Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (25 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
not have seemed odd to anyone. Crowley looked over the preparations and nodded as Will approached
him. "What will they do now?"
"My guess is that we'll get hit with the heavy forces now." He pointed off into the distance toward where the last assault had bogged down. "This first assault was run like an operation using toy soldiers. The shock troops came first, then the light, fast troopers came later. The bullets we used on them had more
brains than most of things they tore up. My guess is that this next wave will come with similar troops, but each one of them will be more heavily armored."
The Native American frowned. "Isn't another frontal assault rather foolish?"
"Yes, but I don't believe Ryuhito will see it that way. The integrity of his creations is on the line. He has to try with brute strength one more time or admit he's foolish."
"If he comes at us again with a frontal assault, he'll
prove
he's foolish."
Crowley slapped Will on the back. "Exactly, which is why we can't let him get a third try at us, because there will be no predicting what he will do." The shadow man glanced off to the north. "I know we can beat him this time, but after that..."
Somewhere out toward the south, a single gunshot broke the stillness of the night. Will ran forward and
hunkered down behind
a
sandbag barricade. As he drew his Mac-11, he saw Crowley go running forward toward the edge of the jungle. In a second, more because it felt
right than it seemed smart, Will leaped up and followed him. He dropped to the ground beside the
shadow man, then crawled forward to the bole of a tree.
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"You don'
t have your normal sidekick, so I'll fill in, okay?"
"Glad to have you, Will."
Will strained his ears to hear anything. "Are they out there? I can't hear them."
"Not a question of hearing, Will, but of feeling." Will saw gold glint from Crowley's ring finger as he waved his right hand in a circular motion before the jungle. "You can feel them out there, I know you can."
The Native American took a deep breath and forced it out slowly. Narrowing his eyes, he willed his
consciousness to expand. He forced it into the forest, controlling it so it would not spread out behind him and confuse him with the emotions of the other workers. He smiled, realizing that he did have that sort of control over his perceptions within Turquoise, and once again he felt ancient spirits coming to his aid.
His perceptive barrier pushed on out and down into the ravine that ran to the south of the compound.
Against the dark backdrop of the steep slope, he picked up the intensity of Bat and his people. They kept their fear in checkby letting unbridled hatred roar through them. They knew the foe they faced was unlike anything they had ever fought before, and that excited them. They lived to slay the monsters in the dark, and Will realized they would likely die doing just that.
Beyond them, he pushed his perception and watched as the landscape unfolded before his mind's eye.
Past the stream that had formed the ravine and on up the gentle slope to the other side he traveled. He
found the place where the initial assault had withered and died. Life leaked from countless bodies, and it was not until he started to
count the individual lifesparks that he realized there were so many of the enemy dead, ft seemed to him that there should have been more pain, more agony present, hanging like a miasma over the battlefield, but there was not.
The ebbing lifestuff drifted up and away from him like smoke, ft took him a moment to figure out that it was not rising to any sort of heaven, but was being drawn up the hill toward the crest of it. Will looked up, rotating his perspective so he faced the direction of the hill. There at the top he saw the crestline silhouetted against the pale glow that might have been a dawning sun. He saw the fragile life-wisps inching their way up toward the summit, and he followed them.
Dread grew in his belly as he did so. He pressed on, then hit a wall that he could not penetrate, ft frustrated and angered him, but secretly delighted him. He knew, as much as he wanted to know what lay on the other
side of the hill, he had no desire to face whatever ft was that created the wall.
He wanted to turn back, but he knew piercing the wall was important. He searched within himself and found hidden strength right where his grandfather had told him he would. His consciousness seemed to meld once
again with that of his surname-namesake, and he suddenly saw and feft himself a raven flying purposely up over the wall and on up the hill. He felt etheric wings beat strongly to propel him forward. With the strength of each motion, his self-confidence grew. He drove himself harder and, triumphantly cawing, he swooped up and over the top of the hill.
Will convulsed as his consciousness abruptly snapped back into his body. He dropped his gun, then clutched his arms around himself. "God in heaven, no!"
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He feft Crow
ley's hands on his shoulders. "Easy, easy. Trying to breach that wall is not something
you should
do. We c
an just waft on this side and give an early warning to
the men when the assault comes."
"You don't understand, Mr. Crowley, I got through."
"You got through?"
