it, Prince? Let’s give this bastard a run for his money. Let’s fight until we’re dead or lying on a cot with a Karg knife spilling our guts. What I’m not going to do is stop any iota sooner than that.”

  “I begin to perceive how you defeated your Jelk overlords,” Venturi muttered.

  “Let me ask you a completely different question,” I said to Venturi.

  “I am still,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That means the prince is listening,” Doctor Sant said.
r />   “Oh,” I said. “Do you believe there’s a connection between the Jelk and the Kargs?”

  Venturi considered that. “Both come from different space-time continuums. Apart from that, I do not think so. The Jelk do not possess such murderous technology as the Kargs.”

  “What are you implying?” Ella asked me.

  “I saw something in Germany,” I said. “Claath looks like a devil, a small one to be sure. Abaddon is a devil, as well.”

  “A demon,” Ella corrected. “In the Bible, in any regard, the devil refers to Satan. He is one. The demons are his servants and they are many.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Claath looked like a stone gargoyle I saw on a cathedral. I’m wondering if that’s just a coincidence or if it happens to mean something.”

  “I highly doubt it means anything significant,” Ella said.

  “I know your worldview doesn’t want to accept such things,” I said. “But it doesn’t even have to be supernaturally related. What if ancient men saw space travelers and wrote about them?”

  “Are you referring to Chariot of the Gods?” Ella asked in a mocking tone. “The ridiculous book scorned intelligent scientific study.”

  “I guess,” I said. “But suppose some of what it said actually is true. Then you could trust old eyewitness accounts written in the Old Testament or in Revelation about Abaddon or demons.”

  “You are reaching, Commander,” Ella said.

  “Enough of this,” Venturi said. “We must decide now what we are going to do. Either we must destroy our ships to prevent our technology from falling into enemy hands or—”

  “No one is destroying Indomitable,” I said.

  “That is not your choice,” Venturi told me.

  I silently counted to three, working to hold my temper. Threatening to try to storm his dreadnought wasn’t going to help us. I had to convince the prince to go the last mile.

  “If there is even one small particle of hope for victory,” I said, “we should take it. The oracle told you to get us. Now you know why. We humans fight to the finish. We don’t quit. Do you want it said that the Lokhars lacked the fire to keep fighting when the rude Earthmen still had the guts to try?”