Dark Star

As their earbuds went silent, Henzollern rested a hand on her MP-7. “Sir, will we be returning for Davidson?”

“Yes,” Southerland retorted sternly. “Dark Star never leaves a man behind.”

Nodding in agreement, the woman tore her attention away from the burning truck as there came a metallic clang and the hatch swung open to reveal Davidson. The pilot paused uncertainly for a moment, then put his back to the others and climbed down the ladder to the ground. The blackened soil was soft around the great ship, but as the man got farther away it started crunching under his sneakers.

“We won’t be gone more than thirty minutes, an hour at the most,” Southerland said, patting the man on the shoulder. “The fire should keep you warm for that long. But even if it dies early, stay in plain sight and wait right here for us. We’re already behind schedule and I do not wish to waste time hunting for you among the rocks.”

“Yes, sir,” Davidson replied, snapping off a salute. “And if Interpol, or NATO, should arrive before you return?”

Already starting toward the ladder, Southerland stopped to turn and stare hard at the pilot. “Throw yourself off the cliff,” he ordered in a perfunctory manner. “People often flinch at the second when shooting themselves in the head, and are only wounded. The bastards must not learn anything of importance from you. Understood?”

“Yes, sir! Hail the Motherland!”

Placing a sneaker on the bottom rung, the colonel gave a grim nod. “God bless South Africa,” he said in reply, starting to climb.

“Sir!”

At the top of the built-in ladder, Southerland climbed into the X-ship and dogged shut the hatch. Heading directly to the control room, he found Henzollern already strapped in and adjusting the dials. “Preburners on,” she announced, flipping a switch. “Reaction chamber is reaching operational levels…ready to go, sir.”

“Launch,” Southerland commanded, strapping on a safety harness.

There came a deafening roar and crushing acceleration slammed the man into the cushioned seat. He watched the world drop way below them, then move sideways as the X-ships descended from the mountains. Keeping a sharp watch on the fuel gauge, Southerland was starting to become nervous when the mountains finally gave way to rolling foothills and then a jagged coastline.

Minutes later a small factory town came into view on the monitor. There were row upon row of small wooden houses laid out in orderly streets. Thick black smoke poured out of tall brick chimneys of the main plant, and the dockyard was busy with cranes loading and unloading cargo from a fleet of vessels.

“Busy place,” Henzollern commented. “What is it called?”

“I could not care less,” Southerland retorted, studying the monitors for their goal. “All I am concerned with is…there! See it there, just to the west?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, working the joysticks. “Starting descent now.”

The air plant was situated off by itself, well away from the town and public roads in case of an explosion. The building was long, the flat roof edged with hundreds of small windows in an obvious effort to try to control the damage of a blast, and off to one side were some bare steel exhaust vents covered with ice and surrounded by white mists.

The colonel started to point at them, but the woman was already heading in the correct direction. The legs extended, a red light began to flash as the X-ship landed on the pavement, the material cracking from the tremendous weight.

“We must have had a lot less fuel than O’Hara figured,” she reported. “We barely made it here, sir!”

“Good thing for him we did,” Southerland said dryly, rising from the chair. “If I die on a mission, he dies.”

Licking her lips, Henzollern ached to ask how it was arranged, but restrained herself. The colonel would not be the man he was without taking any, and all, necessary precautions to safeguard his return. He will make a fine king of South Africa, she thought.

As the man and woman undogged the hatch, they found a crowd of astonished workers gathered around the vessel. Without hesitation, Henzollern began to sweep the people with the MP-7. A dozen workers died before the rest registered the slaughter then scrambled away, screaming in terror.

Ignoring the rabble, Southerland and Henzollern climbed down the ladder and stepped over the twitching corpses to enter the plant. There were no divisions or walls inside the structure, the entire building one single massive room. Hundreds of tall steel bottles were lined up neatly, the bronze nozzles attached to pressure lines. Somewhere big pumps were thumping, steadily forcing two-thousand square feet of gas into the six-square-foot cylinder. While constructing the X-ships, Southerland recalled seeing an oxygen tank fall over, the bronze nozzle snapping off against a concrete block. Instantly, there was a hurricane as the volumes of gas inside rushed out and the cylinder shot along the floor, then up into the air, zooming about madly like an unguided missile, smashing apart men and machinery, until punching through the cinder-block wall and disappearing into the distance. Surrounded by so much explosive material, there was a sudden tingle in his gut similar to the rush of combat.

“Watch the feeder lines,” the colonel directed, pointing. “Green is oxygen, red is hydrogen. We need the insulated tanks. Those will hold the liquid gases.”

