The Dragon Writers Collection Read online

  Alamo Drift loomed large in front of them. Though not nearly as large as Churchill Drift, it was far older, Alamo was an eerie sight. It had been officially abandoned by the United States government in the late 22nd Century due to the inability of the government to control the radiation and the abundance of deaths attributed to radiation sickness. So the drift was turned loose near the Asteroid Belt and forgotten. That is until technology, and crime, caught up with her many years later.

  Alamo was dark. Depressingly dark. But there were some signs of life. Small craft moved to and fro, a few intrepid scavengers walked on tethers around the surface of the drift fixing this or taking that. The drift itself was not inhabited, there was far too much radiation for that. But its basic life support functions had to be maintained for the salvagers and criminals who ran various enterprises from its strategic location.

  “Notice anything about those worker pods, Heck?”

  “Yeah. None of them are near Platform Ten. Nothing there but high levels of radiation.”

  “Rad suits?”

  “Yep, Virgil was nice enough to update the protection levels. Said he’d been here a time or two,” offered Heck wryly. “Patrol craft?”

  “Nothing. Not even a Gesellschaft patrol. Those guys are always up to something out here.”

  “Maybe they’re busy rescuing little old ladies who’ve fallen and can’t get up,” quipped Heck.

  Both men laughed heartily at the idea of Gesellschaft doing anything nice.

  “I’m glad they aren’t here. I’m not in the mood to deal with those wack-jobs right now.”

  “Rad sensors going haywire,” commented Dooly as they approached the platform. Heck glided Sixkiller slowly over the dark platform, ready to switch on his infrared vision when two very dim landing lights appeared and guided him in. Heck landed Sixkiller gently on the platform between the lights and a conveyer belt which guided them inside a massive sally port. Once inside, the sally port hatch closed hard, jarring the men inside their craft.

  “Radiation countermeasures on?”

  “On.”

  “Ok, let’s suit up and get some atomic sludge.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Heck and Dooly stepped out into the dimly lit chamber. The artificial gravity systems on Alamo weren’t very good even during its heyday, and clearly hadn’t been improved. The pair bounded along through the cavernous chamber, sailing through the air in great leaps, and Heck assigned the gravity scale to about .3-gravity. That was roughly one-third the gravity of Earth and equal to that of the moon before terraforming and artificial gravity advancements.

  “You’re having way too much fun, Heck!” Dooly’s voice clicked on the comm system in his helmet.

  “Yeah, right. Now where is our man?” Heck drifted to a stop and landed gently next to Dooly. The pair was facing a large hatch that looked like it opened by a power mechanism and should slide from left to right. It was heavily stained with carbon deposits and any writing there may have been had faded over time. “Think it works?”

  “Ahh, Herr Thomas!” clicked a voice over his helmet comm. Heck looked sharply at Dooly, who shrugged, and the pair looked around with their rifles at the ready.

  “Who’s there?” answered Heck. Someone had hacked his comm frequency.

  “Do you not remember me, Herr Thomas?” came the smooth voice, accented slightly in Earth German.

  Gesellschaft!

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  Dooly looked panicked. Gesellschaft were a gang of criminals who had control of large asteroids, a dwarf planet, and several drifts. They had an armed force the size of a Commonwealth Fleet infantry division. Nobody picked a fight with Gesellschaft that didn’t have an arsenal at their disposal; and Gesellschaft rarely picked a fight they couldn’t win.

  He wanted to head back to Sixkiller, but the clock was ticking. Laylara had less than ten hours to live if he didn’t come through.

  “You injure me, Herr Thomas. We are old friends you and I. Why have you come to my drift?”

  “Your drift?” answered Dooly, nervously looking to Heck for a plan and nodding forcefully toward Sixkiller. “So very, very, sorry Sir Gutentaag. Sir. Didn’t know it was yours. We’ll just be on our way, now.”

  “No, I don’t believe you will,” came the maniacal voice. Heck knew they were in deep trouble. But the question was: where was the trouble coming from? Within, or without? “And my name is Frederick Von Schwarz. Herr Thomas was kind enough to provide me with shelter for fifteen years on a Commonwealth prison hulk. Isn’t that right?”

