Dark Dragons (51 page)

Suddenly, a nine-fighter pod of Vorvon trilobites which had
been hiding on the surface on Darren’s eight o’clock were hauling ass toward
him quickly.  They would be on him before he reached Scorch.  Judging
them the more immediate threat, Darren peeled off his ingress on Scorch and
went wing-over to meet the nimble wedge-shaped fish.  He linked nine
all-purpose fire–and-forgets into the laser-radar and fired.  The
air-to-air missiles sped ahead, disappearing over the mountains, and
intercepted the targets on his scopes.  But the trilobites kept coming.

Scorch had tricked him with its own Feint Mode.  The
alien’s slick deception had allowed it to close in with a wide ten-mile turn
into Darren’s starboard rear-quarter.  Pissed he had been fooled by the
same dodge he had used on dozens of unlucky trilobites, Darren had one-fifth of
a second to snap-and-burn sixty-degrees off Scorch’s lead pursuit.

A raking snapshot caught Darren’s Dragonstar just behind the
cockpit, and his fighter let out a metallic squeal.  His sphincter
puckered up hard enough to break a doctor’s finger.  One of the life
support oxygen tanks exploded, and a brief lick of fire roared into the cockpit
from the air vent above his head.

Finishing the snap-and-burn, Darren appeared on Scorch’s
eight o’clock and tried to pull lead on the alien, but Scorch saw it coming,
pitched up and executed his own snap-and-burn straight at Darren.  He
swept his gauss cannon left and right, spraying the front hemisphere with
bursts of hot slugs, hoping to catch the alien with a lucky shot. 
Nothing.

Darren predicted Scorch’s pursuit angle, went wing-over to
port and found the alien less than sixty feet inverted above him.  Both
tried to pull guns on each other, but they had unintentionally turned into one
another cockpit-to-cockpit, forming a tight Rolling Scissor——a pair of barrel
rolls resembling a double helix designed to compel one of the pilots to force
his opponent to overshoot for a raking snapshot.  It was a knife fight in
a phone booth.  They were too close to fire their guns, but if one of them
deviated just a few feet out of the formation, they would receive a cannon
blast right into the cockpit.  Dogfight over.

And Darren knew Scorch had the advantage in this
maneuver.  The alien just didn’t know it yet.  Soon he would notice
Darren’s Dragonstar was slow off the stick and missing starboard lateral
control because of the blown coils.  Scorch would quickly exploit Darren’s
weakness and kill him.

Darren kept up with him, trying to think of possible
evasions before Scorch discovered his wounds, but he could not come up with a
solitary idea.  Fear began to creep into him, and his Dragonstar seemed to
feel it, too; shuddering now, violently, as Darren tried to push the damaged AG
emitter beyond its impairment.  Scorch fired a blast of off-boresight
laser pulses at him when Darren began to fall slightly off formation, but they
missed.

There it was.  The first clue.  Scorch would have
him any second now.  Darren’s stinking panic rose to absolute
terror.  He knew a snap-and-burn this close to Scorch wouldn’t work
because the alien could easily get off an easy cannon shot before Darren could
peel away.

Darren was now nearly out of the double helix formation, and
a terrifying gauss blast across his cockpit missed literally by a few
feet.  Scorch knew for sure now.  The alien, twirling around with him
in the Rolling Scissor, yawed a few degrees to port, and Darren knew what the
alien was about to do——invert across his beam and attack from an angle where
Darren would have to jam hard to starboard to counter the maneuver——something
he could not do.  Darren was about to die.  His guts went
tight.  He fought the urge to cry out.

Something unpredictable!

Darren popped the windshield, and the glass slid back, the
force fields keeping the hurricane gusts out of the cockpit.  Darren
whipped his left arm out and fired a murderous ten thousand fps blast-stream
from the gauss gun.  He raked Scorch’s Dragonstar from nose tip to canard
wing, shattering the windshield.  Internal guts of hardware——the
laser-radar, the gauss cannon, and most satisfyingly, the anti-g cockpit field
generator——exploded into flaming, spinning comets of debris as the dragon’s
head began to disintegrate.  Scorch’s Dragonstar flipped violently upward
and away, the crushing g-forces on the alien’s body certainly killing the poor
bastard quickly.

