Illegal Aliens (28 page)

Blessed Idow had assisted Silverside in taking over the asteroid, and creating a criminal empire so the droid would always have a home. Idow had asked for nothing in return, but Silverside had insisted on the right to keep the Sazin supplied with whatever he and his ship needed: food, fuel, weapons and the occasional crewmember. Gracious as a god, Leader Idow had accepted the gifts, and in all the many decades they had been associated, never even once did the noble being insult the machine by offering it any kind of payment for the items.

But now, the beloved liberator was dead. Dead!

The battledroid felt its belly solenoids tighten. Revenge must be taken on these walking bloodsacks, and the
All That Glitters
blown to pieces! The very notion of the vile thieves living in the starship stolen from its savior made the warobot shake with ill- restrained fury.

“Hey dude, you okay?” Hammer asked in concern. The machine seemed to be having a seizure or something.

Instantly, twin force blades lanced out from the armored prow of Silverside to slice and dice the ganglord into bloody chunks of flesh. As the body of the youth dropped to the floor in a staggered series of thumps, Drill and Chisel recoiled from the scene in horror. Then a lifetime of streetfights overcame shock, and with an angry shout, the last remaining Deckers sprang into action.

TWENTY-FIVE

Activating his forcefield, Drill dove forward and made a snatch for the HN cube. But Leader Silverside rolled forward over the oozing remains of Hammer, its armored tread grinding the crystal cube in his bloody pocket into dust.

Tumbling frantically out of the way, the gang member barely managed to evade the warobot's killing path, when a stream of bullets, and then a knife, ricocheted harmlessly off the droid's metal body. Without bothering to pause, Silverside released a flight of anti-personnel flechettes and Chisel's scream of pain informed the machine of a direct hit.

“Help!
Ramariez
, help!” Drill yelled scrambling to his feet, but his cry for help was efficiently blocked by the jamming field of the robot's private office. Nimbly, the youth dodged under a plasma bolt that vaporized half a dozen video monitors on the wall. Then Drill wisely turned tail and darted through the sole doorway, adrenaline and raw fear fueling him to run at Olympic speeds.

Relentlessly, machine followed the man into the corridor.

* * *

“Alert!” Ensign Lilliuokalani cried, rising from her seat.

Captain Keller spun away from his conference with Trell at the Engineering console. “Excellent, ensign! You broke through the jamming field?”

“No, sir,” the woman denied. “Drill is back in view.”

The bridge crew turned from their work and looked. There, on the main screen, was the frantic teenager charging out of the opening in the tavern wall and yelling to be rescued.

“Sir, should we teleport him on board?” Trell asked getting ready to do so.

“Scanners locked on target,” Ensign Hamlisch announced crisply, his adroit fingers feeding the coordinates to the console of his fellow officer.

Keller squinted. “Does he have the HN cube with him?”

“No, sir, he does not,” Chief Buckley reported checking the read-outs on his board.

“Then leave him alone, and send in the Marines,” Keller directed grimly. “We must have that cube, and, by God, this time we’re going to get one!”

* * *

As assistance had not arrived and knowing he couldn't outrun a machine forever, Drill decided to make a stand. Leaping over the counter of the bar, he knocked the sponge out of his way and slapped his hand down on the glowing sensor pad.

“Molotov cocktail!” he shouted, unaware that the Drink Master needed no such vocal encouragement for speed. “And keep ’em coming!”

As the alien device began its dance of reconstruction, Drill prepared his weapons for the final conflict: machine gun, laser pistol, knife, damn, if only he had a grenade.

Crouching behind her stool, like the majority of the patrons, Einda suddenly understood what was happening. Flattening herself as only a Datian can, she shimmied along the molding at floor level and down into the passageway to try and find her fiancé, Chisel.

“There you are!” the AI machine thundered in delight, his words booming in the rapidly emptying tavern. “Time to die, assassin!”

Shouting obscenities, Drill fired the machine pistol and laser together until the Molotov arrived, and then he added its fiery bid to the battle. But nothing proved effective against the armored bulk of the death machine.

As Silverside rolled unaffected through the flame, the droid began to reminisce about the many battles it had fought to forge its criminal empire and establish itself as the Leader of Buckle. Each was fun, but always ended much too soon. Someday it hoped to meet a worthy opponent and enjoy a really good workout. Maybe even one that lasted more than sixty seconds.

Smashing the counter to splinters with a single swipe of its heavy duty manipulators, Silverside gathered the struggling teenager and pinned him against the wall with three telescoping servo-arms, accidentally breaking the human's leg in the process; not that the robot cared in the least. Then a buzzsaw extended from its prow, and slowly advanced towards the wiggling man, the singing wheel of steel hovering from the end of a ferruled metal support.

