A glance at N7’s screen showed me similar complacency. No. I take that back. As the android switched to another drone, I saw big circular plates in the ground dilate open. A focusing mirror rose to do battle against us.
“It’s time to launch, boys and girls,” I said.
N7 glanced at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean you and me, just boys this time.”
With quick precise taps, N7 did the honors.
Around us, the artifact trembled as two dozen missiles took flight. They roared with spewing fire, leaving thick smoky trails in the sky.
I had to close my mouth and let my eyes blink several times. The missiles gained velocity fast. Much quicker than the drones had done, the missiles dwindled out of sight.
“Get the beam cannons lined up!” I shouted. “We want to knock down all the defensive satellites upstairs.”
Others now began to sit down at their tables, adjusting computer screens. Chatter increased between them.
The big focusing systems swiveled. Some aimed up. Others watched the horizon for tiger attack-craft. Soon, stabbing rays reached up from Holgotha.
I’d moved behind the new command team. On a screen, I watched a laser beam eat into an armored defensive satellite in orbit. The ray burned white-hot substance, turning the rest of the outpost into vapor. As predicted, Lokhar satellite weapons system had their cannons aimed into space not down at the planet.
Craning my neck, I watched the Demar hauler. Smoke poured from its exhaust ports. Flames flickered through it at times. The spaceship climbed for orbital space. There, it would unload its missile-drones. Their task was to knock down any approaching starships.
“We’re doing it,” I said.
For the next few minutes, I stood content. Rollo, Dmitri and other commanders gathered their attack teams. On the radio-nets, they gave last minute instructions.
A woman cursed softly in horror.
I looked up. Someone grabbed my bio-suited triceps and pointed to the left. I saw what had made her curse.
Checking a helmet chronometer, I realized that ten minutes after Holgotha’s appearance in Sanakaht’s skies, the first thermonuclear warhead went off on the planet’s surface. Given the mushroom’s size, this one had to be fifty kilometers away. The cloud kept growing, rising and expanding as it radiated dirt. There wasn’t anything pretty about this. Yet in its own way, the atomic cloud had a horrible majesty.
I saw another, a third, fourth, fifth—
With an oath, I turned away from the explosions. We were doing to the Lokhars what they had done to us. Part of me exuded savagery at the act, but another part felt small and dirty. Nuking planetary structures just seemed wrong. I wondered if I had let my hatred and my need get the better of me.
First breathing deeply, I asked, “Ella, N7, do you have everything under control?”
“Affirmative,” N7 said.
“Yes,” Ella whispered. She stared into the distance at the biggest mushroom cloud.
“Don’t look at them,” I told her.
She aimed her visor at me.
“We had to use them,” I said. “We have to knock out their retaliatory ability in order to win this fight.”
“I know,” she whispered. “It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
I swallowed down a snappy retort. Maybe sticking to business was the best way to play this.
“Keep everything off our backs,” I told her. “I don’t want any Lokhar spacecraft, star fighters or even balloons in the air. Knock down everything. We’re going to hit the spaceyard.”
Ella’s visor moved up and down in acknowledgement. “Be careful, Creed. The tigers hate you.”
“Some of them at least,” I said.
“There could be Shi-Feng on Sanakaht.”
Thank you, Ella Timoshenko. Her words snapped me out of my brooding. We nuked them because we had no choice. This was their fault, not ours.
“I’m hoping there’s some Shi-Feng,” I said. Spinning around, I sprinted for my air-cycle. The time for contemplation and planning had passed. It was time to rock and roll.
***
As if an internal switch had flipped, my outlook changed as I ran from the command center to my cycle. Worry about unleashing nuclear holocausts dwindled just as the drones had done from my sight. I found myself grinning.
Then I leaped onto my Saurian-built DZ9 air-cycle. Sometimes, life could be glorious and sublime. A few like me rode alone without a back-sitting passenger. Twisting the throttle gave me power. With a hum of energy, I rose into the air. All around me, troopers lifted above Holgotha’s gleaming surface.
Over my headphones, I heard radio chatter, commands and grid coordinates. I heard bubbling engines and saw airborne troopers bobbing several centimeters up and down.
