Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (21 page)

Firing broke out ahead, and the humans slowed so as not to pile up with those in front. After a moment, their progress resumed more slowly, and they passed a small destroyed drone, now unrecognizable. Moments later the group came to a large intersection that included not only crossing horizontal tunnels but four ramps as well, leading upward and downward from the corners. It was a multilevel crossroads.

Trissk spoke into his communicator and the Ryss scattered in several directions, all going forward toward the bow and more operational reactors.

By Rick’s HUD, the various Marine and Ryss forces had cleared the back half of the ship for war drones and emplaced automatic weaponry. He’d noticed many old, broken-down or cannibalized emplacements and realized that they were fighting their way through a ship that was, by comparison, only barely capable of defending itself. Had Desolator been in possession of its full internal combat capacity, they would have been snuffed out like candles in a flood.

Trissk and five warriors took a ramp upward and Rick gunned his electric vehicle to follow. Corporal Melindez chased him with his fire team, controlling his vehicle better than the average Ryss.

At the top of the ramp they resumed their advance on the level above. Rick surmised there must be dozens, if not hundreds, of spacious decks, built for Desolator’s many large machines to rapidly move from place to place. Had they been trying to clear the ship deck by deck, it would have been an impossible task. However, they really were fighting only the machines that got in their way, in order to reach the reactors and shut them down.

Before they had set out in the war-cars, Trissk had explained to Rick: “The photonic drive uses an enormous amount of energy to initiate. Once it is in operation, it can be maintained with much less, but if we shut down enough auxiliary reactors,
Desolator
will not be able to continue at light speed. Then it will only be able to move with its single fusion drive, the only one still functioning, and it will be very slow.”

Rick had nodded. “That’s what our goal should be, then. Once
Desolator
is immobilized, my people’s military forces can converge and disable the insane device.”

“What will happen to us then?” Trissk had asked, watching Rick carefully.

“Humans and another race, the
Sekoi
, already live and work together in peace. I cannot speak for them, but I am sure humans would welcome the Ryss, and find you a place to live upon the planet where we dwell.”

“Are there meat animals there?” Trissk had asked hopefully.

“Many,” Rick had replied confidently, “though it remains to be seen whether you could digest them.”

“I don’t really care about
eating
them,” Trissk had said, ears twitching upward, nostrils flaring. “I just want to
hunt
and kill, at least once on my life,” he added wistfully.

Rick laughed in his war-car as he remembered that conversation.
Each to his own
, he thought.

A chattering up ahead shattered his reverie and he slowed instinctively. Melindez and his team raced around to both sides, and a moment later the hammering of the war-cars’ cannons filled the tunnel. Flashes and clouds of debris roiled ahead, and Rick hunched lower in his seat, closing his armored faceplate and consulted his HUD.

Two hundred scale meters ahead, the icon for one of the target reactors pulsed. With his eyes Rick could see that war drones and emplaced autoguns occupied positions defending it. Three Ryss war-cars were already mangled wrecks, and the others were being hit hard. Several had caught fire, their plastic parts ignited by the blue plasma of the enemy’s multi-legged walking drones.

“Fall back!” Rick yelled, amplifying his voice through his suit speakers for the Ryss’ benefit; his words were carried through suitcomm to Melindez and his fire team. “We need reinforcements.” He put his vehicle into reverse and eased it backward, watching as others did the same.

Suddenly Melindez’ war-car was thrown sideways by a terrific explosion, spinning it into a wall and dumping the Marine out on the deck. Rick changed to his forward gear again, driving up to reach out a hand. “Get on the back!” he yelled, forgetting that the suitcomm obviated the need to raise his voice, and waited until the corporal had clambered onto the rear of the war-car. There was no room in the one-man cockpit.

Keeping his nose toward the enemy, he backed the vehicle away. Ahead of him autoguns blazed, and sparks flew from the armor of his war-car nose. He triggered his own cannon, aiming at nothing in particular, just to give himself cover fire.

