Alien hostiles, p.29
Alien Hostiles, page 29
“Copy, Alfa,” Hunter’s voice replied. “On my way down.”
She’d counted twelve hostiles total in the control room other than the prisoners—four Reptilians, two Grays, and six humans, now all dead. There were sure to be more in the adjoining chambers, though.
Rifle at the ready, Moss reached one of six doorways in the large circular room, the door jammed half-open. Nielson came up beside her, his back pressed against the wall on the other side of the door.
“Cover me,” she told him, then rolled around the door frame and stepped through.
Hunter was still in the Treb’s cockpit, hovering a few meters above the captured control center. “We’re down,” Lieutenant Foster’s voice said over the radio, reporting on the engagement at the aerospaceport. “We’re engaged.”
“Copy that,” Hunter replied.
“Lots of hostiles!” Minkowski’s familiar voice called. “Looks like we kicked over a fucking anthill!”
“Copy. Air support on the way.”
He’d already dispatched the Samford and the McCone to the enemy spaceport, keeping only the Inman to provide air cover for Alfa Platoon. A lieutenant commander did not give orders to Navy captains, but as the ground tactical director he could make strong recommendations. He didn’t have a camera view of the spaceport, yet, and had no idea what Foster might be facing, but a couple of battle cruisers hanging overhead ought to be good for what ailed him.
“Lieutenant Simms,” Hunter called over the channel. “What’s your situation?”
“We’re down Commander,” Master Sergeant Bruce Layton replied. “No resistance.”
“Where’s Simms?”
“Broke an ankle deploying, sir. Medic’s with him now.”
Shit. Murphy always hit at the worst possible time.
“Okay, stay alert, Master Sergeant. Sounds like Bravo is in the thick of it. I suggest you start moving in their direction to give support.”
“Roger that, Commander. I see the cruisers over their LZ now.”
“I’m shifting my flag,” Hunter said. “I’ll check in with you again in ten.”
“Roger that!”
“Shifting flags” was a holdover from sailing ship days, when a flag officer in command of a squadron might shift from one ship to another if the first one was in trouble. Hunter was far from being a flag officer, but he was juggling a hell of a lot of assets right now and needed to act like one.
Pulling on his gloves, he made his way down to the main deck, then forward to the airlock. The ramp was still open halfway, the three rappelling lines still hanging over the edge. The crew chief was standing in the lock. “Good luck, Skipper,” he called. “Don’t break a leg!”
“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks,” Hunter said as he grasped a line, doubled it through his harness, then backed off the edge.
For a moment, he was bathed in the glow of Aldebaran, a bright, tiny disk poised directly on the eastern horizon. Dawn lasted for hours as the moon made its leisurely, tide-locked way around the gas giant. Inman was floating to the north, her cigar-shaped hull silhouetted against the loom of Charlie.
He felt exposed dangling beneath the Treb, but he was in the light for only a moment. He fast-roped down through the peeled-open dome of the enemy control center and into darkness, landing on the deck with a thump. The local gravity, less than the field maintained on the Treb, carried a buoyant, exhilarating feel.
Billingsly met him with a salute. “Welcome aboard, Commander.”
Hunter sketched a salute in return. “Good to be here, Lieutenant. What’s your situation?”
“Main center is secured, sir.”
“Good. Colby!” he called.
“Yessir!”
“Get me a comm link-up . . . with all of the ships, Bravo and Charlie, and patch it through to the Big-H. Can you do that?”
“Working on it, sir.”
He turned back to Billingsly. “Where are your prisoners?”
“Over here, sir.”
Three young men in dust-caked dark uniforms were huddled against a stretch of open wall nearby. They were . . . boys, Hunter realized with a shock. Teenagers, no older than that. A fourth lay on the floor at their feet, left arm and head swaddled in bandages. Gunnery Sergeant Nicholson stood nearby, her laser rifle aimed at the four with a casual deadliness.
“We still need to find someone who sprechs der Deutsch, sir,” she told him.
“We’ve got translators back on board the Big-H,” Hunter told her. Privately, he was glad that there were only four prisoners. More would have been too much for the platoon to handle. He turned to Billingsly. “We need to get these people onto the Treb.”
“Yes, sir. Uh . . .”
“Problem?”
“Kind of,” Sergeant Moss said, approaching him from behind. “Sir, you’ll want to see this. . . .”
Moss led him to the half-open door. He stepped through and into a crowd of diminutive gray beings, standing silently, watching him with their enormous, obsidian-black, almond-shaped eyes.
We must leave this place. The words formed silently in his mind. We are in great danger here. . . .
He thought the “speaker” was the one right in front of him, the one regarding him with a particularly solemn lack of expression.
Hunter still didn’t know what to think of the Grays. They were actually human, members of an evolved humanity from a million years ago or so, but they didn’t act human and their motivations and emotional reactions were far removed from the twenty-first century. Originally dubbed EBEs, for “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities,” they were popularly known as the Grays in current human culture. Elanna, more than once, had referred to both Grays and the Reptilians as “Malok.” Solar Warden tended to use that sinister-sounding word solely for the Saurians.
