Alien hostiles, p.28
Alien Hostiles, page 28
He passed this final inspection. You will watch the Untermensch at the mine.
“Jawohl, Herr Meister.”
The Meister were being especially strict since the alien incursion several work periods before. There were rumors of a victorious space action, but reports, too, of three Haunebu lost near the coast of the Eastern Sea. The identity of the aliens was still unknown, and speculation held that the intruders were from Earth.
For Spahn, Earth was largely mythical, a place of larger-than-life tragic heroes in the fall of the Reich, of evil subhumans bent on dominating true humans overrunning the planet, of the fire and destruction of Armageddon, of high civilization dragged down and destroyed.
He was curious about Earth. Life on Paradies was . . . not ideal. The Unters were slaves, pure and simple, and even the Ubers were little more than servants of the Meister . . . servants who could become Unters with one misstep or even at a Meister’s whim. The Ubers were indoctrinated every work period with the urgent need to be strong, to come together in support of the Return. Powerful forces, they were assured, allied to Aldebaran were waiting for them on Earth, and the army of liberation was now being mustered.
Everyone, Ubers and Unters alike, had their role to play in the coming triumph. Earth would be liberated, and life would be better for those privileged enough to be classified as Ubers.
And right now, Spahn’s role was sitting at a monitor watching gangs of naked Unters hacking away at rock, filling baskets, hauling baskets to the transports, and doing their part to bring about the final triumph.
Even Unters were necessary.
On the screen, two Unters, a man and a woman, had paused in their labor, sheltered from the view of the nearest overseers by the massive bulk of one of the ore carriers. They were just talking—about what, he couldn’t tell—but it was an unauthorized rest break and might even indicate an illicit relationship. Unter males did not mate. Unter women were only able to mate with chosen Ubers, and only under the direction of a Meister.
He identified the nearest guard, hovering on a grav platform, and alerted him to the violation.
Duvall held his Stingray on course, slotted in astern of the rest of the Thunderbolts. So far, everything was going to plan. There was no sign of Malok saucers, and that worried him.
“Talk to me, Marv,” he said. “Where are they?”
“No clue, Double-D,” Martel replied from the Stingray’s back seat. “The screen is blank, except for our guys. No news is good news, huh?”
Duvall didn’t reply to that last bit. He’d much rather know where the enemy was than be left wondering if they were about to spring a trap. He knew Malok craft could cloak themselves, a trick of bending the light around their ships with a powerful electrogravitic field.
The gas giant Charlie stretched across fifty degrees of the sky ahead, bloated and huge, bisected by the white slash of its ring system seen edge on. Daarish hung closer in the sky, half-full, a mottled rust, blue, and white world not less than a hundred thousand miles distant. The last time he’d been this close . . .
“Contact!” Martel called. “Multiple contacts, bearing three-five-one! Coming from behind the objective!”
“Here they come, Thunderbolts!” Blakeslee’s voice called over the tactical network. “Weapons free! Protect the transports!”
The squadron split ahead of Duvall’s fighter, six to the left, six to the right, following their own operational plan. Duvall banked left, sticking with Blakeslee’s ship.
And then the enemy was on them, filling the sky, as one of the six Thunderbolts ahead vaporized in a blinding flash of light. Duvall pivoted his Stingray, tracking a saucer slipping through within the formation and triggering a long burst from his twin pulsar cannon. Flashes of white light sparkled off the enemy saucer, but without damage that Duvall could see.
Balancing his gravitic drive, he killed his forward velocity and accelerated toward the target, which abruptly changed vector. Duvall sent another stream of rapid-fire laser pulses into the target at much closer range, and saw bits and pieces of hull plating gleam in the orange sunlight as they spun clear.
More saucers were trying to force their way through the phalanx of Stingrays, and Duvall saw that they were trying to line up with the three TR-3Bs. Pushing his gravs hard, he angled back toward the unarmed transports, trying to put his fighter between them and the oncoming disks. The maneuver brought him alongside the space cruiser Samford, a thousand miles out in front of the Trebs.
