Assault Troopers Read online

  I switched to the command channel and found the tigers had killed one of the overmen. That left two of us.

  “I’m taking over,” I told Overman Decker.

  “Roger,” he said. “I’m with you and I’ll take your orders.”

  We talked another minute and a half, maybe two. He and I decided to let the aliens shoot up the assault boats. From above, cannon-sized shells shredded our vessels. They didn’t matter at the moment.

  “I found shafts going up,” Dmitri said over the comm.

  “Tell me about them,” I said.

  Dmitri gave a quick rundown and I revised the plan. After explaining it to Decker, I switched to the centurion channel.

  “We’ve treed us some tigers,” I told them. “Now we’re going up after them.”

  Jelk OCS had taught us something we’d already known long ago on Earth. War was simple. But during a firefight, heck, even during an advance toward contact, the simple became difficult. My plan was direct and as simple as could be: climb up and kill the enemy.

  We split up into four sections, and we climbed. In some ways, the hangar bay was like a regular house’s room. We were in the walls like rats, so to speak, ready to engage in a bloody war of rats. To keep the tigers occupied and focused on the room, we raced our few surviving battle robots back and forth across the main floor. They spewed fire at the Lokhars. The Lokhars fired back, killing our robots and buying us time.

  I climbed with my cohort, with Ella beside me. The girders were closer together than a human architect would have made this thing. They were also smoother, with baroque flares to them and sharp little flanges. Several troopers cut their hands, or the bio-suit stuff covering their hands. I told them to halt and wait until the suit healed the cuts.

  I climbed, hauling myself higher and higher. About halfway there, the tigers realized what we were doing. From positions high up in the dark, Lokhar gun barrels emitted flames and sparks, and ricochets rattled everywhere. Beside me, a trooper’s helmet opened like an eggshell and she began the slide to the bottom.

  We had to move, or be destroyed where we clung. “Attack!” I shouted. “Let’s get ‘em.”

  I suited action to words, and I climbed like a monkey. Yeah, I was the brains of our legion. I should have emulated a Mongol and not Alexander the Great.

  What’s the difference? Probably the world is all.

  The old Mongols of Genghis Khan’s time had been some of the greatest conquering soldiers of history. They didn’t just march over miles, but across degrees of longitude and latitude, forging a Russia-sized empire, the second biggest the world had ever seen. If you’re wondering, the British once reigned over the world’s largest empire. My point is that a good Mongol leader stayed in the back, sending messengers up to the fighting soldiers. It meant the Mongol leader rarely died in the middle of combat.

  Alexander the Great—one other great conqueror of history—had played a different game. He fought at the front like a hero out of the Trojan War. He’d gained many wounds that had proved his courage, and he’d pulled his troops along at times with the fire of his zeal. In one battle near the end of his days, Alexander had gotten good and pissed. He’d charged up a ladder, fought on the city wall and jumped down alone to fight the enemy. It had cost him heavily, with a spear in his chest and a perforated lung, giving him one of the worst wounds of his life. His soldiers had gone berserk though, murdering everyone in the small Indian city.

  I fought Alexander-style rather than Mongol-style. Obviously, as space mercenaries, we didn’t have any long traditions to guide us. All we had was our courage, training and buff bodies, oh, and the freaking bio-suits. They made a difference.

  I should have known some fear. The living armor had me high on combat, giving it a surreal sense as if I saw all this on a video screen. At times, it took an act of will to realize I actually made all these moves.

  I used those steroid-pumped muscles, the weeks of training under high Gs. Like a monkey, a big bad chimp of a human, I climbed the girders in the teeth of Lokhar fire. Troopers around me died, with large bullets slamming them in the chest. Every few seconds, I lifted my laser and beamed. The red targeting symbol in my HUD made the difference. I’d wash over the barest piece of tiger as a legionary leaned over the ledge to fire. When I pressed the stud, the laser shot straight to target, and I felt like a HALO champ.

  “Attack!” I shouted. “Kill the world-destroyers!”