  Dooly cast Heck a furious look. “You arrested Frederick Von Schwarz? Frederick the Black?”

  Heck shrugged and looked back at the hatch. Von Schwarz and his goons were clearly not near enough to kill them, which meant they were probably on their way in short range assault craft. Heck pointed a small remote control at Sixkiller and armed the Phalanx system, there was enough in his fuel reserves to sustain Phalanx operations continually for two hours. The incredible drain of energy would result in the loss of seventy-five percent of his fuel cell stores. But Heck was looking at his future in terms of surviving the day and saving Laylara. Then Heck turned back to the hatch and began manipulating something that Dooly couldn’t see, but Heck motioned him to keep talking to Schwarz.

  “Uh, look. Mr. Black, sir. We are really, really, sorry about that. I think Marshal Thomas regret’s sending you to prison,” he finished lamely.

  “I will personally see that he does, Herr Doolin. And you as well. You see, I always repay my debts!” the voice drifted off into maniacal laughter.

  Heck lunged at Dooly and the two sailed ten meters through the air, landing harshly on the deck. But not as harshly as they would have in Earth gravity. It was then that Dooly saw the gaping hole in the hatch where they had been standing; Heck had blown open the door! The silence of the vacuum on Platform Ten prevented Dooly from hearing anything outside the comm signal in his helmet. He nodded his thanks to Heck, but remained silent. The pair got up and Heck led them quickly through the open hatch into the darkness beyond.

  They walked silently down the darkened corridor. Due to the low gravity of the drift, they were able to move very quickly with little effort. It was apparent to Thomas now that Virgil’s contact didn’t actually have possession of the enriched uranium. Nobody did, because this part of Alamo Drift was disputed space. Meaning it was very likely that right now another gang was on its way to assert dominance over the uranium enrichment facilities. Perhaps even two or three rival gangs. It was going to get very crowded on Alamo Drift.

  Lacking any other information, Heck went in whatever direction the rad sensors showed was strongest, hoping that would be the place to find his uranium. As luck would have it, the direction he needed to go was straight ahead. The pair came to a point where the rad levels neither strengthened nor weakened and Heck had to maneuver around for even a tiny fluctuation in the signal strength. Dooly aimed his rifle down the passageway the came from, waiting for signs of pursuit. None came.

  A tiny increase in signal strength appeared on the screen of Heck’s rad sensor when he lowered it toward the deck. He looked around quickly and spied a hatch in the deck. He strained against the stiff lever of the hatch until finally it lurched open. Heck lowered his sensor into the shaft and confirmed that the signal was emanating from below and dropped into the shaft.

  Dooly wasn’t overly fond of drop shafts like this but he didn’t think there was much choice. Gesellschaft soldiers were going to overwhelm them very soon and he didn’t want to be captured by those maniacal men; not alive anyway. Dooly hurried to the opening and dropped down after Heck.

  Heck landed gently at the bottom of the shaft and surveyed the area. It was dark, darker here than one level above. He flipped his goggles’ infrared vision system and was able to navigate by the glow of infrared light strips. The wall markings were clear here, and he was grateful they were in English. This drift dated back before the Commonwealth, to the ea
rly days of space colonization and habitation. There were people from all over Earth trying to make their fortunes in the remote operations of Alamo Drift; the markings could have easily been in Chinese.

  He was in a small chamber with a hatch in each direction. The one directly in front had the universal radioactive hazard placard on it and that was where the rad signals were strongest. About the time he opened that hatch, Dooly dropped in behind him breathing hard. Dooly quickly activated his infrared vision and Heck motioned for continued silence, though nothing more could be heard on the comm system. The pair entered another long corridor which ended in a sally port. There was atmosphere and pressure beyond. Heck hesitated, but there was nowhere else to go and no other way to get there.

  In they went.

