by T. R. Harris
The mutant snickered. “Invincible? Nothing is invincible.”
“I was hoping you’d say. The Klin are using their machines to slowly take over the galaxy and so far no one’s been able to figure a way to stop them. We need to defeat their ships and stop the invasion.”
“We?” Panur queried. “My friend Adam Cain, you have certainly developed an inflated impression of yourself since last we met.”
Damn!
To Adam’s relief, Panur turned his gaze to the azure sea beyond the now blood-soaked beach he once referred to as The Wedge. “You must tell me everything you know about these black starships,” Panur began. “I also need access to monitoring recordings and other data that show power output and input, as well as video of the ships in combat mode.” He looked again at Adam and smiled. “After which, we shall work on a solution together.”
A few minutes later, flickering of shadows on the cloudless day caught both Adam and Panur’s attention. When they looked into the sky, Adam’s heart skipped a beat.
The deep blue of the morning sky was dotted with hundreds—perhaps thousands—of tiny t-shaped objects. With his enhanced eyesight, Adam could make out the wide, thin form of elongated parachutes, and dangling below them, the frightening site of the Klin’s killer robots. Even as Panur and Adam focused on the terror from the sky, the robots opened fire on everyone and everything on the surface.
The Human commandos and Expansion forces took the brunt of the initial incoming flash cannon fire, as they formed the largest concentration of living creatures on the island. But the buildings to the north were also receiving their share of energy bolts. The once-intact hangar building was riddled with hits, while the huge orange freighter next to it was perforated with holes, before literally exploding from the inside out.
As he and Panur sprinted for their respective ships, Adam noticed that the Defiant—the trans-dimensional starship—was being spared from the rain of deadly energy bolts. The robots had been programmed to recognize the vessel, meaning the Klin knew of the ship and its capabilities.
Everyone! Get to the Defiant, Adam spoke through his ATD to all the other ATD-equipped members of his team. You’ll be safe inside.
“Panur, come with me!” he shouted aloud.
“I would prefer my own ship,” the mutant yelled back. “I see Lila does too.”
Lila had just broken away from her mother and was running toward the mutant’s cracked-open egg-shaped starship. Arieel watched her for a moment before turning for the Defiant.
Soon, Adam was the only one left on the beach. Both mutants had sprinted off in matching blurs, moving at unbelievable speed. Is that how I look to normal people? Adam asked himself. Damn!
Adam shifted course and ran toward the stretch of beach he called The Strand. Most of the Human commandos were tumbling into their Zodiacs, while others pushed the rubber and wood speedboats into the water. He could see three of the Humans had been killed by high-level flash bombs, with another five sustaining injuries.
“Major! Get your men to the mainland and back to your landing craft as soon as possible,” Adam yelled. He picked up an M-101 assault rifle dropped on the beach during the retreat. “I’ll try to draw their fire.”
“Thank you, Captain Cain. You should know our transport ship has left the area, ordered away when the Klin ship arrived.” The Army officer looked around the beach. “Sorry about all this, just following orders.”
“As well you should. Now get moving! If I don’t make it back for an evac, seek out the natives. They’ll keep you safe, if they can.”
Adam pointed the weapon into the sky and began targeting the robots about to land on the beach. Their repulsive magnetic shields deflected the metal slugs with a powerful electric field, causing no damage. But the bullets did get their attention. The beach around Adam exploded.
This time when Adam went airborne, it was not of his own choosing.
The cloud of blown up sand obscured the robot’s vision for a moment, but it didn’t stop them from firing into the cloud. Adam rolled on the soft sand, now liquefied by the deep depressions made by the energy bolts. He tasted gritty saltwater, but found the shallow hole to be cover against the incoming fire. A dozen of the Klin automatons landed and discarded their black parachutes. Dual treads transitioned to multi-jointed legs and they scurried off over the soft sand in Adam’s direction. On each articulated arm was a weapons-array, a multi-function device capable of firing flash bolts, ballistic slugs or lasers. Having identified their primary targets as Human, they fired lasers, rather than their other less-powerful armament.
The crest of the depression was raked with beams of intense light. The sand turned to glass and formed a hard crust. Adam laid the barrel of his rifle over the edge and began firing. To his delight, he noticed the robots stopped firing their lasers as the magnetic shield went up to block the incoming bullets from the M-101. The intense magnetic field interfered with the lasers somehow. This was all well and good, if not for the fact that Adam would soon run out of ammo at the rate he was firing.
A few of the robots shifted their attention to the two Zodiacs out on the water. Although the little boats were extremely fast, the tracking system of the robots could follow them with ease. Lasers and flash bolts erupted from the killing machines, striking the trailing boat. The powerful engines exploded and the craft lurched forward, burying its bow in the shallow water of the lagoon. The troops were thrown out, with half their number floating unmoving on the choppy surface afterwards. That still left half a dozen swimming for the distant shore, a hundred yards away. The robots continued to target the survivors.
Two of the robots were locked on Adam’s position, although he was keeping their lasers at bay with periodic bursts aimed at their square central torsos. Off in the channel between the island the mainland, Adam saw geysers of water erupting near the lead Zodiac. They were next on the target list.