  We came at them from all sides. This time around, we were like the Aliens from the second movie of that title.

  Grenades flew everywhere. Bullets hissed and beams lit up the area. I saw tigers snarling behind their visors before the glass or plastic melted and flesh cooked. A flame burned whiskers on one. Tigers roared in agony. Others hurled themselves at us on the girders and fought hand to hand, sometimes falling into the darkness. Earth troopers died in swaths to grenade blasts and bullets. Others plummeted, grappling with a tiger and plunging a knife through powered armor as the alien did the same in return.

  It was mass murder by demented creatures on both sides. In the end, in the teeth of enemy fire and valor, we climbed to the top, we battled and we conquered.

  “Cease fire!” Rollo shouted. “Cease fire.”

  I stood up there, with smoking tiger corpses strewn everywhere. They had powered armor and heavy caliber rifles. We had bio-suits and pure hearts, oh yeah.

  With the locale secure, I sent down a team. They got on the assault boat radios and contacted a nearby legion.

  “Do you have a map yet, N7?” I asked.

  “I’m putting it up now,” the android said.

  With the map on my HUD, I studied our position, the other legion’s position and what we knew concerning the location of the main PDS beam.

  “Right,” I said. “We’re heading for grid eight-E-twenty-two. Centurions, spread out your maniples. Overman Decker, take the left, I’ll command the right. We have to silence the PDS beam, and we have to kill every tiger we find. Any questions?”

  After I answered a few from the lower officers, I said, “All right. Let’s do it.”

  As the fleets battled outside, we fought in our own mini-universe. I wondered if the tigers could call to the planet for reinforcements. It seemed likely they could escape down to the surface. But the way the Lokhars fought, I doubted they would use the opportunity.

  Our HUDs mapped as we traveled through the giant satellite, and N7 brought up older schematics of past Lokhar PD stations, searching for similarities. During that time, we engaged more tigers, took losses and killed them. Some of the troopers began looting corpses.

  We found that one of the Lokhar weapons suited us just fine. It was a big cannon like a giant spotlight nestled on a trooper’s chest. A trooper rested twin cushioned bars onto his or her shoulders to hold the cannon in place. Under the main gun, hanging like a beard, was a rubber-like feeder tube. The trooper used a trigger-switch on one of the shoulders bars. Every time he pulled the trigger, the thing magnetically launched an ugly-looking claymore-like mine from the cannon on his chest. The mine attached to a wall or bulkhead, and BOOM: a gaping, smoking hole took the vanished mine’s place.

  I put the portable artillery to use, but not directly against the tigers. Our lasers worked well enough for killing them. The one-man artillery blew open or created doors for us where they had been bulkheads before. The thing negated walls so we busted through corridors and swept around into tiger-held strongholds.

  With the help of the mobile artillery, we replayed the Battle of Iwo Jima, this time in Sigma Draconis space. Corridor by corridor, wall by wall, we encircled yet more Lokhars. We killed them and too often took losses ourselves.

  “Ready?” I asked later in a hoarse voice.

  “This is why we came,” Dmitri said. “Give us the word.” The stocky Cossack had slung a Lokhar cannon onto his shoulders.

  We’d moved fast, creating a swath of death behind us. Now we were in position to attack the mighty beam. First, we ne
eded to break through another armored bulkhead.

  I glanced behind me past a blown wall. Thirteen troopers waited, clutching their weapons. Our legion had taken fifty percent casualties already. Finesse was fine in a regular battle. But assaulting an enemy planetary defense station had its own parameters. Time counted for everything. If we could silence this place—particularly the big beam—it meant our fleet had a better chance of winning. If they won, we went home, or what passed for home these days. If the fleet lost, it didn’t matter how many troopers I saved by careful tactics, as we would never be going home again. Speed imposed an entirely new set of requirements.

  “Do it,” I whispered.

