Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Page 32

“EP,” Ella said, “did you hear me?”

  “I do not appreciate these continued interrogations,” the relic said. “I forbid you to ask me anymore.”

  “Who are you forbidding?” I asked. “Ella or me?”

  “Both of you,” EP said.

  “Commander…” Ella said. Then she quit talking.

  I decided we could push the issue later. We had to leave.

  With N7’s help, I explained the controls to selected troopers. They hurried to various platforms. Three of the control panels failed to light up. N7 checked each one and discovered that one of the troopers had failed to follow the correct procedure. The other two platforms simply didn’t work.

  By this time, we could hear alien BigDogs trotting down the corridors. At my orders, troopers and our few legionaries piled onto the flyers.

  “They’re almost here,” Dmitri told me. “Maybe I’d better stay behind to hold them back.”

  “No,” I said. “Everyone is leaving.” Then I gave quick instructions to the plasma cannon crews. I wanted at least one of them per flyer, preferably more.

  Dmitri’s flyer and mine floated beside by the chosen shaft. One by one, the other platforms sank into the great abyss, heading down for the center of the planet.

  The last flyer disappeared, when a company of BigDogs trotted into the hanger bay. Like old time sailing ships Francis Drake had sailed against the Spanish Armada, our plasma cannons belched broadsides from our last two platforms.

  “Go, go, go!” I shouted at Dmitri. “Get into the shaft.”

  “We have to nail them all,” he shouted back at me. “Otherwise, they can just leap after us and fall down like missiles.”

  He had a point. So our two platforms hovered by the opening as more BigDogs leapt into the hanger bay. We slaughtered them, the sizzling orange superheated blobs melting them by the dozen.

  “My cannon is overheating,” a trooper shouted.

  Other crews yelled similar news.

  “It’s time to go,” I said.

  “The BigDogs—” Dmitri said.

  “Forget about them,” I said. “Go, go, go.”

  Dmitri’s flyer maneuvered over the shaft. Then his platform dropped into it, disappearing out of sight. Mine was the last one left, with grim troopers armed to the teeth. I’d put N7 and Ella on an earlier flyer, so it was just my remaining zagun and me.

  More BigDogs flowed into the hanger bay, climbing over the destroyed ones. These held Karg soldier-creatures on their backs.

  I waved my hand over the bright controls. The flyer lurched. Then Karg bullets reached us. The platform spun around like a top, and we lost three troopers who sailed off. They got up on the hanger deck. A Karg bullet flipped one soldier onto his back. Then bullets made the man’s helmet crack. I saw a puff of air jet out and knew he was dead. The other two troopers jumped, reaching our platform just as it sank out of sight.

  By that time, I brought a semblance of control back to the flyer. Troopers craned their heads, looking up. The hanger lights dwindled, and then it darkened suddenly.

  I used long-scan vision and put it on my HUD. Just as Dmitri had predicted, BigDogs jumped down the shaft after us, falling like missiles for our platform.

  -28-

  The next few minutes were gut-wrenching. I stood at the controls, and I judged distances. The shaft was quite a bit bigger than my platform, maybe three times the circumference. That didn’t give me much maneuvering room, though.

  We floated down, and I dared to drop faster.

  “Dmitri,” I radioed. He was somewhere below me.

  “Here, Commander,” the Cossack said.

  “Kargs and BigDogs are raining down on us.” Even as I said that, the falling aliens began firing rifles and heavier ordnance. An occasional exploding bullet blasted against the platform, wounding troopers and raining bio-suit pieces. “Raise a cannon!” I shouted. “Give them something to worry about.”

  Two crews informed me their cannons wouldn’t be ready for a few more minutes. That just left the one. Troopers helped wrestled it into position so its orifice aimed straight up. Then a roiling orange glob spat upward. How far would it go before it stopped climbing and fell back down onto us? This was a mad gamble.

  As we sank, we passed girders and tiny openings, but nothing to fly a platform through in order to dodge. I wondered if this had been a service or maintenance flyer. It had that feel. It certainly didn’t possess weaponry or anything approaching combat speeds.

