“Okay, forget about the Highborn then,” Marten said. “The point is we should be joining forces to take out the cyborgs.”
“Join Social Unity?” asked Tan. “They obliterated the Jovian expeditionary fleet many years ago.”
“No, I’m not taking about
joining
Social Unity. I fled from them, remember?”
“What do I care about your past actions? You must make your meanings clear, barbarian.”
“Bah!” Marten said. “You’re drugged. Why am I even bothering with you?”
“I possess the superior intellect. I have trained my entire life so I can control my emotions and think logically.”
“Yeah, sure,” Marten said. He scowled, and he pressed both palms onto the metal table. “You said it earlier. You looked into the future, and no humans looked back at you. That tells me we have to bury our differences and band together. Every human left in the Solar System needs to unite, just as the various Jovians united here.”
“I cannot believe that Social Unity rulers would agree to abide under the Dictates.”
“They won’t. But they might agree to fight together against the cyborgs. Use that superior intellect of yours and think about what I’m saying.”
Tan pursed her lips. She opened her mouth, but before she uttered any words, a klaxon began to wail.
Gharlane withdrew his blade from the warm carcass. It collapsed in a seemingly boneless fashion at his feet. Kneeling, Gharlane plucked the hammer-gun from the corpse’s belt. He searched and found extra ammo magazines.
Gharlane had drifted through space for endless hours, submerged in a coma. His life-readings had been underneath the threshold of any sensors that had scanned his region of space. After a precise length of time, an internal chronometer had clicked and he’d been injected with vigorous stims. Upon waking, he’d discovered that his calculations had been off by point zero-zero-two percent. As he’d floated in space, he’d fired a spring-loaded spear gun. It had shot a barb with monofilament fiber over a kilometer, attaching to the dreadnaught’s particle-shield. Gharlane had reeled himself to the dreadnaught, crawled between two particle-shields and gained entry into the ship.
“Override,” he now whispered in the ship, adding a sequence of binary numbers. He overrode the calming chemicals in his bloodstream and gave himself combat-enhancing injections. His existence would end during the next few minutes. The achievement of his goal—that was primary.
The ship corridor was narrow, and there was a trace of oil in the atmosphere indicating working mechanisms and recycled air. The nearly imperceptibly-vibrating deckplates showed that the fusion engine was online.
Gharlane surged forward, colliding into a bio-form that came fast around the corner. Over three times its weight, Gharlane knocked the bio-form backward and off its feet. Its head snapped back hard against a deckplate, almost rendering the female unconscious. A precise kick of his vacc-suited foot against the female’s head killed it. A quick inspection of its torso added another hammer-gun to his growing collection.
Klaxons wailed as Gharlane trotted down the corridors—the ship was under centrifugal-gravity. He repeatedly emptied his hammer-guns, killing over two dozen humans, the last group obviously sent to intercept him. These were inferior specimens compared to the space marines that had stormed onto Athena Station. For a moment, he wondered if he could reach the fusion core and blow the entire ship.
No. The core would be protected. Every human captain had learned to guard it after the destruction of a Doom Star during the Martian Campaign. None of that mattered now, however.
Gharlane slammed a magazine into one of the hammer-guns. The other had malfunctioned. He’d sacrificed his last cyborgs so he could achieve this location. Chief Strategist Tan—she was a first level intellect that had used the Jovian military with canny ability. Web-Mind analysis of the Homo sapiens indicated the rarity of such unmodified first-level intellects. As primary targets, such rare individuals were to be expunged with extreme prejudice.
I will cease to exist soon. But I will take the first level intellect into the darkness with me
.
The death of such a militarily important target was, according to a Web-Mind’s parameters, worth the deletion of a planetary system’s controlling cyborg.
Gharlane jumped around a corner into a fusillade of shots. They’d been waiting for him. A hammer-bolt smashed against his chest-plate. Another caromed off his titanium-reinforced skull. Instead of falling onto his back, Gharlane bent onto one knee. Smoothly, he snapped off three shots before another hammer-bolt clipped his hip, spinning him.