Adam scrambled from the depression, heading for the two robots facing him. His M-101 fire kept their weapons at bay. The Klin killers had defenses against a variety of threats, but did they have anything to stop a flesh-and-blood person from a direct assault? He was hoping not. The designers probably figured no one would that stupid.
When he hit the first robot, his mutant-enhanced strength was at its max. He slammed into the metal torso with the added inertia from his run and felt a sharp electric shock as he passed through the unit’s diffusion shield. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The intense magnetic field of the repulsive shield ripped away his metal buckle and the belt with it. An intense pain also erupted in his right side. His ATD was being ripped out of his skin.
When Adam slammed into the robot, all it did was take a single step backwards, barely moved by the attack. In desperation, Adam ripped off one of the arms and twisted the other until it hung lifeless at the side of the boxy torso. To his relief, the shields dropped. The pain in his side subsided. It would have been a bitch if he lost his ATD.
Even though the shields were down and both weapons-equipped arms neutralized, that still left a myriad of other offensive weapons embedded within the skin of robot’s body. Gunshots rang out, skimming past Adam with only inches to spare. These weapons were aimed by a shifting of the machine’s orientation. That was the same for the flash bolts. Even so, Adam caught a portion of an energy bolt on his already burning right side. It hurt like hell until his mutant brain cells muted the effect.
He placed a stiff elbow into the robot’s dome-shaped brain on top of the boxy body. The unit broke away and the unit slumped down on its legs in the wet sand of The Strand.
Adam only had seconds to get away before the self-destruct instructions were executed. He jumped off the dead machine and ran for the other. Without suppressing fire from the M-101, the robot was sending beams of white-hot lasers at him. Quickened mutant reactions saved him from the first barrage. The exploding robot to his rear did the rest.
Both Adam and the active robot were thrown away from the blast, A
dam forward, the robot onto its back. Adam landed on the machine and began ripping it apart with his bare hands, leaving only one articulated arm working and firing a near-constant stream of lasers from the tip.
Adam gripped the arm and worked its aim across the beach, targeting the Klin machines firing at the retreating commandos. A few of the robots were destroyed in the first few seconds of the attack. These exploded, taking out even more. Then shields went up and the firing on the commandos ceased.
But now the robots turned toward Adam.
Adam ripped off the robot’s remaining arm and then took off across the beach in a crouch toward the Defiant, running as fast as his enhanced muscles would allow. A moment later he tripped, his belt-less pants having slipped from his waist to around his legs. He kicked them off, leaving only his boxer shorts for decorum. The second robot exploded, providing him just enough cover to make it to the open side entry hatch of the starship. Once inside, he was safe; the robots were programmed not to fire on the TD-starship.
The door closed automatically, but by then Adam was already entering the pilothouse. The ship was off the surface and banking to the left as Kaylor lined up on the same trajectory as Panur and Lila in their now-glowing egg-shaped starship. Then the mutant’s ship became just a steak of light. Stunned, Adam leaned against the back of Kaylor’s pilot seat and let his jaw fall open. He’d never seen anything move that fast from the surface of a planet. Even the incredible acceleration didn’t cause it to burn up in the atmosphere.
Adam closed his mouth and nodded. This is why he needed the mutants—both Panur and Lila. He needed their genius. Seeing Panur’s miraculous little starship bolt from the surface of Pyrum-3 told him he was on the right track.
3
A few minutes later the Defiant was in space and tracking Panur’s speedy craft as the gap widened between the two ships. Jym and Riyad Tarazi were huddled over the proximity screen, nervously looking for the black behemoth that was a Klin VN-91 starship. What made them nervous was the fact they couldn’t see it, as well as the fear that at any moment a thick, white laser beam would vaporize the Defiant, with them inside.
“It’s not here,” Riyad said for the room. “And neither are the ships that brought the commandos and the Expansion troops. Two Nuorean ships are on the screen, but bolting away on full drive. Everyone is running away from something, something we can’t see.”
“And something that can kill us all before we even know it,” said Jym, adding his two cents.
“Does that mean we could already be dead and not know it?” Copernicus Smith asked. Jym shrugged off the remark and returned to the screen.
Sherri Valentine also ignored her boyfriend. “Could the Klin have developed some kind of cloaking device?” she asked instead.
Adam shook his head. “Why would they do that? Their ships are already invincible. They don’t need to be invisible as well.”
“And where the hell is Panur shooting off to in such a mad rush?” Riyad asked, not wanting to be the only one in the room not to ask a rhetorical question.
Panur’s track was clearly visible on the main screen, having been displayed there by Kaylor at the pilot’s station. The actual ship was off the active screen, but his track was still highlighted. There was a crackle from the comm speakers.
“I thought you might like to make contact with us,” Panur’s voice announced through speakers on the bulkhead. There was a slight trace of humor in his tone. The gray mutant was right. The crew of the Defiant had no idea how to contact Panur’s glowing starship.
“Where the hell are you going?” Adam asked through the open comm line. “You do know there’s a Klin warship out here somewhere?”
“Indeed I do, and we are quickly closing on it.”
