Planet Wrecker

-87-

Marten peered around the edge of the dome at the troop-pods floating down for a landing. The stars glittered behind them. The oval-shaped craft had stubby anti-personnel guns along the sides. If needed, those guns would fire masses of exploding pellets. The pods no longer floated, but moved down in controlled, jerky bursts. Assaulting a small asteroid like this with its almost nonexistent gravity was delicate work. Unfortunately, the cyborg pilots seemed up to the task.

Encased in his armored vacc-suit, Marten desperately wanted to scratch his nose. Why had no one ever designed a nose or face-scratching suit? He twitched his nose as he leaned against the dome and watched the troop-pods. They had skids on the bottom of the oval craft. As he waited, he wondered if the cyborgs cared that ultimately they were on a suicide mission. Was there some way to break cyborg programming, the way Osadar had broken hers? That seemed like the most cost-effective way to defeat the cyborgs, turning their soldiers the way cyborgs turned ordinary people into aliens.

A space marine stepped past Marten and slid his Cognitive missile around the dome, aiming up at the nearest troop-pod.

“What are you doing?” Marten said, grabbing the missile-tip and yanking it down. “You might accidentally achieve lock-on. That will ping on a troop-pod’s sensors and alert the cyborgs.”

The space marine backed farther behind the dome.

The five troop-pods came down in a strict formation. They were almost to the surface, with stardust beginning to swirl upward in a cloud. The top of the cloud began to hide them.

“There,” Omi said.

Hearing that through his headphones, Marten swiveled around. He followed Omi’s pointing finger. Low on the horizon flashed movement. In a second, a Jovian patrol boat reached the crater-lip. It zoomed upward and swooped down on the five troop-pods easing into the billowing cloud.

“She’s firing!” Omi shouted.

It looked like sparks on the patrol boat’s wings. Bigger blooms were the ignition of missiles.

One troop-pod began to drift. Another blossomed in an explosion, showering metal and machine parts. Something flashed past Marten and plowed into the soil, sending up a puff of stardust. On the third and fourth troop-pods, the stubby anti-personnel tubes moved upward and pellets sprayed in shotgun-like blasts. But Osadar had already passed the pods and began a long banking maneuver so she could come back at them. As that occurred, hatches opened on the troop-pods. One after another, cyborgs jumped, and thruster-packs expelled hydrogen-spray as they began to descend individually.

This was the most vulnerable moment in a space-landing assault. It’s what Marten had hoped would occur.

“Kill them!” he shouted.

Space marines hurried past him. More, he knew, came around from the other side of the dome. Jovians sank onto one knee and raised their infantry missile launchers. Others went prone. A few stood. In moments, a flock of Cognitives zoomed at the remaining troop-pods and at individually exposed cyborgs. Marten knelt, raised his gyroc and sent up one rocket-shell after another. He fired, reloaded and continued firing. Nearby, Omi did the same thing.

In the patrol boat, Osadar passed again, destroying the last functional troop-pod and dozens of thruster-pack-spewing cyborgs. Those cyborgs used laser-carbines. But as they fired, their unattended thruster-packs often took them in the wrong direction. It was far from a turkey-shoot. Cyborgs had uncanny reflexes and abilities. But with surprise and the patrol boat, the odds now lay with the Jovians.

“It looks like we’re going to hold our asteroid,” Omi said as he reloaded.

Marten grunted, even as his rifle pinged with lock-on. On his HUD, a dot centered on a red silhouette of a floating cyborg. Marten fired an APEX shell. The hardened round struck the cyborg and exploded, killing the target.

“What’s troubling you?” asked Omi.

Marten looked over at his friend. He’d been watching the dead cyborg drift into space. “We’re winning,” he said. “But how are the others doing?”