What the Grays might call themselves was unknown.
“How many of them are in here?” Hunter asked.
“Twenty-seven, Commander,” Moss replied.
“Any Saurians?”
“No, sir.”
Thank God for small favors. While both Grays and the Saurians were telepathic, the Lizards could worm their way into your thoughts and make you see or believe things according to their agenda . . . or read your current battle plans straight from your mind.
“They’re not our responsibility,” Hunter decided. “Leave them.”
We request diplomatic asylum, the voice in his head said. If you leave us here, all of us will be killed.
That jolted Hunter. The Grays’ thought processes were so different from those of present-day humans—they probably didn’t even understand twenty-first-century concepts like “diplomacy.”
“Sir,” Moss said. She sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. “There’s something else you should see. . . .”
On the far side of the room full of milling Grays was another doorway, this one opened onto stairs leading down. With a sinking feeling of resignation, Hunter thought he knew what he would find at the bottom.
And he was right.
“How . . . how many of them are there?”
“We haven’t been able to count them all yet but lots, sir.”
“Damn it all to hell!”
He was standing in the middle of a repeat of Zeta Reticuli. As far as he could see in every direction stood vertical transparent cylinders, most containing an unconscious human. The tubes were filled with a green fluid and connected to the ceiling by bundles of wires and plastic tubes. Childhood memories rose in Hunter’s mind of the lurid comic book covers of an earlier decade depicting beautiful women in bathing suits imprisoned in exactly such tubes . . . except that these prisoners were nude and included both sexes. The comparison would have been hilarious if not for the horrific reality.
He stepped close to one tube containing a woman so lovely he thought for a moment it was one of the Talis. Her blond hair was spread out in the fluid like a net, long enough to reach the backs of her knees.
As he peered into her face, her eyes snapped open and Hunter jumped, startled. The human prisoners on Zeta Retic had been in a state of hibernation, but seemed to drift in and out of consciousness in an unending horror of nightmare and ghastly helplessness. As he moved closer once more, the woman’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she drifted back into . . . whatever hell she’d been experiencing.
Billingsly had joined them. “This one,” Hunter said, lightly tapping the tank. “Get her out, get her dressed, and we’ll bring her with us back to the ship.”
“What about the others, sir?”
“Nothing we can do for them now,” Hunter replied. “Shit, there are hundreds of them down here! We’ll need a major evolution just to get them back to the Big-H, and I don’t think the bad guys are going to give us that luxury. But I do want to talk to one of them, maybe find out what the hell’s been going on here.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Hunter wondered how he was going to put this across to Winchester. And there was “Mr. Smith” back at Groom Lake’s S4. If you uncover a basement full of human abductees again, you will not release them without specific orders from a higher command authority. . . .
“This,” Hunter said, shaking his head sadly, “is just freaking wonderful. . . .”
Minkowski peered over the top of an ornamental wall, holding his NV-10A digital binoculars up against his helmet visor. There it was . . . a machine gun behind a sandbag revetment on top of the aerospace port’s control tower. And it had Bravo Platoon pinned down.
The Treb had come in low, ramp down, and Bravo Platoon had jumped down a couple of feet onto the tarmac, spreading out, taking down several armed human guards. But the enemy had responded almost immediately with a sizeable ground force, soldiers in Nazi regalia with light automatic weapons.
Bullets cracked and sang off the wall, and Minkowski ducked back behind cover.
“You see it?” he called into his radio mic. “You see it? On top of the big brown building with the Nazi flag!”
“Roger that, Bravo,” a voice came back. “We have them in sight.”
Overhead, the McCone drifted with lazy ease through the early morning sky. The bad guys were firing at the ship from the ground, but so far Minkowski had seen no weapons in enemy hands more deadly than conventional military firearms, and bullets were useless against a starship’s armor. “Firing,” a voice said, and a beam snapped out from the port side of the McCone to the top of the control tower, the high-energy laser clearly visible in the haze of dust and smoke that now filled the air over the aerospace port. The upper portion of the tower exploded in an orange ball of flame roiling upward, vivid against the dark early morning sky. Minkowski lifted his head and looked through the binoculars again.
“You got ’em,” he called. “Nice shot.”
Lieutenant Foster was close by with Doc Marlow, his right leg wrapped in a length of elastic bandage. A bullet had punched through his thigh early on as they’d advanced on the tower ahead. Marlow had stopped the bleeding, but the morphine hadn’t kicked in yet.
“That MG is out of commission, sir,” Minkowski told him. “Where do you want us?”
“Traffic control tower,” Foster replied through a grimace of pain. “We sure as hell can’t stay out here!”
“Roger that! But . . . we kind of broke the tower. . . .”
Foster twisted enough to manage a quick look over the wall. “Shit! Secure it anyway, Mink. Go! Go!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
1-JSST were trained for quick raids, hostage rescues, and intel snatches; the absolute worst way to employ them was in a big-unit slugfest where attrition counted more than surgical precision. The original opplan had called for Bravo to take down the traffic control tower while Alfa grabbed the command center, but the surprise presence of several hundred armed Nazi soldiers had scuppered that idea.