Painkillers already flooded his bodily system. Boosters accelerated his reactions. From his kneeling position, he leaped at the nexus-node, firing with cyborg precision.
A blue-uniformed woman tumbled back, her forehead a gory ruin. Three other ship-guardians were already twisted into bleeding heaps, their weapons clattering across the deckplates.
“Die, you freak!” a guardian shouted. He had a pulse rifle poked around a corner. A red pulse ejected from the tube. It missed by a fraction, blowing a hole into the wall of the corridor and producing a metallic-smelling gout of black smoke.
Gharlane fired. The man’s throat became a red ruin as he cartwheeled away from the corner. Before the pulse rifle could hit the deckplates, Gharlane snatched it out of the air.
He moved like a giant insect in a blur of motion. Black blood dripped from several of his wounds. Gouged titanium showed in places. His vacc-suit was useless now, torn in a dozen spots.
One sobbing guardian tried to run away. Gharlane hurled his expended hammer-gun, catching the slow-moving creature in the neck. With a howl, the man flew off his feet and hit the flooring with his chest. Gharlane cracked his left elbow into the last guardian’s face, breaking bones. A punch into the thing’s throat finished it.
Turning into the corridor with the prone guardian, Gharlane charged down it toward the commander’s cubicle. He connected with his steel-toed boot, caving in the guardian’s forehead. Then he moved his legs like pistons, firing from the hip as he sprinted through the ship.
He was at eighty-three percent capacity, the enemy shots having taken a toll of his efficiency. He was a master unit cyborg: heavier, and constructed of more durable materials than the combat models.
I will die soon. I will cease. Chief Strategist Tan defeated me. She cannot be allowed life. I must end her existence
.
A growl alerted Gharlane. His lips drew back into a platinum smile. He spun around the last corner, firing the pulse rifle, adjusting as the pulse ejected from the tube.
A myrmidon sprang. The red pulse blew it backward, leaving a gaping hole in its thick chest.
Two others charged. There was no finesse to their attack. Stun impulses struck Gharlane’s body. It felt like steel balls slamming against him. The stun-shots would have dropped a Homo sapien and would have forced a Highborn to his knees. The stuns disoriented Gharlane. Then pain-rejecters momentarily numbed his nerve endings.
He fired the pulse rifle, and clipped a myrmidon’s shoulder. The attacking creatures snarled, and each stroked his body with their shock rods. Gharlane punched the pulse rifle’s tube into a myrmidon’s gut, achieving penetration. The thing howled, and it clawed his face. The other myrmidon must have recognized that its shock rod was having minimal effect. It dropped the rod and attacked barehanded.
Gharlane freed his blade, burying it in a myrmidon’s chest. The creature possessed amazing vitality, however. It kept attacking. So did the other, and it was damaging him. His efficiency had dropped to seventy-nine percent, and was dropping several percentage points each second of combat.
Yanking the blade free, Gharlane slashed and stabbed with cyborg speed and strength. If the myrmidons had held combat knives, it might have ended differently. But they didn’t.
Gharlane drew a ragged breath as he hurled the gene-warped creatures from him. Black blood soaked his vacc-suit, mingling with red myrmidon blood. Graphite-strengthened bones showed in places.
One myrmidon flopped on the deckplates, twitching in death. The other mewled with rage, attempting to crawl back into combat. But its back was broken and it made minimal progress.
Gharlane bent down to retrieve his pulse rifle.
The door to the commander’s chamber swished open. Gharlane didn’t waste time looking up. With blurring speed, he grabbed the rifle and hurled himself forward. While airborne, he lifted the rifle and paused a fraction of a second. He’d expected more charging myrmidons or humans leaning out of the door. He didn’t expect to see a man standing in the doorway, aiming a long-barreled slugthrower, tracking him.
Gharlane’s finger twitched. Maybe it was the sixty-eight percent efficiency. Maybe the man was just fast. He beat Gharlane to the trigger. The slugthrower bucked in his hands, and a dum-dum bullet exploded the pulse rifle, causing the pulse-shot to fizzle.
