Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (24 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
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toward H
al. "You might want a gun yourself."
"I'll pass." Hal waved Bat out of the trailer. "You go get your people aimed, and draw as much ammo as you need."
The African-American turned his attention back to the corpse. "You said Ryuhito had something to do with this. Do we start assuming he has attained status as a Dark Lord and, if so, how do we deal with him?"
"This thing is strictly Lego blocks compared to what a Dark Lord can do. The biggest threat to us here is that Pygmalion decides to clean up and uses his troops against us." The shadow man looked at Tadd. "If we were faced with a half-dozen of fighters like your son, this would be over fast."
Tadd shook his head. "I'm glad Mickey isn't here."
"Amen to that." Hal picked up a walkie-talkie. "I think advising the Japanese of our situation would be good."
"Agreed. We definitely have to consider ourselves being centered in enemy territory." The Yidam tapped the crudely drawn map on the wall. "We are not in the most defensible position here, but the clearing has good fields of fire. There is a battle in your history that our position parallels."
"Little Big Horn?" Will asked hopefully.
Tadd shot Will a harsh side glance. "Most of us didn't have kin on the winning side of that one, Will."
The Yidam shook his head. "Roarke's Drift."
Hal scowled. "Perhaps I io///take a gun, after all."
"Good. I can only use two at a time." Bat entered the
trailer and tossed a Mac-11 to Hal along with a web belt and two clip pouches. He handed similar rigs to
Tadd and Will. "My people are heavy, but if Ryuhito's warriors get through, you can use these to stop them."
Will settled the belt around his waist. "You hope."
"No, you hope."As Bat let his AR-15 slide from his shoulder, Will saw the sheathed dagger he had on his left hip.
"I take it you expect to get close to anything we have to fight?"
Bat snapped the bayonet on to the AR-15. "Knife worked for you."
True, but I don't want to be that close again.
Will said nothing and pulled the slide on the Mac-11 back into the firing position.
"I think we have trouble." Bat stood in the doorway and looked out. "Big trouble."
"What's the matter?" Tadd turned toward the south-facing window and shrugged his shoulders. "The sun's
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comi
ng up, big deal."
"I think, Mr. Farber, you will recall," Crowley commented as he drew his machine-pistol, "in this dimension, the sun does not rise in the south."
Ryuhito sent an honor guard of his warriors through first, then he entered Blue Africa through the circular dimensional gate. In Blue Africa, it looked no more remarkable than a circle of termite mounds, while in
the dimension Girasol it appeared like a pond with a shimmering rainbow of lights. Stepping free of it,
and refusing to let himself acknowledge the nausea he felt from using it, he floated up into the air on a disk made of golden light.
To his immense pleasure, he saw Blue Africa in all its dawning glory. Beneath the hilltop above which he
hovered, he saw a compound filled with tents and a few mobile
homes. Beyond it, to the north, he saw a thick jungle that gave way to the hills on the far side of the
valley. In the distance, he could make out some terracing and stones, but other details escaped him in the darkness. They did not matter, for his mission was to slay what he had found in Blue Africa and, clearly, the compound was his target.
He floated back down to the ground as his army climbed free of the dimensional gateway. The first
battalion formed up, and Ryuhito smiled. As rank upon rank lined up, radiating green in the backglow of
his glory, he saw his army would be more than enough to destroy those who had invaded Blue Africa.
The first battalion on station was a mixed assault battalion. Creatures he designated as Hammers made up
the first company. The heavily built and thickly armored drones formed a solid wall behind which the rest of the battalion could advance. Drawn up in two ranks of 20, the Hammers could run at a top speed of 15
miles per hour, which had proven sufficient to blast through the defensive positions of the opposition in his wars. All bony spikes and blocky fists, both fortifications and enemy soldiers crumbled beneath their assaults.
Behind them came 80 of the half-sized warriors with the diffused nervous system that Pygmalion had
praised. Try as he might, Ryuhito had not been able to find a design that worked as well at surviving a
combat. Because their central nervous system had ganglia-knots at the joints, one part of the creature
could be torn off and the rest of it would continue to function. Damage to the chest cavity could
incapacitate one, but having two hearts—one high and one low—meant that even massive torso trauma
would not guarantee a kill.
The Gnats, as he called them, used fangs and claws to kill. Aided by incredible reflexes and superior
agility, they were difficult targets to hit. Because they kept coming and
coming, they forced the enemy to devote more resources to destroying them than they might have seemed
worth. Because ignoring them was not an option, once the Hammers had opened a hole in the enemy line,
the Gnats could terrorize the enemy from within.