I gunned my machine, speeding away from the artifact. For a sick moment, fear curdled my gut. I zipped past the silver donut surface and hung over a vast abyss of air. Far below me spread out Sanakaht’s green surface.
The fear evaporated as I shouted, “Here were go!” The sound reverberated inside my helmet. I loved it.
Then, as if I were in the middle of a cartoon, my air-cycle dropped. I plummeted toward destiny. Around me, other air-cyclists dropped likewise.
I could feel my lips stretch into a wild grin. This was too awesome. Today, I had become Superman. Titling my air-cycle’s nose downward, I gave it more power. I sped down for the spaceyard like a bullet.
Whooping like a berserk Hell’s Angel, I lead the pack down upon the Lokhars. This had to be the greatest moment of my life.
“We’re the Star Vikings, baby!” I shouted. “We’re here to rock your world and bust your balls!”
As my velocity built, my machine began to shake. I loved it. Hunkering lower, I sledded down like a madman. A quick twist of my head backward showed me a horde of Star Vikings hot-dogging it after me on their DZ9 cycles.
Maybe the tigers had AA guns and missiles. Stolen Saurian beam cannons lanced their rays down from Holgotha. They burned defensive equipment out of existence.
I’ll spare the sensitive and anti-poetic among you. Riding the air-cycles, we swooped toward the spaceyard. It might have been a little after lunchtime Sanakaht-time.
Buildings soon came into focus. Smashed missiles and jumbo-jet craft burned crazily on the ground. Most of them sent up thick oily smoke. Things like bus-sized dune buggies raced away from the spaceyard. Other tigers sprinted for cover. A few took potshots at us with hunting weapons.
At that point, I don’t know what everyone else did, but I can tell you how I enjoyed my visit over Sanakaht. Rocketing like vengeance, I chased several dune buggy buses. They rocked up and down on the road and swayed side to side. The vehicles had some springs. The path looked like a steel highway. It reflected the harsh sunlight, forcing my visor to darken.
In the nearest buggy, ten tigers turned around. A few pointed with their fingers. I couldn’t tell if they’d exposed their claws. One cocked his arm and tossed what must have been a grenade. It exploded in the air far before me, leaving a black mark. I dodged it just in case. Only two tigers seemed to have guns, and those were stubby like carbines.
As I closed the distance, the carbines bucked upward. Did the tigers fire bullets? I couldn’t see any laser or particle beam.
With both hands on the bars, I swooped down after the bus like a hawk from Hell. None of our air-cycles boasted integral ordnance. These things were as innocent of weaponry as the first biplanes in World War I on Earth. Yet just like the first observers in those biplanes, I carried a handgun. Mine did not pop weak slugs. I had a heavy laser pistol specially selected for this.
A coil linked the pistol to an energy pack strapped to the air-cycle.
Guiding the cycle one-handed, I drew smoothly. The tigers kept shooting. A bullet might have hit my cycle. It rocked. Another slug definitely struck my bio-armor. I felt a sting of pain in my side. Soothing coolness smothered the sensation almost instantly.
/> I pulled the trigger. The beam lanced down, visible on my HUD. It rayed beside the buggy. As I closed the final distance, I adjusted. The beam cut down several tigers, including one of the rifle-Lokhars.
My HUD schematics showed me the buggy’s fuel pod. I held the ray there for two seconds. Then my cycle passed overhead by ten meters. Behind me, I heard a terrific explosion.
I twisted around and had the distinct pleasure of watching the bus flip. Tigers spilled out, raining onto the road and the soft ground beside it. Then the buggy crashed, shedding metal. And it exploded again, flipping and twisting the thing.
I turned forward, holding the air-cycle’s bars with both hands. The concussions from the bus made it a bumpy few seconds.
After turning the DZ9 around, heading back at the buggy pack, I found myself roaring with laughter. I’d been waiting to do something like this for a long time. I remembered seeing my dad—Mad Jack Creed—dying from a tiger beam. I remembered the cities of Earth igniting, including my hometown. I could also remember little penguins keeling over and spitting black gunk.