Suddenly other war-cars swept up next to him and fired as well. This was fortunate, as two armored war drones rolled from behind barriers and began advancing on them. These were shaped more like small wheeled tanks than the insectoid kinds they had seen before. These also seemed different from the others in another way…they looked clean, and new, somehow, rather than battered and old.

Rick didn’t have time to wonder about it before war-car shells slammed into the two enemies, marring their pristine surfaces. The mini-tank guns spoke, and two more war-cars, one Ryss and one Marine, blew up in spectacular displays of destruction.

“Those guns are too heavy! Get out of here!” Rick yelled, and scooted his war-car into a side corridor to maneuver out of the line of fire. Reversing all the way to the next intersection, he asked more calmly, “You okay back there, Melindez?”

“Yes, sir. I’m getting off here, sir. I gotta get up there.” The Marine hopped down and rotated his back-rack off, then pulled out an anti-armor rocket launcher from it.

“Wait a moment, Corporal. Ready your rocket and get back on the back. When they go by, we’ll ambush them together.”

Once Melindez complied, Rick backed into a further cross-corridor and then stepped out of the war-car to peek around the corner. Once he saw the enemy mini-tank go by, he jumped back in the seat and said, “Hang on!”

Roaring forward, he skidded around the corner and gunned it out into the main corridor, turning to follow the enemy war drones. Their guns were facing the retreating Ryss and Marines, and firing intermittently at longer range. Rick slowed at what he thought to be the right distance. “Hop off and shoot!”

Melindez jumped down with cybernetic agility, racing forward to take a position in a doorway, aiming his anti-armor rocket at the back of the enemy combat vehicle. Sighting quickly, he triggered the launcher, and the rocket banged out across the short intervening space to impact against the rear of the thing.

Its shaped charge forged a white-hot tongue of molten metal against the flat armor, burning through in an instant. The mini-tank blew apart with a satisfying explosion as its ammo cooked off.

At the same time Rick aimed his war-car gun at the right rear wheel of the other enemy, not sure whether his shells would penetrate its protection.
Probably not armor-piercing
, he thought, since it was made to fight mindless Meme bio-constructs made of flesh. Firing, he was happy to see it damage the solid rubber-like tire, causing the mini-tank to slow and wobble.

Frantically, Melindez reloaded his rocket launcher, racing against time as the damaged enemy turned jerkily to bring its gun to bear.

To complicate matters, Rick suddenly noticed the impacts of autogun fire on the back armor of his war-car, then he felt the vehicle settle and scrape as his tires were shredded. He found himself caught between enemies.

Hitting a switch until then unused, the vehicle gave a lurch and rolled ninety degrees. The cockpit cage he was in gimbaled upright, and at the end of the evolution he had a new set of tires on the deck.

Unfortunately that did not solve his autogun problem, and shells continued to hammer away at his back armor. One round slammed into his right elbow as he let it get too far outside the open edge, and his arm went numb.

I’m not physically enhanced like the Marines
, he reminded himself, and gunned his war-car forward and around the side of the semi-functional war-drone away from its working cannon.

Unfortunately that gun was now pointed at Melindez, who fired a fraction of a second before the mini-tank did. Rocked by an explosion, the enemy lifted up its nose, and its gun went off while it pointed at the overhead. Its shell exploded, ripping a hole in the metal ceiling and showering a slew of hot debris on the Marine crouched in the doorway.

It then slammed down nose-first, its forward wheels in ruins, its back ones resting on rubble and its gun pointing toward the deck. Melindez dug his way out of the mess as Rick maneuvered the war-car in behind the wrecked tank, using it as cover against the autoguns. “Can you make it to me?” he called.

“Not sure, sir,” the Marine said from his doorway. Autogun fire, drawn by his movement, tore chunks from the jamb, and ricocheted into the niche, pieces striking Melindez’ armor with painful thuds. “I don’t think so.”

“Hunker down there, then. You’re okay for now. Maybe you can open that door behind you.” Switching channels, Rick checked his HUD for the nearest Marine forces.

“Captain Bryson, this is Commander Johnstone, come in,” he radioed.

