The Highborn twisted even as he slapped a sealant to his faceplate. Marten’s shells burned into the heavy shoulder-plate, disabling the Highborn’s arm, but they failed to kill. The Highborn used his good arm, lifting his big gyroc rifle, aiming at Marten. Marten frantically tore out his empty magazine. He wasn’t going to make it.
Then, out of the corner of his faceplate, he saw a Cognitive missile streak down at them. For a wild second, his gut clenched.
I’m going to die
.
The missile seemed to zoom right at him. Maybe something was wrong with its targeting acquisition. Before the Highborn could pull his trigger, however, before Marten could slam in a fresh magazine, the missile slammed into the enemy giant, exploding, saving Marten’s life.
It took a split-second for Marten to realize he was still alive. Then it was time to enter the
Mao Zedong
.
***
Marten Kluge crept through the crippled missile-ship. He’d shed his thruster-pack, clutched his gyroc rifle and used his magnetic boots.
It was dark in the long corridors and the tight chambers. He used infrared sight and kept up a schematic of the ship’s passageways on his HUD. His space marines followed him. Omi and Osadar lugged a plasma cannon. Group-Leader Xenophon led the squads in an adjoining corridor.
There was no sign of the Highborn. Had the enemy retreated deeper into the ship? Or had they exited to a hidden shuttle and even now readied nuclear missiles to pump into the warship? He should have left someone aboard the
William Tell
to monitor the situation. He hadn’t expected the patrol boat to survive, however. In truth,
he
hadn’t expected to survive this engagement with the Highborn.
His helmet beeped as the sensors picked up life-readings. “Four-G-nine,” Marten said.
“I see it,” Omi said. “It’s hot! They have weapons!”
Marten snapped orders as his stomach seethed. Somewhere inside him, he had hoped the fight was over. He should have known better. These were Highborn.
The space marines moved in the darkness, spreading out in the various corridors.
“Watch for booby-traps,” Marten radioed. His radio buzzed. He used his chin to click and accept.
“Careful,” Omi said. “They could be using the emplaced device we spotted as a locator or a directional finder.”
Marten nodded, even though he knew Omi wouldn’t be able to see the head gesture.
“Marten Kluge,” a Highborn said over the radio.
“Titus?” Marten asked, as he started in his combat-suit.
“I am
Centurion
Titus,” the Highborn said proudly. “You have reached the ship because of your faithlessness.”
“Wrong!” Marten said. “I’ve stormed the vessel because we’re better at this than you.”
“He’s moving,” Omi said. “Or someone is. He’s headed for the engine core!”
“Stormed?” Titus sneered over the radio. “You have stormed nothing, preman, but for your tomb. You are a dead man. We are all dead.”
“Yeah?” Marten asked.
“I am Centurion Titus, and I have pronounced your doom.”
“He’s moving fast!” Omi said.
“Is he attempting to maneuver us into an ambush?” Osadar asked.
Scowling, Marten tried to think past his knotted gut and the heaviness in his chest. They had made it onto the
Mao Zedong
. Against Highborn, they shouldn’t have been able to do that. What did it mean?
“De-magnetize,” Marten said. “We have to reach him before he blows the core.”
“Highborn are not suicidal,” Osadar said.
“But they do hate losing,” Marten said, “especially to premen.” He clicked a switch on his suit. The boot-magnets turned off and he lifted minutely. As he activated his palm-magnets, he jumped off the deck-plates. Slotting the rifle, Marten began to “swim” along the corridors. Instead of pushing against water, his magnetized palms gripped the walls as he pulled. He twisted his palms at the last moment, ripping off the magnetic holds. It was an art, and he was good at it. Marten propelled himself faster and faster, and clicked on a helmet-lamp. Infrared and schematics could only do so much—then old-fashioned eyesight was needed. The beam washed through the darkness, giving an eerie feeling to the compartments, making it seem like a ghost ship.
Behind him, the space marines followed. It was a race, and it was a terrible gamble chasing a Highborn so recklessly.
