by G. H. Holmes
Cherry turned around again to see what he was doing, and found him busy entering coordinates for another quantum wind jump.
"Where are we going, Sir?"
"To Kasaganaan," Ben answered. "Commencing jump in three, two, one second. Here we go."
A cloud of light enveloped them once again and again Cherry felt as if she were taking a shower under a waterfall in spring. The air, the water, everything was so clean. This was wonderful. The light went away and the big screen right in front of her was a dark contrast to the bright vision she just had.
"This is the entrance to the pylon road on the side of Kasaganaan," Ben explained. "The Vamrah cruiser could arise as soon as in under an hour. When he comes off the road, his energy shield will of necessity be switched off. Then he's ours."
Like the tortoise and the hare, Cherry thought. Her head was swimming. She'd never been in combat before and now she had witnessed the doom of an entire fleet by the hands of one soldier. She'd jumped in and out of Planck Space more often than any other human before her, she was sure. Harrow had been with her, of course, but he didn't count. She was convinced he was not fully human. No matter what he said. He was something else. A being in a class by itself.
And she was sitting here with him. Of all humans in the universe, she alone was sitting here with him.
Her eyes went to the main screen and she recognized how colorful the stars of the Kasaganaan system really were. The vista was stunningly beautiful.
"This is gorgeous, Sir."
Harrow, deep in thought, sat behind his desk, his face obscured by his steepled fingers.
Cherry decided to shut up. Who knew what he was thinking at the moment. She desperately wanted to know if he'd been able to fix whatever damage the plasma bomb had inflicted on the Western Sun, but she recognized that this need to know sprang from her desired to communicate more than from necessity, because the ship was operating just beautifully. He obviously had been able to heal its wounds.
Suddenly she realized how thirsty she was. Jumping in and out of Planck Space, swinging close to the sun and getting hit by a plasma bomb on top would dehydrate any but the strongest.
"Request permission to get something to drink, Sir," she said.
Without looking up, Harrow said, "Permission granted."
Cherry got up. The hatch hissed open and she left the bridge to go aft, where the refrigerator waited for her in the food bay. It was stifling hot in the narrow corridor of the Western Sun. Over the small sink she washed her face, left it wet and went to the fridge. She pulled its door open and held her face to the cool fog that spilled out.
This felt good…
When the coldness began to bite into the wet skin around her neck, she took a bottle of liquifood and closed the fridge. After she'd emptied the bottle with a few drafts, she decided to sit down and rest for a minute. She simply sat on the floor, leaned against the wall and tried to think of nothing.
All of a sudden the Western Sun lurched into motion and she almost rolled over. Cherry got up and stood wobbly on her feet. She wiped her sweaty face, steadied herself on the wall and made her way back to the bridge.
The door hissed open and she entered— and was captivated by the view on the big screen. The Vamrah cruiser had just come off the pylon road. Cherry realized that it had traveled even faster than her x-jet. This was one speedy craft. But looking at it as it flashed by, she saw that it was now a gunmetal gray. Harrow had been right. They hadn't engaged their shield.
Ben was flying after the hostile Vamrah craft and punctured its thruster pods with well-placed stabs of roentgen fire. One after the other the bright blue circles of the pods turned orange and then black. The crippled craft slowed down and he sent two morning stars at it.
But the dying Delta cruiser was fighting back with everything it had. Its gun turrets lit up with laser fire. Colorful streams of light flowed towards the Western Sun and even another plasma bomb was released by the big gun in the dome on its top. But Harrow's craft entered Planck Space and vanished. It was gone before anything reached it and the munitions from the Delta didn't know where to go. The laser impulses fizzled out and the plasma bomb exploded into a giant fireball, but did no damage.
Harrow's morning stars, however, homed in on their target and met it—just as its captain activated its energy shields. But it was too late. The Vamrah cruiser and the ordnance of its armory exploded in a succession of whomps and flashes that lit up space for many miles around.
Charity Jones and Ben Harrow were back in the Gemina system. The Vamrah had brought their best weapon up last and now that the Delta cruiser was history, the remnant of their fleet seemed to lose heart.
The battered Terra Gemina Space Navy on the other hand was buoyed. The sudden appearance of the Western Sun hours earlier had boosted their spirits. Their fighting morale strengthened, they attacked the remaining Vamrah ships with renewed vigor. They gave no quarter and asked for none.
Ben joined the battle again and was victorious wherever he went. After a few more hours the battle in space was essentially won.
When they hadn't fought anybody in more than thirty minutes of circumspect maneuvering, Cherry asked, "Is it over, Sir?"
Ben nodded. "Now we'll need to fight them on the ground." He was mindful of the divisions of Vamrah infantry that Daniel von Schwarz had mentioned.
He also wondered whether the human ants had backups. While he'd been over in their space, he hadn't detected a single ship. But Ben knew, that meant nothing.
