Dark Dragons (14 page)

One obvious issue Darren noted very early concerned their
limited inventory of missiles, anti-missile orbs, and gauss rounds.  They
would have to fight with what they already packed, which placed more emphasis
on the use of their primaries, the pair of five-hundred megawatt laser cannons.

Darren held a special place in his heart for the
Dragonstar’s last weapon system.  Hidden in a recess bay under the
dragon’s head, the hydra shroud was a defensive, computer-automated,
individual-kill weapon——an anti-intruder, 40-gun cannon that also served
offensively as an anti-personnel weapon with ghastly effect.  Its shroud
of “snakes” were flexible laser barrels that could target up to forty living
beings with a long-range brainwave sensor and zap them all in less than half a
second before acquiring the next forty bad guys in the same time.  Using
pre-set programming and the main computer’s virtual intelligence, it could also
discriminate “bad guys” from “good guys” in a hostage rescue situation or on a
mixed battlefield of enemy soldiers and friendlies . . . or alien invaders
among frantic humans.  Also, if the Dragonstar’s VI computer identified an
object as being a possible weapon, it would kill whatever held or picked it up,
again based on pre-set determination.  This was effective against
“artificials” like robots, which didn’t have brainwaves required for sensor
lock.

Checking his long-range, aerial mass displacement scopes,
Darren spotted a pair of mass shadows four thousand kilometers to the
southwest.  The passive AMDS’s one irritating drawback was its inability
to properly identify aerial objects.  It could only detect the target’s
mass.  Proper IFF identification had to be determined with the
synthetic-aperture laser-radar, an active sensor that, in turn, would reveal
Darren’s position to the enemy.

Having no choice, Darren swept the area ahead of him with a
sensor sweep.  The computer processed the return echoes and formed a
three-dimensional image on his visor.  The database identified the mass
shadows as a pair of enemy troop carriers hovering over one of the planet’s
metropolitan zones.  The invaders were landing.

He turned in that direction and accelerated to full speed,
activating his missile launcher to
STAND-BY
and selecting the singularity missiles to air-intercept mode.  Still, no
flat trilobite fighters that his sensors could see.

“I’m getting my ass kicked, here!” Tony screamed in Darren’s
headset.  He was somewhere to the north.  “Somebody give me a hand!”

“Nate?  Jorge?  Can you assist?”

“On my way,” Jorge said.

Darren had almost reached the city.  The rolling
horizon slowly revealed the pair of humongous troop carriers at his twelve.

“They’re all over the place . . . I can’t shake——”

A sharp crackle of static filled Darren’s headset followed
by ominous silence.  His comm-unit beeped to indicate Tony’s transponder
had quit broadcasting.

That’s because Tony was dead.

Darren’s eyes went tunnel-vision as he concentrated on the
troop carriers now hurling a wall of frightening, defensive fire at him from
their position just above the mushroom-shaped skyscrapers.  He activated
the fighter’s Feint Mode, which projected a swarm of “radar ghosts” across the
enemy’s sensors.  The aliens’ fire now spread across the sky in a
fruitless attempt to bring down fighters that did not exist.  The horde of
angry laser pulses zipping across the sky looked kind of cool, Darren mused,
but this was a trivial observation he quickly pushed aside.

He thought of the eight proton destroyers nestled in the
retractable missile carriage inside the Dragonstar’s fuselage, the perfect
weapons to finish off gigantic targets quickly. 
No . . . the bad guys
are in the atmosphere.
  Those horrific weapons could only be used in
space.

When nature created the proton——the elementary particle
which provided the basis of all matter——it produced a particle with a rate of
decay the Xrel discovered to be older than the universe itself, some 14 billion
years.  However, nature left a loophole for its destruction in the quantum
design for a technological intelligence to discover.  The proton destroyer
accelerated that decay to nanoseconds . . . in short, it was a massive
disintegration
weapon which not only erased the target from existence but also any matter in
contact, be it gas, liquid, solid or plasma, and leaving a deadly blast of
positrons, pions and gamma radiation in its wake.  Not a choice weapon to
select for use within the atmosphere or anywhere near a planet for that matter.

One of the singularity missiles screamed out of its launch
carriage and signaled that it had locked onto one of the giant troop carries in
AMDS mode.

“No!”

