“This is new,” Hawthorne whispered.

  “Did a cyborg ship escape?” Kursk asked.

  “I’m more interested in finding out if a Web-Mind escaped,” Hawthorne said.

  “I doubt we’ll ever know,” Blackstone said. “That was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Stranger than the Sunbeam?” asked Kursk.

  “I can understand the Sunbeam,” Blackstone said. “What we just witnessed, I don’t want to hazard a guess as to what it was.”

  “Was that a rip into hyperspace?” Hawthorne asked quietly.

  “There are no warp drives or wormholes,” Kursk said.

  “Not until now,” Hawthorne said. The pain in his chest was less than before, but it hurt every time his heart beat. Had they just fought the greatest war ever, only to have the enemy slip away to start everything over again from a different base? If that was a starship, with the Prime Web-Mind aboard…it meant the next cyborg attack might possibly come from another star system. He massaged his chest. This was more than he wanted to think about now. Sunbeams and starships…he wanted to go home to Earth.

  Sunk in gloom, Hawthorne fell silent as Triton broke into sections, cut apart by the terrible ray.

  ***

  The Prime knew a moment of rarified glee as its vessel winked out of existence above Triton and away from the annihilating ray.

  In the huge ship, cyborgs stood at their stations, awaiting orders. The cargo-holds held massive amounts of equipment, all that was needed to begin again.

  It was a risk I might never have taken. Now I own an experimental starship, a vessel to span the galaxy.

  The glee turned to anger as the Prime realized it would have to start over.

  I will rebuild elsewhere. Then I will return and cruelly subjugate those who thought to destroy my magnificence.

  Quick calculations showed the Prime its strongholds in Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars could not survive the terrible Sunbeam. Perhaps if it gathered every surviving Lurker and used the starship—

  No, I cannot risk losing this wonderful vessel. I own the only known starship. I will—

  The Prime’s gloating was cut short as a lurch and alarms throughout the starship told of a reentry into normal space. It ran an accelerated analysis. Neptune’s nearness had upset the starship’s gravitational fields, which needed a precision bordering on the Sunbeam’s targeting systems.

  Where am I? Have I reached another star system?

  Cyborgs on the bridge poured their findings to the Prime. With a shock, the Prime realized it had only hopped a short distance. Then a louder alarm rang through the experimental starship.

  ***

  Sub-Strategist Circe contemplated the meaning of the third Dictate. She sat in the Force-Leader’s chair in the control chamber. Unconsciously, she rubbed the black gem embedded in her forehead. With half-lidded eyes, she let her gaze rove over a statute of an ancient, naked Roman boxer with a broken nose. He—

  Sirens blared, making her twist in her chair.

  “Sub-Strategist!” the Erasmus’s weapons officer said. “An-an intruder has just appeared.”

  “Explain your statement,” Circe said sharply.

  “Look up at the screen,” the officer said.

  She did. Long-range teleoptics showed a big ship. “Is that an SU battleship?” she asked.

  “No. It’s bigger.”

  “Where did it come from?” Circe asked.

  “There was a flash, Sub-Strategist, and then it just appeared.”

  “Attention!” Circe said, as she slapped an intercom button on her chair’s armrest. “Warm the lasers and target the enemy ship. It is a cyborg vessel, the most dangerous one in existence. We must attack it with extreme prejudice.”

  “Are you sure it’s a cyborg vessel?” the weapons officer asked.

  “Destroy it,” Circe said, “or we’re all doomed.” She had studied Chief Strategist Tan’s information about a Fuhl Event. The cyborgs must have finally ironed out the flaws and now used this ship to attack each fleet piecemeal. It was a brilliant strategy. The thought she had endured so much to fall prey to yet another secret cyborg project—

  “Annihilate it!” Circe hissed. “Annihilate it before its beam or missiles destroy us.”

  ***

  “Engage the Fuhl Mechanism!” the Prime messaged the cyborg crew. “We must leave this place.”