An explosion occurred in a side corridor—there was a flash to his left and the faintest of shudders.
“What was that?” a space marine shouted.
“A booby-trap,” Xenophon radioed. “Just like Athena Station. It killed Achilles, tore his head clean off. And it put a hole in a bulkhead.”
Marten grunted. Athena Station had been hell. It had been Cyborg Central for the Jovian System. The space marines had gone down and tried to root them out. At the end, the cyborgs used nuclear bombs to take hundreds of their enemy with them. Before that, there had been endless booby-traps and gun-battles.
“He
is
luring us,” Osadar said over the radio.
Marten didn’t think so. Centurion Titus just wanted to slow them down in order to give himself time. The Highborn would have foreseen the possibility of a fast-assault. Yet what if Osadar was right? He shook his head. Titus was headed for the core. That said it all.
“Go!” Marten shouted. “We have to reach him now.”
“What if—” Osadar said.
“Go!” Marten shouted. The clench in his gut was gone. This was a race. The Highborn should have already rigged the core to blow. Titus would have been too arrogant, however, to believe that premen could defeat even a handful of Highborn. The one SU missile—the S-80 nuclear weapon they’d carried from Earth—it must have taken out ninety-nine percent of the enemy. Had the Highborn been getting ready to leave?
The thoughts slid away as Marten propelled himself through the corridors. A second booby-trap would surely kill him. He was betting Titus hadn’t enough time to rig two. What shocked Marten—if he was right—was that a handful of Highborn would have tried to capture the
William Tell
. In their place, he would have destroyed the patrol boat.
Marten ducked his head as he shot through a hatch into the engine room. His beam of light washed over another hatch leading to the core. There was motion in there!
Magnetizing his boots, Marten twisted, even as he reached behind him. He grabbed the rifle, wrenched it free and aimed at the hatch. At the same time, the soles of his boots stuck hard to the wall, as he’d applied full magnetic power. He stood sideways in the room as his momentum propelled his torso, slamming him against the wall. The blow caused him to let go of the gyroc.
A space marine shot past him. Titus appeared in the hatchway and fired at nearly pointblank range. The laser-pulses tore open the stitches in the marine’s armor. Heat and smoking blood billowed. Red splashed against the wall. Scratch another Jovian.
With frantic haste, Marten grabbed the rifle. The Highborn was turning at bay. He couldn’t let the super-soldier kill any more of his marines. Marten’s torso bounced off the bulkhead, tossing him up sideways even as his boots remained magnetized to the wall. He sighted and fired. Two shells ignited in flight, zooming toward the core-hatch.
The beam quit as a gyroc shell flew through the hatch. The second exploded against a side of the hatch, gouging metal.
Marten shoved off the wall as he turned off his boots. He flew across the chamber, knowing he had to keep moving. Titus reappeared, his beam burning where Marten had been. Then the beam was tracking him, and it struck Marten’s stomach-plate. If the pulse-laser had started on him for these few seconds, it would have burned through the armor. Fortunately, Titus ducked behind the hatch again.
On his HUD, Marten saw the reason. Omi and Osadar set up the plasma cannon. A second later, a gout of orange, roiling plasma boiled in a mass toward the core-hatch. The plasma reached the hatch. Some of it vaporized against the sides, chewing through and melting it. Within the core chamber came an explosion.
Marten didn’t hesitate. This was the moment. He propelled himself toward the orange-glowing hatch. He moved through it with his rifle ready, careful to keep from touching the glowing hot metal.
In the chamber, Centurion Titus stood to the side of the hatch. The nine-foot Highborn raised his pulse-laser and might have tried to fire. The barrel had melted enough so it was inoperative. Marten and Titus must have realized this at the same instant. The Highborn released the laser and aimed his hand cannon, the one attached to his left arm. Marten snapped off a gyroc round—he was still sailing through the room.