“We’ve got incoming, Dee,” Martel warned. “Bearing three-five-seven relative, range five hundred.”
The saucer angled in from ahead and Duvall brought his targeting reticule into line with the distant blip and engaged one of his AMRAAM missiles. The range was ridiculously long for an AIM-120. In atmosphere, an AMRAAM normally could manage eighty or ninety miles; but, in the hard vacuum of space, there was no drag to fight against as its solid-fuel motor sped, and no gravity to pull it to earth once the motor burned out. Inertial guidance would take the missile most of the way to the objective at velocities far above Mach 4, but that demanded very precise handling of his Stingray as he lined up the targeting reticule.
Inertial guidance would get the bird close to the target, and then its radar would switch on before the fuel was expended and actively home in on the target for the final phase of the flight. Holding his breath, Duvall watched the dwindling range figures on his screen . . . then pressed the firing button at two hundred miles.
“Fox three,” he announced as the missile slid from his rails, accelerating on a white-hot plume as it twisted toward the target.
Breaking off from the fire-and-forget AIM-120, he maneuvered into a good blocking position in case the bird missed.
“Still accelerating,” Martel reported. “Bird is now fifty miles from target . . .”
Was the alien ship aware of the incoming AMRAAM? It didn’t seem to be—no jinking or sudden boost or vanishing into a space-bending bubble. That was a datum worth noting.
“Closing,” Martel informed him. “Intercept in five . . . four . . . three . . .”
In the distance, Duvall saw the flash of a detonation just ahead of Martel’s prediction, and the radar screen showed an expanding cloud of fragments.
“Nice shooting, Duvall!” Blakeslee’s voice sounded in his headset. “Welcome to the Thunderbolts! Form up on me. . . .”
Laughing at the sudden shift in his squadron relationship, Duvall accelerated.
“The problem, Chief Krueger, is we don’t know if the Ubers are going to fight us. Will they side with the Meister? Or join with us?” Wheaton said.
Wheaton, Krueger, and Elanna were standing in a small viewing room, looking through a large window of one-way glass. Klaus Kemperer sat alone in the next room, unaware that the three surreptitiously kept an eye on him.
“He says his friends, the other Unters, will join us, no question . . . so long as they’re not too terrified of Meister retaliation. The Ubers, I don’t know. Klaus hates them, hates them with a passion. When he says the Ubers will side with the Meister, he may just be hoping we’ll kill them.”
“He’s also extremely worried about a young woman among the Unters,” Elanna told them.
“How do you know that?”
“It’s fairly obvious in what he’s told us. Her name is Astrid, and he’s been begging us to rescue her. She was one of five women the Meister took away from the labor camp.”
“Is this true, Chief?”
Krueger nodded. “I think our friend in there will do just about anything to get his girlfriend back.”
Wheaton looked at his wristwatch. “Well, the strike group should be almost on Daarish by now. I’ll have them pass the word . . . but our people may be too busy to watch out for any one individual. Especially if the Ubers fight us.”
“I wonder,” Elanna said, “if Klaus could help us with that.”
Chapter Nineteen
“I’ve been at Homestead Air Force Base—and I’ve seen the bodies of some aliens from outer space. It’s top secret. Only a few people know. But the President arranged for me to be escorted in there and see them.”
Jackie Gleason, as reported in The National Enquirer, 1983
12 July 1943
They’d come for her in the night, armed SS troopers who’d showed her their orders. Maria Orsic was to be taken to the Reichsführer at once. She was not under arrest . . . not exactly, but the officer in charge made it clear that she had no choice in the matter whatsoever.
The drive north to Wewelsburg was dangerous and slow. Allied aircraft had been stepping up their attacks against the Reich, the Americans bombing by day, the British by night. Central Germany still lay outside the reach of enemy fighter aircraft, but formations of bombers hammered the cities, and more than once, the convoy of military vehicles had been forced to detour around a city with streets pounded to rubble.