  “We need time to adjust and recalibrate the black-hole pods, Prime,” a cyborg radioed its master.

  “Then accelerate the ship away from those vessels!”

  Several seconds later, the Prime experienced the building Gs as thrusters roared with life.

  The Prime focused its sensors on the three meteor-ships. They were battered-looking.

  Yes, they fought the Uranus cyborgs. By the ALL, I must survive.

  Even as the Prime thought this, the three meteor-ships fired their primary lasers.

  “Use the mechanism! Jump us out of here!”

  “We need time, Prime.”

  “Do it now or I will die!”

  The lasers burned into the starship’s hull. Then the four nodes swirled with power. The Fuhl Mechanism started up, and the vessel began to crumple in upon itself. Its own gravitational forces destroyed the Solar System’s first experimental starship.

  ***

  As the Prime Web-Mind of Neptune perished, torn apart by black-hole gravitational forces, Commissar Kursk tapped her communications screen. A face appeared on the module.

  “It’s Marten Kluge,” Hawthorne said.

  “Greetings,” Marten said. “I have just taken control of the Sun Station. I realize my time here may be short, so I have made some hard decisions. The first was the destruction of the Sun-Works Factory. I gave the Commandant the option to leave and head for Luna. He could not agree, so I destroyed the Factory before he could use it against me. I have just demolished Triton and I am about to target Luna and destroy the Highborn base there. In the days to come, I will target all cyborg concentrations of strength in each planetary system.”

  Marten Kluge took a deep breath. “I have lived under many political systems, and I have found them all repugnant. Therefore, the Solar System is going to try a new way for a time—my way. Those who cannot agree to try it, I will target. My way is called freedom, giving people a choice.”

  Marten’s taut features broke into a grim smile. “I’m going to build a bigger station, a bigger defensive bulwark around the Sunbeam. And I’m calling it a Star Fortress. It gives me veto power over anything I find repugnant. Remember that as you begin instituting freedom throughout the Solar System. That is all for now. Marten Kluge out.”

  The End

  Read on for an exciting excerpt from a Doom Star Series novella.

  Task Force 7

  -1-

  Day 752: Sub-sergeant Mule and Sergeant Chen sweated in a workout room aboard Mothership Slovakia.

  Like a caged rat, Mule ran on a circular wheel. He had short hair, hard eyes and harder muscles. Indications of a ruthless fighting mentality showed in his demeanor. He was the squad’s sniper and scout. Today, he sweated as the odometer clicked onto six kilometers.

  Chen performed curls, using an excessive amount of cable resistance. The Marine’s biceps swelled with blood. He had wide, flat features and possessed enormous strength. After finishing the set, the sergeant mopped his face with a towel.

  “Have you heard the latest?” Chen was privy to more information than most. He went into officer country at times, which was on a different part of the mothership.

  “Earth news?” Mule asked.

  “Yeah, right,” Chen said sarcastically. “I have Task Force 7 news. Are you interested?”

  They were part of Task Force 7: two Engels-class strike cruisers and a Trotsky-class mothership. They headed for a cyborg-occupied planetoid named Tyche. It was in the Oort cloud and they had already taken two years travel time to reach this far. That made this the longest combat mission in human history.

  There had been a monstrous, destructive war in the Solar System until Marten Kluge had ended it by using the sunbeam. Thousands of near-Sun mirrors had fed a gigantic focusing lens that fired a massive, annihilating ray. Because of Kluge, the newly-forged Alliance had won, but still mopped up stubborn cyborg strongholds throughout the system.

  Task Force 7 had a singular and dangerous assignment to perform in the distant Oort cloud. They were going because the sunbeam couldn’t reach past Pluto.

  “Any time you’re ready to talk,” Mule said, as he continued to run on the wheel.