“Sadly, I am unaware of how my creator died,” the machine said in its toneless voice. “But I am sure that your death will be more painful.”

The first swipe of the buzzsaw sliced off his bulletproof vest, the second laid open Drill's jumpsuit, putting a shallow slash across the chest. Drops of blood welled from the cut and dribbled into his clothing. Contemptuously, Drill spat on the camera lenses of the machine and braced himself for death. The man had always known he would die in a bar fight, only he had honestly expected it to be in Manhattan. Or at the very least, in Brooklyn.

But at that instant, the tavern was washed with light and a squad of UN Space Marines in powerarmor teleported in.

Lt. Sakadea absorbed the torture scene in a glance, and ticked off his options with lightning speed. Bullets would be useless against the armored bulk of the war droid, and their lasers couldn't penetrate the forcefield that his helmet sensors told him surrounded the machine. That left only grenades or missiles; either of which would kill Drill along with the robot. No, wait a minute, that was wrong.

“Dead volley,” Sakadea ordered over his suit radio, and the Marines launched a flurry of their special, anti-robot Church Key missiles. But without arming the weapons first.

From both of the fluted muzzles at the tip of their nameless UN rifle, twenty rustling firebirds streaked across the bar to viciously slam into the angular body of the warobot, going up to their hot fins in the thick armor. The savage pummeling made the droid rattle and vibrate under each battering impact, but the damage incurred was superficial, and only Sgt. Lieberman's did the required job.

Her first missile smashed directly onto the base of the descending buzzsaw, knocking it away from Drill's exposed throat and tearing the limb free from the warobot's chassis to crash into the nearby Drink Master. Which promptly burst into flame, as the obedient device was still dutifully manufacturing the gasoline and soap concoction requested earlier.

The second missile zoomed straight in to embed itself right between the eye cameras of the enemy droid.

Utterly horrified, Silverside sent off a unique signal pulse to seize control of these robots and bind them to its will forever. But instead of instantly complying like good slaves, the metal warriors menacingly advanced closer and ordered the droid to surrender or die.

Bristling with missiles, the desperate machine sent off the signal again and again, but the results remained the same. Impossible! No conceivable robot or computer could possibly resist the override command, especially as it had been augmented and boosted by the technical genius of Leader Idow so that even Gee military computers were helpless before the signal pulse. Unless, Silverside finally realized, there were living creatures inside those metal shells. Hostile alien creatures immune to its control, with both the ability and the desire to do the machine serious harm.

The unsettling thought of personal combat in which the droid did not have a totally superior advantage filled its central data processing unit, and for the first time, the warobot downloaded the bitter emotion of fear.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Leader Silverside released its captive like a thermally active ground tuber and quickly retreated, backrolling straight into the corridor that led to its office, the double doors slamming shut right in face of pursuing Marines.

“Never mind the robot, secure the bar,” Lt. Sakadea directed, then the lieutenant countermanded the order when he observed that the establishment was deserted except for his troops and a very bloody Decker. “Lieberman, check Drill.”

Kneeling on the littered floor, Tanya roughly shook the teenage convict to wake him from his stupor. “Where's the cube?” she demanded over the external speaker of her powerarmor.

“My leg,” Drill groaned, the street tough holding the injured limb with both hands.

Bone showed through the bloody fabric, so the sergeant activated the medical kit inside her metal wrist, and gave the wounded man a Navy SEAL dose of Hot Shot right in the neck: 10ccs of morphine, cocaine, caffeine and methamphetamine. If that devil's brew didn't put a person immediately on their feet, the military called an embalmer.

“Destroyed,” Drill gasped, as a tingling wave of relief washed over him. “But there's a whole lot more of them in the office.” He pointed with an unsteady hand.

“What about the rest of your gang?” she asked.

He coughed. “Dead. Died kicking ass. Almost got the bastard myself. Was gonna drown him in my blood.” Drill managed a faint smile. “Your turn, lady,” he whispered and passed out.

“Good work, soldier,” Sgt. Lieberman said softly, giving the highest compliment she could. Gently as possible, the woman laid his head on the floor and stood. With proper training, the lad would make a fine Marine.

“Lutzman, stay with him,” Sakadea ordered gruffly. “Geiger, check the door that damn robot went through.”

“No booby traps, sir,” reported the Advance & Delay expert over her radio a few seconds later. “But the seams have been cold fused together.”

“Okay, clear the area,” Lt. Sakadea snapped over the command circuit. “Matulich, Berouzi, open those doors. Platoon, get ready to move!”