The laughter changed to snarls of savagery. With each pass, I took out another dune buggy. Whoosh, I’d rush over the vehicles, beaming. Then I’d turn the handlebars, swinging around, heading back—whoosh.
Big old dune buses burned on the steel highway. Dead tigers bled. It had become their personal Highway of Death. The U.S. military had done the same thing to the soldiers of Saddam Hussein in 1991.
Here on this alien world, we taught a few Lokhars why their brethren shouldn’t have nuked the Earth.
After the sixth pass, it finally dawned on me that I’d let my symbiotic suit get the better of me. For once, I’d gotten carried away with battle-madness and bloodlust.
It took a minute of intense internal dialogue to head for the spaceyard. Killing Lokhars had its own appeal. Coming home victorious to Earth trumped that.
It was time for me to go tactical and remember the victory conditions. That was to bring home as many assault troopers as I could, along with prime loot.
Killing tigers didn’t count in that. Grabbing territory didn’t matter at all, either. But I needed to ensure we brought back as much stuff as possible.
Turning the air-cycle, I sped above the gunmetal-colored road. The spaceyard was in the distance. Behind me spread out a Lokhar city. This one had tall steel towers like old science-fiction posters. Big block buildings glittered with sunlight. I saw a tiger air car take off one of those. It raced away.
That didn’t seem good, but I wasn’t going to worry about it now.
Facing forward, I saw Star Viking cycles dipping and darting above the spaceyard. As I neared, I heard tiger roars, screams of agony and machine gun chatter. An air-cycle broke apart, its two riders falling a hundred meters, no doubt to their deaths.
The high-pitched whine of lasers focused my vision. I saw bright rays stabbing down from the back riders. Tigers curled on the ground like bugs burning beneath a child’s magnifying glass on a hot August day.
The heavy machine gun quit firing. Then it started up again. Other Star Vikings killed those Lokhars, too.
A new squadron of cycles from Holgotha roared toward an empty tarmac. Rollo shouted orders. I heard them on my headphones.
The spaceyard had big skeleton girders. Inside most of those cradles sat spaceships. A few were mere skeletons themselves. Other half-completed jobs showed pleasure yachts and military patrol craft. Several big warships looked finished to my eye. Seeing them made me grin.
Then one of those ignited. Geysers of metal and electrical wires fountained into the air. Tigers raced away from the damage.
Sabotage. They wrecked the warship.
I gunned my cycle, heading for the other completed cruisers and missile-ships. We needed those, all of them we could grab.
I landed hard, running before my cycle had quit humming. Yelling at an arban of troopers to follow me, I began hunting for saboteurs.
We flushed three Lokhars trying to plant a bomb on the side of a cruiser. As we approached, one of them leaped to his feet and raced nearer, igniting into a fireball, taking two Star Vikings with him.
“Get down!” I shouted.
The next Lokhar sprinted at us. He moved fast with smooth rhythm.
The rest of the arban reacted beautifully, hitting the deck. The second tiger exploded harmlessly. That left the last one.
They work in triads, I thought to myself. These tigers were Shi-Feng.
The last Lokhar’s gaze locked with mine. He began to squint, which I recalled was the firing mechanism. I beamed him in the head; to the side, it turned out. Yeah, I should have hit the ground like the other troopers. Instead, I waited for the explosion. It didn’t come. The tiger slumped onto the ground and didn’t ignite. Had my headshot shorted whatever mechanism made him blow up?
I debated beaming his body into a crisp. We couldn’t take chances with the Shi-Feng. Then, I reconsidered. I’d like to get my hands on one of the holy Lokhar warriors.
“Get up,” I told the troopers. “Back away from his body.”
“Sir,” their leader said, a woman named Zoe Artemis. “You should back up, too. We can’t afford to lose you.”
“I have to check something.”
Zoe glanced at the remaining arban of troopers. Something passed between them. They rushed me.
“What are you doing?” I shouted as they grabbed my arms. They dragged me farther from the downed tiger. Smoke trickled from his wounded head.
“What we should do, sir,” Zoe said, answering my question. “We’re keeping you out of danger. Henry, check the tiger.”
