Death Drop (36 page)

“You, Colonel, will be the opening entertainment for my army. You killed so many of their brothers in the mine with your heroics and your
amazing abilities
that they would very much like to see the ice king die. And since Gyumak must pay for allowing the other Dissenters to escape, you will fight him to the death. The rules of the black arena apply to your match as well: no weapons, just the powers the gods have given us.” Killikbar’s villainous smile was on his mouth again, and Abalias knew he wasn’t going to get a fair shot in his match-up against the giant either. “And, Colonel, a small warning. The arena is vast, but put all thoughts of running and hiding from your mind. Some of my soldiers will be
keeping watch
on the field, and you won’t like it if they have to persuade you to return to the battle. You
will
stand and fight my giant.” He turned to leave and his ghosts followed, drifting backwards and staring at the Dissenters with multitudes of dead, white eyes and ready instruments of destruction.

Abalias wasn’t very happy about having to face the Berzerker monster in hand-to-hand—or hand-to-tentacle—combat, but he was more concerned about the dark general’s plan to conquer the universe. His mind was overwhelmed with the thought of Killikbar possessing the powers of Graale and Helekoth. Then, suddenly, he realized the dark general had said something familiar, and he struggled to find his voice before Killikbar was gone. Finally, it came.

“Blangaris?”

Killikbar stopped in his tracks. “You’re familiar with Helekoth’s Mewlatai dog?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,”
Abalias thought to himself. “He attacked two of my men,” he said between coughing fits as Graale pulled him to his feet again, “killed one of ‘em on Sitiri 9 just before you graced us with your presence.”

Killikbar turned to face them once more.

“I knew he was going to be there, but I didn’t know he was so foolish and reckless as to give his name to the enemy before his mission is done.”

“His mission?” Abalias rasped.

“To destroy the one who makes the Serum—Tyrobus Daelekon—his own brother.”

“His brother?” Graale said.

“It’s a blood feud fueled by betrayal. The Mewlatai servant of Helekoth is drunk with bloodlust and rage. A powerful adversary, too powerful. That is why I
must
have your soul!” Killikbar howled and pointed a huge, black clawed finger at Graale.

“So you can be strong enough to stop him from destroying the Serum,” said Abalias knowingly. “So you can defeat Helekoth.” It all made sense to him now. “You know, General nutsac, I was wrong. Helekoth didn’t turn you into a murdering, twisted evil shit-ass, you came that way all by yourself, didn’t you?”

“I will enjoy watching Gyumak tear you apart, Colonel,” Killikbar said with genuine satisfaction as he turned around and made for the door.

“You of all people should know that the Serum is failing. The Durax have progressed beyond its potency and it won’t fend off their powers much longer.” Abalias said this in his best ‘everyone knows this, why don’t you’ tone and waited to see if he could surmise any truth out of Killikbar’s reaction. He got more than he bargained for.

“All the more reason to put my plan into action as soon as possible,” Killikbar growled. The two phantoms covering their master’s exit swarmed back onto Abalias and forced him after the dark general by phantasmic, glowing sword point and ethereal whip cracks. Graale watched on in terror, not only for his friend and commander, but for himself, his people, and every world in the endless universe. Death was coming for all and it was coming on ghostly wings.

Chapter 28:
Seeing and Believing

I
t was
very
difficult to sight a moving target using just the two cameras mounted over the entrance to The Boneyard, but the portmaster finally found the right height, and flames spewed from the perforated barrels of both the preacher-bot’s guns as he swept them from right to left in line with Dezmara’s shoulders. She slunk low, knuckling the stairs in front of her while holding tight to the blades curving along her forearms. She felt the air shimmer above her back as the preacher’s bullets sped by and the kranos registered another close encounter. The preacher was just four steps above her now, and she was close enough to hear the portmaster roar with frustration through the speech unit on the bot and the whirr of cogs as he repositioned the guns to cut Dezmara in half at the waist. She knew that she had been lucky to escape The Boneyard, and she wondered how much longer her luck would hold out as the guns, now just a few feet away and locked on her midsection, roared to life one more time.

She jumped. The barrels of the preacher’s guns glowed red as the portmaster mashed the triggers back to their stops. The slides on each big cannon snapped back and forth and spent casings turned the staircase into a glittering fountain of golden metal. An arc of bullets cut past the tip of Dezmara’s left boot as she pulled her legs up toward her torso. The portmaster had overcompensated and aimed too low. It looked like Dezmara’s luck was going to hold out just a little while longer.