There came the sound of running boots and several burly men in denim jumpsuits appeared from around the row of air tanks, brandishing long wrenches and iron bars. One fellow in a suit was holding a fire ax. Obviously, that was the owner of the plant, or at least the foreman. Knowing to discharge the Webley this close to the charging lines might blow them to hell, the colonel pulled out a knife and jerked his wrist.

Across the floor of the plant, the man dropped the ax and staggered backward, the handle of the knife jutting from his throat. As red blood began to gush between his spasming fingers, the workers lost heart and ran away frantically, casting aside their makeshift weapons.

“Cowards,” Henzollern sneered, pressing the release button on the French police baton. The coiled sleeve of steel extended to a full yard, and locked into position. Eagerly, she tapped the deadly bludgeon against her leg, looking for prey. But there was nobody in sight, only the jerking hoses and thumping machinery.

Retrieving the gory blade, Southerland saw a side room full of refrigeration tanks and heavily insulated conduits. Opening the door, he was hit with a bitterly cold wave that chilled him to the bone. “This is it!” Southerland cried, reaching for a pair of safety gloves lying on a convenient table.

Having done something similar hundreds of times before, it took only a few minutes to run a pair of flexible hoses to the X-ship and start the pumps. In short order, the refrigeration tanks had been emptied, and the Dark Star operatives disconnected the lines to simply cast them aside. Returning to the control room, Southerland took command this time and started the engines, frowning deeply as the fuel gauge only registered a quarter full. Damn, just barely enough.

The colonel sent the X-ship soaring skyward, the fiery exhaust igniting the feeder hoses, the flames rushing back into the plant as they climbed high into the sky.

Streaking back toward the mountains, Henzollern saw the huge explosion rip the plant apart. As a roiling fireball covered the building, hundreds of black shapes began darting around within the blast, punching through the walls, and roof, then spiraling off into every direction. Mother of God, those had to be the air bottles!

Like a salvo of missiles, the steel containers dispersed randomly, a handful reaching the town to smash through buildings, spreading a wave of destruction throughout the homes and factories, and even reaching the cargo ships moored at the wooden docks.

“Our next stop will be Tasmania,” Southerland said, working the joysticks. “After that, we go back to home base.”

“But, sir, what about Davidson?” Henzollern asked uncertainly.

The man grit his teeth. “Unfortunately, we don’t have enough fuel for three, so he must stay behind.”

“I’ll take care of it, sir,” she said, pulling out the MP-7 and checking the clip.

“No, a commander must handle such things himself,” the colonel countered, gliding sideways toward the old uranium mines. “It is a matter of honor.”

“I’m sure he would appreciate the gesture.”

“Oh, I doubt it highly,” the man chided. “But as a soldier, he would understand the necessity, and that is enough.”

The dark plume of smoke rising from the burning truck made an excellent guide back to the landing site, and the X-ship hovered over the area for only a few seconds, before streaking upward into the starry black of space.

CHAPTER SEVEN

London, England

Ethereal mist moved over the Thames River like a living thing, the ancient stones lining the shore weather to the consistency of polished marble from the endless decades of wear. Far at the bottom of the river, covered in layers of silt and mud, the decaying pieces of German war planes warmly rotted alongside the remains of the vaunted Spanish armada from another century.

Rising majestically over the murky waters, Tower Bridge was an imposing Victorian edifice. The massive Cornish granite blocks had been intricately carved by master masons from another era, and the two great Gothic towers that stood on either side of the center span resembled something from legend, beautiful, dominant, eternal.

High overhead, the perpetually gray sky rained slightly, then stopped, merely to start once more as if it had forgotten what happened just moments earlier. On the busy sidewalks crossing the ancient bridge, only the tourists cried out in annoyance, or dashed about struggling to open their newly purchased umbrellas. The locals simply ignored the drizzle, the same as they did the blaring car horns from the streaming traffic, or the thick reek of diesel fumes from the fleets of double-decker buses.

“Ah, just like home!” A tourist smiled, deeply breathing in the smog. “God, I miss New York.”

“Are you insane? How can you think about Manhattan when we’re standing smack in the middle of London!” his wife gushed happily, both of her hands full of shopping bags from Harrods department store. “I mean, look at this, Harold! We’re actually standing on London Bridge!”

“London Bridge,” he said slowly, tasting the words. “As in the old song, ‘London Bridge is falling down…’?”

“Exactly! Isn’t it exciting?”

“London Bridge,” the man said slowly, smiling.

Several of the people passing by tried to hide their amusement at that, but an elderly barrister stopped alongside the gawking couple. Lord love a duck, bloody Americans didn’t know a lorry from a lavatory!

