Dark Dragons (22 page)

‘Okay, everyone access my readouts.  I’m going to show
our reentry point.’

‘Got it,’ Tony said.

‘I’m in,’ Nate replied.

‘Ditto,’ Jorge said.

Darren accessed Jupiter’s plot once again and selected the
closest moon next to Io, Thebe, a lonely little rock sixty miles in diameter
and currently four hundred thousand miles from Io.

‘We’ll exit metaspace, here’——Darren marked a red glyph on
the map——‘just on the opposite side of Thebe from Io and do a little
spying.  The computer indicates a fourteen minute jump.’

He entered Thebe’s position into the warp drive computers
and primed the metaspace thrusters, heard the generators whine to a vibrating
growl.  The charge level on Darren’s visor climbed to eighty percent,
seconds from reaching one hundred.

He leaned back in his seat just as a two-toned beep in his
earphones informed him that the warp drives were at max charge.  Before he
thought-activated his fighter into metaspace, he took a last look at Earth
behind him.

Why did he suddenly feel cold?  Was he really doing
this?  Everyone he loved lived down there.  Mom had shacked up with
Sam somewhere, unaware that her only child was in outer space and about to jump
into the quantum unknown.  He wondered what Vanessa was doing.

A dark circle opened in front of him, blocking out the stars
behind it.  At the edges, trapped star-images bunched together to form a
sparkling wreath of light, and Darren felt a momentary tug as the fighter
lunged forward into the puncture.  Goose bumps rose on his skin, and he
heard a ringing in his ears build and fade away.  As suddenly as the abyss
appeared, it vanished, along with the sea of stars around him.  The
universe had completely disappeared.  No stars, no sun or Earth, nothing
but blackness.

Darren felt gnawing panic seep into him.  Isolation and
claustrophobia, with a little fear thrown in, suddenly overwhelmed rational
thought.  He was gone from everyone and completely closed off. 
Darren tried to communicate with his friends but heard nothing over the
comm-set.  Even the drone from the engines had stopped, and the only sound
he could hear was his own ragged breathing.

He wasn’t sure if he did something wrong.  Could he get
back?  Maybe this was how metaspace travel looked and felt.  He would
be glad when he returned to his own universe——Jupiter, Earth, he didn’t care
which.

*

Colonel Towsley was finally bound for George Air Force Base
aboard the APIS’s C-21A Learjet, along with Major Deanna Weinholt and General
Taggart.  Towsley was staring out the window, picking out animal shapes in
the clouds, when the sat-radio signaled.  He picked up the headset.

“Tango,” he said.

He heard the voice-recognition computer acknowledge him with
a beep, followed by Admiral Breuer’s voice.  “Colonel?  We just
monitored visual Flash Traffic.  Four bogeys just left the atmosphere from
East Pacific sector about two minutes ago.”

“Heading?”

“Two-one-six, but we aren’t sure of destination because they
just up and disappeared on us.  We got a GEODSS visual track from our Maui
station when they came into line-of-sight.  Medusa Stare acquired
telescope lock, too.  No radar echo or infrared from the targets.”

Towsley stared directly ahead.  “Did our weapons engage
at all?”

“They locked on with visual-remote but shut down when the
bogeys vanished on us.  They were quicker than hell, colonel.”

“Thanks for keeping me abreast, admiral.”

*

A soft beeping emanated from somewhere inside the cockpit,
but in the absence of sound, it reverberated like a roar.  Darren looked
out to see he was finally coming out of metaspace.  The stars blurred into
focus, and he heard ringing build in his ears.  The fighter shuddered when
the black and silent universe of metaspace spit the Dragonstar back into the
known realm of matter.  The sea of stars returned, and directly to
starboard lay a dark brown orb pocketed with craters.  Thebe.  Nothing
exciting, really.  Just a drab little rock.

Darren looked to port, and the contrasting view there was
distinct and imposing, a majestic sight which made him feel even smaller. 
He had seen the Voyager pictures of Jupiter in science books and on television,
even printed a few color photos for his science report, but they didn’t quiet
steal the breath the way the Roman King of Gods did personally up close. 
White-blue splotches of lightning flashed like strobes across the planet’s dark
side, from pole to pole.  Multi-colored cloud bands of pinks and oranges,
reds and yellows swirled and eddied, but the titanic hurricane, the Great Red
Spot, went unchallenged in the Jovian skies.  Darren couldn’t really scale
Jupiter to size which seemed nothing more than a tie-dyed orb ten feet in
diameter five feet away, but he had to keep reminding himself that Earth’s
dimensions would be equal to a baseball held at arm’s length.

