Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (21 page)

Rock reached over and grabbed his helmet where he had placed the thing on the floor while firing. All the men in the ship had their suits on as did he. Rock just prayed they had a chance to get the helmets on as well. He had barely snapped his helmet locks closed and thrown the oxygen on when he saw a huge gash appear in the side of the Dynasoar.

And suddenly he was looking out at space itself. And even as he tried to yell out a warning he was being sucked out of his seat, into the void, into the blackness where a million billion star eyes were winking at him madly.

Twenty-Seven

H
e was floating. Floating amidst the chaos of the universe, amidst the chaos of war. Men were flying by all around him, pieces of men, glowing metal shrapnel. Lasers, bullets, small anti-personnel missiles, all whizzed everywhere.

Rock searched around for the whiz kids who had been sitting next to him just a second before, but couldn’t see a trace of them. He couldn’t locate the Dynasoar either.

There was so much debris flying around it was like being in a tornado; hard to see much of anything. He used his jetpack to rocket toward a large piece of steel plating about twenty-by-twenty-feet and hid behind it using it as a shield against a hail of Nazi fire.

Though it was hard to know just what to shield himself from since debris and arms fire came from virtually every direction, he did his best. Below, he could see the great wheel’s flaming sections burst into even brighter flames as they hit the upper atmosphere, then were sucked down like turds into a swirling toilet, turning swiftly. They were glowing ever hotter as they exploded and broke down into smaller pieces.

Little of it would reach the Earth, Rock thought with some satisfaction. Even if he croaked right now—they had saved the planet from Killov’s insane wrath—for the moment. The Wheel was kaput. And Killov too. There was
no way
he could have survived that inferno. And yet—

And then before his eyes Rock saw the rest of the Nazi fleet turn tail and run. They’d had enough. Cheers rang out as the Astro Frenchies screamed their joy inside hundreds of bizarre helmets. Rock crawled out from behind the steel slab and saw the Dynasoar floating about three hundred yards off. It was in two pieces, each turning around each other in a circle, like two slow-footed dancers in a perfect pirouette. Well, he sure as hell wasn’t driving that baby home any time soon. It had just joined the junk belt.

The helmet radio crackled and Rock heard a familiar voice. “Anyone alivez out dere? This eez Louis XIV on le pearl ship—are you zere?”

Rock let a grim smile flicker across his face as he came out of hiding and searched around for the Frenchie’s scavenger ship. But he couldn’t see it through the dense fog of steel and wires and human pieces that spun everywhere. It was like being inside one of those glass Christmas balls that you shake and there’s a blizzard. This was a blizzard of death. He tried to swim through the junk watching out for anything with jagged edges. One slice and he knew he was through out here.

It took nearly an hour before the French pearl ship picked him up. Rock dragged himself exhaustedly out of the airlock with a desperate look on his face. “My men—are they—” he gasped out at Louis XIV, grabbing his suit as the stubbly face opened the door.

“Zey are all herez ahead of vous, Rockson,” the Frenchie said, slapping him on the back. “Lostez only a few de your men, je thinkez. Vous are a worker de miracles. Zank you, zank you. From all of us Space Junkers we zank you from zee bot-tum des our hearts.”

Louis was all over Rock’s face with kisses and had to be forced to stop.

“Rock,” Chen exclaimed happily as he rushed up from the back of the main space sphere that led the chain of Louis XIV’s space friends’ spheres. The thing had fought well in combat. And the Frenchie felt not a little pride on that score. “We’re all accounted for except—Jenkins and Murdoch. And—”

“And who?” Rock asked, expecting the worst.

“Rajat. They can’t find a trace of him. Don’t know if he was blown up—or is still out there in the middle of nowhere. But—”

“Un minute,” Louis XIV said, resting his gloved hand on Rock’s shoulder. “We’re getting un message now. Zey will patchez us in.” Suddenly they could all hear the staticy words over the ship’s PA.

“Calling Dynasoar Strike Force, calling Space Strike Force, this is Rajat.”

