Chapter 8

The attack on Loki II started off the same as the attack on Loki IV, except that there were few SAM sites to deal with. Instead, they had spotted where the Wasp fighters had launched, and those places faced the full fury of the spacetubs' attack. Again, the destruction wrought by the kinetic warheads was awesome to behold! Massive craters were left whenever more than one of the rockets hit in the same place. The first rocket penetrated the ground, and that absorbed a significant portion of the energy from the missile, but it left a thick fused layer of glass which refused to let the next warhead penetrate. This resulted in the entire energy amassed by the falling rocket being transformed into a plasma ball which consumed anything in its vicinity.

The Wasp fighters were effective fighters and caused considerable damage to the spacetubs before they were wiped out. Superior armament and superior speed were the two factors that enabled the spacetubs to out duel the Wasps. Dammit, something needed to be done! The humans and Arlosians just could not sustain a high loss rate; they did not have the resources to replace the lost pilots. Fortunately, the engineers on Earth were working on a solution to that problem and hoped to have the last bugs resolved very soon (they refused to say "real soon now").

Once the Wasp fighters had been dealt with, they went in with the close flights of scouts with FLIR units to find the concentrations of Wasps below ground. After these sites were mapped out, more of the kinetic missiles were sent in, with the intention of hitting close to the concentrations of Wasps and having one missile land on top of the fused glass from a previous missile. The idea was to try to pound the ground hard enough to cause the underground cities of the Wasps to collapse.

This sort of attack took a long time because they had to wait for each pool of glass to solidify before hitting it again. Each solidification took hours, so the bombardment lasted for about two weeks. The patience of everybody aboard Freya was sorely tried by the waiting, but the wait seemed to be worthwhile.

As far as they could tell from another FLIR instrument survey, all of the Wasps were either dead or sealed into spaces which would become their tombs. One way or another, the Wasp problem on Loki II was solved—on to Loki III.

Before the attack on Loki III was begun, an effort was launched to find what being was used by the Wasps as hosts for their larvae. No life, other than Wasps, had been found on either Loki II or Loki IV, so the breeding must be taking place on Loki III. If the hosts were sentient creatures, every effort had to be expended in trying to rescue them before all life was wiped out on the planet.

Long range FLIR flights had found many living creatures, but there was no way to sort out the Wasps from the other life, if any. Freya backed off to allow time for the people aboard to decide how to proceed. During this time, a new device was delivered from Earth: it was a remotely controlled robot tank that should be impervious to anything that the Wasps could throw at it. Basically, it was a spacetub that was beefed up with more armor and designed specifically to negotiate tunnels with tight clearances. It had no wheels, but used the antigravity belt to move around. It had been dubbed the tanktub.

Weapons consisted of an RG-2 railgun (a scaled-up RG-1) and a poison fogger. Both weapons were fed by replicators. The tanktubs were capable of going almost anywhere, though their weapons were limited to Earth-like conditions. By using FTLR for the control messages, the operators could stay on Earth while the tanktubs operated virtually anywhere in the galaxy, possibly in the universe. The virtue of the tanktub concept was that no operators were ever in physical danger, though there might be some emotional damage derived from their mission.

The code for the tanktub was delivered to Freya and 200 were replicated. They were flown from the replicator to Loki III and organized for exploration and battle. Some entry ports to the underground bunkers had been found, so the tanktubs went there first. A few well placed shots with the kinetic bullets from the RG-2 opened the doorways wide enough for the tanktubs to enter.

The tanktubs started spraying as they entered, and a number of Wasps were killed on the spot. The dead Wasps turned out to be workers, so little was gained there, other than proof that the poison was effective. The tanktubs cleared the first level, which appeared to be a warehouse similar to what had been found on Loki IV. This floor appeared to be stocked with food produced by a replicator; the contents of the crates looked like slabs of raw meat.

The tanktubs moved down to the second underground level and found another warehouse full of food. A few Wasps tried to fight down here, but the tanktub armor was impervious to the stingers. These Wasps were wearing the protective suits, so they had to be killed with the railguns. That wasn't difficult, it was just time consuming.

The next level down, the tanktubs came upon an amazing sight. Various Wasps were held in cages. These Wasps ranged in size from the size of a football to even larger than those that were normally seen by the humans. As the tanktubs moved among the cages, their turrets were swiveling about in an effort to see as much as possible. The cages seemed to go on for miles, and the corridor between the cages was lost as it disappeared over the horizon.

The tanktubs were leaving nothing but death behind as they sprayed poison as they progressed down the corridors between cages. This was like some vast biological laboratory with specimens being kept on hand.

An odd shape was seen to flit across the corridor too far away to be seen clearly, even when the recorded image was enlarged many fold. All that could be said for sure was that the being seemed to move on no more than four legs and it was estimated to stand about four feet tall. All of the tanktubs accelerated to maximum feasible speed as the operators tried to get a better look at whatever they had seen so fleetingly.

Suddenly, the tanktubs stopped sending images back to the Earth-based control center. It was impossible to tell whether the tanktubs had been destroyed or communication had simply been blocked. The smart money was on the first choice, since the people on Earth believed that there was no way to block or shield the FTLR signals.

Immediately, the replicator was set to making more of the tanktubs and they were dispatched to the place where contact had been lost. Twelve of the tanktubs were dispatched to replace the five that had been lost, and the operators of the other tanktubs in different locations were alerted to the possibility that their tanktubs could be lost the same way.

The tanktubs being sent to replace those whose signal had been lost were soon on scene. The sight sent back to Earth was astounding. Each tanktub appeared to have been destroyed by some sort of explosive, but there was no obvious way to tell if the destruction had been caused by a chemical explosive or by a kinetic explosive, though most observers were betting on the former with a shaped charge. From what little could be seen, each tanktub appeared to have a relatively small hole drilled in its armor on or near the front, and the rear of the vehicle was ripped away by some sort of explosion. If any personnel had been in the tanktubs, they certainly would have been killed by the explosion.

Each derelict tanktub had two to four beings standing around it, apparently examining it to learn all they could of its design and construction. These beings had hemispherical bodies with four jointed legs and four jointed arms with hands. A small head was mounted on a foot-long tentacle-like neck. This head appeared to be covered by sensory organs. It was impossible to tell at this point if the brain was enclosed in the head or was located elsewhere in the body.

One of the beings pointed a tubular device at a tanktub. There followed a flash of light and a rocket of some sort sped toward one of the tanks. This prompted the operators of the other tanktubs to start spraying poison and bullets at the strange-looking creatures.

The first tanktub was destroyed by the rocket when it hit, but all of the creatures standing around were quickly destroyed by the explosive bullets sent out by the RG-2s. This was unfortunate, because it would have been nice to have a prisoner for interrogation, but you can't win them all.