No, no, wait a minute, a colder part of myself said. My android could have easily killed these three and stashed the comm-equipment elsewhere. Yet if that was true—that he’d killed the engineers—had he broken apart his spring-firing gun after finishing them?

  Hmm. The truth was I still lacked enough data to make a concrete conclusion.

  As I wondered about my next move, I felt an aching sensation like a cold or flu. It felt as if the sickness was in my bones. I shivered, and I glanced at the damp spot on my coveralls. The sliver from the spring-gun had gone in just under my bottom left rib and out my back. Why should that make me ache? Had the splinter projectile contained a toxin?

  While rubbing the material of one of the dead men, I realized I had to ignore the ache for now. I had to warn the crew. There might be more androids posing as engineers, moving through the ship and slaughtering us one by one or three by three.

  I resumed traveling, listening for odd sounds. I didn’t want to run into another assassin just yet. I needed a weapon first.

  The interior battlejumper made plenty of its own noises, such as long creaks of shifting metal. It reminded me of a whale, this one a creature of the void. Pumps cycled air and they caused a constant thrum. Finally, recyclers occasionally hummed into life, always ending with a rattle like a smoker’s hack.

  I’d gotten used to the noises. Now they seemed alien again as I sought to hear something different. The flu-like pain became worse as I pulled myself along, and I shivered more often.

  Finally, I reached an emergency comm-panel some of our techs had installed. I expected to find it wrecked, but it looked good. I pressed a button, and loud static came out of the speaker. I tried it again and got the same result.

  My stomach twisted in concern. Was everything I’d fought for this past year going to be a waste of time? Had I gained freedom only to have it snatched away from me? Ever since the Lokhars—

  I forgot. You might not have heard about them. The Lokhars were the first aliens, the ones who dropped the thermonuclear warheads and sprayed the bio-terminator on Earth. They were like upright tigers, seven feet tall with thick chests, dangling arms and retractable claws in their fingertips. They were also militarists, the Spartans of space. They’d gotten wind of the Jelk idea of using humans as ground pounders. To end run the idea, to make sure they didn’t get our kind of competition, the Lokhars visited the Earth first. I hated the tigers. Their day was coming, believe you me.

  Back then, during the first alien visit, my dad Jack went up to greet their ship. He went in a shuttle. The Lokhars used a laser on the craft, killing Mad Jack Creed.

  What’s the point of my telling you this? Instead of fearing the aliens—Lokhars, Jelk, whoever—I wanted to bust their heads. I wanted to get even. So despite the fear of another alien attack, there was also anger and rage, the primitive desire for retribution of the worst kind.

  Thinking dark thoughts, I resumed my journey. The reward came five minutes later.

  I heard rapid-fire talk down the corridor, like computers with voices who only spoke that way when humans weren’t around to hear. I knew that androids sometimes communicated like that. Maybe just as bad, the voices headed my way.

  I retreated until I reached an empty compartment, opening its hatch and closing it behind me with a minimum of sound. Floating near the top, I kept peering out the round glass window in the hatch. Finally, I saw three androids float past. They carried rifles and wore cyber-armor: mechanical skin, molded to fit them.

  The sight jarred me. That was combat weaponry, not just an assassin’s tool. Well, now I knew. The battlejumper was under a full-blown enemy stealth assault. I hadn’t heard any klaxons wailing due to hull breaches. That was telling.

  I had to use my wits. So what did I know? My android killer had given me greetings from Claath. That implied…what exactly? I expect it meant someone had sent a radio signal, or some kind of signal, activating the androids. Had they been in hidden storage areas as I’d first suspected? That made the most sense. But if someone had sent a signal, that would have to mean at least one alien vessel had reached our solar system, and that meant they knew where we’d taken the battlejumper.

  Yet if all that were true, why hadn’t I heard from anyone else yet? Why hadn’t a ship-wide alert gone out? Was I alone, the last human left on an empty vessel?

  I need my armor and a gun, a real one.