He had for just the slightest of moments thought of the
singularity missile sliding out of the launcher, the actual visual command that
fired the weapon.  It had only been a split instant within the time frame
of a giant second, but that had been plenty of time for the computer to
acknowledge an okay.  The target was too close to the city.

Darren sent out the self-destruct command, but the deadly
warhead had already armed.  The cockpit glass polarized to keep the flash
out of his eyes just before the missile’s proximity fuse shut down the
warhead’s magnetic field separating a pair of mass points.  The sudden
release of concentrated gravity against the alien vessel’s hull created a
blinding flash and a 4-kiloton shock wave.

 The windshield re-polarized, and Darren watched what
remained of the enemy ship slowly fall from its perch in the sky, smoking and
burning all the way down.  It landed hard, taking out entire blocks of
alien skyscrapers and power grids directly beneath it before the collapsing
power plants inside the vessel finally finished it off.

Darren gasped and accelerated to starboard when ten
kilometers of nuclear hell suddenly came at him with every electromagnetic
wavelength on the spectrum.  He kicked in the mental-afterburners, but the
radioactive bubble was already on him, the gamma ray alarm howling.

“No, no,
no!
”

The image of the alien landscape faded from the cockpit
glass.  The virtual intelligent flight simulator beeped, and rendered on
his visor in the Xrel alphabet of strange glyphs and symbols came
ALL SYSTEMS INOPERATIVE - TWENTY MILLION INHABITANTS
KILLED.

“Thank you,” Darren mumbled.  The VI simulator computer
then scrolled through several alternate attack profiles, showing Darren the
correct usage for singularity missiles, but the rush of 3-D images sweeping
across his visor just mocked him.  He shut the simulator off, and the
windshield re-polarized.  Early morning sunlight streamed into his fighter’s
cockpit.  He popped the canopy, unplugged the thought-control cable and
removed his helmet.  Warm Santa Anna wind blew in his face.

Nate and Jorge’s windshields were still dark.  Tony sat
on the nose of his fighter, smoking a cigarette.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“I got into a major furball,” Tony replied.  “I thought
you were going to help me?”

“I was busy myself.  Besides, you shouldn’t have
separated from us to begin with.  Once they saw you alone, they went in
like lions.  I would have, too.”

“At least I didn’t kill twenty million civies.”

“At least I killed something.”

*

Not only had they become the pilots of interstellar death
machines; they were now soldiers designed for thought-controlled, close-quarter
combat.

Sitting on the ground, they examined the pieces to their
combat suits like curious children trying to appraise the function of a new
toy.  The suits were made of the same super-carbon  armor as their
fighters and could repel any non-gauss projectile fire up to 30mm or an angled
laser blast.  Each suit had four separate power packs: one for the helmet,
another for the rifle holster clamp on the back of the suit, one for a
hoist-cable gun on the right forearm, and a whopping 300-kilowatt pack the size
of a TV remote for the suit’s armor-piercing gauss gun mounted on the left
forearm.  Like its big brother on the Dragonstars’s nose, the gauss gun,
with a powerful telescopic sight, used an electromagnetic accelerator that
fired tungsten-carbide slugs at adjustable speeds of two thousand feet per
second to an armor-piercing ten thousand fps.  Thankfully, no recoil.

The hoist-cable gun on the right forearm fired a shaped,
tungsten-penetrator attached to a 120-foot metal twine.  A powerful reel
motor in the gun could then lift or lower the operator to whatever height he
desired.  It would come in handy in zero-g or if he had to rappel from one
ship hull to another.

The combat suit also had a row of bandolier compartments
mounted to the hip module holding fourteen grenade magazines, fifty gauss gun
slugs, three hoist cable spools, and one needle pistol clip.  Additional
suit ammo was located in the personal effects compartment in the Dragonstars’
cockpits above and behind the seats.

Darren grabbed the laser pulse rifle, his primary weapon,
and put it to his shoulder to get a feel for it.  A rather short rifle at
only thirty-one inches long——suitable length for tight combat environments——it
possessed a 50-kilowatt attitude which could punch fist-size holes out of any
material be it rock, dense metal, flesh or bone.  At any other time, he
would have felt clumsy and nervous with a weapon in his hand, but the pulse
rifle instilled no such feeling . . . nothing more than just another extension
of his body.  The rifle could fire a single- or unlimited-round burst,
depending on the situation.  A sniper hit would require only a single
shot, but for an advancing phalanx of bad guys——unlimited-round, “street
sweeper” mode would suffice.