“My God,” Rock said, grabbing his helmet and yelling into the inset mike. “Where the hell are you? They’ve been scouring the place and can’t find a—”

“I’m far off now. I would estimate about twenty thousand miles. I—I—was thrown out of the ship at high speed by the explosion. It’s weird, Rock, it ripped my lower suit apart, so my body is completely frozen—paralyzed. But left just enough of my lungs still heated and moving and my helmet functioning with oxygen and warmth—that I’m still somehow
alive.
I’m dead—but I’m still alive!”

“Rajat,” Rock said haltingly, “We’ll find you somehow, I swear.” Even as he spoke the words he glanced over at Louis XIV who was shaking his head slowly to indicate no. No—there was no way they could go out into the blackness of space that surrounded them and find the lad. If it was near, perhaps. But at that distance—no. And Rock knew the truth without a word being uttered.

“No, Rock, I know you can’t find me now,” Rajat chuckled with the same mischievous giggle he had always had. “I’m lost out here. Lost in Space.” He giggled again. “We used to watch those shows in C. C. Remember, Connors?”

“I remember Rajat,” the other whiz kid said as he stood at Rockson’s side, his spacesuit and helmet splattered with someone’s blood, not his own.

“It’s beautiful out here,” Rajat said in a whisper. “So many stars all around me. I can hear them singing almost, calling to me. I can’t move my arms or anything but I’m in a slow spiraling orbit, so I keep revolving and I get to see the entire cosmos. And my eyes—my
mind,
they are still functioning. Oh, it is so beautiful; I feel tears coming to my eyes. They’re singing,
the stars are singing.”

“Rajat!” Rock said hoarsely. “We will remember you always back on Earth, back in C. C. You saved mankind. Without you, we never would have had a—”

“Do not mourn for me, Rock,” Rajat chucked again though his voice was much weaker now. Yet it was filled with a powerful joy that they could sense even from twenty thousand miles. “I am a Hindu, and a spirit worshipper. Out here I can feel them all, Vishnu, Siva, Kali—all waiting for me, their loving spiral nebulae arms reaching out with knowledge and love.

“I shall be reborn. Reborn into star fire and space dust.
Love!
Give my love to, love—”

Suddenly there was a loud clicking of static and then nothing. They looked at each other and not a man could say a word. Nor was there an eye dry even among the toughest of them.

Twenty-Eight

T
he next day.

“You’re sure this will work?” Rock asked over the helmet mike to Louis XIV whose pearl ship hovered about a hundred yards away. They had given Rock and his men one of the spheres of the garbage craft, modified for atmosphere re-entry with parachutes attached all over the whole thing. Easy enough—just guide it in a perfect trajectory, wait until you feel the walls about to explode from heat and pressure—then pull the chutes to stop the fall. The old-fashioned way of returning to Earth.

Yet the Astro Frenchies had performed a few miracles already. Not the least of which was Rock finding McCaughlin up and around when he got back inside the ship. The treatment had worked. The swelling was gone, the redness back in his cheeks. And an appetite as big as a house that a dozen helpings of the Frenchie iron-gruel wouldn’t assuage.

But now, inside the junk ball with Rock and Connors at the controls, the single whiz kid was having his difficulties trying to figure out the exact descent path on an old Macintosh computer—the only thing the Astro Frenchies could dig up to give them from their collection of junk. With the Dynasoar gone, Connors was on his own. And though he was smart, Rajat had been the driving force behind the duo. He and Rockson would just have to fake it.

“Well, I guess this is it,” Rock said as Connor tilted the wheel of the strange craft, Louis XIV had gone over the steering at least ten times. It wasn’t like they had a hell of a long way to fly. Rock had asked the junk fleet commander to join them, to bring the fleet down. “Think of it—grass, dirt beneath your feet, blue skies above your head.”

“To you, these are things wonderful,” Louis XIV had laughed, “mais for us, we, Le Space Rats—no way. Now havez whole new collection scroungez through. We are settez pour another hundred years.”

“We’d better move,” Connors said nervously, he wasn’t use to operating without the constant interaction with Rajat. “We’re got to come in at just the right angle—they call it an atmosphere keyhole. Don’t make it—and the door gonna slam in our faces. We’d burn up.”

“Let’s do it to it,” Rock replied firmly. As the garbage-ball began descending into lower orbit, the Doomsday Warrior sat at the console and pushed various levers and buttons that Connors yelled out for him to engage. The thirty-foot sphere of wired and welded junk began glowing almost as soon as they dropped below the Van Allen Belt.