Chapter 31
When the citizens of Terra Gemina had first heard the explosions up by the airport and when they had seen echelons of man-sized ants with assault rifles in their hands appear in their streets, the sight had shocked them.
They'd never seen beings like that before.
But when the first shots rang out, when glass façades shattered and people in tumbling buildings started dying, they pulled themselves together and turned into citizen soldiers. They went for the guns in their closets.
Every family in Gemina City had at least one government-issued assault rifle in their home. Peaceful people themselves, they nevertheless knew that wars had the nasty habit of breaking out when you felt safest. Even during the Seven Years of Silence, when intergalactic travel had not been possible, the leadership of Terra G had insisted on regular exercises. The training paid off now.
When the first firefights erupted in the quarters around the spaceport and it became clear that this was a serious affair, word had gone out and the citizens had taken their women and children to the well-maintained bunkers around town.
Then they'd begun to fight.
But resisting the Vamrah was difficult to do, because it seemed that they were less interested in conquering the city than in flattening it. Powerful enemy destroyers came down out of space and lit up entire sections of town with their high-powered pulse guns. Many times they didn't even spare their own people and killed them, too, when they seemed to be losing a skirmish in the eyes of the Vamrah commander aboard the destroyer.
Annihilation.
That was the word that popped into Captain Joel Anderson's mind when he saw the carnage unfold on the plaza in front of him.
He and the Kasa MARDET under Lieutenant Colonel LeBlanc had immediately checked themselves out of the hospital when the fighting began. Still carrying the aftermath of their journey on the pylon road in their bones, they were doing well enough.
Now they were busy defending different parts of the city and Anderson, together with Lieutenant Stella Halvorsen, stood next to an old-fashioned antiaircraft battery painted urban gray and waited for a low-flying Vamrah destroyer to appear above the houses, which were fairly tall downtown Gemina City. The ship's deep-note hum made the ground to vibrate. So far it was still obscured, but the squad around Anderson and Halvorsen heard the intermittent rumble of its guns. Its thunder and lightning tore the usually tranquil air apart. When the warship finally moved up, slow like an ancient zeppelin, they wa
ited until all six thruster pods on its bottom were exposed.
The Vamrah destroyer overshadowed them. Its pods were blue stars.
Red lances of light were flying from its ventral domes and walked up to them, when Anderson lifted his hand and yelled, "Fire!" His hand cut through the air and six AAA-rockets left their tubes with an aggressive hiss and lots of smoke. They flared and cut across the short distance and found their targets.
The pods exploded and scattered debris.
"Run!" Anderson shouted. He pulled his head in and began to race down the street, away from the craft that was coming down. Stella Halvorsen was hard on his heels as was the rest of the squad.
The destroyer hit the ground and made the earth to wobble. Neither Anderson not Halvorsen turned around to watch it disintegrate. Instead, they kept on running as fast as they could. Soon a dust cloud overtook them and painted their backsides white.
As soon as they'd reached the intersection, Anderson dropped to one knee and peeked around the corner—and promptly saw a company of Vamrah infantry trot up the sidewalks. But suddenly gunshots rang out from the windows of the buildings on both sides. Some of the Vamrah went down, but others fanned out and entered the houses from which they'd been attacked.
Suddenly the news came over the command channel that the space fleet of the Vamrah was essentially eliminated, thanks to General Harrow of the Terra Gemina Space Marines. The human troops all over town took heart and pushed the aggressors back wherever they found them.
All of a sudden a star appeared in the evening sky and many thought a comet or a destroyed spaceship was coming down. Open-range fighting ceased for a moment as everybody gazed up at the object. Soon it was clear that this was neither a comet nor a dying spacecraft, but General Harrow in his chariot. The Western Sun was coming to fight with the troops on the ground.
When word got out among the Vamrah and they heard who'd come, the will to fight seemed to leave them, because were they had executed brilliant maneuvers in the days before, they now acted like headless chickens many times and it was suddenly easy for even the least experienced citizen soldier of Terra Gemina to pick them off.
The defenders were winning.
The most difficult place to take back proved to be the airport, where a large contingent of Vamrah engineers had immediately begun to burrow, like ants are wont to do, especially since all their transports had been damaged by the human defenders and they had no means of returning to space. They had to fight to the last man, because surrender was not a word found in the book of their race.
When they resisted persistently, General Harrow up on his perch gave the order to withdraw from the area in question and when everybody had cleared out, he released a custom plasma bomb on the burrowing engineers that turned to them into smoke and ashes.
There was no triumph or exuberance in Ben's heart after he'd slain his enemies. As far as he was concerned, he'd killed human attackers. Because there were no aliens. Ben deeply regretted the loss of life and Charity Jones, who sat in the nav chair of the Western Sun next to the general, noticed his somber mood, understood it and loved him even more.
That's what you get for making war on somebody like Ben Harrow, she thought. How unwise of those people.
There were still skirmishes here and there in the city, but the battle was essentially over. The first planetary assault by the Vamrah had failed.