  Exiting the dark compartment, I floated stealthily through the corridors. I felt naked and defenseless, hating the sensation.

  The next ten minutes were among my worst. Not only did I feel rotten and weak, but I also had no idea what the situation was with the rest of my troopers. I couldn’t afford to lose a single soldier.

  Sweat dripped off my face as I finally entered my room. A groan escaped me. The chamber was a mess, with cushions, bed sheets and junk floating everywhere. Androids must have been here, and they had tossed it, looking for something. Did that mean they’d taken my armor and weapons?

  I jumped to the closet, hitting it harder than I wanted, rebounding and drifting away. For twenty seconds, I flailed uselessly. Eventually, I floated to a wall and shoved off. This time I grabbed the closet handle, anchoring myself. I opened the thing and knew a vast sense of relief as I spied the heat unit. The green light was on, indicating that it still worked. I drew out the unit, lifting the lid. I found it there, and pulled it out: a hefty black blob. I pushed it onto the floor where it quivered in anticipation. Taking off my shoes and my clothes, I stepped naked onto the blob. The substance oozed onto my legs, coating my flesh. It felt warm, a comfortable sensation.

  This was second skin, symbiotic alien armor, genetically engineered for human use. Alive after a fashion, it could heal itself at times. The outer surface would harden and it allowed the wearer to operate in a vacuum, in outer space. The skin also amplified human strength. At times, it secreted a battle drug into our system. It must have done that now, giving me something to counteract the toxin.

  The familiar symbiotic skin rushed up my thighs, over my belly button and didn’t stop until it reached my chin. I put on my helmet and grabbed the gun in the closet. The androids should have disabled it. That was a mistake on their part. I checked the battery pack. It had a bar symbol on it, with the green all the way to the + sign on top. The laser rifle had a full charge. We had taken to calling it a Bahnkouv assault rifle. Dmitri had told us about an experimental Russian laser, the design headed by a Dr. Bahnkouv. I liked the name because it was human.

  As the aching feeling receded, righteous fury boiled in me. I would attack with my Bahnkouv. I would kill. I would—I shook my head.

  The armor was doing that, or some of it, at least. The symbiotic skin had been engineered to prompt soldiers to attack head-on in a storm assault. That meant the suit often turned a trooper into nearly a berserker warrior. How else could a man psyche himself up into attacking blazing weaponry?

  At this point, outwitting the androids was the key. I had to save troopers and the battlejumper, not just win a firefight.

  Did the androids monitor my helmet’s radio frequency? I had to risk transmitting. I chinned the command channel. Before I could send out a signal, I received one.

  “There are too many,” Rollo was saying to someone. “They’re driving us away from the armory.”

  “You must fight through,” N7 said. “Unless we—”

  Rapidly spoken chatter—enemy androids—broke onto the channel. Did they do that to disrupt our communications or were they directing each other on the same frequency? Probably the first reason. That showed me more than ever they had originated on our vessel. They must have been monitoring us for some time to know the right frequency to use.

  With a grimace, I leaped out of my room. On my helmet’s HUD display, I pinpointed N7’s location in the battlejumper’s control room. Rollo was closer, several corridors over, in fact.

  “Okay, you bastards,” I muttered to myself. I leaped with power, with feral, suited strength. I was a space-assault trooper again, with vengeance thrumming in my brain. My neuro-fibers gave me heightened speed. The bio-suit amplified my muscles—

  I heard laser fire before I actually saw it, a high whiny noise. Cyber-armored humanoids also clanked down the halls like automatons. It told me they used magnetized boots in the zero G.

  I unlatched a grenade from my belt, twisted the setting and peered around a corner. The androids had gotten cocky. They hadn’t left a rearguard. Three of them in a staggered formation moved purposefully away from me, with their rifles beaming. Farther away on the other side of the androids, I heard men shouting, my friends. I recalibrated the grenade’s setting to something lower. Rollo’s comment earlier meant they were unarmored. I didn’t want to kill my friends with too high a blast.