Wewelsburg Castle lay in Westphalia, overlooking the village of the same name. Once the property of the kings of Prussia, it had been purchased by Himmler in 1933 and converted into both the headquarters of the dreaded SS, and a kind of mystic, spiritual center for Nazi occult beliefs.
Himmler’s office was here; an opulent room with marble floors, paintings on the wall glorifying Greater Germany, and ceiling-to-floor-length swastika banners hanging between tall windows. Every detail, Orsic thought, had been incorporated with the sole purpose of overawing those brought into the Reichsführer’s presence.
Himmler sat behind a massive desk, his ridiculous pince-nez perched on his nose as he signed a stack of documents before him. Orsic stood between two SS soldiers for a long moment before Himmler set the pen down and looked up.
“Ah, Maria,” he said, smiling. “Thank you for coming.”
“I had little choice, Heinrich,” she told him. She deliberately used his first name, both to play on his obvious long-term sexual interest in her, and as a means of letting him know that she was not intimidated by the setting.
“I know, I know. But it was imperative that I see you. I want to know . . .”
And with that, his tone turned cold, as cold as his eyes. “Maria, my dear, I want to know where Herr General Kemperer is. Now!”
The Present Day
Hunter had moved up to the bridge of the TR-3B and was peering over the shoulder of the electronic warfare officer at a large monitor. Daarish was visible as a red-orange curve across the sky, mottled with clouds. In the time since he’d returned to the Hillenkoetter, the painfully slow Daarish dawn had broken over the area he and the recon unit had surveyed. Aldebaran was a bright orange flare of light right on the horizon, and the city lay sprawled out below, the command center towers casting long, dark shadows across the ground.
“Remember, we need surgical precision here,” he was saying into the radio. “Just punch through the roof. We don’t want to come down on smoking rubble.”
On the other end were the commanding officers of the three cruisers assigned to the strike—McCone, Inman, and Samford. Those ships weren’t under Hunter’s command by any means; they were taking orders directly from Admiral Winchester. But Winchester was several light minutes away, and it was Hunter here and now who needed the precise bombardment. Winchester had given him the role of fire controller, with orders to call in fire as he and his team needed it.
“We’ll do what we can, Commander,” Captain Roger Harding of the McCone replied.
“But we’ve never done this before, right?” Captain Janice Makilroy of the Inman added. “We can’t vouch for what will happen.”
“Just stay back and out of our line of fire,” Captain John Holcomb called from the Samford. “We’d sure hate to own-goal you!”
“Copy that,” Hunter replied. “That just might ruin our whole day.”
The three cruisers were descending toward the Malok city, now surrounded by a cloud of fighters. Enemy saucers continued to probe and push, but so far they hadn’t been able to break through the defensive screen.
Ground fire lanced up into the sky from a dozen emplacements. Hunter heard Harding’s order. “Burn those triple-A sites!”
Invisible lances of laser light stabbed down at the enemy weapons emplacements. Intense flashes detonated around the Malok command center, and as clouds of smoke roiled across the complex, those beams became visible, dazzling in their vibrancy. The three cruisers hovered above the command center in an equilateral triangle, their beams playing across any enemy weapon that dared speak. From his vantage point on board the lead TR-3B, Hunter could see only a scattering of sparkles, as smoke obscured the center of the facility. He asked for a better view, and the Treb’s RIO punched up another monitor, one repeating the images transmitted from the Inman less than a mile above the action.
“Shift to missiles,” Makilroy called out. “The lasers aren’t punching through!”
AMRAAMs and modified cruise missiles arrowed toward the ground, striking the six domes encircling the central tower of the complex. For long seconds, the entire area was blanketed in thick black and gray smoke and dust, but gradually the cloud began to dissipate, revealing the wreckage and rubble beneath.
“Hit that tower!” Makilroy yelled. “Now!”
The tower identified by Ashley as the Malok command central now became the focus of a deadly confluence of laser fire, beams of searing intensity focusing on the exact apex of the dome. Within seconds, the massive dome was broken open, a gaping, jagged-edged maw in the smooth surface of the structure revealing smoking darkness within.
