Alien agendas, p.34
Alien Agendas, page 34
“Let Billingsly know,” Hunter told him. “The LZ is secure. Start bringing Rescue through.”
“Roger that, Spearpoint.”
Hunter turned his attention to the rows of vertical storage tanks. “Elanna?” he called. “Ask if Julia can guide me to the guy she saw earlier, the Nazi. Is he still conscious?”
“She can’t tell, Mark,” Elanna said after a moment. “She thinks he’s to your left . . . all the way down that row in front of you, four from the end.”
“Gotcha. Mink . . . Nicholson . . . Bostwick . . . with me.”
If the captive Nazi was still awake, they might be able to question him. Hunter knew from previous rescues that it took time to awaken the unconscious prisoners, that they were muddled and often incoherent until they’d had a chance to recuperate. Not always.
A few had awakened screaming.
In any case, he didn’t want to smash his way through the Forest at random trying to find someone who might or might not have some useful information about this place.
“There he is,” Ashley said over Hunter’s helmet radio. “On your left.”
Hunter saw the man . . . and realized that Albrecht now saw him, too. The blue eyes were wide open, bulging in terror, as he struggled within the tight confines of the liquid-filled cylinder. Hunter knew that these cylinders were equipped with some sophisticated alien electronics that could render the prisoner unconscious. Evidently, Albrecht had been left awake . . . that, or he’d been awakened by the Reptilian Ashley had seen from Mars. The man hammered his fists against the transparency, the blows slowed by the liquid to ineffectual shoves.
“Winslow!” he called. “Get a rescue team over here. Second row back, far end.”
“On our way, Commander.”
“Bring Marlow with you.” They would need the corpsman to start reviving these prisoners.
In moments, Winslow arrived, leading Vince Marlow and a half dozen technicians and one of Hillenkoetter’s ordnance carts.
“Get him out of there,” Hunter told Winslow. “We’ll want to talk to him. And we’ll probably need a German translator.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Chief Krueger is with us back at the LZ.” And Winslow began snapping off orders.
Christian Krueger was an ENC, an Engineman Chief assigned to Hillenkoetter’s black gang—the old-time slang for men working in a ship’s engine room, in the days when a coal-fired boiler was what propelled the vessel. He’d helped translate for rescued German prisoners at Aldebaran.
As they waited, Hunter prowled among the vertical tubes, searching. Julia had found Geri for him once before, using a photograph to pinpoint her position. She was in here somewhere. . . .
“Julia?” he called. “Do you remember where Geri Galanis is? You found her when you first found this base.”
“I’m . . . not sure, Mark. She’s in toward the middle of the Forest, I think. I didn’t get a lock on her exact position when I was here before.”
This way, then. . . .
Damn it, he knew he shouldn’t be looking for his girlfriend now, not when—
“Skipper! We have incoming!”
Hunter turned at Briggs’s warning and pounded back to the perimeter. Four Saurians had just materialized inside the defensive perimeter, close beside the cluster of ordnance carts and flight deck crew. As Hunter approached the group another appeared out of emptiness . . . and another . . .
Saurians elsewhere in the undersea base had pinpointed the human incursion and were sending troops in to deal with it. The JSST troopers had already opened fire at the newcomers, but they were handicapped by the fact that the enemy was appearing inside their defensive circle, alongside the flight deck people, which meant that they would hit their own comrades in the crossfire if they weren’t damned careful with their aim.
The Saurians wore gold-colored armor, etched with intricately shaped loops and whorls, with helmets molded into cartoonish, fiercely reptilian visages. Each carried a chest-mounted weapon that left their arms free, a device like a flat box strapped onto the front of their torso. Curved blades, like savage claws, extended from their gauntlets. Hunter had never seen Malok troops like this and wondered if they represented some sort of elite soldier—a Saurian special ops force.
A dazzling flash seared Hunter’s retinas, and a JSST soldier nearby went down, his helmet and the upper part of his torso vaporized. The Saurian was hit by immediate return fire, the light and heat from four Sunbeam lasers flaring off his armor until he collapsed.
