Doom Star: Book 06 - Star Fortress by Vaughn Heppner Read Free Book Online Page A

need obedience in order for my genius to flower. You made your greatest strategic error today in coming here. Otherwise, you fought brilliantly.”
    “Are you armed?” Hawthorne asked.
    “I have my hands,” Cassius said, lifting them. “They will be more than enough to twist your neck. For a preman, you fought better than anyone could have believed. However, I will take pleasure in this. My genetic imperative and greatness relentlessly leads me to the ultimate prize—victory!”
    Hawthorne took a deep breath as he drifted near Cassius. The Supreme Commander raised his left arm and pointed his index finger at the Highborn’s face.
    “Do not beg, preman, and do not preach to me concerning preman morals. Fight me and go down to death as a soldier should—struggle until the last breath leaves your pathetic frame.”
    With his middle finger, Hawthorne pressed the pad embedded within the skin of his palm. He had undergone emergency surgery. The left index finger was a functional prosthesis. The tip of skin blew away as a dum-dum bullet fired from the finger mount.
    Cassius might have shown surprise. It happened so quickly, however, that Hawthorne couldn’t tell if the Highborn knew what was happening. The dum-dum slug entered the Grand Admiral’s face under the right eye. As that occurred, the piece of mercury in the hollow part of the slug was flung against the lead. That caused the slug to fragment like a grenade as it entered the Highborn’s face. The slug exploded, instantly killing the soldier.
    A hidden transmitter in the palm-pad trigger also alerted the security team outside. They were not ordinary humans, but bionic soldiers. This was another clear violation of the agreement they had made. The bionic soldiers attacked the three Highborn, who proved themselves marvelous fighters. Cassius’s three guards killed fourteen soldiers before they died, but die they did.
    Afterward, the surviving members of the security team entered a pod and dropped for Earth. James Hawthorne strapped a propulsion pack to his shoulders, sealed his vacc-suit, entered a lock, waited until the chamber rotated into space and launched for the Vladimir Lenin .
    ***
    Aboard the Vladimir Lenin , Commodore Blackstone stood at the command module as the chamber was bathed in red light. He watched the pod drop toward the heavy cloud cover. A tiny blip on the screen showed him Hawthorne’s position.
    “Propulsion,” Blackstone said, “give me bearing seven mark ten. Put us between the Julius Caesar and the Supreme Commander.”
    There was a lurch aboard the battleship as subsystems fractionally moved the multi-million-ton vessel.
    How much time will they give us? Blackstone asked himself. The answer came almost right away.
    “Highborn weapons systems are hot,” Commissar Kursk said. She monitored the situation from her part of the module as she stood near him. “I think they know what happened to their Grand Admiral.”
    Blackstone gripped the module’s sides. “Are they targeting us?”
    “They’re not responding to our calls,” Kursk said.
    Blackstone flinched as he watched the module’s screen. A laser on the Julius Caesar activated. It was a stab of brilliant light that caused the small vessel to wink out of existence, killing the bionic soldiers aboard. Then a floating, and up until this point, invisible stealth-missile appeared on the module’s screen. The missile’s exhaust brought it to glaring notice.
    “Should I intercept?” Kursk asked. “The missile is heading for the station.”
    “Leave it,” Blackstone said. “Let the Highborn think they’re getting revenge.”
    “There’s a probability that an exploding fragment from the station will kill the Supreme Commander.”
    “It’s a risk he’ll have to take,” Blackstone said.
    He had received a communication from Hawthorne an hour ago. The orders had been sketchy, but Commissar Kursk had helped the Commodore fill in the gaps. Blackstone knew what he needed to do