  “We got some!” a trooper shouted. “The plasma melted them into scrap metal.”

  Twice more the cannon fired, the discharge climbing to strike falling enemies. The number of bullets hitting us dropped dramatically, although we still saw occasional muzzle flashes up there.

  Bit by bit, the initial raining debris gained on us. When I tried to make the flyer sink faster, the entire platform began to wobble. A trooper staggered near an edge. There weren’t any rails along the sides. Before he plunged off, another trooper grabbed his arm and steadied the man.

  I reduced speed after that, and brought the wobbling under control.

  “They’re coming!” a sergeant roared.

  “Get ready,” I said. “This is going to be rough.”

  I had three lookouts, and they agreed exactly where the first dead Kargs would hit. For the next several minutes, I maneuvered the platform to one edge of the shaft to the next. Individual Kargs zipped past us, and then so did melted BigDogs.

  Then a BigDog slammed against the flyer. It made the platform dip badly that way. Three troopers plunged off. I hoped Dmitri could catch them. We scraped against the shaft, and I fought to keep our vehicle upright. If I did this wrong, the entire craft might go sideways and dump everyone. Troopers shoved the BigDog off, and distributed the weight evenly again. I had almost bought us back under control when the second BigDog struck. We lost another trooper, slammed against the shaft, which caused us to carom like a billiard ball and hit the opposite side of the tube.

  That knocked me sideways. My grip slipped and I fell, and I might have slid away, but I grabbed the station, hanging on. For a second, I thought it was over. We wobbled and the left edge dipped. Troopers slid toward the edge. With a heave, I climbed back into position, moving my hands over flashing knobs. Bit by bit, I brought the flyer back under control and this time, we didn’t lose anyone. It made a difference when troopers linked arms, saving his neighbor. Even so, if another BigDog had struck then, it would have all been over.

  During that time, a comm expert radioed ahead and told Dmitri what to expect.

  We had to find a side passage fast, or the trip to the center would never work. We couldn’t dodge falling aliens forever.

  Luckily, Dmitri radioed and told us about a sharp turn coming up. I had to slow down, dodging three more BigDogs until we floated into a side opening.

  My gut ached as I released tension and I felt bile in the back of my throat. For the next several minutes as we traveled away laterally, loud clangs told us of raining BigDogs hitting the bottom of the shaft. The Kargs must have begun shoving the dead ones down.

  For the next three hours, we traversed various shafts, going sideways, drifting down again and dropping laterally once more. I taught a sergeant what to do because fatigue made my eyes burn. Finally, I lay down and closed my aching orbs.

  I slept like one dead until a trooper shook me awake.

  “Commander,” the woman said, “N7 has been trying to contact you.”

  “Trouble?” I asked, as I propped up onto my elbows.

  “I think I’d better let him explain,” she said.

  I sipped water from a tube in my helmet, letting the warm liquid trickle down my parched throat. It made me feel like a rabbit in a cage, the suit as my imprisonment. I chewed on paste we used in lieu of food and finally chinned myself onto the command channel.

  “What is it, N7?” I asked.

  “We’ve been descending for some time,” the android radioed from a flyer below
us somewhere. “Our speeds compared to the tube-train show that the Kargs using the other side of the planet will win the race to the bottom. They will likely be waiting for us there. The Kargs on our side might also catch and pass us soon.”

  “What’s the margin for the other side Kargs?” I asked.

  “They are presently two hours and thirteen minutes ahead of us,” N7 said. “That margin will continue to grow if we remain in the flyers.”

  Great. The flyers were slower than the tube-train. Everything EP told us seemed to be the opposite. Just how damaged was the relic? Had my shots done it? Well, how didn’t matter right now.

  “Is there a tube-train station nearby?” I asked. “Somewhere we could get on one?”

  “Yes, in another eighty kilometers.”

  “Then we need to push the flyers, load up there and see if we can make the tube-cars move faster. We can’t give the Kargs too much time to set up ahead of us.”

  “Yes, Commander,” N7 said.