But two more Lizards stepped through out of emptiness and into the center of the LZ. A blue-vested crewman went down . . . then a red-vest mag rat crouching behind a cart. Lizard warriors were pouring through into the center of the human defenses with a shrill clatter of steel, killing with indiscriminate abandon.
With sudden, aching dread, Hunter saw Elanna, standing out in the open, seemingly frozen. The Lizards hadn’t shot at her yet . . . or hadn’t noticed her, but that would change in an instant. Or . . . was it possible there was a very deliberate truce between Talis and Malok, that they knew her as Talis and wouldn’t kill her if she didn’t threaten them?
No time to think about that now. “Elanna! Get down!” Hunter yelled. “Tell the Big-H we need help in the LZ!”
His words seemed to startle her, but she dropped behind an ordnance cart. “Done, Mark.”
But what the JSST could not afford was a stand-up fight with superior forces. If they got bogged down here, the Lizards would swiftly scrub them right off the deck.
An armored Saurian leaped onto the flatbed of an ordnance trailer, looming directly above Elanna. Hunter fired his Sunbeam Type 2 pistol and hit the Lizard squarely in the visor of its intricately shaped helmet. Arms flailing, the Saurian pitched back off the cart and into the surging mass of its fellows behind.
More Saurian warriors poured through the second gateway, along with a number of unarmored Grays. What the hell were they doing here?
“Concentrate your fire!” Hunter yelled over the tactical channel. It had worked when the Malok were boarding the Hillenkoetter.
JSST troops began firing into the vaguely defined patch of air through which the enemy was forcing its way. Eight or ten uprated-PEW beams at a time punched through gold armor, and in seconds the dimensional doorway was filled with a tangle of bodies, some dead, some still struggling. Within moments more the transporter gateway was engulfed in sun-bright energy, and the entire LZ as far as the nearest reaches of Sherwood Forest was wreathed in greasy smoke.
Hunter reached Elanna, who was still crouching behind an ordnance transporter. Technically, radio signals could be sent through an open transporter gate, but the angle had to be just right for decent reception—that, or the receiver had to be right inside the gateway’s mouth. It was faster and more certain to bypass the electronics and use the Talisian’s telepathic abilities instead.
“Tell Ares Prime to execute Plan Bravo!” he told her. “Now!”
“Done, Mark.” She paused. “Commander Ramsey requests that you make sure your end of the gateway is clear.”
Good point. Hunter wasn’t sure what would happen if someone was half on one side of the gate and half on the other . . . and the gate closed. The result, he imagined, was probably quite messy.
“We’re clear!” he called. “Hit it!”
A moment later, the dimensional portal between Mars and the Malibu base closed.
Combat does not afford the luxury of making battle plans on the fly. Whenever possible, various alternate plans were worked out ahead of time, given code names, and used to coordinate tactics with a minimum of discussion and wasted time. “Bravo” was the second of six tactical responses Hunter, Groton, Ramsey, and Elanna had worked out to counter possible Malok threats.
It was also the most dangerous response on the list. By closing the gateway between Mars and here, the JSST troops and support personnel already inside the undersea base were completely cut off—no retreat, no reinforcements, and no communications until Ramsey and his team decided to reestablish contact.
If they could reestablish contact.
Meanwhile, golden Lizard warriors continued to pour into Sherwood Forest, stepping across the stacked and savaged bodies lying in front of their own Dimensional Gateway. The JSST Spearpoint continued to edge closer to the gate, firing through the Lizards’ opening as quickly as they could cycle their weapons.
And thank the high-tech gods of modern warfare, Hunter thought, squeezing off shot after shot with his Sunbeam Type 2. Spearpoint would not have stood a snowflake’s chance in hell if they’d not been packing these uprated PEWs. Between battery life and the long power recycle time between shots, their old gear had never been up to extended firefights, putting them at a distinct disadvantage in rodeos like this one.