Mounted under the rifle’s barrel was a stubby
Electromagnetically-Propelled Grenade launcher, or EPG, capable of spewing
grenades out to a maximum range of five hundred feet.  The grenades came
in five-round magazine clips, each grenade with a microprocessor so the user
could program for a direct-impact, proximity, or timed detonation.  Blast
fragmentation spread death within a twenty yard radius.  These grenades
did not belong to grandpa’s army because they were ‘in-flight
omni-directional’, meaning they could zip around corners or behind obstacles like
missiles.

“Teenagers solving their problems with violence,” Darren
cracked.

Tony aimed his own pulse rifle at something in the
distance.  “There goes the school cafeteria.  Boom!  Just like
those psycho kids on the news who took too much shit—
—and snap!
——cafeteria’s
got a new paint job.”

Darren’s grin evaporated, and he suddenly felt numb. 
“Yeah.”

“Kill ‘em all!” Tony shouted with a grin.

He looked down at his rifle, scared, cold.  “I bet
that’s how D.B. felt, too.”

The mood in the air suddenly changed, stifled by Darren’s
somber comment.  Everyone looked away, recognizing the painful weight of
that remark.

Tony put the rifle away and picked up his helmet.  “I
was just kidding, man.  I’m not that whacked.”

Darren couldn’t be sure if he was either.  Still, the
presence of their old friend, D.B., still lingered like a reminder, a
cautionary tale.  They would use these weapons for good, he thought. 
Survival, the right to peacefully exist . . . all that Superman stuff.  Not
for whacking a school full of teasing jocks and mocking girls.  Right?

A large spherical hologram of Earth’s solar system suddenly
appeared in front of Jorge who had a disk-shaped object in his upturned
palm.  Planets, moons, comets, and near-Earth asteroids were displayed in
real-time, provided by sub-space signals from the two early-warning satellite
drones which the Xrel cargo ship had deposited in stability orbits at the L1
and L2 points.

“Any bad guys?” Darren asked.

“Nothing specific,” Jorge replied.  “But there’s a lot
of heavy-gravity interference in the continuum outside the solar system.” 
Jorge squinted his eyes and gave Darren a
What-did-I-just-say?
Look. 
“What I mean is that something big is moving out there.”

What Jorge had in his hand was a PDA, or a personal data
assistant——a kind of alien smart phone.  The disk-shaped object was made
to be carried at all times when “out-of-suit” just like a smart phone, and
performed a variety of utilities, four of which were crucial:  the first,
holographic early-warning provided by the two satellites drones; second, a
homing beacon/range-finder to locate their fighters if separated over a long
distance or caught in adverse weather; third, an auto-pilot retrieval function
which brought the Dragonstar to the pilot’s location, regardless of the
distance, by tracking the device’s sub-space beacon signal, and finally, a
jam-proof, tight-beam communicator linked to the other three PDAs.

“Make sure you keep these on you at all times,” Darren said,
and stuffed his own PDA into his front right pocket.  “Use them when we’re
not suited up.”

Three thought-controlled, flying reconnaissance camera
scouts each the size of a small bee were attached to the helmet, used to spot
bad guys hiding around corners or behind obstacles.  How they flew
remained a half-understood mystery to Darren, something which involved positive
and negative magneto-gyroscopes.  All three RCS’s working together could
send back instructions to help the suit’s computer build a 3-D tactical map of
the battle area and also establish waypoints to retrace one’s starting point.

Darren unholstered the heavy-needle pistol from its magnetic
clamp on the right thigh module, and went over the characteristics of this
weapon:
fires exploding flachettes, able to penetrate heavy body armor,
semi-automatic with a 100-pin clip
——a lot of mayhem packed in a small,
back-up weapon.

It was the vibro-knife stored in a scabbard slot under the
left arm, however, which drove home the serious shit that now confronted
them.  The dark gray monster with an 8-inch blade was actually
powered——molecule-agitating motors inside the handle gave the weapon the
ability to slice through heavy body armor with barely a pause.  Its very
crudity seemed more blood-chilling than an advanced pulse rifle or gauss gun.