  From the surface, it was over five thousand kilometers to the center. We hadn’t even traveled one thousand kilometers yet. I wondered about the T-missiles. So far, we hadn’t hit any nuclear devastated areas. Had Admiral Venturi been able to launch any into the planet? Maybe he’d needed all the teleportation missiles to clear a path through space for us to the surface.

  We pushed the flyers as fast as we dared, enduring more swaying. Once, I watched a trooper flip upward, as if our craft was a frying pan and the soldier a piece of meat. The truth was obvious. Whoever had designed these hadn’t worried about aerodynamics.

  Now came a grim game of daring and stomach-churning wobbling for another eighty kilometers. We lost three more troopers altogether before we landed and piled into sleek tube-cars. Each of the whale-sized vehicles unlocked in the back. An entire orifice dilated open. I could imagine a long snake-centipede wriggling into the tube. The controls were in front: colored crystals where one had to wave his or her hands over node-controls. Would a giant centipede have used some of its front legs to do that?

  My skin crawled at the idea. I hated snakes. I wondered if that’s what First Ones had looked like: the ghostly holoimage I’d seen earlier. I didn’t like the idea of them being snake-like. Wouldn’t that make them evil? I was thinking Garden of Eden and the serpent.

  With a shake of my head, I switched worries. We had to get down fast, before the Kargs formed an impenetrable defense between the center and us.

  Each car held several zaguns worth of troopers. There weren’t any chairs in ours, just the upward-curving walls. We stretched out and relaxed, while a driver piloted the car. None of ours were linked, but we each followed the other.

  Soon enough, we zipped at high speed along what I figured must be magnetic rails. Occasionally, out the front or back windows, we saw flickering lights and a flash of girders, but mostly we saw darkness.

  Even going fast this would take time. Many troopers fell asleep, including me. The next fight might be the last, and we all needed to be in the best condition possible.

  I woke up to discover we only had five hundred kilometers to go. That brought a strange feeling. After all our efforts, we were about to run the final lap. At least we were getting a chance to fight near the victory post.

  I felt groggy and my muscles had become sore, but the burning feeling behind my eyes was gone. Maybe we could actually do this. Yeah, we were going to win. I had to tell myself that, otherwise—

  Just then, Abaddon called, and it turned out that he wanted to speak to me personally.

  The good feelings evaporated, and fear built in my chest. How had the top dog learned about me? The implications meant he had prisoners. What did Abaddon have to say to me anyway?

  With a scowl, I decided there was nothing to lose. So what if he was the master of evil. I was Creed. Screw him. So far, no one had been able to hold me down. I’d flip him off to his face; I’d go down fighting, unbowed and unapologetic about it.

  He must know we were almost to his forward lines. I wanted to hit the Kargs before they settled down and made elaborate plans or built up their area. Why had EP told us to use flyers if they were so slow as to give the enemy the edge? Stupid relic.

  N7 brought a portable receiver and snapped a link into my comm jack. The receiver had a holoimage-pad, a small thing really, about the size of a clipboard. Rollo, Dmitri, Ella with the bagged relic and N7 sat around the receiver, watching and ready to listen. I don’t know. If this was the supreme devil, I was glad to have the others near me.

  I smiled then, a grim thing. The situation reminded me of Antarctica when we’d sat around the TV and later near the radio transmitter. I’d come a long way since then, and yet, I still sat hunched before comm equipment, wondering what the future held for me and for humanity.

  The holoimage started out fuzzy like before and stayed that way no matter how much N7 fiddled with the receiver. For just a second, I wondered about that. What did Abaddon have to hide from us this late in the game that he didn’t want to show himself?

  “Commander Creed?” I heard in my earphones. The gravelly voice made me shudder. I’d never liked it, and I doubt I ever would.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I said.

  “I had not realized until a short time ago that the Lokhars had acquired humans as slave soldiers,” Abaddon said.

  “No?” I asked. That he knew about humans confirmed the worst. But why did he assume we were slaves?

  “Why do you fight for your oppressors?” Abaddon asked.

  “No one is oppressing us,” I said. “We’re on our own.”