A steep wrinkle cut through Harrow's brow. He was thinking of the future. He'd have to go to Kasaganaan and he'd have to enter the pyramid. He'd have to go alone, because nobody else in this universe could shift his shape like he could. He'd have to scout out the scope of the enemy's operation. He'd have to meet their leadership and persuade it not to pursue this war.
He had his work cut out for him.
THE END
of
Book One
of the
"COSMIC CYCLONE"
series, featuring Ben Harrow and Charity Jones.
***
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Book Two
"COSMIC CYCLONE – Wrath Of The Vamrah"
will come soon to your favorite e-book store.
Book Two of this series is not yet released.
But there's a prequel, entitled CYCLONE'S CORE. It reveals how Ben Harrow got to be what he is.
Here's a preview:
CYCLONE'S CORE
A "Ben Harrow" Novel
by
G.H. Holmes
*
From the Author
"Power tends to corrupt," Lord Acton once said, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
People dressed up in a little brief authority can indeed be a sorry sight. We all know politicians and superiors who think that the rules apply to everybody but them. The more unassailable they are, the more insufferable they become. It's difficult enough to deal with people like that.
But they are still just people.
Time will take care of them.
Now imagine a person of extraordinary abilities who is physically indestructible.
You cannot get rid of him.
You cannot flee him.
If he involves himself into anything, he's involved. He's to be reckoned with—always.
What kind of character would that person have to have in order not to become a global menace? He'd have to be "ideal man." But is there even such a creature?
Just rambling.
What you're about to read is not a philosophical treatise, but an action-adventure techno-thriller with lots of suspense and some good old heart-warming romance mixed in.
I hope that you'll enjoy reading about Ben Harrow and Sharon, and brilliant Dr. Davidson, as much as I enjoyed writing about them. This tells about how it all began.
The story happens to start at -2. You'll know why when you arrive at 1.
Here we go:
-2
Below the star-spangled sky of western Iraq, an MH-6 "Little Bird" helicopter tore through the night, hugging the ground. Once it had passed into Syria, not too far from Al Bukamal, it suddenly flared. The silver disk of its rotor tipped back and it descended on the cold desert floor, where it hovered. Its landing rails never touched the ground as the rotor wash kicked up a dust cloud big enough to pass for a small sandstorm.
"Godspeed," the pilot said to the lone operator sitting next to him.
Spade in hand, Ben Harrow nodded. He put his feet against his dropsack and pushed it out the door. The sack tumbled and smacked the ground.
Ben adjusted his goggles. Holding his breath, he burst from the cockpit into the grit and dust and the high-pitched hiss of the engine. Stabbing the sand with his spade, he started to dig as soon as his feet hit the ground. Not once did he glance back as the drop-shaped Little Bird ascended and sped away.
Soon the crunch of the blade against the ground were the only sounds to be heard across the flat terrain.
It was a windless night. When the dust finally settled and the stars came back out, there was not a trace of the operator to be found anywhere.
An hour later, a thick layer of clouds moved in, as predicted by the weather report. It blotted out all light and the night became as dark as the guts of the earth.
The Syrian torture prison out in the desert, many miles west of Al Bukamal's circular fields, lay still. Only the occasional groans of sleeping inmates reliving their torments in anguished dreams could be heard. Remarkably, all lights in the
installation were off. Probably because fuel for its generators was hard to come by these days. The darkness made child's play of stalking the place and its perimeter undetected.
Ben, donning night-vision binoculars, checked the four guard towers that rose like minarets of steel at the corners of the foursquare complex. They seemed to be unoccupied.
A lone sentry sat in a cubby hole by the gate. The man scratched himself languidly and yawned. Blinded by the night, the guard was unaware of the operator sneaking by on cats' feet barely twenty yards in front of him.
When the sentry heard a click of metal on metal by the gate, he wiped his drowsy eyes and fished for the flashlight. But when its yellow beam finally sliced through the darkness, there was nobody. Relieved, the guard switched the light off and went back to dozing.
Ben knew the compound's layout by heart, having studied derivative blueprints and sat shots for hours during the last few days. He knew near which doors heat signatures piled up, indicating increased guard activity. He also knew which prisoners' cells saw traffic. Most didn't see a lot. Only one cell's door saw a more-than-usual heat-signature pile-up according to the HD thermal imaging pictures. It was located in the middle of the eastern block and housed a recent arrival.
An American navy nurse.
The lady was blonde and probably meant to go up for sale in Beirut. Gulf sheiks loved blondes. Particularly when they had the extra benefit of blue eyes, as this one did.
That she was a member of the United States armed forces was of no concern to the Iraqis who passed her on to the Syrians, who in turn would pass her on to the Lebanese. She would disappear, never again to leave the harem in which she'd wind up to pat some big daddy's big belly. She'd garner a pretty penny for her captors, that was all that mattered.
But right now she was still right here.