“Bryson here, sir. Kind of busy.” Rick heard the whines and thuds of weapons fire.

“A Marine and I are pinned down. Can you send me a squad to take out these autoguns?” He caused the friendly and enemy icons to flash on Bryson’s HUD.

“Just as soon as I can, sir,” Bryson said resignedly.

Rick could hear the disgust in the Marine captain’s voice, as he probably thought he was weakening his own force to get a stupid Navy officer out of an unnecessary jam. As long as the man sent help, he really didn’t care what Bryson thought.

Just then the damaged enemy mini-tank fired its cannon from its awkward nose-down position. Gun pointed sharply at the floor, the blast threw another shower of debris onto Melindez, burying him in the doorway, and incidentally rocked the war drone back onto its wheels. It now had a distinct forward slope but with its gun elevated as high as possible it could probably fire out to a range of fifty meters, if awkwardly at the floor.

Rick’s war-car was within fifty meters.

Pulling the controls toward him, he backed up as fast as he could, presenting his front armor to the wounded mini-tank. He hated to leave Melindez but he had to get out of the thing’s line of fire.

Triggering his own gun, Rick watched with satisfaction as his shell slammed into the enemy, knocking it briefly sideways before inexorably lining up on him again. Then it fired.

Backing up the way he was, he had a front-row seat as the floor before him exploded. The war drone’s shell had plowed up the deck where he had been just a moment before, but now he was too far away, skating backward. Stuck downward as the thing’s cannon was, it could not reach him.

Or so he thought.

Still backing, he watched as the clever machine climbed its damaged fore-wheels up onto a piece of its fallen fellow, elevating its whole front end and, incidentally, its gun.
Oh, crap
, Rick thought just before an explosion knocked the enemy war-drone sideways and off its perch. Melindez’s rocket had come just in time, as he finally pulled his war-car around a corner and out of the line of fire.

“Bryson, where is that squad! I still have autoguns pinning down Corporal Melindez, and there’s a damaged war drone with a functional cannon here,” he said angrily, highlighting all the positions on the captain’s HUD.

“They should be flanking the autoguns momentarily,” Bryson said calmly. It sounded like his own fight was done with.

“Those guns and the war drones were guarding a fusion generator. As soon as you relive Melindez, disable it,” Rick ordered.

“I just might do that, sir,” Bryson said dryly. “Bryson out.”

A motion to Rick’s right startled him, but it was only Trissk with three other war-cars pulling up beside him – two Marines and one Ryss.

“Can we help?” the young male asked.

Rick held up his palm, hoping the gesture to wait was understood, as he switched to the two Marines’ channel. “Melindez is pinned down up there. Bryson is supposed to be hitting the autoguns momentarily. When they do, can you go and get him?”

“Damn right, sir,” one of them replied, and the two raced up to wait at the corner, ready to dash in.

“Trissk,” Rick said, flipping up his visor, “the human combat specialists have better armor and weapons than yours. They will help their comrade.”

The Ryss sighed wearily, visibly exhausted and covered with cuts and bruises. Without armor, every ricochet or piece of shrapnel meant a wound. “As you wish. Your people are great warriors.”

Rick did not disagree, not wanting to offend the Ryss’ taboos by explaining that the Marines were full of augmentations. Undoubtedly in their natural state the Ryss were fearsome indeed, with their size and strength and claws and teeth.

Besides,
he thought to himself,
humans
are
great warriors when they have to be. Just not me…not the way they mean. I wonder what they will think of our female Marines… Probably best to let Bull be the liaison, once he learns the Ryss language.

Checking his HUD, he saw a platoon of Marines engage the autoguns from the side. Moments later, the professionals had disabled the enemy machines and shut down the reactor, and Rick, Trissk, Melindez, two surviving Marines and one remaining tough old Ryss warrior began digging out their dead and wounded.

Kirst’aa ambled over and poked at the dead thing with her ancient walking stick. “So you got him in the end,” she remarked. “Good thing, since he was of your clan. I thought we females would have to do your dirty work for you.”