  “You lie,” Abaddon said. “I know that the Lokhars devastated your homeworld, adding biological agents to make it inhabitable for generations to come.”

  “How would you know about that?” I asked.

  Abaddon chuckled in a devilish manner, and his torso moved about in the fuzzy holoimage. He seemed to be regarding those hunched around the receiver.

  “You will never pierce the ring of soldiers guarding the Altair Object,” Abaddon said. “Your advance is futile and wasteful of your last hours of life.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “But since we’re here and all, you know we have to try. Besides, I seem to recall someone telling the admiral we’d never even make it to the portal planet. Looks like you were dead wrong about that. Why not wrong about our chances of breaking through your creeps?”

  “You are a vain beast to speak to me so,” Abaddon said.

  I blinked several times at the grainy bastard. Something didn’t ring right here. The way he spoke…

  “Who are you, Abaddon?” I asked.

  “I am the end of life,” he said. “I am universal doom.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Well, what about the Jelk? Do you hate them, too?”

  “Who are these Jelk?” he asked.

  “Yeah, right, like I buy you don’t know who they are. What’s your game, Abaddon? Why are you pretending? What’s the real purpose and why did you call me?”

  “You are a worm, a doomed creature. Abase yourself while you can and earn a few last minutes of peace.”

  There was something fishy here. It hovered in my mind as I tried to think this through. “Just a minute,” I said. I chinned my helmet comm-lever and turned away from the receiver where the holoimage still looked around. “Ella,” I said, on a different channel. “I want you to take out the relic, wake it and see if EP can give us better reception.”

  No one else asked me why. Maybe they felt Abaddon’s strangeness as well.

  I heard Ella zip open the ammo bag as I faced the holoimage. I chinned the Abaddon-talking channel back on.

  “What’s the point of all this?” I asked. “Why do the Kargs hate everything but themselves?”

  “Surrender, human,” Abaddon said.

  “Is there any good reason I should?”

  “If you do, you will receive preferred treatment. That is better than dying in futility and agony.”

  “Why would you
bother calling and offering us that?” I asked. “Do you fear us? Have we proved tougher than you believed? I bet that’s it. You’re calling because you fear.”

  “Foul beast, decide quickly before I rescind the offer.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed EP hovering in place, with its lights flashing.

  “EP,” I said, broadcasting over my helmet speakers. “Can you fix the grainy image?”

  “I can,” the relic said. “Do you wish to see your tormenter?”

  “I sure do,” I said.

  A thumbnail-sized slot on EP opened with a snick. A pin-sized gun poked out. Then a white beam rayed the holoimage. The grainy appearance wavered and solidified into a perfect picture. To my astonishment, I found myself staring at Shah Claath, or the perfect replica of him. He had red skin and inky eyes, with sharp little teeth just as I remembered. The last time I’d seen him he’d been busy transforming himself into an electrical ball of energy in order to escape my Bowie knife.

  “You’re Abaddon?” I asked. “Is this a joke?”

  The creature who looked like Claath glanced about, and he snarled with rage, reaching out and flipping a switch. It did nothing to change the image. He glared at me, and he looked around again. Then he stared at EP, and understanding swirled in his dark eyes.

  “You have always proved a troublesome beast,” Claath or Abaddon said to me. “I should have destroyed you the first day I laid eyes on your repugnant form.”

  “Yeah, what can you do?” I asked. “These things happen.”

  His eyes narrowed with anger.

  “I don’t get it, Claath,” I said. “How can you be Abaddon, and how can you have trillions of Kargs willing to do your bidding? Or have the Jelk seen the way the wind blows and turned traitor to our universe?”

  Claath straightened, no doubt trying to regain what little dignity he could. “You are destined to lose,” he said.

  N7 spoke up, his voice coming through his helmet speakers. “I do not believe the personage we’re viewing is or was the original Abaddon. I have heard both beings speak, and I have kept internal recordings. Their voice patterns and manners are different. I believe Claath has impersonated Abaddon for the moment only. Earlier we heard the real Abaddon.”