“Excuse me, old chap,” the barrister said, resting his umbrella on the sidewalk with a flourish. “But this is most certainly not London Bridge.” He flipped the umbrella upward to point at the two massive structures at either end of the span. “See those? This is Tower Bridge.”

“Not London Bridge?” the wife asked, hoping this was some sort of joke.

“No, ma’am, honestly, it is not.” The barrister used the umbrella again to point upstream. “See there? The next bridge is London Bridge.”

“Are you sure?” the husband asked warily.

“Absolutely.” He smiled tolerantly.

Just then the clouds parted and fire descended from the sky.

Realizing what was happening, the SAS operative posing as a barrister started to go for the gun under his jacket, then changed his mind and shoved the two tourists over the side of the bridge in a desperate effort to save their lives.

The shocked husband and wife were still falling when the X-ship arrived to hover above the bridge, its exhaust washing over the granite slabs to ignite people and vehicles. Screams and explosions filled the roadway, the SAS operative trying for his weapon just before vanishing in the incandescent fury of the rocket engines.

On the roof of the South Tower, an iron-bound door slammed open and a dozen Special Forces soldiers charged into view, working the arming bolts of their Enfield L85 assault rifles. Rushing to the parapets of the castelated tower, the troopers took aim and fired streams of 5.56 mm hardball bullets upon the huge ship below them. But the hail of bullets only bounced harmlessly off the steeply sloped sides of the smooth hull.

Desperately, the soldiers raked their gunfire along the scarred, white hull, searching for a window, or a hatch, anything that might yield a vulnerable point to the flying mountain. But the seamless X-ship seemed to be a single homogenous artifact, immutable and indestructible.

Seeing the futility of the assault, the lieutenant swung up an XM-18 grenade launcher and started pumping high-explosive rounds at the giant machine. But again, the 40 mm shells ricocheted off the smooth hull before detonating, doing no damage at all.

“Get clear!” a sergeant bellowed, swinging up a Stinger missile launcher. The brains in Whitehall had deduced how the X-ships were protecting themselves from the heat-seekers, and new software had been hastily written and loaded into the minicomputer of the antiaircraft Stinger. It was no longer a guided missile, but a deadhead, a simple rocket that would fly true until it ran out of propellant. All he had to do was to get close and—

“Bugger me!” the sergeant snarled as the distance to the X-ship appeared on the viewfinder. The damn thing was too close! The tower was two hundred feet tall, but the X-ship was well over a hundred itself, and hovering several yards off the bridge. A standard Stinger needed a hundred yards to arm the warhead and the X-ship was less than one third of that distance!

Gamely trying anyway, the soldier fired the rocket, and it slammed into the side of the X-ship only to shatter into pieces and fall tumbling into the ocean of boiling flame covering the bridge.

The unit’s lieutenant stared hatefully at the steel invader. Then he paused. Was it made of steel? A chap from the RAF said that space shuttles, and the like, had a sort of heat-proof glass shield covering the nose as protection. By sheer necessity, the material was rough and tough, built to take incredible punishment. However, it was breakable.

“Aim for the nose!” the officer bellowed over the unimaginable noise of the engines. “Bust the heat shield and it’ll melt trying to lift off. That’s the weak spot! The top!”

Focusing their attack on the crest of the cone, the British soldiers got off only a few bursts before the X-ship incredibly started to rise and a monstrous wave of volcanic heat-searing fumes poured over the parapet, stealing the air from their lungs.

Coughing hard, the soldiers were driven back inside the South Tower and hastily slammed the ancient iron door shut.

“Mother of God,” a corporal wheezed, barely able to form the words, while another man bent over the iron railing at the top of the granite stairs and nosily lost his breakfast. Struggling to pull in a breath, none of the others blamed the poor sod a bit. That was the closest any of them ever wanted to get to hell. A few more seconds of that and they all would have keeled over.

Suddenly the streams of heat came from around the thick door, eased away, and a great silence filled the tower.

Never pausing in the reloading of their weapons, the troopers listened hard, but they could only hear the piteous wails of the wounded and the crying civilians mixing with the crackling of the burning cars and trucks.

“Did it leave?” a private asked, thumbing a 40 mm shell into the grenade launcher of his L-85 assault rifle.

“Bleeding hope so,” another man snarled, then hawked and spit in the corner. “God, I can still taste the stink!”

“Silence!” the lieutenant snapped, pressing an ear to the warm metal of the door. Instantly the men went quiet, but still he could hear nothing from outside. Nothing at all. Strange…

“What is it doing, sir?” the sergeant asked, loading another Stinger missile into the spent launcher.

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