The platform was secure.
29 — The HUB Doors
“Shit!”
Turn shot his gaze forward, toward the X-22’s cockpit and Captain Mark Richards seated in the pilot’s seat.
“Shit!” Mark said again, this time slamming his hands down on the controls.
“What is it?” This time Turn was up beside him, a simple step with his cybernetic legs really all it took to clear the space separating them.
“HUB doors,” Mark said, pointing out the cockpit window, “they’re closing.”
“But Aaron and his men from the helicopter made it inside!”
Mark shook his head at Turn’s words. “Even though they got in there and got that sonic switched off and the holograms down, the hydraulics on all the door systems must still be working.”
“So what can we do?” Turn bit his lip and stared at the HUB doors, now with just a sliver between them. They were huge things, two thick slabs of steel towering a good fifteen feet high and each as wide as the front of a barn. They were thick too, not as thick as blast doors meant to protect against a nuclear attack, but thick enough that once they were closed, no one was getting through.
“What the hell can we do?” Mark said, his hand slamming down on the cockpit controls once again, his frustration plain. “What the hell can we do?”
Inside the command facility where the base’s controls and sonic killing system had been turned off, Command Sergeant Major Aaron Haney was thinking much the same thing.
“Hells bells!” he said, popping the clip from one of his Uzis and slamming it right back in again.
“What are we gonna do, sir?” Sergeant Paul Carson said, that calm voice and demeanor of his causing Aaron to frown at his own outburst.
“We’re gonna get to those doors and get them the hell open, that’s what we’re gonna do!” Jerry said, then looked over at Aaron. “Isn’t that right, sir?”
Aaron frowned again. The whole plan was going to hell, or at least changing rapidly. Already the HUB doors were nearly closed, and unless they acted in the next few seconds, they would be.
“We’ve got to get some explosives on those doors — pronto!”
“Comin’ right up, sarge,” Lewie said, then immediately began digging into the bulging pouches along his belt and in his jacket. Within moments he had several pieces of C4 explosives laid out on the table in front of them.
“Good,” Aaron said, nodding at the explosives, “that’ll get the job done, now we’ll need two men to plant it, one on each of those doors.”
“Well I’m going — they’re my damn explosives!” Lewie said with a laugh, and just as the HUB doors slammed shut out in the greater port hangar. The men turned about and it was as if a collective sigh overtook them.
“And I’m going to,” Jerry said next.
“Whoa,” Paul said, holding up his hand, “if both of you go alone then you’ll have no protection against the Gray’s mind attacks.”
“He’s right,” Johnny said, “once those Grays see you two moving out they’ll open up with everything they’ve got in their heads — you won’t stand a chance.”
“Ha!” Lewie laughed. “We don’t stand a chance as it is — how the hell we gonna get across thirty yards of hangar, aliens all about, and not get hit with something?”
“Because we’ll have your asses, that’s why,” Aaron said, slamming that ammo clip into his gun again.
Paul nodded. “Then let’s stop talking and start moving.”
The men looked at one another again, each meeting their teammates’ eyes. This was it, when battles hinged on single decisions and the willpower and bravery of but a few stood to affect the many, this was the moment.
The two men moved to the door.
“There!” Turn nearly shouted, his arm shooting out toward the cockpit window, nearly hitting the thing.
“I see them,” Mark said back, and the two quieted down as they watched the two men — Paul Carson and Lewie Yates by the look of them — move out of the command facility door and then start to edge along the side of the building.
“They’re going for the doors!” Andy shouted.
“No shit, Sherlock!” Billy said beside him, and with a good hit upside the head for good measure.
“Look!” Mark shouted, his finger going up this time.
The other men looked, then their eyes went wide.
“Run!” Paul shouted, but he knew it was too late. He and Lewie had only gone a dozen feet from the command facility and already the Grays were locking-in on them, and beginning to fire their flash guns.
Lewie didn’t have to be told twice. He gripped his machine gun all the tighter and started moving, giving sideways shots toward the small clutch of Grays hiding out behind the huge UFO on their left.
“Go!” Paul shouted again, but at the same time he was doing his best to stay within ten feet or so of Lewie, enough to ensure the Grays couldn’t use any mental attacks against him. If that happened, he knew, Lewie wouldn’t stand a chance.
Lewie gritted his teeth and said ‘the hell with it.’ He put his machine gun up, began running, and began firing right at the side of the large UFO, expecting Grays to be there at any moment. Sure enough, there they were, a small bunch of them, just waiting to do their mental attacks.
“Take cover by the fighter craft!” Paul called out from behind, and Lewie hoped it was close enough still that the Grays couldn’t get a beat on him. They were into the base now, rushing up to the main doors, and he expected they were damn mad about that, damn mad indeed. Watching a stream of his bullets rip into the aliens, shearing off their weak and frail arms before cutting into their bodies and heads, Lewie backed-off and started back toward the fighter craft lined-up on the other side of the floor from the large UFO. At the same time he shouldered the AR-15 machine gun and grabbed hold of his twin Colt .45s.
“Let’s get down over here and pick ‘em off,” Paul said, already squatting down beside one craft.
The things were nothing more than hovering, black triangles by the look of it to Lewie, but they’d provide cover just like Paul said. He rushed up to the one beside Paul and started to–
BOOM!
The blast — whatever it was — took the craft Lewie had been running to out completely, and a large chunk sheared off, striking him right in the left leg. It took the leg right off.
“You bastard!” Lewie shouted just after he was whipped up into the air and then slammed down onto the hard, cement floor of the port hangar, the wind still somehow in him. All thoughts for his safety or well-being gone, he put up one of his Colt’s and started firing wildly, like he imagined Custer and his boys had done one hundred years earlier at Little Bighorn.
Paul looked back at him and started to get up.
“Get those doors!” Lewie shouted at him through gritted teeth, not even looking his way, but knowing nonetheless that the younger soldier was going to try to save him. “I’m done. Get the doors and—”
Paul watched in horror as one of the flashgun laser shots from the Grays connected solidly with Lewie. Literally in a flash he was vaporized, his outline faintly juxtaposed against the hangar like some ghost of a photograph, and then he was gone, a small pile of fine, black powder all that remained beside his two Colts.
Paul gritted his teeth, but suppressed the urge to yell out and start firing at the Grays that’d did it, wherever they were, which he had no idea. Instead he put his head down and got his feet under him again, then started moving toward the HUB doors, now just–