Landing on the deckplates, Gharlane scrambled fast, charging the human. If the human had hidden behind the door, shown even a margin of timidity—
The man with the slugthrower snapped off shots. Each dum-dum bullet blew off chunks of flesh and graphite-bones and twisted titanium-reinforcement. The kinetic force of the shots also slowed Gharlane. The man’s firm stance, his deliberate tracking and near perfect shots—each one telling effectively—caused Gharlane to smash against a bulkhead instead of taking out the human.
The man’s hands blurred as he slammed in a fresh clip. Gharlane lifted his torso, and he gathered himself for a final assault. If he could get into the room, he would detonate himself. Maybe he should detonate himself now and hope the blast reached Tan. She had to be in the room.
The man fired, aiming at the brainpan. Dum-dum bullets jarred the casing.
Explode
, Gharlane thought. It was his last.
The final fusillade of bullets mashed enough brain tissue to garble the neuron impulses. The explode sequence never reached the explosives.
The man with the gun killed the master unit cyborg.
Marten sat across from Chief Strategist Tan.
It was a day after the cyborg had died in the corridor. After-battle analysis had proven it was a unique cyborg, unlike the skeletal kind. Further analysis had been impossible. The team examining the cyborg had died in the blast that had obliterated it.
Tan knelt on a cushion. The pill dispensary was gone, although the silver chalice was still there. She pushed a twin chalice toward Marten before lifting a decanter and pouring him white wine.
Marten accepted by lifting the chalice and sipping. It was a dry wine, with a hint of peach flavoring. He wore a black Force-Leader uniform. Today, there had been no argument about his having a sidearm.
“Your dialogue yesterday was persuasive,” said Tan.
Marten nodded, but kept silent. Yesterday, the two of them had watched on her embedded table-screen as the cyborg advanced through the corridors. Marten had urged her to flee while there was time. She’d sat frozen, fixated on the death machine. Finally, Marten had decided to use the spy-sticks, to time his entry into the battle at the perfect moment. Even so, it had been a near thing.
“I had thought earlier….” Tan bit her lower lip. She frowned, and she glanced to her right. It was where the dispensary had been. Her right hand seemed to twitch involuntarily, as if wanting to press a switch to gain a blue pill.
“My thoughts yesterday were selfish,” Tan said. “I believed it was possible to rebuild our system as the cyborgs invaded Social Unity planets or other Outer Planets.”
“We can rebuild,” Marten said.
“I thought it would be possible to arm ourselves with enough satellites and warships to defeat any cyborg armada.” Tan shook her head. “The way the cyborg moved yesterday—it slew the myrmidons with ease.”
“Cyborgs are deadly,” Marten agreed.
Tan’s brow furrowed. “I ordered space marines to go down onto Athena Station and face them. Seeing that thing yesterday—I ordered those space marines to their deaths.”
Marten nodded as he tried to gauge the Chief Strategist. Did she feel real sorrow, or was this an act? Could someone as certain and arrogant as she’d been yesterday change her opinion so quickly? He didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t know.
“Tomorrow,” Tan said, “I plan to open negotiations with Mars, with the Planetary Union leaders. Then I will speak with the leaders of Social Unity.”
“What do the controllers of Europa and Ganymede have to say about that?” Marten asked.
She looked up at him. “I showed the controllers a video of the cyborg’s assault. I told them it detonated itself during examination. How it managed to get onboard…. Why did scientists develop such things?”
“Why did eugenicists create the Highborn?” Marten asked.
“We must unite,” Tan said. “The Solar System must band together to destroy these things. You were right in telling me that.”
Marten wondered about that. He and Omi had talked last evening. Usually Omi didn’t say much. He did point out that he remembered a vicious gang leader in Sydney that the other members had hated more than feared. The leader had kept power by involving them in a deadly and ongoing turf-war. Everyone had recognized the leader’s gift at street fighting, and had been content to follow him as long as they were engaged against a tougher gang. Was Tan like that leader?