  Mule was a strange one even for a Marine. His passion ran deep, to the very fibers of his soul. During the war, the cyborgs had killed or converted everyone on Mars, an entire civilization. Mule’s people were gone, including his wife, kids and parents. Mule had survived because he’d been a Martian secret service agent once. He’d protected a Martian diplomat on Earth. That had ended with his planet’s death. He’d joined the Alliance Space Marines because he wanted one thing: to hunt cyborgs, and especially, to kill them. Doing so wouldn’t bring back the dead, but it would stoke the fires that raged in his heart.

  “I don’t know when Command intends telling the rest of the Marines,” Chen was saying. “So you’ll have to keep this quiet for now.”

  Mule nodded.

  Chen hesitated, maybe reconsidering. He glanced into various corners of the workout chamber, as if searching for eavesdroppers.

  Mule waited. He was patient.

  Finally, in a low voice, Chen said, “Strike Cruiser Ashurbanipal has left the flotilla.”

  “What?”

  “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  A cold anger tightened Mule’s features. These were elite crews and the best Marines. The Alliance didn’t have many ships left. Everyone knew that sending three warships all the way to Tyche had caused bitter debates among the leadership. Now one crew had broken and mutinied?

  “Is this information reliable?” Mule asked.

  “Command fears to tell the boys,” Chen said. “But they’ll have to say something soon before word leaks out and starts a panic.”

  With his thoughts in turmoil, Mule began to sprint on the wheel. He was the lone Martian among the Earthers who made up Slovakia’s Marines and crew. The Earthborn practiced different customs than he did and sometimes he rubbed the others the wrong way.

  His physique highlighted much of that difference. He was lean like all Martians—lean as they used to be. Despite his muscles, his ribs showed, making him seem like a starvation victim.

  Most of the Earthborn Marines took synthetic, performance-enhancing drugs that changed the body. One was called Dense, a muscle-building aid considerably more powerful than old-fashioned steroids. Another was Quake, which speeded neural impulses, making the user faster, if more irritable. The worst sin in Mule’s view was the posthypnotic hate-conditioning given to the Marines. Because of the enforced emotion, he feared his fellow warriors would act too rashly in combat and unnecessarily get themselves killed before completing the task of destroying the enemy.

  Mule hated the enemy too, but his was a cold and lethal thing guided by intellect. He would do anything to kill cyborgs, but he intended on staying alive a long time so he could destroy more of the foul melds.

  The wheel’s odometer clicked onto seven kilometers. Mule slowed down and he noticed a droplet of sweat floating before him. He picked up a towel and wiped himself down. He didn’t want more sweat to detach from his skin, float around the chamber and clog the recyclers.

  “When did Ashurbanipal mutiny?” Mule asked.

  “Five days ago,” Chen said. “The ringleaders contacted our captain and told him this was a suicide mission. We learned three days ago that the mutineers killed Ashurbanipal’s captain and his Marine guards. But they began braking five days ago. They’re already hundreds of thousands of kilometers behind us.”

  “Didn’t Belisarius attack Ashurbanipal?” Mule asked.

  “They couldn’t risk it,” Chen said. “The ringleaders knew what they were doing and had every missile and gun radar-locked on Belisarius. If the other strike cruiser would have attempted battle, the best we could have hoped for would have been mutual annihilation.”

  “They were supposed to be an elite crew,” Mule said. “Ashurbanipal was our best ship.”

  “The odds are getting longer, that’s for sure.”

  Mule’s stomach tightened. This had happened five days ago. Five days… Slovakia hadn’t begun braking maneuvers yet. That meant they were still heading toward Tyche. Would Captain Han suddenly quit and decide to turn around?

  “This is a disaster,” Mule said.

  “Agreed,” Chen said. “We need Ashurbanipal’s firepower to tackle the cyborgs.”

  “What?” Mule asked. “Oh. Right, you’re right, we need more firepower.”

  Chen stared at him and finally shook his head. “You’re worried this will jeopardize our mission and that we’ll go home. You’re not really thinking about what this means: that we’re lacking a badly needed warship.”