The hand cannon fired a heavy slug, and it destroyed the gyroc rifle, shattering it into pieces. The gyroc shell—
The room and its occupant—the condition of both—finally penetrated Marten’s thoughts. Titus’s armor glowed hot from its nearness to the plasma blast. Through the faceplate, Titus appeared to be in agony. Beads of sweat rolled down a red and blistered face, and the eyes were wide and staring, showing Titus’s pain. The gyroc shell penetrated the heated armor, and the Highborn winced. His left shoulder—air expelled from the hole.
Automatically, it seemed, Titus slapped a patch to his armor, to the wrecked shoulder. Incredibly, the patch held. On the other arm, the hand cannon had jammed, likely also affected by the intense plasma-blast heat.
The slug that had destroyed Marten’s rifle had also slammed against him, pushing him off-course. He would have sailed into a glowing bulkhead or he might have sailed through it to the inner chamber. Because of the slug, Marten hit a different bulkhead.
At that moment, Titus jumped. His one arm was useless. He didn’t appear to have any effective weapons left. His body-armor must have been too hot, maybe even cooking him. But the Highborn was still very much alive.
Marten understood then. Centurion Titus didn’t leap at him. The Highborn sailed for the ruptured bulkhead. If Titus could reach the inner chamber, he could explode the core and kill everyone aboard the
Mao Zedong
.
Shifting, Marten gathered his legs under him and jumped at the Highborn. As he sailed through the chamber, Marten drew his vibroblade and clicked it on. The special alloy blade vibrated thousands of times per second, giving it greater cutting power.
Titus rotated, bringing his one good arm into play. Marten smashed against the giant, clicking on magnets. The armored, orange-glowing arm smashed against Marten’s helmet, and he heard something crack. In retaliation, the former shock trooper thrust the vibroblade. It vibrated harder, and it cut through the weakened Highborn armor, the blade shoving into Titus’s torso.
For a second, Marten and Titus stared faceplate-to-faceplate, eye-to-eye. Shock and pain roiled in Titus’s orbs. The giant moved his arm, maybe to make another blow. Marten twisted the vibroblade and he jiggled it.
Titus’s eyes bulged outward from the sockets. Blood seeped from his compressed lips. Then Centurion Titus whispered something as his lips moved. What he said was lost forever as the Highborn died, magnetically connected to Marten Kluge, his killer.
***
The next several hours proved horrifying. They found the SU crew. Some floated dead, still wearing vacc-suits. They had been shoved into closets, floating corpses. There were others in the shuttles: naked, shackled and many tortured and bruised. The Highborn had been getting ready to leave, about ninety of them. With the number of dead in the missile-ship, it appeared as if twenty-five Highborn per shuttle had originally flown to the warship.
“At least we put the missile-ship’s crew out of their misery,” Omi said later, speaking about the nuclear blast that had killed everyone in the shuttles.
Before they went outside to check the shuttles, however, they found something else. It was in the medical station—and it was devilish.
A naked Highborn lay strapped to an articulated frame. He wore a bulky helmet with many leads and lines sprouting from it, connected to a computer bank. Several dozen electrodes were taped to his discolored skin. As they watched, the electrodes zapped him, and he arched in agony as his muscles strained. When the electric flow stopped, stalks appeared from a medical unit. With a sharp, surgical implement on the end, the stalks flayed an area of skin. Another stalk with tiny claps peeled away the flesh. Disinfectants sprayed the wound. Then a mist of acid sprayed, and the groans from within the helmet were pitiful.
With an oath, Marten shot the machine until it
died
and then he began ripping electrodes from the Highborn. Omi unbuckled the helmet, tore it off and hurled it away. A wild-eyed Highborn strained to free himself. He gnashed his teeth as foam flecked at the corners of his mouth.
Shocked, Marten stared at the Highborn. He had a wide face, square chin and chiseled features, with the normal stark-white coloring. His hair had been shaved away, and he had two scars, one moving from his forehead into his hairline and the other along the left side of his face.
“Cassius?” Marten whispered.
The Highborn glared at him and spit in hatred, struggling more fiercely.
“No,” Marten said, recovering from his shock. “You’re not Cassius. You’re too young. You’re Felix, the Grand Admiral’s clone.”