  On the other side of the sally port the pair emerged in what must have once been a hospital ward. It was arranged very much like any other hospital yet its purpose had been singular, treating radiation sickness. Neither of the men trusted that the atmosphere and the rad signals were still very high. Taking off their helmets was out of the question, though Heck always found it easier to think and move without the darned thing on.

  As they moved down the hallway, Heck began to see what Gesellschaft’s interest here was. He looked into one of the patient rooms and saw a corpse strapped to the bed and that corpse wasn’t old. There were open sores and caked blood all over the body, the sheets were discolored and stained, and there was blood on the floor. Each room they passed possessed a corpse of its own, in various states. Some had sores, other had open cuts. Some had incisions, others were missing limbs. One or two seemed a hodgepodge of mismatched limbs, not unlike a Frankenstein experiment.

  The experimentation rooms of the Gesellschaft.

  Heck grabbed Dooly by the shoulder and held up a hand of warning, Dooly’s heart rate was climbing; the grisly scene and the danger creeping up behind them was getting to him. Dooly nodded, but Heck could see fear in the man’s eyes.

  They continued on down the passageway, not stopping to look in any more rooms, until they found a large hatch of reinforced steel. It took both of them to get the hatch open and they were rewarded with being knocked off their feet. The pressure difference between the hallway and the chamber on the other side had been very great. Getting up, Heck noticed an odd reading on his life support monitor. Radiation inside his suit was climbing!

  His heart raced with the realization and he had to force himself to calm. The suit must have been damaged and the rad shielding was not holding up. Or the rad forces on this miserable drift were just too impossibly high. Either way, panicking wouldn’t help. There were a few hours left before radiation poisoning would be irreversible. He had to focus on finding the uranium.

  Heck entered the chamber while Dooly stood guard outside. This room was full of pressurized lockers, each marked with a radiation hazard placard. Each one had a different element written on it.

  Damn, which one is uranium? And is any of it enriched?

  He looked around from locker to locker examining each sign, trying to remember what kind of uranium he needed. He saw several lockers marked with a ‘U’ but some had numbers: 234, 235, 238... and so on. Reasonably sure that uranium was indicated by a U, Heck just had to figure out which number was the type he needed. Karkov hadn’t been specific.

  “Have my little thieves found what they are looking for?”

  Heck took a deep breath and focused. He didn’t want to turn off the comm system, because he could at least try to read his opponents; for what that was worth.

  “Have my little creations scared you?”

  Heck glanced dangerously at Dooly, he could tell by Dooly’s bio signs that he was very close to talking. If they didn’t transmit, then it would be harder for Black to find them. He nudged Dooly to get his attention and warned him to silence. Then went back to work. All the way to one side, on ground level, was a locker with an unusual marking. It read, ‘U-999.’ And that rang a bell. Suddenly he remembered that U-999 had been discovered and mined on a dwarf planet called Liber, and some of the larger bodies in the Asteroid Belt nearby, during the early days of Alamo Drift. But scientists soon learned that this strange new element had some very frightening properties.

  “They will...”

  U-999, even in very small amounts, had bizarre and unpredictable effects on the laws of physics in its immediate vicinity. There had been reports of severe mental trauma, even on those shielded from its influences, and perceptions that time and space were being altered. The wormhole. That’s why Kharkov wants U-999, to power her wormhole device. And she knew that Gesellschaft had some. The woman was clever.

  Heck used his holophone computer’s hacking capabilities to send a signal to the computerized locker controls, and the locker opened; he was thankful that no one bothered to update the simplistic 21st Century technology. Hacking it took a few minutes longer than blasting it would have, but he had no idea what effects an explosive charge would have on the radioactive material. He had no idea what enriched uranium would look like. Luckily, the U-999 came in nice tidy little bars which he slipped into a radiation-proof container and strapped to his back.

  He stepped out into the corridor with Dooly and nodded down the hall the way they had come, Time to go!

  Dooly nodded agreement and the two eagerly made for the hatch at the far end of the passageway, twenty-five meters ahead.

  “Have you met them yet?”

  What the hell is he talking about? Heck wondered. The Gesellschaft were creepy, diabolical and evil. He knew better than to ask Black; anything that man had in store for them was going to be very unpleasant. Maybe that was why they hadn’t pursued yet.