  Dmitri clicked the trigger twice. Two ugly claymore munitions flew through the air and attached to the wall. BOOM! BOOM! Flames appeared and the reverberation went through me. Metal twisted, rained against a nearby bulkhead, with some of the pieces sticking like arrowheads in the opposite wall, and the way magically appeared into a roaring den of death. Tigers lay on the floor and others turned toward us.

  “Follow me!” I shouted.

  I moved like Death’s second cousin as the neuro-fibers gave me amazing reflexes and speed. Firing from the hip, using my targeting crosshairs on the HUD, I mowed down every tiger leaning over something to fire at us. Beams washed around me. One of them shot and melted a Lokhar grenade. Then I was inside, one my belly, still beaming, still killing.

  The vast chamber we entered held the giant reflectors that fired the Lokhar beam at our battlejumpers. The opening way up there showed stars.

  “Heads down!” N7 said.

  I pushed my visor against the floor and squeezed my eyes shut. The air vibrated. I knew the giant beam fired once more.

  “Now,” N7 said. “You may attack.”

  I looked up, aimed, pressed the firing stud and nothing happened. The mechanism had been damaged. Pitching my useless laser rifle aside, I clawed out pulse grenades. With a twist, I put the first one onto its highest setting. Like I’ve said before, the bio-suit helped make me crazy. I stood and heaved, and my pulse grenade shot like a catapult ball for the distant reflectors.

  One, two—a tiger beam touched me. I dodged, but not before fiery agony caused me to shout. My side smoked. I saw the curl of oily fume and knew it came from me. I flopped onto the floor like a landed trout. Someone foamed me with a sprayer. Cooling comfort bathed the hurt, and my side throbbed. I couldn’t think. Sweat poured out of me. Then a shattering explosion brought a vast rent to the reflector plates.

  “Retreat!” Ella shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

  I took up her cry as someone lifted me. I had no idea who did it. Troopers fled from the chamber. Was it seconds later? I wasn’t sure because I might have passed out for a second. The son-of-a-bitch beam had toasted some of my skin. I looked down. A clear piece of bio-suit had stretched across the former burn-hole, keeping my insides in place. Then I had no more time to observe.

  “Down, down, down,” N7 said. “The beam is about to fire.”

  “Have you timed their shots?” I asked.

  “I have. Get down.”

  The person carrying me threw me like a sack. I hit the floor and crawled. We all slithered—and then it happened.

  The great Lokhar beam energized. What had my pulse grenade done? Didn’t know. Didn’t care. What mattered was that it must have screwed up something critical. An intense white light and a terrible heat consumed my thoughts. I entered a new sun. I endured, I died—or I thought I did. Then a terrible pounding pain pulsed and throbbed through me.

  “Run while you can,” N7 said. “It’s building heat and wattage.”

  I got up and ran. I used the neuro-fibers in ways I wouldn’t have believed possible. For the first time while on the Lokhar station I felt fear. Whatever I radiated must have been too powerful for my bio-suit emotion filters to handle.

  Space-assault troopers ran while the white world grew and intensified its hot power. Troopers bellowed in agony. I heard sizzling, screams and things popping like cannons. I found a shaft, and I dropped. Then the mother of all explosions ended one portion of my existence. I didn’t know it then, but something miraculously incredible had occurred—for the living.

  The explosion slaughtered Earthers together with thousands of nearby Lokhars. We’d silenced the giant beam, making our first real contribution to the fleet battle.

  I crumpled at the bottom of the shaft. My right knee strained, and I waited for a tear, a pop, something to tell me the tendons had snapped. They held, thanks, I think, to Jelk biotechnology.

  The last few minutes combined into a meld of existence, and I lay there at the bottom of the shaft, enjoying an immensity of throbbing hurts.

  “Sound off,” Rollo said in a faraway, tinny voice.

  For a time I listened to troopers speak, debating whether I should say anything or not. War, what was it good for? I checked my bio-suit. The place where I’d been burned had thickened.

  “I don’t feel good,” a trooper said through the comm channel.

  Something about that made me laugh.

  “Creed?” Rollo asked from the open comm.

  “Overman Creed to you,” I whispered.