I struggled, but there were several of them and only one of me. “I just want to know if he’s still alive,” I said.
Gingerly, the selected trooper bent over the obvious Shi-Feng Lokhar. “He’s still breathing,” Henry said.
Zoe aimed her silver visor at me. “What should we do with him, sir?”
I thought fast. “Do you have any bomb detectors?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Check the tiger for explosives.”
“Where does he carry them?” she asked.
“In his body is my guess.”
Zoe stared at me a moment later. Then she snapped her head around, facing the trooper. “Henry,” she said, “back away from the tiger.”
He did, fast.
Soon, with the others still holding my arms, Zoe approached the unconscious tiger. The Lokhar had a hole in his head that leaked blood onto the tarmac. Zoe had a boxlike device aimed at the Shi-Feng.
She adjusted dials and turned to us. “He’s definitely got explosives in him,” she reported.
“Can you remove them?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Zoe asked. “According to this—” she raised the detector— “the junk is in his stomach.”
“I realize that. Can you take it out of him?”
Zoe didn’t stare as long this time. “There’s only one way to find out, Commander.”
“He might blow up if you try,” I said. “Let me do it.”
She motioned to her troopers. They dragged me farther away.
With her Bahnkouv, Zoe Artemis beamed the tiger’s stomach, slicing open his stomach with a deft touch. Then, she knelt and reached in with a bio-suited hand. A second later, she yanked out a bomb with bloody wires. Cocking her arm, she hurled the warhead, doing it none too soon.
With a terrific blast, the bomb exploded in midair. A zagun of troopers turned and stared.
Zoe re-aimed her detector at the Lokhar. “He’s clean now, sir,” she said. Her head jerked. It must have been a signal.
The four troopers released me. I hurried to the tiger.
“No hard feelings, sir,” Zoe told me. “We were just following orders.”
I said nothing. Instead, kneeling beside the defused Shi-Feng, I took out a medikit. With it, I began to patch him the best I could.
“Are you trying to keep him alive, sir?” Zo
e asked behind my back.
“As of now,” I said, “your task is to bring the tiger back alive. I want him upstairs with us when we leave.”
Zoe aimed her visor at the sky.
I stood, looking up too. The vast silver donut gleamed up there. It seemed obscene somehow, and it struck me as very like the science fiction stories I’d read in my youth.
“Is he important, sir?” Zoe asked.
“I don’t know. It’s possible.”
She nodded, motioning to her troopers.
I could see that Zoe Artemis ran a tight ship. That was a good sign. Soldiers like her were one of the reasons we’d won so many of our encounters.
After watching Zoe and her arban hustle the unconscious tiger to their cycles, I went back to mine.
Lifting into the air, I searched for Rollo. It took me a few moments to find the right channel. He stood with a clot of Star Vikings near the biggest spaceship.
I landed beside him.
For the next few hours, Rollo and I toured one spaceship after another. Those we could take rose upstairs to Holgotha. The rest we rigged with explosives.
At this point, I discovered a problem with using the artifact as the central attack platform. On Sanakaht, Holgotha remained stationary. I would have liked to hit the opposite side of the planet and do the same thing there as we’d done here.
“From what I can tell,” Rollo said, “the outskirts of the city are where they keep the warehouses.”
I gazed at our new warships floating beside the artifact. The raid was supposed to be a rich one for us, the big daddy payday.
In World War II, at the start of the Pacific War for America and Japan, the enemy had struck at Pearl Harbor. Everyone knows the story. Japanese planes destroyed docked American capital ships and parked aircraft, although they missed the carriers. The U.S. flattops had been out at sea on maneuvers. On the return to their own carriers, some of the Japanese pilots begged for one more strike. They wanted to hit the big oil tanks onshore and blow them up. The Japanese Admiral Nagumo wanted no part of that. He wished to bring the Japanese fleet home intact. They’d done enough. It was time to scram. So, they sailed away, leaving the oil tanks intact. If they had made one more strike, it would have crippled American recovery efforts even further. Without those oil tanks in Hawaii, the American Navy would have had a much harder time striking the Japanese Empire as soon as it had.
Extinction Wars 3: Star Viking Page 16