‘That is off the hook, G!’ Nate murmured.  ‘I can’t
believe we’re here.’  His Dragonstar had reentered two kilometers off
Darren’s starboard.  Then Jorge’s fighter appeared.  A few seconds
later, Tony joined them.

Nate was right.  They
were
here.  Millions
of lonely miles from home.  Darren suddenly felt icy, alone, but quickly
redirected his attention on the elaborate functions of his fighter to keep his
mind occupied.  He checked the frequency hopper to verify the
effectiveness of their tap-proof communications.  Check. 
Active-stealth assimilation field.  Check.  Their Dragonstars were quite
hidden from the universe.  All weapons systems primed.  ECM suite
functional.

‘Let’s form up,’ Darren said.  ‘Keep your active
sensors offline and follow me in.’

*

When the computers sensed they were approaching Thebe and
its rising gravity well, they automatically shut down the sub-light engines and
fired the slower anti-graviton emitter drives.  Although Darren
appreciated this safety feature, it was annoying.  Like any pilot, he got
off on the speed.

Just sixty meters above Thebe’s rocky surface, the guys
swooped over the dark terrain at 1.5 mps.  Their passive aerial mass
displacement sensor sweeps detected no fast moving blips yet.  Darren
tuned the AMDS for long range scan and to its highest setting to locate low
mass objects.  He found several, and the computer immediately disregarded
slow moving asteroids and icy balls floating throughout the Jovian system and
highlighted several objects that had identical density ratios and were under
their own power, all of them buzzing around a central point that he assumed was
Io.  Most were lightweight mass shadows, probably fighters, while other
objects were extremely heavy, one in particular.  A troop carrier, Darren
guessed.  He wouldn’t be able to properly ID and catalog them until he
used his synthetic-aperture laser-radar.  Which would also give away his
location.  No go on that yet.

They crested a short mountain, and finally Io appeared above
the horizon.  Darren immediately activated the targeting telescope in the
fighter’s nose and aimed the camera at the red and orange mottled orb. 
From his vantage point, Io looked similar to typical medieval interpretations
of  Hell with its seas of molten sulfur and hot gases of sulfur dioxide
spewing into the thin atmosphere.  Darren could see what looked like water
fountains scattered across the tormented surface but were actually volcanic
ejecta shooting hundreds of miles into space before gravity pulled the debris
back to the surface.  Io was indeed a world literally turning itself
inside out, agitated so by Jupiter’s intense gravity.

The Dragonstar’s computer spotted a Vorvon base northeast of
a particularly large caldera.  Darren increased magnification.  A
circular metal city, like the hub and radial spokes of a sports car wheel,
occupied the bottom of a crater.  There were several oddly shaped
structures and hundreds of lights scattered across the complex, which appeared
to be nearly fifteen miles across.  Support vehicles slowly buzzed around
the base like fireflies above a nest.  Twelve domes, each perhaps a
quarter-mile in diameter, circled the fortress in the obvious defensive
formation of anti-spacecraft batteries.

‘Why would they build a base on a moon like that?’ Darren
asked.

‘They could be using geothermic energy to produce power,’
Tony replied, his true intelligence showing through the self-imposed, dumb-kid
facade.  ‘Or maybe they’re mining something.  Sulfur, uranium,
whatever.’

‘Look on the other side of the moon,’ Jorge said. 
‘What is that?’

It hung in a low-orbit above Io and had six large gray orbs
clumped together, four forming a square, the other two above and below
them.  From the various parallax angles calculated by the telescope, the
computer estimated the object to be just under fifty miles in diameter.

‘They look like storage tanks,’ Nate said.  ‘My pops
has pictures of the Exxon plant in Alaska where he used to work.  Big
tanks there.’

‘I think you’re right,’ Darren said.  ‘That’s not a
military base on the surface.  It’s some kind of refinery.’  A
methodical procession of cylindrical vessels docking to the giant tanker in
orbit and returning to the alien complex certainly gave the impression of fuel
transportation in action.  ‘They’re using Io as a fuel depot.’