She was still howling her attack cry through the kranos as she flew through the air. Dezmara spun the blades forward in her hands and then viciously swooped them across her body in opposing directions—the right weapon slicing down and the left upward. She felt the slightest resistance in the handles as the blades met the hardened outer casings of the preacher’s arms and then the scythes sliced cleanly through in a spray of fluid. Severed pins, sliced springs and sheared cogs joined the preacher’s severed limbs, still loosely clutching the machine guns, as they spilled onto the stairway and tumbled to the plaza. With her arms wrapped tightly across her chest and the blades curled to each side, Dezmara somersaulted over the defanged preacher-bot and into the tunnel behind him. To minimize the pain to her injured leg and ribs, Dezmara allowed her momentum to continue forward as she hit the ground and she launched into a dive-roll, whipping the blades back along her forearms so she could use her closed fists to guide her head to the ground. She stood with her arms slightly bowed out to her sides and her chest heaving from exertion. Now that her attack was completed, the pain in her leg returned and the cavern began to spin. Her coat was ruined thanks to the preacher’s gunfire, but she’d be damned if she was going to cut it to pieces to stem the flow of blood from her thigh.

She turned and walked casually toward the back of the amputated bot as it spun quickly around to face her. The only thing it could do now was attempt to run her down, but it sat idly at the edge of the stairway and didn’t move. Dezmara knew the portmaster was watching from a camera mounted somewhere in the plaza, and she assumed that since the machine wasn’t charging her, he had something to say. She stepped up on the sloped track and walked forward until the kranos was level with the preacher’s shattered, empty eye. She twirled her right blade forward and was poised to strike when the bot spoke.

“You’ll pay dearly for destroying the preacher!” the portmaster’s voice growled through the three dark slits on the machine’s wedged face. Dezmara slashed downward then across and returned her blade to its sheath, but the sardonic speech continued. “You think you’ve won? You have nowhere to go, Ghost! I’ll hunt you down and kill you, and everyone in the universe will know that
I
defeated the mighty Ghost. You
will
die on Luxon!” The portmaster let out a guttural laugh and Dezmara could almost see the torso of his mechanical puppet shake as he roared somewhere on the other end of the com unit. Dezmara kept quiet as she pulled the black strips she had cut from the preacher’s coat tightly around her leg and then tied them off. The pressure hurt like hell, but the portmaster’s egomaniacal cackle made her mad enough that she didn’t care. Now that the wounds on her leg had been taken care of, Dezmara unsheathed her right blade again, spun it forward in her hand, and sliced the air in front her with a swish before returning the weapon to its hold in one swift move.

The preacher fell silent as the portmaster stared through his camera for the resulting damage from Dezmara’s blow, but nothing happened. The machine erupted into another bout of laughter as she hopped off the side of the tread. She clapped her hand over her ribs and let out a small grunt of discomfort as she landed and headed for the stairs. She was in a considerable amount of pain; her helmet was gouged and scratched, her flight suit torn and her jacket riddled with holes, but she was smiling from ear to ear beneath the kranos. She had made it down five steps when the laughter stopped abruptly, followed by a heavy clank on the stairs behind her. Dezmara continued her controlled march as the head of the preacher-bot wheeled by, pinging and clunking as it hopped and turned end over end and sped down toward the plaza. She held up her hand so the cameras were certain to see it clearly and extended her middle finger as the head was passing; and then she let out a painful, but very satisfying, laugh of her own.

She knew her moment of humor would be short lived as she surveyed each of the six doors in view of the kranos and the scores of people waiting to somehow get through them. The crowd was less frantic now that the gunfire had stopped, but there wasn’t a soul in Luxon’s fabled marketplace that didn’t want to run for the nearest ship in the dockyard and escape through the great gate. Throngs of travelers stretched out from the impenetrable doors like masses of writhing insects as they pushed, pulled and crawled over each other in hopes of getting out alive.

