Marten grinned as he stared at the stars. He had beaten Hall Leader Quirn. He had beaten Major Orlov. He had slain mad Colonel Sigmir, the Highborn who had made his life hell during the Japan Campaign. Now he had beaten Training Master Lycon and owned a spaceship, the Mayflower.
It was a small spaceship, a shuttle. But it was a spaceship just the same. It gave him liberty and freedom of movement. If he calculated it right, if he used his wits at Mars, he could reach the Jupiter Confederation yet. He could escape the Social Unity fanatics and the bigoted Highborn Supremacists.
A klaxon wailed. It shattered the quiet peace that Marten had known for weeks. He whirled around and blinked five times before he realized the significance of the noise.
“Omi!” he shouted.
Marten fumbled at his buckles. He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. With greater concentration, he unsnapped the last buckle and pushed himself toward the hatch. He floated through the Mayflower to the medical unit.
Omi looked up through the clear cylinder.
Marten grinned like a maniac. With practiced speed, he opened the cylinder and slid Omi out.
“Take it easy,” Marten said.
Omi frowned and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was dreadfully thin compared to the muscled shock trooper he had been eight weeks ago.
Daily, Marten had slid the unconscious Korean from the cylinder and massaged his muscles with a specially designed machine. The machine had worked on similar principles as their acceleration suits aboard the Storm Assault Missiles. It had massaged and moved the muscles so they wouldn’t deteriorate too much, wouldn’t atrophy altogether.
“Where are we?” Omi finally whispered.
“You’re aboard my spaceship,” Marten said proudly.
Omi’s frown deepened. With methodical slowness, he turned his head, looking around.
“Where…” Omi wet his lips. “Where are the Highborn?” His voice was hoarse and hard to understand.
“Let’s get you set up first,” Marten said.
Marten found him clothes, a one-piece jumper. He let Omi sip concentrates and had him float throughout the shuttle with him.
“We’re alone,” Omi said at last.
Nodding, Marten laughed.
“I don’t understand,” Omi said.
Marten pointed at the heavily polarized window in the pilot compartment. “Training Master Lycon is floating with the stars.”
Omi’s eyes narrowed.
With barely restrained glee, Marten told Omi how he’d spaced the three Highborn. A part of Marten scolded himself for his enthusiasm. He had killed three humans in cold blood. It was true the Highborn had treated him like an animal. They had caused the death of all his friends. Yet there was something too bloodthirsty about taking such inordinate joy in having spaced three of the Master Race.
Omi stared at him, with that cold, hard smile playing along his lips. “I would like to have seen them die.” Then Omi closed his eyes and fell asleep.
-2-
Commodore Joseph Blackstone’s body ached most of the time from radiation poisoning. He sat before his vidscreen in his tiny wardroom aboard the Vladimir Lenin. It was a Zhukov-class battleship in far-Mars orbit.
The Vladimir Lenin had taken hits from a Doom Star. The super-ship had previously been orbiting Mars. They had finally repaired the engine damage and stopped the radiation leakage, but his crew and he had been weakened by the ordeal. Now, everyone took anti-radiation tablets and tissue regeneration drugs.
Commodore Blackstone was a short man, noted for his decathlon victories in his younger years. Once, he had been vigorous, a dynamo of energy and self-confidence. Unfortunately, he had seen better days. He had seen better years. The war, the extended voyage and the grim encounter with the Doom Star had caught him at the worst possible moment in his life.
He had dearly loved his wife, had always looked forward to their time together during his shore leave. Then his wife had sent him a divorce decree through official channels. He’d discovered that she’d had a string of lovers for years. Worst of all, she had kept a careful dossier on his sarcastic comments regarding Political Harmony Corps and the Directorate of Inner Planets. Learning those things had been horrible enough. The fourth blow had arrived a month before the beginning of the Highborn Rebellion. His only daughter had been horribly mutilated in a flyer accident on Venus. For some inexplicable reason, she hadn’t taken to regeneration therapy. He desperately wanted to see her, to hold and comfort her as he had when she’d been a little girl after her hoverpad accident that had chipped her two front teeth.
His once smooth features had become slack as he lost weight. He had bags under his eyes and too often forgot to shave. He was listless and thin, never smiled, and lived far too much in his memories of happier days.
Blackstone doubted that Supreme Commander Hawthorne was aware of any of his personal problems. Hawthorne had been an old friend from Academy days. Blackstone suspected that he knew nothing of the attributes of the political officer assigned to the Vladimir Lenin. Because of his ex-wife’s files, the political officer had boarded the battleship with a company of PHC enforcers and with extra-military authority. She was a three-star commissar, a daunting woman with a bruising personality and heavy-handed attention to protocol.
Commodore Blackstone lifted a shaking hand and turned on the vidscreen. The Vladimir Lenin had a task to perform. He’d never failed before. He studied the Supreme Commander’s operational plan for the reduction of the Rebel Mars Planetary Union orbital defenses.
“Destroy Doom Stars,” Commodore Blackstone whispered later. He was supposed to take Mars in order to lure Doom Stars here. The ache in his bones told of the danger of attempting any engagement with the super-ships.
Blackstone tapped at his desk screen. A simulation of the Mars System appeared. Mars’ average distance from the Sun was 1.52 AU. (An AU was an Astronomical Unit, the average distance of the Earth from the Sun.) The Earth and Mars were on the same side of the Sun presently, so it should have been a short journey for the convoy fleet. The closest the Earth ever came to Mars was 56 million kilometers. Now, however, Mars was nearing its farthest orbital distance from the Sun. It was also 100 million kilometers from Earth and made the convoy fleet’s journey nearly twice as long.
Commodore Blackstone rubbed his bristly chin. He needed a shave. He had forgotten that daily ritual for two mornings now.
He began to read the bulletins and study spaceship velocities. He read deceleration schedules and reports concerning the structure and position of the battle pods these cyborgs from the Neptune System came in. Blackstone had seen bionic soldiers before and assumed the cyborgs must have advanced prosthetics. How the cyborgs could benefit the coming assault, he had little idea. Hawthorne’s plans for them were patently absurd.
The scattered units gathered here in far-Mars orbit simply couldn’t do what the Supreme Commander fantasized they could do. Blackstone had toured a missile-ship yesterday that had escaped the Venus System. He had been appalled at the sloppy uniforms, the lackluster salutes and the depleted ship’s supplies. If the other warships were in similar shape, he doubted there would be enough firepower left in his growing fleet to give the Highborn much worry.
How was a commander supposed to gather a dispirited fleet in the far orbit of any planet? Then he was supposed to re-supply them, ship-to-ship, without any base facilities. Then he was supposed to effect repairs, erasing previous battle-damage.