*

Behind them, a metaspace portal opened and spewed a
nightmare into the universe.   The silhouette of a great monster
suddenly materialized against the bright Jovian surface and approached quickly,
silently, undetected.

*

‘We have a wonderful opportunity here for mischief,’ Darren
mused.  ‘We can use a proton destroyer on that tanker and zap the refinery
with our singularity miss——’

Thebe suddenly went dark.  Sunlight reflecting off
Jupiter for some reason suddenly quit shining.  Darren had a cold
sensation of doom sink into him before he turned in his seat to check his
six.  ‘Oh my Jesus God.’

A black moon, 1,400 miles in diameter according to the mass
displacement sensor, bore down on them.  Or at least it had once been a
moon, but the Vorvons, employing some unknown and incredible feat of gargantuan
engineering, had transformed the barren world into a spaceship.  The
entire equator was gone, the aliens having blasted out the midsection to
accommodate the ship at the core, or perhaps it had been obliterated by an
enemy weapon which had exposed the vessel underneath.  Several craters
spread across the basaltic surface were actually charred to a glassy black, no
doubt as the result of harmless thermonuclear strikes which the moonship wore
like proud scars, badges attesting to its invincibility.  The most
distinguishing feature——a gargantuan scar hundreds of times larger and deeper
than the Grand Canyon stretched across the southern hemisphere.  It could
have only been created by a massive kinetic weapon striking from an oblique
angle but failing to kill the behemoth.  The ship itself at the core had no
true symmetry, just mountains upon mountains of steel piled upon one another,
clamping both hemispheres together into a misshapen, hourglass shape.

From out of the moonship’s depths came a tight, fast moving
formation of flat X-shaped assault cruisers, twenty-eight of them, each thirty
miles in length.  The aft section of each vessel had an X-shaped winged
configuration while the front half of the ships looked like elongated
clamshells.  Moored along the X-wing arrays of each cruiser were countless
triangular troop carriers, themselves about a mile across.  Darren picked
out one cruiser and began counting troop carriers attached to its hull. 
He counted forty before the flight of colossal assault cruisers passed overhead
for Io
.  Eleven hundred and twenty troop carriers total
, he
thought. 
Each carrier over a mile wide, a battalion-size force aboard
each, maybe an entire division.
 That meant a surface force anywhere
from eight hundred thousand to three million alien troops.

‘I didn’t think we would be this outnumbered,’ Nate
whispered, processing the same conclusion.

Any God-like feelings of invincibility pumping through their
veins had now been sucked out of them and cast to the winds.  Darren felt
colder, depressed, and very scared.

The moonship passed overhead one hundred thousand miles away
and proceeded for Io.  Darren spotted eight enormous engine thrusters on
the moonship’s surface arranged in a cross-shape.

‘What are we going to do, Darren?’ Tony asked.

‘Get the hell outta here before they spot us,’ Nate replied. 
‘That’s what.’

‘Let’s just sit tight and watch,’ Darren told them. 
‘Maybe we’ll learn something.’

On the AMDS scopes, the twenty-eight assault cruisers began
to quickly insert themselves into polar orbits around Io.  In just four minutes,
they were all in line.  Suddenly, brilliant laser pulses flashed downward
into Io, stirring up the moon’s already violent surface.  They were
shooting at several targets on the ground.

‘What are they doing?’ Jorge wondered.

‘I don’t know,’ Darren replied.  ‘Target practice
maybe.  Keep your telescopes on them.’

The AMDS sensors indicated that new signals had appeared
from the cruisers——the troop carriers.  They cast off from their berths
and now roamed free from their motherships, all 1,120 of them.  Seconds
later, the troop carriers began deorbit maneuvers.

‘They’re playing war games,’ Darren said.  This was
definitely a military exercise on a grand scale, something that would both
impress and scare the hell out of the generals at the Pentagon, he thought.

When the troop carriers arrived at an altitude of two
kilometers, each ship disgorged a squadron of what Darren guessed to be fully
loaded dropships since he could only see their drive flares from this
distance.  The tiny lights swarmed toward the volcanic surface like flies
on a corpse.  The entire exercise had taken only
ten minutes
to
complete.