Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (29 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
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I look
ed up at the Empress of Diamonds. "Even if I desired your offer, I could not accept it. Fid
dleback
has end
owed me with a mechanism that will kill me were I to take on a Dark Lord's power against his will. He learned from Pygmalion, and will not make the same mistake."
"Fiddleback would never allow you to become my consort while he still lives." The Empress licked her lips deliciously. "An obvious remedy to that situation suggests itself."
"I agree." I slid off the bier and stood. "Once Fiddleback has eliminated Pygmalion, he will be my biggest problem. To kill a Dark Lord, one has to use a Dark Lord."
"You think like one of us already. Fiddleback says he made you, but I think you may have been a natural all along." She closed again and pressed her hands against my chest. "You will honor my alliance with Coyote? Once you and Fiddleback have destroyed Pygmalion, I will help you destroy Fiddleback."
"Agreed."
She raised an eyebrow in a very un-Match way. "You have a plan?"
"I'll put something together." I smiled. "Right now, though, I need to return to Earth. I tried that before, but 1 could not get out of here. It was as if this proto-dimension had been hardened."
The Empress of Diamonds nodded. "It was. This proto-dimension's nature and my aspect have a natural
affinity. With a sufficient expenditure of power, I can make the dimensional wall all but impenetrable.
Any Dark Lord can do that, if his aspect is compatible with the dimension. Pygmalion has done that with
his dimension because of the disaster with his little pet."
1 frowned. "Disaster? Something has happened with Ryuhito?"
"It did, which means Pygmalion is lairing up. Even so, 1 know you will find a way to destroy him. You can leave this place now. And here, I make you a present." Match's body slumped against mine, but I
caught her before she could fall to the floor.
With crystalline clarity, a voice spoke within my mind.
«Care for her well, Coyote. You both have ualue
to me. When you need me, tell her and I will know. Together we will not be defeated.»
Dark Conspiracy 3-24.jpg
It would have seemed to me that my return and my bringing Natch Feral back with me would have
sparked quite a reaction when 1 arrived in Earth. As 1 had planned before, I decided to reenter the
dimension of my birth in Japan, at the Galactic Brotherhood headquarters. I made that choice because, as
I recalled, we had decided to use the Japanese base as
a
staging area for sending people and equipment into whatever dimension we were using to get close to Pygmalion.
1 materialized in the jungle courtyard with the dimensional gateway at the Galbro facility, but no one
took any notice of me at all. Standing there, with Match's unconscious body in my arms, I looked almost
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normal
. All around me, arrayed in neat lines, I saw bloodied and unmoving bodies. Off to my righ
t, closer
to the
facility's main building than I stood, stretcher bearers stepped from the dimensional gateway
and
headed off with an injured person.
"Crowley!" I started to work my way toward the man as 1 saw him exit the gateway. He turned toward me, his face an angry mask. He had another man's left arm looped over his shoulders and, with a firm grip on the man's belt,
Crowley half-lifted the injured man over the lip of the gateway.
Crowley's expression lightened only slightly when he realized who I was, then he shook his head. "Just a minute." As he started shuffling toward the building, I recognized the man he was helping. As if the bodies had not been enough evidence of a dire catastrophe, Bat's blood-soaked shirt and the weakness of his
staggering steps toid me how bad things had really gotten.
Two medical technicians took Bat from Crowley and helped him toward the building. Another relieved me of
Hatch's body, undoubtedly assuming she had been injured in the same disaster that had claimed all these
others. I caught not even a flicker of curiosity about me or my clothing, just fatigue and a concentration on the tasks at hand.
I turned to Crowley. "What happened?"
Emotionally, from what I could sense, the haggard man in front of me did not exist. "We won."
1 looked back at the rows of bodies and shook my head. "We knew there could be danger, but..."
"These guys caught it in spades." Crowley stepped over two bodies and knelt down by a third. He peeled the gray blanket back from the face. "Mickey's father. Broken neck, ft was fast."
Ice cascaded through my guts. "Does Mickey know yet?"
"How are we going to explain death to a 5-year-old?"
"Rajani has a rapport with him, perhaps..."
Crowley looked at me with hollow eyes. "But 1 haven't even had the time to tell her that her father is dead yet."
My jaw dropped open. "I thought you said we won."
"We did. C'mon."
I followed Crowley into the dimensional gateway. Built into the base of a fountain, it replaced the water with an
opalescent shimmer when in operation. Stepping over the fountain's edge and stepping down did not feel all that much different from wading into water. The gateway gave me a cold shock as 1 first started to sink, then it wrapped me in a scratchy blanket and twisted me around, utterly disorienting me.