There was a sudden tumbling motion like they were going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. And suddenly they were in the atmosphere rapids. And the ship was shaking and twisting all over the place as it grew instantly hot inside the craft. All the men were in their spacesuits, strapped into makeshift couches taken from wreckage. The twelve surviving Freefighters could see the walls start to glow all around them. It didn’t look good. Rock had a hard time with his dials. The heat came right through his gloves.

“We’re coming in too fast already, I can feel it,” Connors said as he tried to slow and change their angle of descent. “Pump more juice into her reverse engines—that button there—I need more
power!”

Rock hit the thing and the junkball suddenly moved even faster as the glow on the walls went from red to orange.

“It’s not working,” Connors yelled. “Some malfunction.” Then they could see the whole Earth below them tumbling up all blue and revolving every which way so it was hard to focus or see clearly what was happening.

Connors aimed the ship as much as he could, lining it up with the 47-degree angle of descent that the Mac had calculated was necessary for survival. It was like bouncing a stone along a pond, getting just the right angle so the sphere bounced off the heavier air and skidded its way along—instead of sinking. Only they were bouncing at ten thousand miles an hour.

Theoretically, the junk ship was
supposed
to hold together, but as none of the Astro Frenchies had ever gone down to Earth—or at least those who had had never returned—who could say?

Rock sat back in his seat and held his breath as the world rushed up at them ever faster in the tiny curved glass cockpit window (that had been taken from an astronomical orbit-scope). The walls were almost white-hot now, and there was a sour smell in the air like that of a steel foundry.

“We can’t take much more, I’m going to slam the whole system into reverse—maybe that will bring the retro-rockets in line—they’re
wobbling.
You pop the chutes as soon as you feel us slow.”

“You got it, Connors,” Rock said, throwing his hands over the chute releases. They had four of them. Four parachutes built into the outer skin of junk. God help them if they failed—meaning
tore
—at this speed.

“Three, two, one,” the whiz kid shouted. The retro-engines blasted for a microsecond, and a set of two mini-tug engines that had been welded to the front of the sphere, just for this perilous journey, roared to life, spitting out tongues of yellow flame in front of the falling ship so that the two co-pilots were blinded momentarily. The drag of the sudden gravity felt so powerful that Rockson couldn’t move his hands to throw the chute releases. But the engines cut off again after ten seconds and he lunged forward hitting two of them.

There was a sharp cracking sound behind them and suddenly the entire craft was ripped sideways and up as if it was in the hands of a god who was juggling it around in the air. They fell crookedly, the sudden weighty feeling of the chutes slowing them down, at least for a few seconds. But even as Rock started to breathe a sigh of relief, he felt one of the chutes rip free, suddenly speeded up again—then the other tore loose and they were falling again, and fast.

“Damn,” he spat out even as he moved his hands before they got caught up in the gee force. And again two sharp little retorts, that made the whole ship shake slightly, occured. And again they slowed.

The world below was coming up fast. Rock could see forests now, lakes, They were supposedly somewhere back over the American Northwest, that was what all the waiting to thread-the-needle had been for. They’d sure as hell find out soon enough. It seemed like they were coming down too fast, but he didn’t feel the last two chutes rip off this time.

And they fell from the skies toward the northern parts of Utah, toward the small lake that had once been the Great Salt Lake; an area where Rockson had once slipped into a time warp.

And as America came up at them with the speed of a prizefighter’s fist, Rock sent out a silent prayer of thanks and peace toward a frozen body that hurtled without cessation towards the center of the galaxy, hurtled toward where gravities beyond human measure pulled all things home:
Rajat—Thanks, and God speed.

Twenty-Nine

E
ven as the garbage ball was falling to earth, far above them a gaunt space suited figure was scuttling from one scrap of space debris to another. All around him, the Astro Frenchies were gathering up the spoils of war with long towing cables, lassooing the junk into corrals for later sorting and use. But the figure, suited in black plastic with a wide tinted helmet with a swastika on its top, moved with the stealth of a street rat, sliding from shadow to shadow. He was using all the results of space war, men’s bodies as well as debris, to hide, to get closer to that which he sought.