"I did, I got through." Will shook himself and forced his terror away. "Ryuhito is up there, and he has plenty of troops. More are arriving each minute. "This won't be Roarke's Drift or even Little Big Horn." Will picked his Mac-11 up again. "This is Desert Storm, and we're defending Iraq."
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Ryuhito studied the proud ranks of his warriors and knew victory would be theirs. He had mutated his
Hammers into Ultra -Hammers by filling in the holes in their armor and doubling their size. He made their brains larger and managed to instill in them enough of a basic cognitive framework that they would recognize insurmountable obstacles and deal with them appropriately.
Of course,
he allowed to himself,
with their
strength they are now invincible.
Two companies of Ultra-Hammers stood backed by two companies of Wasps. Gnats had been enlarged and
more strongly armored. The need for more intelligence did demand a centralization of their nervous system, but the addition of horns and a thick skull-plate protected the added brains he stuffed into their heads. More importantly, though, he modified their bracers to provide them with missile weapons capable of visiting
accurate and deadly retributions on snipers.
He reveled in the elegance of the design. In a system reminiscent of how a shark always has teeth growing up out of its jaw, a four-pointed star-shaped piece of chitin grew flat atop the bracers. When one of his Wasps cranked its hand up and back, the internal pressure
forced the top star up and around so one of the points positioned itself between the Wasp's middle two
fingers. Bringing the arm forward and accompanying it with a snap of the wrist would free the organic
shuriken and sent it off on its way.
Because of how he had designed his creations, they could continuously create new throwing darts,
because their chlorophyll allowed them to draw energy from sunlight alone. He knew they would need
more nutrients to be able to produce an ongoing supply, so, while he worked on the Paragons, he set his
Wasps to foraging and devouring all the plant and animal life they could find behind the Gltra-Hammer
line.
The Paragons he changed the least. He filled in the holes in their armor and provided them with enough
muscle to move. He modified chitinous plates on their backs so they could flick out and help the
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Paragon
s get lift during, or glide after, their leaps. Their weaponry became more formidable just with
their i
ncreased bulk. He half-considered giving them some sort of missile weapon, but decided agains
t it.
The samurai had shunned the gun because it lacked honor. So, too, would his Paragons remain unsullied.
With a clap of his hands, he called the Wasps backfrom their foraging. He intensified his solar glow so
they could charge themselves up, then he pointed toward the forest and the encampment beyond it.
"There, my children, are your enemies. Yours is the honor to succeed where your brethren failed."
Will saw the sky brighten and swallowed hard. "They'll be coming now."
Crowley nodded and stood. "We'll pull back to the barricades. Better fields of fire."
The Native American frowned. "But don't we need to be
here to cover Bat's men as they retreat?"
"Do you honestly think they'll retreat?"
Will shook his head and ran back to one of the sandbag fortifications. To reach it he had to pick his way through a tangle of sharpened stakes that had been cut from the jungle and stabbed into the ground a good 20
meters in front of the sandbags. Like a porcupine's quills, the ends of the stakes had been barbed so that any creature impaling himself on one would do more damage pulling it free than it made going in.
It struck Will as curious that the stakes had been placed thickly on either edge of the compound, but more thinly distributed toward the center. Likewise, the sandbag shelter in the middle of the line had no one
standing behind it, while all four of the others did. Clearly, Crowley and Hal wanted to channel the warriors into the middle, but if the line could not hold, the enemy would split their camp in half and destroy them.
He looked to the right and to the left. On his right, two sandbag shelters down, Tadd stood amid a knot of hard and determined men. Tadd gripped his Mac-11 tightly and pointed it downrange toward the darkened forest
and the glowing hill beyond it. Behind him, the men carried their shovels and other tools as if they were waiting for scab labor to try to cross a picket line. Will admired their bravery, but having seen what he saw, he knew they were whistling their way through a graveyard.
To his left, Crowley crouched within a sandbag semicircle. He spoke to the men with him in a low but
confident voice. Their faces slackened a bit, then closed up as a grim determination entered their eyes.
Crowley had told them the score, and they accepted it. Will smiled, knowing how Crowley's ready acceptance of him made him feel.
He is a true leader of men.
Will looked at the men standing with him. Wearing
yellow, plastic hardhats, threadbare flannel shirts and dirty jeans, they looked as about as unsavory a lot as he could ever imagine having seen in his life. As they looked back expectantly at him, he realized that they were looking to him for leadership, ft struck him that back in Eclipse they could have just as easily been part of a gang who would have gone after him for being an Indian.