Planet Wrecker

-67-

Climbing down the hill was hard work in the negligible gravity. The hundreds of hours of practice on the Spartacus’s outer shell gave Marten and the others their only chance. If they jumped too high, they would reach the asteroid’s escape velocity and simply keep drifting out into space.

The space marines were tethered together in groups of three, the line attached to their belts. Nadia was tethered to Marten, and Kleon was attached to Nadia.

“You have one task,” Marten told Kleon, a space marine from Europa. “Keep Nadia alive.” She’d tried to complain, but Marten hadn’t listened.

Most of the space marines carried IMLs, the Infantry Missile Launcher. Each of those held a new and improved Cognitive missile. The rest carried gyroc rifles or lugged extra ammunition and missiles. The armored vacc-suits were just like those they’d used in the Jovian System. None of the suits had thruster-packs. The weight saved allowed each marine to carry more ammo.

The survivors reformed into three platoons and moved down the hill. They looked like big insects, an infestation of bipedal cockroaches with weapons ready and helmet sensors sweeping everywhere.

“Overhead,” said Nadia. She carried a bigger sensor-unit, one of Marten’s tactical improvements.

Marten looked where Nadia pointed. Three patrol boats zoomed surface-ward for a landing.

“They’re bunched too close together,” Marten said.

“No!” shouted Nadia.

From the other side of their hill, bright objects accelerated up at the patrol boats.

“Cyborgs!” a space marine shouted.

The bright objects were shoulder-launched missiles. A flock of them zoomed at the patrol boats. Dots of light appeared on the patrol boats, auto-cannons firing. Then the missile-flock struck the lead patrol boat. It quit decelerating as the thrusters abruptly stopped, and it seemed to leap ahead of the last two boats. Its heading would take it past the asteroid.

Marten closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “Up the hill and over. We have to take out the cyborgs.”

“I killed them,” Omi said from his patrol boat. He must have meant with auto-cannon fire.

Marten stared at the last two boats coming in. They floated now, it seemed, and they came toward him.

“Follow my signal down,” Nadia said, as she adjusted the controls on her box.

“Roger,” said Omi.

“Three boat-loads of space marines,” Marten said. “I hope it’s enough to conquer this asteroid.”

Then the last patrol boats off the Meteor-ship Spartacus began to settle at the bottom of their hill.