Nevertheless, they could still take the objective, but then what? Surrounded by the local Wehrmacht, surrendering their mobility and the initiative, they’d be a couple of light-years up Shit Creek without a gravity drive.
Another machine gun opened up on them from across the field. On the other hand, he decided, being inside a brick building was a lot more appealing than being here in the open.
He raised the mic again. “Overwatch,” he called, “this is Bravo. We have another MG at one-seven-five, range two hundred.”
Again, lightning flashed from the sky, and the enemy weapon was silenced.
“Overwatch, be advised we’re moving to the control tower,” he told the cruisers. “Lay down some cover for us, would you?”
“Copy that, Bravo. On the way . . .”
Multiple stabs and slashes of coherent light flashed from the two cruisers, setting off explosions, scattering debris, raising blossoming clouds of black smoke on all sides. “Let’s go, Bravo! Hit that tower!”
Stooping, he helped Marlow lift the injured Foster to one foot, then together they hobbled him across open tarmac toward the building. By the time they’d reached it, elements of the platoon had already smashed in the door and stormed inside. The rest of the platoon was coming in from all directions, taking advantage of the curtain of fire laid down by the cruisers to make their move.
Inside the building was a large rotunda with offices and cubicles around the walls. A wrought iron staircase rose from the stone-tiled center, rising toward the second floor. A dozen Gray aliens milled and jostled, but Minkowski didn’t see any of the Saurians.
And no humans either.
“Keep an eye on them,” Minkowski ordered Master Sergeant Rodrigo Sanchez, gesturing at the Grays. “The rest of you, with me!”
There was a lightweight door at the top of the stairs and it was locked. Minkowski brought his door-kicker into play, ripping through the hinges with a shotgun blast.
The Bravo lead element stormed through; a Reptilian stepped out of the darkness and was gunned down. A second Saurian opened up on the team with a box mounted on a kind of harness, and Gary Tompkins pitched over backward, the left side of his head blown away. Carla Powell had her Sunbeam pistol up, clutched in both hands as she fired into the hostiles. Then she cursed. “Fucking battery’s dead!”
Minkowski’s shotgun took down a Malok in a messy splatter of blood and gore. Davis tossed Powell a spare battery pack, and then the two of them took down a couple of gray-clad humans holding rifles. “Room secure!” Nielson yelled, and then it was up another set of stairs to the next floor.
A Saurian coming through the door died, and Minkowski, Nielson, and Daly pushed through into the next room.
It was the air traffic control center. A dozen uniformed humans, several Grays, and two golden-eyed Saurians were inside. The ceiling had partially collapsed under the McCone’s barrage overhead, and one end of a girder had dropped to smash a console and several tables, but most of the instruments were up and running.
Laser fire cut down both Saurians and a couple of the humans. The others raised their hands, several shouting “Bitte nicht schiessen!”
Minkowski thought that meant something like “don’t shoot.”
“Round them all up!” he ordered. “Check ’em for weapons! The Grays, too!”
“Oh my God!” Daly said at his back.
Minkowski turned. “What—”
He stopped. Hanging from the overhead was an enormous monitor, like a flat-screen TV half the size of the wall. On it, flanked by red symbols or the letters of an alien alphabet was a ship . . . a ship unlike any that Minkowski had ever seen.
To judge by the rows and rows of tiny lit windows, it was huge, as big as a city.
And it was entering orbit above Daarish.
Chapter Twenty
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”
Heinrich Heine, Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII, 1842
13 July 1943
“I don’t know what you mean, Herr Reichsführer,” Orsic said. She was shaken. She’d been tending this garden most carefully . . . but now it looked as though Himmler’s patience was at an end. She had been playing him along, using his obvious infatuation with her, to get what she wanted. But that, she now knew, would no longer work.
Himmler gave her a cold glare through the pince-nez. “You people, your so-called Vril Society, they have been promising the Reich a new type of weapon, a Wunderwaffe unlike anything ever seen before, a flying disk faster and more maneuverable than anything the enemy possesses, yes? More . . . you have been promising the Führer an open alliance with the authors of these weapons, with these technological supermen since . . . when? The 1930s?”
“We offered antigravity technology from our extraterrestrial contacts in the early 1920s, Herr Reichsführer,” Orsic replied. “We were rewarded by having our Vril Society shut down, our work appropriated by the SS and taken over by General Kammler’s scientists.”
“For reasons of security for the Reich,” Himmler told her. “Madam, the Führer is becoming disillusioned with your promises!
“And now, one of our generals has been sent to verify your claims of a German colony on another planet . . . and he disappears! General Kemperer was supposed to have returned from this Paradies of yours almost a year ago! Where is he? Why haven’t we heard?”
“Herr Reichsführer . . . I don’t know what to tell you. We have not heard from our Sumi contacts either. We have been unable to reach them.”
“So very convenient.”
“It’s true!” Stark desperation clutched at her throat, her mind. “Sir, the Sumi have been assisting us! They promise that the new bomb—”
“Enough! No more promises!” He regarded her for a long moment, and Orsic had the feeling he was weighing options. Her life might well hang by the decision he was about to reach.