A salvo of rockets from the bazooka team blasted the portal to rubble, and the Marines stormed in even before the reverberations ceased, bits of ceiling bouncing off their armored hides.

Nothing attacked them in the tunnel, and the second set of locked doors was disposed of as easily as the first. Stepping over the smoking debris, across the bare room the troopers saw Leader Silverside spin on its tread and crash straight through a wall of video monitors, glass shards and pieces of wire flying everywhere. Only blackness showed on the other side.

More concerned with the job at hand, the Space Marines ignored the robot and began searching for any HN cubes. But a single glance showed the glass walled office was devoid of anything except a horrible mangled pile of flesh.

“Which one of them is it?” a private haltingly asked.

“Both, I think,” a hoarse voice replied.

Somebody muttered a phrase in Italian and nobody needed a translation to know that it had something to do with disgusting.

“Your opinion, Tanya?” Sakadea asked on their personal communication channel, none of the other troopers able to hear the privileged conversation.

“We have got to capture that robot,” the sergeant advised, arming the sole replacement rockets on her rifle with the twist and jerk of a safety ring. “At the very least, it knows where the rest of the HN cubes are stored.”

“I agree. Let's go get the bastard.”

She smiled grimly. “And kick some alien ass.”

“We’re going after Silverside,” the lieutenant broadcast to the rest of the soldiers. “Point men, take your positions, but shoot only to defend yourselves, we need that tin can alive.”

Lieberman saluted. “Aye, sir. Okay, let's move out!”

In tight formation, the troopers traveled down a short spiraling ramp, but their helmet lights did little to illuminate the incredible darkness.

“Night visors,” Sakadea ordered.

As the Marines lowered the UV filters over their faceplates, they promptly saw a staggeringly large underground cavern, whose dimensions took their breath away. They could plainly see that this was the true interior of the asteroid. The sprawling city above them only utilized a tiny percentage of the total volume of the gigantic planetoid. Mere size did not impress these Marines, but what was in the cavern gave them pause.

Strapped to the curved rock walls high above them were countless gold missiles the size of battleships, and running down the length of the asteroid, becoming lost in the distance, was a colossal amber laser assembly that dwarfed the missiles to toys. The soldiers gulped. It was painfully obvious what they were standing in, the mammoth, twelve story tall triangle in a circle in a square carved into the wall on their left totally superfluous.

“Ai carumba,
it's a weapons cache for the Great Golden Ones!” a voice breathed in awe.

Another Marine gave a grunt. “No kidding.”

“But if Silverside is in charge of Buckle,” added another soldier thoughtfully. “Then he must know about this place.”

“So either the Gees are really crooks, which is highly doubtful, or this Silverside guy must have turned traitor for some reason and have taken over the place for himself.”

“Great!” somebody remarked, checking the action on her nameless assault rifle. “Then killing the creep won't be marked against us, but will actually be a point in our favor. Why heck, we might even get a reward.”

While the soldiers eagerly discussed the possible monetary aspects of the situation, Lt. Sakadea fiddled with the controls in his helmet and tried the radio again. “Landing party to
Ramariez
, can you read me? Over.” But only the static of the jamming field answered him.

Damn, this must be the source of the interference the bridge had encountered in Leader Silverside's office. Made sense. With the advent of modern sensors, you couldn't hide something anymore by just burying it under a couple million tons of rock and ore. But without contact with the ship, the Marines were on their own. Okay, no problem.

Weapon in gauntlet, Sgt. Lieberman waddled forward. “Orders, lieutenant?”

“Regardless of our location, we will continue the search for the robot,” the officer said brusquely. “Our mission is to obtain an HN cube. That objective will be accomplished.”

The Marine nodded. Sounded good, now if only they could do it.

Although not designed for fleetness, Leader Silverside had nevertheless made good its escape, frantically shucking missiles along the way and taking refuge in a utilities closet inside one of the flange support legs of the Nova Grade laser. Lacking anything more appropriate, it barred the door with an electro-mop.

Feeling safe, at least for the moment, the droid took the opportunity to remove the unexploded missile from between its eye-cameras and deposit the filthy thing on a nearby shelf. The nervous machine then uncoiled its most delicate manipulators, removed a saffron-colored toolbox from inside itself, and began to patch the gaping wound in its forehead. With good reason, the droid was scared lubricantless. In its many years of running Buckle, the robot had never before been damaged in a fight. The act of getting shot in the head with an armor-piercing missile was most unpleasant, and the droid had absolutely no intention of ever letting such a calamity happen again. Hot Void, no.