She tried to raise Simon again, just in case, but there was still no response. The kranos highlighted the door that led to dock six and promptly reminded Dezmara that it was virtually impregnable. A zoomed view of the key pad appeared with the information that there were literally millions of possible code combinations. “Dammit, Simon, where the hell are you? I can’t do this alone—I’m no hacker!” She was going to need another plan, and the only thing that came to mind was fighting through the rioting crowd and skewering the keypad with one of her blades; hoping it would short-circuit the combination. “C’mon, girl—that shit only works in cheesy action stories—this is the
real world…
but what else are you gonna do?”

She sighed heavily as she stepped over the lifeless bodies of the civilians the portmaster had killed with the preacher-bot. Swirls of blue, green, red, and black mixed together on the floor, and her boots sloshed on the ground as she jogged through the pools of blood. The sight was a grim reminder that the portmaster was still in control of the game and he intended to kill her in order to win. Dezmara didn’t know how he had found out that she was Human, and at the moment she couldn’t think too much about it—right now she had to get the hell out of Luxon with her life. It didn’t take long for Dezmara to cross the plaza and reach the wall of bodies backed up from each door and tangled together like a mass of dense, writhing weeds.

“This is hopeless,” she sighed. There was no way of getting through the crowd without using force, and she knew better than to try that—these people were like cornered animals and it was very likely that they would respond violently if she barged in and started shoving. She knew time was wasting and her heart raced faster as she looked over her shoulder at the wreckage of the preacher-bot. Dezmara wondered how long she would have to wait before the portmaster sent more of his goons to track her down and kill her; then six shapes bolted through the opening in Gamuun’s chest and started down the stairs.

“Dammit!” she cursed and then turned again to look at the crowd blocking the access to her ship. If only she had one more bullet left for the revolver, she could fire it into the air. That would make them scatter and she could hope that she wouldn’t be trampled in the hysteria. As it was, the blades would only be useful if she felt like slicing through several hundreds of mostly innocent people to get to a portal that she probably wouldn’t be able to open anyway. The situation was beginning to look bleak.

Avoiding gunfire from one enemy was difficult enough, but dodging bullets from six of them was impossible. She could dive into the crowd and try to disappear, but the portmaster had already proved he didn’t care who he killed in order to get to her, and she didn’t want innocent blood on her hands. It looked like the portmaster was right: she was going to die on Luxon, right here in the market. She spun around to face the rushing attackers and loosed the blades from their sheaths. If it was time to die, she wouldn’t fall without a fight. She felt the small sparks of animal energy shock her muscles again as her breathing became heavy, and her mind filtered out everything else around her except the battleground of the plaza and her oncoming foes.

The kranos detailed the powerful guns that each goon carried. She spun the blades into attack position and leaned forward, balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to launch herself into a dead sprint and speed to her end; then she heard a soft noise drift through her barrier of concentration. It was distant and it hardly registered against the intensity of her focus at first, but it steadily beckoned for her to return. It was a pleasant sound, like a beautiful harmony hummed on a warm autumn day in a peaceful place, and it occurred to Dezmara that a sound like that didn’t belong here in Luxon; certainly not in the present situation. And just like that, her rational mind took over and she stumbled forward—shaking off her war daze and turning to find Lilietha tugging gently at the tatters of her flight jacket.

“Ghost,” she said calmly, “come with me.”

“Lilly, get the hell out of here”

“We don’t have much time and you’re not listening again,” the little girl said sternly. “Now follow me.” Lilietha stared at her with unblinking, oval eyes and held out two long, blue fingers. Dezmara hesitated for a moment and then quickly slid her blades to their catches before taking Lilietha’s spindly digits and hurrying after her. “Stay down!” Lilietha cried as she tugged on Dezmara’s arm, and they banged into the outer perimeter of the crowd. Dezmara squatted as low as she could and the muscles in her legs, not to mention the wounds, burned as she and the little girl wound quickly through the shuffling bodies. Aside from throwing a few strategically placed elbows and bumping several crazed marketgoers out of their path with her shoulders, they were making their way rather quickly. Dezmara was impressed: she would never have thought that getting lower to the ground might help her navigate through the mob. Dezmara’s mind raced as she tried to figure out how Lilietha could possibly help her or where they were going. She was about to stand up, pull her to a stop, and ask just what was going on when they broke into a small clearing. They were behind the statue where Lilietha had had her blanket of goods when Dezmara first arrived. Lilietha stopped where the giant’s back foot met the wall and smiled up at her.