  “Do you want to turn back?” Mule asked.

  “When I’m in the right mood in my bunk and thinking clearly, yeah, then I realize I’d love to go back home. This is a suicide mission. The rest of the time the hate-conditioning takes hold and all I can think about is crushing cyborg skulls.”

  “You don’t own your hate,” Mule said.

  “What?”

  Your hate owns you. For maybe the first time since heading to Tyche, Mule felt sorry for his brother in arms.

  “As long as we have surprise we’ll be okay,” Mule said.

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Chen said. “Maybe you’ll actually believe it.”

  Mule continued running. The Marines exercised for hours every day. Otherwise, the extended weightlessness would leech their strength and stamina and leave them too weak to destroy the cyborgs.

  The reason for the task force had come from the last Neptunian humans alive—scientists on Tyche. A scientist on the Oort cloud planetoid had sent a distress signal. It had been one word long, a scream of, “Cyborgs!”

  Mule had heard a recording of the message; they all had. He’d heard the terror in the man’s voice and it had sent his heart pounding. He’d envisioned his wife and children screaming like that when the cyborgs had invaded their underground city on Mars. Just like on Mars, the cyborgs had slaughtered or converted every human living in the Neptune gravitational system, including the various moons and space habitats.

  Mule had seen gruesome videos of what happened to men and women caught by cyborgs. It was brutal, sick and irreversible. To a cyborg, a human was a meat-sack of valuable body-parts.

  The cyborgs, or melds, had it down to a science, an assembly-line horror. They used skin-peelers to pull away the outer epidermis and fine-tuned saws to tease off the muscles of a captured human. It was the spine and the brain that counted to the cyborgs, and the eyes and other hard-to-manufacture parts. The melds married human material to machines as if it were cloth, making synthetic demons, more cyborgs. His wife and children—

  Mule shook his head.

  One word screamed from the scientist on Tyche, from one of the few survivors of Neptunian civilization. Mule had heard a recording of the short message. The first time, he recalled staring at the speakers, waiting for more. There had been heavy breathing, a background explosion, an intake of air from a living being and then hard static. “Cyborgs!” had been the only and last word to transmit from the science station on Tyche concerning the subject of melds.

  Because of the stellar distance, the one-word message sent by laser beam had almost been a year old by the time Marten Kluge received it.

  Over two years ago, Slovakia and two strike cruisers had peeled away from the Alliance Armada headed for the Jupiter gravitational system. Humanity was on the offensive, hunting the cyborgs. With Kluge sun-beaming anything that moved in space, the armada could concentrate on each meld-controlled Jupiter moon and habitat. If the cyborgs proved too stubborn in a particular place, the sunbeam sliced and diced the moon into tiny chunks. Io at Jupiter was already gone, as was Triton in the Neptune system.

  Task Force 7 had built up sufficient velocity and over a year ago, each ship had shut off its fusion drive. The ships were coasting the rest of the way to Tyche, cloaked in silence and stealth. The idea was to surprise the cyborgs.

  “You’re certain we’re continuing the mission?” Mule asked.

  “If we were going to stop,” Chen said, “the captain would have already begun to brake.”

  Mule’s stomach began to loosen.

  Not only did Marten Kluge possess the sunbeam, but also the giant interferometer that swept the Solar System searching for stealthy cyborg ships. If that wasn’t enough, the Alliance had deployed over a hundred drones throughout the Outer Planets to watch for secretive cyborg stealth craft, for the hated Lurkers. That was the cyborg signature: to sneak in close and attack out of the darkness.

  Despite the drone surveillance and the giant interferometer, at least one Lurker had reached Tyche. Because of that, the rulers of the Solar System feared for the future. Task Force 7 was the answer, and despite losing one-third of the flotilla to mutiny, it looked as if it would continue to be.

 

 

  Vaughn Heppner, Star Fortress (Doom Star 6)

 

 

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