Behind the Gnats came the warriors he called Paragons. Tall and slender, they had an incredible reach.
Their hands and arms, while incredibly thin, were whiplike in their ability to strike and flay an enemy
alive. At the same time, a Paragon possessed the strength necessary to crush a man's chest in its bony
grasp. Built on legs that looked remarkably like those of a locust, Paragons could leap great distances,
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and the claws
on their feet could shred sheet steel. The tail, which they used for stability, had enough
strengt
h in its long, flat length to shatter bones and stone with a single swipe.
Confident of victory, Ryuhito bowed to his troops. In unison they executed a deep and respectful bow in
return. Moderating his glow, Ryuhito gestured down the jungle hillside and toward the human compound.
"Go, my children, feast on those who would do us harm." Feeling safe behind the wall of Hammers that slipped into the brush, Ryuhito advanced in the midst of the Gnats like a teacher leading anxious children on a field trip.
On reflection, Ryuhito realized he had erred in either not making his creatures utterly silent in their
movements, or in not giving them hideous and terrifying voices. Though they moved through the
undergrowth and through the forest like shadows, the were not careful about avoiding dead branches or
topping rock piles that gave away their positions in the darkness. He knew his error stemmed, on one
hand, from having waged his wars in the arid, desert-like climate of Pygmalion's headquarters. On the
other, of course, he could not have borne the constant combat cacophony that would have accompanied
his war games.
While he thought his troops unnecessarily loud in their advance, the thundercrack of the first gunshot startled him. ft split the night in half and almost buried the thwip of a bullet exploding the head of a Gnat standing next to him. In an instant, he realized the shot—to get overthe line of Hammers—had to have come from a
sniper high in a tree. With no way to return fire—another error in his designs he acknowledged—he gave the only order he could.
"Level the jungle!"
The Hammers broke into a run and slammed into the trees before them. Loud, wet snaps echoed between
gunshots as the Hammer line closed and began to clear a path 60 feet wide. While he did see two snipers leap from their perches and scamper off before the assault, he saw the line was too wide and moving too slowly.
The Hammers could not build up enough speed and, lacking sufficient intelligence to know when something
should be bypassed, left holes in the line when a stone outcropping failed to give way.
Before he could stop them, the Gnats began to pour through those holes. Yipping and chittering like homicidal gerbils, the Gnats crashed on into the underbrush. He saw them scampering up the boles of trees, snapping off limbs and showering the ground with bark fragments, ft occurred to him that the Gnats had always taken their cue in identifying the enemy by what the Hammers had assaulted, so the Gnats gleefully started to wage war on the jungle itself.
Elements within the jungle fought back. Scattered, single gunshots swelled together to become a ballistic hailstorm. Gnats mewed and wailed as bursts from automatic rifles blasted them from tree trunks. More
concentrated gunfire staggered Hammers. The design conventions that made their armor light allowed bullets to
penetrate the Hammer bodies. Leaking black blood from dozens of wounds, they stumbled backward. The
Hammer line crumbled, and the Gnats poured forward into the guns of the enemy.
For the barest of seconds Ryuhito thought the Gnats might carry the day. The men in the jungle used their weapons to great effect, literally shredding the Gnats as they advanced. The fact that the Gnats kept coming meant more fire was directed at them than would have to have been used against a human cadre of the same
size. Had the Gnats been human, they would have better coordinated their attacks and avoided some
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casual
ties, but with their rudimentary brains, any order beyond attack or kill meant nothing.
The Gnat line did not so much break as it was blown in little twitching chunks over the floor of the rain forest.
Ryuhito watched his creations march into death without a shred of remorse. He used the humans'
preoccupation with the Gnats to withdraw. Using the Paragons as a rear guard to screen his retreat, he headed back up the hill to where his second battalion waited.
He looked at them, then glanced back down at the waiting forest. "You will do, my pets, with a few changes.
You will do indeed."
Using curt hand-signals, Will directed workers in placing the hastily filled sandbags. No one in the camp had taken the warning about the Red Army Faction lightly, and when Bat's men moved into the rain forest, tension rose in the compound. When the gunfire started, those who had not immediately crawled under cover started looking for something to do. Armed with shovels, picks, sledges and scythes, the workers formed themselves into a rag-tag peasant army.
"No freaking slimeball Jappo terrorists are going to
scrag this American," one man vowed with the voice of many.
ft surprised Will no end to see Crowley walking openly through the camp. The men who looked at him,
Will concluded on a moment's reflection, only saw a shadowed figure which, in the relative dark, should
