“Forget about that,” he said. “The truth is I don’t care who rules here. It’s such a little thing that it makes me angry I’m even arguing about it.”
“You are amazingly illogical and sporadic. I’m beginning to wonder if your chaotic thought-patterns act as a protective shielding. It’s almost impossible for a high-grade logician such as me to predict your course or understand your thinking.”
“Listen to me,” Marten said. “I’ve thought a lot about how to defeat the cyborgs.”
“You are a monomaniac, as I’ve said.” Tan fingered one of her rings. Its signet was the Greek letter
“I’m talking about killing every one of them in the Solar System,” Marten said. “I’ve actually met them on the battlefield, not just theorized about them in the quietness of my study. I know how incredibly deadly they are.”
“…The people of Callisto knew that too,” Tan said softly. “My cousin Su-Shan knew that.”
“That’s why you should be listening to me, instead of insulting me,” Marten said. “You’ve seen the devastation caused by these aliens. You must know like me that the Jovians cannot defeat them on their own.”
Tan lowered the chalice with a clunk. She frowned at Marten.
“We have to unite against them,” he said.
“We?” asked Tan.
“Every human in the Solar System,” Marten said. “The Jovian moons, Mars, Earth, Venus, maybe even the Highborn. The Praetor gave his life to kill cyborgs. Maybe the other Highborn—”
“The Highborn are too arrogant,” Tan said. “It would be like taking orders from myrmidons. That would be worse than foolishness.”
“Okay, forget about the Highborn then,” Marten said. “The point is we should be joining forces to take out the cyborgs.”
“Join Social Unity?” asked Tan. “They obliterated the Jovian expeditionary fleet many years ago.”
“No, I’m not taking about
“What do I care about your past actions? You must make your meanings clear, barbarian.”
“Bah!” Marten said. “You’re drugged. Why am I even bothering with you?”
“I possess the superior intellect. I have trained my entire life so I can control my emotions and think logically.”
“Yeah, sure,” Marten said. He scowled, and he pressed both palms onto the metal table. “You said it earlier. You looked into the future, and no humans looked back at you. That tells me we have to bury our differences and band together. Every human left in the Solar System needs to unite, just as the various Jovians united here.”
“I cannot believe that Social Unity rulers would agree to abide under the Dictates.”
“They won’t. But they might agree to fight together against the cyborgs. Use that superior intellect of yours and think about what I’m saying.”
Tan pursed her lips. She opened her mouth, but before she uttered any words, a klaxon began to wail.
-6-
Gharlane withdrew his blade from the warm carcass. It collapsed in a seemingly boneless fashion at his feet. Kneeling, Gharlane plucked the hammer-gun from the corpse’s belt. He searched and found extra ammo magazines.
Gharlane had drifted through space for endless hours, submerged in a coma. His life-readings had been underneath the threshold of any sensors that had scanned his region of space. After a precise length of time, an internal chronometer had clicked and he’d been injected with vigorous stims. Upon waking, he’d discovered that his calculations had been off by point zero-zero-two percent. As he’d floated in space, he’d fired a spring-loaded spear gun. It had shot a barb with monofilament fiber over a kilometer, attaching to the dreadnaught’s particle-shield. Gharlane had reeled himself to the dreadnaught, crawled between two particle-shields and gained entry into the ship.
“Override,” he now whispered in the ship, adding a sequence of binary numbers. He overrode the calming chemicals in his bloodstream and gave himself combat-enhancing injections. His existence would end during the next few minutes. The achievement of his goal—that was primary.
The ship corridor was narrow, and there was a trace of oil in the atmosphere indicating working mechanisms and recycled air. The nearly imperceptibly-vibrating deckplates showed that the fusion engine was online.
Gharlane surged forward, colliding into a bio-form that came fast around the corner. Over three times its weight, Gharlane knocked the bio-form backward and off its feet. Its head snapped back hard against a deckplate, almost rendering the female unconscious. A precise kick of his vacc-suited foot against the female’s head killed it. A quick inspection of its torso added another hammer-gun to his growing collection.
Klaxons wailed as Gharlane trotted down the corridors—the ship was under centrifugal-gravity. He repeatedly emptied his hammer-guns, killing over two dozen humans, the last group obviously sent to intercept him. These were inferior specimens compared to the space marines that had stormed onto Athena Station. For a moment, he wondered if he could reach the fusion core and blow the entire ship.
No. The core would be protected. Every human captain had learned to guard it after the destruction of a Doom Star during the Martian Campaign. None of that mattered now, however.
Gharlane slammed a magazine into one of the hammer-guns. The other had malfunctioned. He’d sacrificed his last cyborgs so he could achieve this location. Chief Strategist Tan—she was a first level intellect that had used the Jovian military with canny ability. Web-Mind analysis of the Homo sapiens indicated the rarity of such unmodified first-level intellects. As primary targets, such rare individuals were to be expunged with extreme prejudice.
The death of such a militarily important target was, according to a Web-Mind’s parameters, worth the deletion of a planetary system’s controlling cyborg.
Gharlane jumped around a corner into a fusillade of shots. They’d been waiting for him. A hammer-bolt smashed against his chest-plate. Another caromed off his titanium-reinforced skull. Instead of falling onto his back, Gharlane bent onto one knee. Smoothly, he snapped off three shots before another hammer-bolt clipped his hip, spinning him.
Painkillers already flooded his bodily system. Boosters accelerated his reactions. From his kneeling position, he leaped at the nexus-node, firing with cyborg precision.
A blue-uniformed woman tumbled back, her forehead a gory ruin. Three other ship-guardians were already twisted into bleeding heaps, their weapons clattering across the deckplates.
“Die, you freak!” a guardian shouted. He had a pulse rifle poked around a corner. A red pulse ejected from the tube. It missed by a fraction, blowing a hole into the wall of the corridor and producing a metallic-smelling gout of black smoke.
Gharlane fired. The man’s throat became a red ruin as he cartwheeled away from the corner. Before the pulse rifle could hit the deckplates, Gharlane snatched it out of the air.
He moved like a giant insect in a blur of motion. Black blood dripped from several of his wounds. Gouged titanium showed in places. His vacc-suit was useless now, torn in a dozen spots.
One sobbing guardian tried to run away. Gharlane hurled his expended hammer-gun, catching the slow-moving creature in the neck. With a howl, the man flew off his feet and hit the flooring with his chest. Gharlane cracked his left elbow into the last guardian’s face, breaking bones. A punch into the thing’s throat finished it.
Turning into the corridor with the prone guardian, Gharlane charged down it toward the commander’s cubicle. He connected with his steel-toed boot, caving in the guardian’s forehead. Then he moved his legs like pistons, firing from the hip as he sprinted through the ship.
He was at eighty-three percent capacity, the enemy shots having taken a toll of his efficiency. He was a master unit cyborg: heavier, and constructed of more durable materials than the combat models.