Darren sealed the windshield and inverted into a split-S to
ride the alien to the surface . . . and watch him pancake into the
ground.  A thick contrail of evaporating steam from spewing liquid
nitrogen poured from a blown access door.  As soon as the coolant emptied,
black smoke and flames shot out as the overheated anti-graviton emitter now
began to burn into the surrounding guts.

Instead of tearing off, the starboard wing rent backwards,
nearly folding back flush against the fuselage.  The Dragonstar nosed up
somewhat into a half-ass attempt at stabilized flight.  Scorch,
incredibly, was still alive.  The alien’s engines, however, were dead.

Darren was tempted to lock him up with both the laser and
gauss cannons and just finish off the cold-blooded bastard.  But the
thought of thousands of people the alien had killed with its senseless attack
on the American military bases kept his finger off the trigger.

Spend a little more time thinking about it on the way
down.
  ‘Death blessed, Vorvon, do not be fright!’ Darren shouted,
repeating Scorch’s taunt from Jupiter.

The alien responded to his mockery with a blind salvo of
air-to-air missiles from the undamaged port wing, but Darren’s forward
anti-missile pod swatted them effortlessly out of the sky.

Scorch pulled one last insolent act out of the bag when the
alien reared up with just hundreds of feet to spare and executed a controlled
crash straight into a neighborhood of homes on the outskirts of a small town in
central Kansas.  The alien took out two houses before rolling to a stop in
a wheat field.

‘You bastard,’ Darren growled.

There was nothing he could do for any possible survivors in
the two demolished houses.  Dozens of neighbors were already rushing
toward the burning homes.  Darren didn’t see any cars in either driveway,
so that was a good sign.  Still, he could not help, his mind set on
Scorch.

He swooped in low behind the Vorvon Dragonstar and destroyed
both wingtip laser cannons with a pair of shots from his own guns, then raked
the still intact port wing, destroying the missiles launchers hidden
inside.  Scorch was finally toothless.  Slowly, Darren hovered around
to examine the demolished dragon’s head and the cockpit there.  What he
saw inside didn’t make sense.

He hovered in closer, his Dragonstar’s nose just feet from
the pulverized alien fighter.  The cockpit was exposed and rent slightly
askew, the windshield missing.  Black smoke continued to roil out of the
engine chamber where the white hot AG emitter had melted, now burning through
the bottom of the dome which contained it.

Scorch was still locked into
his
chair.

He
was barely alive.

Scorch was a goddamn human.

Friday, May 21

Darren directed his suit computer to scan the swarm of
microwave bands floating about until it found the one he wanted——a hissing,
Extremely High Frequency carrier wave from an Air Force satellite still
untouched by the aliens’ attack.  Checking the scan map, he saw that the
satellite’s frequency footprint covered China Lake.  This microwave band
had to be the one.

“This is. . . .” he realized he had never given himself a
call sign.  “This is Space Cowboy”——it worked——“calling the Near-Earth
Space Surveillance and Tracking Center, do you copy?”

No reply.

“This is Space Cowboy, calling NESSTC Control, do you copy?”

Three seconds later, he received a woman’s muffled, and
rather annoyed, reply.  “Whoever you are, Space Cowboy, you don’t belong
on this net.  We need this for official traffic, so clear off.”

“I could try 911, but the phone lines are dead.  I need
to talk to Colonel Martin Towsley, but not General Strangelove.”

“Do you have a code for me, Space Cowboy?  I need code
clearance for all inbound traffic.”

“Romeo Tango Bravo Yabba Dabba Doo.”

Darren heard the headset on the other end pass from one hand
to another, then, “This is Colonel Towsley.  Who is this?”

“Hello, colonel.  This is Darren Seymour.  I’m
somewhere just outside a little town in Kansas.  I need you to see
something, and I want you to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

 “You tell me.  I’m sending you an MPEG-Two feed
from my suit camera.  You should be getting it now.”

*

The image which appeared on the top HD monitor on the COC’s
front wall showed a man——or what appeared to be a man——still locked into a seat
dangling halfway out of an exposed cockpit that had been blown in two. 
Towsley recognized the vehicle as a Dragonstar.  What was left of it
anyway.

“This is the bad guy who wiped out your satellite weapons,
colonel,” Darren said.  “And the military bases on the east coast.”

“But it’s a man.”

“I know it is!”