  It surprised me, but troopers cheered. “The overman is alive,” someone said.

  “I’m switching to the centurion channel,” Rollo said.

  “Okay,” I said. It took some thinking. I felt groggy and spent. Finally, I found the pressure switch and used my chin to push it.

  “Are you okay?” Rollo asked.

  “No. You?” I asked.

  “Good enough,” Rollo said. “One of the troopers told me you got shot.”

  “Just a scratch,” I said.

  “There are reinforcements coming,” Rollo said, “more tigers, I mean.”

  “How many more?” I asked.

  “Don’t know that. What should we do?”

  “We’re Earthers,” I said. “We’re going to fight to the death.”

  “Overman,” a different centurion said.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Some of the troopers are complaining about their suits. A few of them have opened up. I mean, sir, some of the suits are sliding off. That kills the trooper, of course—violent decompression.”

  “That’s more than a problem,” I said.

  “I thought so too,” the centurion said. He was a cool one.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I switched to the android channel. “N7, we got problems.”

  “Describe them to me,” he said.

  I told him.

  “Where are you?” N7 asked.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with the bio-suits? We have to keep that from continuing.”

  “I must speak to you immediately and privately,” N7 said. “It is imperative that you give me your location.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. I brought up the schematic map and told him. Then I talked to Rollo and told him the same info. “I need some troopers down here with me. The android has been sneaky lately, and I’ve begun to wonder if he’s playing his own game.”

  “Do you think he wants to even the score with you?” Rollo asked.

  “Androids: zero, Creed: two?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Rollo said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “You don’t trust N7?”

  I laughed, and that hurt my side. I wondered if the bio-suit pumped pain killers into me to take the edge off.

  “I’m on my way,” Rollo said.

  I stirred, and I found that my knee throbbed too hard for me to want to stand on it just yet. No, I didn’t have that kind of luxury. A cripple died in this kind of battle. I had to remain mobile.

  Summoning strength from who knew where, I forced myself to sit up. I was down in some elevator-like shaft, maybe double the size of the ordinary Earth type. Dead body parts littered the floor around me: severed arms, some headless legless torsos and other grue
some pieces. I slid my butt to one of the walls and used my hands to drag myself up onto one leg. It made things twist inside me, and my bad knee throbbed miserably.

  Love the blast. Own the blast. This was a joyride, Mickey.

  I must have noticed movement out of the corner of my eye: an outthrust hand with rigid fingers. I turned my head and spied N7 crawling down the wall like Spiderman. He wore his cyber-armor and he moved like an android on a mission.

  I had no rifle, some pulse grenades…and my Bowie knife. Should I take it out?

  “I see you,” Rollo said over the comm, “and I see N7. Want me to waste him?”

  “Negative,” N7 said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “You’re acting funny.”

  “Negative,” N7 said again. “I have never received humor modifications.”

  “You’re a regular riot,” I said.

  “Your idioms do not compute,” N7 said. “Are you speaking in beast-code to each other?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m tired, dead tired. More Lokhars are coming. I’ve lost half my command, maybe more, and now you’re acting weird.”

  “I have not suggested to my brothers that I destroy you,” N7 said. “Yet as always, you speak of death.”

  “Give me a break, N7. Every second day you’re threatening to punish me or have me destroyed.”

  “So it would appear,” N7 said. He rotated on the wall and jumped to the floor.

  I still balanced on one leg, not having built up the nerve to try to use my other leg.

  “You are badly injured,” N7 said.

  “I’m standing, I’m breathing. I’m okay. Now what’s up?”

  N7 pulled out a boxlike device. “Will you permit me to test the obedience chip?”

  I laughed dryly. “Did you hear that, Rollo?”

  “Tell him I have my targeting circle squat on his head.”

  “Rollo wants me to tell you—”

  “I heard him,” N7 said. “I comprehend your distrust. Before we proceed, I think I should test your chip.”

  “If you hear me scream…” I told Rollo.

  “Roger,” my best friend said.