“You’re what? I told you what happens when you fire on one of those things. It charges their main lasers and turns the damn thing into an invincible killing machine.”
“The not to worry; we have no weapons.”
Adam looked around at the stunned faces of his team. “So…what are you going to do?”
“Just going in to take a look,” was Panur’s matter-of-fact response.
“Lila!” Arieel cried out. “That will be suicide.”
“I will be safe,” her daughter’s sweet voice said through the speakers. “We will only be testing the ship’s defenses and monitoring their power systems.”
The tiny dot representing Panur’s ship appeared at the outer edge of the screen, having slowed down as it reached the six-mile-long Klin warship. Soon the much larger and brighter signature of the VN-91 came on the screen.
As the Defiant raced from the surface of Pyrum-3, Adam noticed the VN-91 had dropped a much smaller force of killer robots than was their normal modius operendi. As they’d climbed into space, it was clear the machines were targeting the island exclusively. The rest of the planet was being spared. And having dropped its cargo, the VN-91 was now in hurry to leave the scene of the crime.
The alien ship was bolting from the system on full power. But why? Adam wondered. The warship broke orbit before Adam and the mutants left the surface. They certainly wouldn’t be running from them…were they?
This black ship had penetrated farther into Expansion territory than any before it. Is that why they were running? Then a terrible thought formed in Adam’s mind. Maybe they weren’t running at all, but rather in a hurry to get someplace else—another target perhaps?
He didn’t have time to ponder any more unanswerable questions; Panur’s ship was closing on the huge ship, which was now visible on extreme magnification. Light from the Pyrum system’s colorful gas giant reflected off the black hull, shimmering, even as a pale green glow of concentric circles led the ship’s way through the darkness of space. In light of the ship’s deadly pedigree, few people had spent time analyzing the strange double blackhole gravity drive the ship employed. For now, it was just what it was. Once the engineers and scientists figured a way to keep ships like these from destroying entire populations, then they would worry about the unique space drives of the black ships.
Of course, it wouldn’t be others who would solve the problem of the Klin black ships. That would be left to Adam and his mutant allies.
“Don’t be crazy, Panur!” Adam called out over the comm. “They still have a formidable defense system. The hull is dotted with dozens of laser turrets. They’re not as powerful as the offensive weapons, but enough for your little ship.”
“My dear Adam, size isn’t everything,” said the four-and-a-half foot tall mutant.
“But you said you don’t have any weapons. I realize the two of you can’t die, but you can become a pair of floating ice cubes lost in space. At that point you might be a little hard to find.”
“None of that is going to happen. Please observe….”
The Defiant was closer to the two ships, and the crew could see the brilliant glow radiating out from Panur’s tiny vessel. It swept in close to the VN-91, passing through the three diffusion shields, which began twenty miles out from the hull of the warship. Green flares lit the area around where the egg-shaped ship penetrated the shields. When Panur was ten miles from the hull, a dozen lasers ignited on the surface of the black ship and contacted the glowing egg.
At which point the egg glowed even brighter, lighting up the interior of the Defiant, both from the image on the screen and from the tiny—yet brilliant—pinpoint of light visible through the viewport.
The globe of light skirted along the six-mile length of the Klin ship before racing off into space ahead of it. After making a quick loop—that left a trail of white light in its wake—the tiny spacecraft made another run along the length of the VN-91.
This time after the run, the glowing egg continued to pull away, coming back to rendezvous with the Defiant.
The black ship hastened along its way. A few minutes later it reached a point where it could engage its deep-gravity wells, and disappeared from the Pyrum system.
“Are you okay
?” Arieel asked through the comm, her voice trembling.
“We are perfectly fine, mother,” said Lila. Her voice was also trembling, but not from fear. She seemed to be…excited.
“As you noticed,” Panur began, “my ship absorbs energy, just as you say the Klin ships do, yet much more efficiently.” He then laughed. “And as an added bonus, the energy flows throughout the interior, giving both me and Lila a very welcome infusion of power. It’s quite stimulating.”
“So you’re both all right?” Adam asked.
“More than all right, my friend.”
“Good,” Adam declared. He placed a hand on Kaylor’s shoulder. “Then we’re going back to Pyrum-3 to rescue what survivors there are.”
“We will be along shortly,” said Panur. “The ship is much too hot to land on your tiny island. It would incinerate anything within a three mile radius.”
“Turn us around, Kaylor,” Adam commanded.
“An estimated twenty minutes to destination,” said his blue-skinned Belsonian friend.
Adam grimaced. The commandos had been taken a beating when the Defiant left. After another twenty minutes…and there could be no one left to rescue.
4
Kaylor brought the Defiant in low over the island and then continued to the nearby mainland, looking for the best place to land. There were survivors. They made it into the palm and mangrove forest of the low-lying marshland, seeking what cover they could find.
From the air, Adam saw how most of the alien robots had landed near the island, either on land or in the water. The damn things could float, and were able to make landfall utilizing some form of slow propulsion system. Yet almost all of them were now on the island, even as a wholesale effort was underway to reach the mainland. But the going was slow. A thick fleet of bobbing robots filled the channel between the island and the opposite shore.