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Finall
y, 1 emerged amid a circle of tall, termite mounds. I saw a puff of dust from where Crowley had he
aded
out, and
I chose that route because it took me out of the way of medtechs with stretchers. Scrambling dow
n
the other side. "Crowley, wait up."
I got no response from the shadow man, so 1 jogged forward and grabbed his wrist. He tried to pull away, but I held on and spun him around. "What the hell's going on here?"
He opened his mouth to shout something at me, then stopped abruptly as his temper lost its battle for control.
"Sorry, I..." He exhaled explosively, then pointed out the panoramic view we had from the top of the hill.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
I nodded. The proto-dimension looked to me like an African savannah that bordered on a rain forest. Had the vegetation been green instead of blue, I would have had a hard time believing we had left Earth at all. "It's gorgeous."
"Most of the men who died here thought this was Borneo, for crying out loud!" Crowley shook his head and his fist knotted up. "You and I, people like Bat and Hal and the Yidam, we knowwhat's going on. We accept the risks. The men who were here, they were just out for a job. We made them part of a battle with Dark
Lords."
"They were already part of that battle, Crowley." My eyes narrowed. "They could die here, or they could die in their homes. Dammit, most of these men should have been like Tadd Farber. For all intents and purposes, they
were dead already."
Crowley's head came up. "But they were
not
dead."
"Agreed, but their deaths here mean that others may not have to die." A breeze blew from the valley below, and I caught the swampy scent of decaying plants. "How bad was it? Can we salvage anything?"
"Not a question to ask me, I'm afraid. Take a look for yourself."
We set off down the slope toward what appeared to have once been an encampment. The jungle between
the hilltop and the clearing below had
a
wide swath of destruction cut through it. Underbrush had been trampled, and trees had been taken down more efficiently than in a clear-cutting operation. On the trunks I could see evidence of bullet hits and a disturbing number of long claw scars that sent a shiver down my spine.
Throughout the area I saw sodden masses of greenish slime that looked like a slimy fungus or an open
gangrenous wound, ft took no intelligence to determine these lumps were the source of the decaying plant
scent. I paused near one and saw a flatted bullet pop out like a piece of gravel melting out of ice. "I take it these things were worth shooting?"
Crowley nodded impatiently as two men carrying a stretcher worked their way up the narrow path we had
been coming down. "Prince Ryuhito created these things. He had given them, among other things,
chlorophyll in their skin so they could produce energy when basking in his glory. In fact, we noticed that out of his presence they were sluggish and not terribly hearty. They were a nasty army."
I stood and wiped my hands off on my gold-trimmed kift. "You're still pulling wounded men out of here,
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but th
ey're in an advanced state of decay. Does this proto-dimension have alternating time zones t
hat run
slow?"
"No." Crowley started down the hill again as he explained. "This dimension has a bacteria that breaks down chlorophyll. Ryuhito did not realize that when he brought his creatures in here. The bacteria was
not enough to kill the creatures outright, but it did weaken them. That's probably why we survived as long as we did—they were not in top form."
We crossed from stone to stone across a stream and worked out way back up toward the compound. On
the way up I saw an area where all the undergrowth had been uprooted. A twisting trench with shallow
rootlets running off in all directions cut across the swath of destruction. At the lower lip, the green slime covered the ground like a foot-and-a-half coat of green-yellow wax.
"Bat and his people made a stand here." Crowley shook his head. "When I found Bat, he was wandering through the jungle looking for more of the enemy. After he ran out of bullets and his bayonet broke, he
went after them with his bare hands. He showed me the sites of three kills and said he forgot where the
others are."
Three fallen trees had been used to bridge the plant-rotfoam. 1 crossed it and started up the steepest part of the hill. In the dark loam, 1 could see impressions of enormous hooves. Superimposed over them, I
saw smallish clawed footprints and then a few larger and more slender footprints. Judging by size and
relative depth, whatever the creatures that lay rotting had been, formidable would have been an
understatement when applied to them.
Coming up over the lip of the hill, 1 saw a scene that explained to me Crowley's anger. Warfare is death
and destruction, but too often gets remembered in terms of a person's heroism in the face of brutal chaos.
Memorials are raised to the innocent dead, and heroes are remembered with ceremonies, but the sheer
cost in life that
results from a war is difficult to quantify and so incomprehensible that memorializing it defies even the most talented artisan.
Rotting plant-stuff the color of peppers long gone bad covered the compound like a lake of pea-soup vomit.