He could still wish for more punch in the hand lasers. That damned Saurian gold armor drank coherent light like soda through a straw. He was finding that by aiming for spots blackened by the fire from heavier lasers, though, he could make his shots stick. A seven-foot Lizard with charred armor over his torso went down when Hunter drilled him with two precise shots.
And then the Saurian troops were withdrawing, stepping back through their open gateway as the JSST closed in around them. Lizard warriors were undeniably fierce in combat, but they seemed to possess powerful survival instincts. Hunter thought about what he’d heard in various briefings—how there were relatively few Saurians left in the wake of the impact event that had annihilated the dinosaurs. Apparently, they didn’t care for stand-up slugfests any more than Hunter did.
He realized that was the key to defeating these things. Hit them, hit them hard, keep hitting them, and make them bleed. Sooner or later, they would decide they’d had enough and back off. Hunter remembered an expression—to step on someone’s foot until they apologized. He couldn’t remember where he’d read that . . . but that might well be the way Humankind would get the Saurians to acknowledge that Earth had new masters now.
And that humans were no longer things to be abducted, to be kept in bottles, or to be the subjects of alien experimentation. He looked off into the rows of tanks with their shadowy captives. No more of that. Humans would be their own masters now.
“Can you talk to Julia now?” he asked Elanna. He wondered what was happening back on Mars. He’d heard somewhere that telepathic communications actually bypassed the space between two subjects, cheating Einstein.
“No, Mark,” the Talis said. “It’s much too far.”
So much for that. They would simply have to sit tight until Plan Bravo had its hoped-for effect.
“Spearpoint! Spearpoint!” a woman’s voice called. “This is Nicholson! Lizards coming through!”
“Layton!” Hunter snapped, looking for troops close by. “With me! Bring your squad!”
Ten of them clattered across the open deck, racing for the far end of the tube forest where Minkowski, Nicholson, and the rescue personnel with them were still gathered about the cylinder holding the German captive. Four gold-armored Saurians had just stepped out of a new Dimensional Gateway and were closing on the small group.
“Take ’em down!” Hunter yelled, and he opened fire with his pistol, even though none of these suits of armor was vulnerable as yet. For a mad five seconds, energy beams snapped back and forth between three warring groups. These Lizards had heavier, hand-carried weapons rather than the small boxes strapped to their chests, and a dazzling flash of actinic light caught Briggs just a few feet to Hunter’s right, wiping away his helmet and upper torso in a spray of vaporized blood and tissue.
Laser fire from the two human groups pinned the Saurians in a vicious crossfire, killing one. Another Lizard snapped off a bolt of energy at Minkowski’s group and missed, smashing the top of the translucent cylinder holding the German prisoner.
Green perfluorocarbon sprayed across the area, some of it flashing instantly to steam. The cylinder, cut from the mechanisms holding it upright, toppled, spilling Albrecht onto the deck in plastic shards and liquid.
“Corpsman!” Minkowski yelled.
Vince Marlow, the team’s corpsman, was at the man’s side immediately, as energy beams continued to flash and snap. Alvarez, Moss, and Layton crouched side by side, burning down the remaining Lizards who appeared to be trying to retreat, now, through their open gate.
The gate snapped off, cutting a wounded Saurian neatly in two.
Mark! Elanna’s voice called in his head. We have a gate connection again with Mars!
And moments later, Lieutenant Billingsly arrived, along with several troops from the JSST’s reserve.
The fierce and deadly firefight for Sherwood Forest was over.
At least for the moment. . . .
Chapter Twenty-four
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke,
Profiles of the Future,
1973 revised edition
Viktor Albrecht forced himself to hands and knees, coughing and gagging on the green fluid as he expelled it from his lungs. He gasped in air—real air—and nearly collapsed again with the pain. He was cold and wet and in agony with the effort of trying to breathe air once more.
“Sei einfach,” a voice said close by, amplified over a pressure suit speaker. “Wir sind Freunde.”
Be easy. We are friends.