  I hurled the grenade and ducked back around the corner. A terrific flash and a loud crump told me the grenade ignited. Instantly, I darted back into the corridor. One android drifted. One was missing an arm. The last one had torn cyber-armor on its back and swiveled toward me. Blasting with heavy laser fire, I beamed through its visor. Then I remembered my original attacker. I switched targeting to the chest and burned him down with several seconds of concentrated fire.

  Then it was over. I’d killed the three androids.

  “Rollo,” I shouted.

  “Creed?” he yelled. “Is that you? The androids told us you were dead.”

  “Hurry here. We have to get to the armory.”

  “Creed, Starkien warships are coming through the jump point. N7 counted at least five beamships near Neptune.”

  I closed my eyes in pain. We needed time to get every freighter in orbit, and time to escape from here and hide in a lonely star system. If I couldn’t win free from Earth, human life might cease to exist.

  By what Rollo said, it appeared as if Starkien contractors had come after us. I hated the technocratic baboons. That’s what Starkiens looked like: furry monkey-creatures with bulging foreheads so you knew they were clever. Just like all the other aliens, they thought that humans were animals.

  I’d worked with Starkiens before. In their case, contractors really meant they were nomadic pirates for hire. Had the Starkiens signaled sleepers hidden on our battlejumper? If true, that meant the Starkiens worked under Jelk backing, and that likely meant Claath.

  “Hurry up! “ I roared. “We have to clear the androids off our battlejumper. We have to get ready to face the Starkiens.”

  Rollo appeared at the other end of the corridor. Three other troopers followed him, one with a bandaged and broken arm. My friend used to be long and lanky. Steroid-68 had turned him into a muscled gorilla with thick deltoids. He had an angry red laser burn on his cheek, looking like Indian war paint. How close had I come to losing my best friend?

  “Come on,” I said. “We have to get to the armory. We need to get you boys suited up.”

  “How are we going to beat five Starkien beamships?” Rollo asked, as pain flashed across his face. The laser burn must hurt. “We’re screwed, Creed. Everything we worked for—it’s over.”

  “Not yet,” I snarled. The pain had apparently made him pessimistic. “Now hurry up. We don’t have all day.”

  -3-

  I took point. As we traveled through the metallic corridors, I noticed the flu feeling again. It pulsated in my bones, attempting to steal my strength and dull my wits. The suit tried to counteract it. I could feel each drug entering me. The toxin must be more powerful than the suit’s ability to handle, though.

  That made me paranoid. If the android poison was too strong, the symbiotic skin could be dampening the symptoms even as the toxin killed me. I had to get to sickbay and get treated. First, however, I had to clear my battlejumper of android sleepers.

  “Creed,” Rollo whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked in a low voice. I had my visor open so I could hear him.

  “There’s something just up the corridor,” Rollo whispered. “Can’t you hear it?”

  I must have been sicker than I realized. No, I hadn’t noticed anything. Now I did. From around the corner, metal scraped against metal and I heard a purr that could only mean a flamer, a portable piece of heavy weaponry that fired heated plasma.

  “We know you are near,” an android called. “We see you on our scanner. Surrender; you cannot reach the armory and it is useless for you to die.”

  “How did you get on my ship?” I shouted.

  “The battlejumper belongs to the Jelk Corporation,” the android said. “It is the property of Shah Claath, your owner. You must return it.”

  “Is that what you are, property?”

  “Why do you labor against reality? You know the answer to your question.”

  “Do I?”

  “If you are Creed, know that we will accept your surrender. Shah Claath is eager to regain you in prime condition.”

  “The thing’s trying to trick us,” Rollo said.

  I motioned Rollo to give me his jacket. Once he did, I balled it up. Then I whispered, “Get back, and await my signal.”

  Rollo retreated to the others.

  “Have you come to the logical conclusion?” the android asked. “Are you ready to submit?

  “You promise me you’ll take my surrender?” I asked.