“That’s our cue,” Hunter told the pilot. “Get us down there.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The TR-3B descended, slipping down past the hovering cruisers and drifting over the ruined command complex. The main ramp came down partway as the Treb hovered, and three columns of armored JSST personnel backed down the slope, hanging onto doubled lines secured inside the airlock.
Hunter hated having to stay back, but as commander for the entire task force, his responsibility was guiding and directing from above, not exposing himself to a firestorm unleashed by whatever waited below.
From the Treb’s bridge, he watched as the first troopers stepped off the ramp and dropped on their lines fifty feet toward the gaping hole in the enemy command center’s dome. He’d gone over the personnel records of his people closely while planning for this drop. Abseiling—the delicate art of lowering yourself on a doubled line from a helicopter or a sheer, vertical surface—was part of the stock-in-trade for Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Berets and Delta Force. Air Force controllers were certainly trained in the skill, as were CIA special operations teams, but Hunter wondered if their skills with dangling lines were as sharply honed and keenly practiced as those of the other elites.
First down would be the ones he knew would cut it on the ropes—the SEALs, Rangers, and Delta would follow them down after they’d secured a perimeter.
He watched from above as the first three of his troopers vanished into the smoky opening.
Sergeant Aliya Moss was first to hit the concrete deck, flexing her knees to take the shock, dropping the line and stepping clear so the next trooper in the queue could follow her down. She snapped the weapon strapped to her back around and up, pivoting to take in the shattered room in front of her. Sergeant Alvarez came down his rope to her left, Nielson to her right. Together, they scanned the smoke-clotted scene around them.
It was dark inside the chamber, and Moss flipped her NVGs down on the front of her helmet visor. Minkowski called his shotgun his “door-kicker,” but it looked to her as though the hovering cruisers had kicked in the door and kicked some tail as well. The focused laser fire from the sky had blasted through the control center like a raging firestorm. Instrument consoles in the center of the room had been ripped open, the wiring within spilled in tangled, smoking heaps. Moss saw movement ahead, brought her Sunbeam laser into line, and snapped off a shot. A human in a black uniform toppled over backward, arms flailing, his face a bloody mask above a gaping mouth.
A human next to him had his hands up, his face a mask of terror. “Nicht schiessen!” he screamed. “Nicht schiessen!”
Herrera, Billingsly, and Walkowiak dropped to the control room floor, and the six moved apart from one another, creating a perimeter around the three dangling ropes. Colby, Nicholson, and Briggs fast-roped down next, as Billingsly dropped the German to his knees, then onto his belly, forcing him to spread his legs and arms wide apart.
The raiders’ Sunbeam weapons each mounted a small continuous-beam laser on its barrel for targeting. Those needle-thin red threads swept the smoky darkness around the chamber, throwing bright dots that rippled across walls and consoles. The instruments and screens around the edge of the room were for the most part intact. Two more humans in the shadows surrendered, hands raised. Another had been wounded and was in bad shape.
Moss saw another flash of movement—a small gray alien scuttling for cover. Together, Moss and Nielson lasered it down. It wasn’t one of the Reptilian Meister, but one of the Grays, a species of future humanity that could be found on both sides of the galactic conflict—fighting the Reptilians, or working for them.
If it was here, she reasoned, it was one of the bad guys.
Which brought her full attention back to the prisoners. The team’s premission briefing had given them specific instructions: take prisoners if possible, but only if it could be done without compromising the mission or their safety. These guys might be human, but they’d grown up under Reptilian rule and probably in a virulently Nazi culture.
So that takeaway message at the briefing had been: take no chances.
As others rounded up the prisoners and searched them, she moved forward, stepping past a smoking, ripped-open console. In another few moments, all sixteen members of Alfa Platoon were down, picking their way through the wreckage. “Alfa is down,” Billingsly called over the tactical net. “Control center is secure. Four POWs.”