*

Well, at least it looked like it had once been a man, Darren
thought.  The crash had rent the pilot’s helmet off, revealing black
cuneiform script tattooed across his gaunt face.  He had no hair, and his
skin looked sickly pale.  Darren also noticed a spider-shaped cybernetic
implant imbedded into his bald scalp, guessing it to be a point of
thought-control interface, a mechanical equivalence to the benign growth on
Darren’s brain.  The man wheezed heavily with every inhalation, and a
small puddle of blood began to pool on the ground underneath him.  Not
much time left.

Darren took a few steps closer, his pulse rifle aimed at the
man’s head.  “Who are you?”

A rapid fire dialect Darren could not understand suddenly
burst from the man’s mouth.

*

“What is that?” Towsley asked no one in particular.

The First Lady standing next to her husband a few feet away
raised her hand.  “Colonel Towsley?  As you may know, I’m
Jordanian-American, and I studied Old Arabic at the American University in
Cairo . . . what that man is saying sounds Semitic.  Aramaic, maybe?

“The language Christ spoke?”

The First Lady shrugged.  “I don’t know.  It’s
something I’ve never heard before, yet it sounds familiar.”

Towsley turned to the small group of APIS personnel
nearby.  “Do we have anything that can translate that?  I want to
know what he’s saying.”

“Yes,” came a thin voice beyond the group of people huddled
around him.

Towsley spotted a hand raised way in the back.  “Front
and center.”

The group parted and let the man through.  The guy’s
civilian ID said Albert Yates, APIS, Xenosociology.  “Colonel, we have
voice recognition software that has a linguistics database for all thirty-six
language families and their subdivisions.  If he
is
speaking a dead
language, the software can use a dialectal comparative method algorithm to
identify phonemic——”

Towsley held his hand up.  “Get on it.”

*

“You spoke English to me a few days ago. 
Remember?  What is your name?”

Despite his obvious pain and humiliation, the man managed to
smile.  The unintelligible words he suddenly aimed at Darren came with
daggers.  He was practically shouting, his grin still there.  He knew
the man was probably ranking him up one side and down the other——a dying
combatant’s final defiance directed at his opponent before the God of War
separated ghost from flesh.  Darren felt neither victorious nor mournful
toward this human who had been trying to kill him just fifteen minutes
ago.  A human.  Not a black leather-skin Vorvon.

The man’s roar of contempt trailed off, unable to maintain
its volume, slow death leaching in quickly.  Tears formed in his
eyes.  Still, Darren felt nothing.

He rolled his head to one side so that he could look past
Darren at his Dragonstar parked thirty feet behind him.  His eyes hung
there for a moment before going back to Darren. “G-gooooodrag . . . on. 
Good . . . evol . . .ushine.”

Now he felt something.  “Thank you.”

The man moved a slow withered hand up to his neck, his long
bony fingers wriggling like spider legs, and dug under the gray flight
suit.  A fist came back with something inside attached to a brassy
necklace.  He jerked hard, the chain broke, and he held out his
offering——a slender female torso carved from an intensely blue cut of lapis
lazuli with tiny veins of gold pyrite.  Some kind of ancient fertility
symbol.  It was beautiful.

“Dar—ron . . . G’drag . . . on.”

Darren took the pendant and put it in one of his bandolier
compartments.  He lowered his pulse rifle.  It wasn’t needed.

The man whispered a few words in his strange language, a
prayer perhaps . . . and with that, the son-of-a-bitch died.

*

Yates, sitting at a computer station by himself a few feet
away, studied the information on the monitor before speaking.  “You were
close Madame First Lady.  I selected Aramaic and Old Arabic as base
language families for comparative method reconstruction.  The computer
nailed it down to East Semitic, specifically Akkadian with a ninety-two percent
probability curve, phonemically similar to Old Arabic.”

“Akkadian?”  Towsley stepped closer to Yate’s station
to study the monitor.  Yates had Darren’s video recording of the human
pilot in a playback loop.

“Yes sir.  The info on my screen says Akkadian was the
lingua
franca
throughout the Fertile Crescent during the Middle Bronze Age until
dying out around five hundred BC.  ‘The Akkadian Empire existed from 2334
BC to 2154 BC, established by Sargon of Akkad. . . .’”  Yates continued to
read silently to himself.