  “You have our word,” the android said. “Claath will be most pleased.”

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t shoot. I’m coming in.”

  I edged toward the T-shaped corner and hurled the jacket. I saw a flash of silver buttons just before the jacket disappeared into the other corridor. Almost immediately, the flamer whirred with sound and made a belching noise. The superheated plasma boiled through the corridor, no doubt burning the jacket in a second.

  I’d already backed up. The expanded plasma passed me. I felt the wash of heat through my suit and helmet. Luckily, I’d already shut the visor, or I might have sucked down superheated air.

  As soon as the ball of plasma passed, I pulled myself around the corner and fired, aiming at the tripod-mounted flamer. It would take the mechanism at least another thirty seconds to recharge for a second shot.

  “I see him,” an android said.

  “Fire!” the leader told him.

  My suit absorbed their laser fire for less than three seconds. At the end of that time, my beam broke into the flamer’s armored core. The heavy weapon exploded with the building plasma charge.

  I ducked behind my corner.

  An orange glow like a new sun told me the plasma expanded. It made sizzling noises, meaning it ate corridor steel and androids.

  Portable plasma cannons were like old-time flamethrowers from WWII. Both were nasty, terrifying weapons. They each devoured enemy soldiers. The problem with both weapons was their vulnerability to enemy fire. If a bullet hit a flamethrower’s tank back in the day, it could end in a fiery death for everyone nearby. The same thing had happened here to the sleepers.

  Finally, the glow died down like a setting sun.

  “Be careful as you pass the area,” I told the others. “Everything is hot and could burn you if you touch it.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Rollo said.

  We passed the melted androids and the metallic sopping walls. I saw beads of molten metal dripping like tears. One of the troopers shouted in pain then as a floating piece of red-hot plasma sizzled against his calf muscle.

  Another turn in the corridor brought us to the front of the armory. I opened the vault and in a matter of minutes, I had five suited troopers, not just one.

  “What’s next?” Rollo asked, as he sealed a helmet over his head.

  I’d been mulling that over; the answer depended on several factors. How many androids were on our ship and where did they attack? And where were the rest of my people?

  “N7, can you hear me?” I said through my helmet’s comm-unit.

  I got high-speed chatter for an answer, and that told me all I needed to know. The enemy still blocked our communications.

  “We stick together,” I told the others. “We’re a hunter-killer team.”

  “Which way do we go?” Rollo asked.

  What would I do if I were a Starkien contractor? If I could wake sleeper units on an enemy vessel, I’d go for life support first and the engine second, disabling it. But in order to do their task…yeah, they had to keep the troopers away from their suits. The best way to do that would be to kill them.

  “We’re heading for our main quarters,” I said. I meant where the majority of the troopers slept and practiced.

  On the way there, we slew three more androids. Then we hit another concentration of them, and it devolved into a firefight.

  These androids had more mass and strength than we did and they had tougher skin than the training models used on us a year ago. Even so, the androids couldn’t compete against a suited trooper. That was only logical. Otherwise, Claath would have built androids and used them for his soldiers for hire. He had come to Earth for a reason. One of them clearly was that humans made excellent ground pounders, individual soldiers with a Bahnkouv and grenade.

  We proved that during the next few minutes.

  “Lucy is hit,” Rollo said, meaning the trooper who had burned her calf earlier. Her left shoulder smoked from concentrated enemy laser fire.

  “Get behind us,” I told her.

  She didn’t want to do that, as Lucy was in the grip of battle fury. But she obeyed because she belonged to the toughest, best-trained outfit in the galaxy: the last of us out of many thousands. There had been something like twenty-three thousand human troopers in the beginning. One hundred and sixty-eight had made it back to Earth: the lucky, the mean, the tough and the royal bastards that nothing but atomic weaponry could take down.

  “I’m done playing around,” I said, a minute later and after a particularly nasty laser exchange with the androids. The bright beams had put little purple splotches in my vision. “Cover me.” I wanted to take out these androids now.