Albrecht wasn’t certain if he could believe that. The armored person leaning over him was human, at least in a general way, and not Eidechse, but Albrecht’s mind now was shrieking with paranoia and in need to get away, anywhere away from this nightmare chamber.
Someone helped him stand and draped a towel over his shoulders.
When he’d begun this voyage in time, he remembered, he’d not trusted the Reptiles. They’d promised technology, weapons, a victorious outcome to a war grown increasingly hopeless . . . and never delivered. The anger he’d felt then was nothing at all compared to the desolation and betrayal he felt now.
“Hier entlang,” the voice said, an arm guiding him. This way.
Unable to resist, unable to think, Viktor Albrecht stumbled off with the pressure-suited men.
They’re going to cut you off again, Julia’s voice said in Elanna’s mind. Captain Groton sent through Billingsly with reinforcements to help you hold out. We . . . we think the Hunter Maneuver is working. They’ve found where the Lizards have their dimensional transporters set up inside the Malibu base, and they’re going to blast it.
Thank you, Julia, Elanna though back. We’ll be here waiting.
The mental link was broken.
The Hunter Maneuver. An appropriate name, Elanna thought. Hunter had come up with the idea and argued vehemently for its use. It turned the Malok gateway system into a weapon of mass destruction, at least on a small scale.
She still wasn’t certain what she thought about that.
As long as the MKIS was engaged, the temperature and atmospheric pressure on one side remained separate from those of the other. Turn the MKIS off, however . . .
Hunter had used the trick—a kind of test run—to trigger the pressure sensors inside the Malibu base and seal off the various compartments from one another, allowing the team to secure the Malok’s holding chamber. When the Saurians began pouring their elite G’paku warriors through their own portal, however, Plan Bravo was solidified, opening a portal within the Malok control center and leaving it open to the vacuum of the Martian atmosphere.
Elanna still wasn’t quite used to the change in the planet between her home time and this. The Mars she knew, the world of Prime Center in the 101st century, was green and pleasant and held an atmosphere as breathable as Earth’s. The Mars of Ares Prime here in the twenty-first century was a very different world indeed.
The portal likely hadn’t been open long enough to completely evacuate the Malibu control room, but the Earthside pressure would have dropped enough at least to incapacitate the Malok inside.
With enough time, the pressure inside the Malibu base would drop to one sixth-thousandth of the surface pressure on Earth; the question was whether the evacuated high-tech dome would even be able to withstand the external pressure. Elanna looked up at the vaulted ceiling overhead. How long would it hold?
For now, at least, the air pressure inside the holding chamber was steady at roughly twelve psi. The Solar Warden team working on the portal device back on Mars had just shifted its opening to a different chamber within the Malibu base, sucking the air from the place where the Malok had their own dimensional projection equipment. Once the portal opened, conditions inside the chamber were like those at the heart of a city-wrecking storm.
Charaach crouched behind a console, clinging to the edge as the hurricane shrilled and howled around her. Only once had she ever experienced anything quite like this . . . in another epoch tens of millions of years ago, when Apocalypse had fallen from the skies to exterminate the golden civilization of the Vach.
At least this time fire was not falling from a storm-savaged sky. In moments, however, it might not be fire . . . but billions of tons of seawater.
Somehow, the humans had opened a portal between Rachallich and . . . someplace else with an extremely low atmospheric pressure, probably Mars, possibly Earth’s moon. The wind inside the small compartment was a shrieking, vicious thing. Several Grays, without suits, were already unconscious; two G’paku soldiers, armored and with life support, could still breathe, but could barely stand against the storm.
Charaach, without a pressure suit, could not breathe, could hear nothing but the thunder of disappearing air, and knew that she had only moments to live.
She had remarkably few options. Through that open portal on the far side of the room lay only death, the vacuum on the surface of another world. The Vach projector next to her still was targeted on the holding chamber, with breathable air but held now by the human invaders. It would take several minutes to reset the projector to some other target—another chamber within the Rachallich base, or possibly another Vach base somewhere on or within the Earth.