  “You won’t escape, little thieves. My pets will see to that!” again the voice drifted off with diabolical laughter. Heck’s survival instincts were on high alert, he looked back and saw a person standing there. Then another person shambled out of one of the patient rooms and stood by the first. He bumped into Dooly who had stopped for the same reason: there were people in front of them.

  Heck was grateful at that moment that he was only seeing these people in the somewhat dull vision of his infrared systems, and even that was bad. They were corpses. The same walking, rotting corpses they had seen only minutes before, seen lying atop hospital gurneys in various states of decay! Heck pulled his rifle to his shoulder and fired, thankful that the corpse-things were not carrying weapons.

  Dooly, armed to the teeth, fired a shotgun designed for close-quarter combat on spacecraft. It was terrible at long range, but great in a narrow corridor. One blast from that shotgun and three of the five shambling figures were missing their midsections. Much to Dooly’s horror, the things slowed but did not stop their advance. Heck was noticing the same problem. There were at least five advancing on the pair from behind, and three of them now had perfectly placed bullet holes in their foreheads; but they kept coming.

  “Having trouble, Herr Thomas?”

  Heck’s mind was racing. Dooly’s weapon was having a better effect, tearing off limbs and blowing off gobs of flesh. But the creatures were still advancing. He quickly grabbed a pair of stun-grenades from Dooly’s belt and rushed toward the first corpse. Using his rifle like a fighting stick, he very quickly jammed the barrel of the rifle into the first creature’s head. The rifle sank into the soft forehead, bringing gobs of brain matter and flesh out with it. The corpse-thing took a swing but it was clumsy and Heck ducked to the side, keeping the first creature between himself and the others. As he fought, he realized that the greatest threat these creatures possessed was their intimidating appearance, and the threat of radiation sickness; they were slow and obviously being controlled from elsewhere, with no mind of their own. Heck surged forward into the waiting arms of the first corpse-thing, taking by surprise whoever was operating it. He bowled into the thing’s shambling friends and found himself amidst a putrid heap of flesh and limbs. Then, shoving a stun grenade into the open body cavity of the first corpse-thing, sicke
ned by the amount of putrid slime that poured from its innards, Heck leaped away in the low gravity and landed near Dooly.

  The explosion from the stun grenade in such close quarters created a powerful shockwave that knocked Heck and Dooly into the writhing mass of bodies ahead, and toward their exit. Heck rolled off Dooly’s back and thrust another grenade into a gaping wound in the chest of the nearest corpse-thing. He grabbed Dooly by the shoulder, grateful for his greater strength in the lower gravity, and leaped over the shambling mass on the deck. Dooly trailed along behind, firing at everything that moved or wiggled, and reloading with lightning reflexes.

  The stun grenade exploded, ripping apart its victim, and causing serious injuries to the other corpses, though they didn’t know they were injured. Their tactic worked. Dooly and Heck were able to reach the sally port hatch at the far end of the passageway and seal it behind them as they passed through. Heck leaned up against the hatch, thankful that the suits they were wearing had protected them well enough from the concussive force of the stun grenades. He hadn’t thought about that possibility when he threw the first one. A fragmentation grenade would have worked better, but would have killed them all.

  Then a scratching and pulling sound from behind the hatch warned the pair that the corpse-things were not dead. Dooly punched the controls that depressurized the chamber and the second hatch opened. Dooly grabbed Heck and pulled him through, shutting the hatch behind him. Heck punched in a few commands on the sally port control, allowing the inner hatch to open, then overrode its systems. The atmosphere from the room of horrors was being vented and would soon be a vacuum. He didn’t know if a vacuum would do anything to the corpse-things, but it sure was pleasant to think about them exploding into pieces.

  When they reached the shaft that led up, Heck put his foot in Dooly’s hands and lurched upward in the low gravity. He grabbed onto the lip of the hatch above and swung himself up and through. Dooly pulled himself up right behind Heck and the two were running down the corridor toward Platform Ten and, they hoped, Sixkiller.