by Tim C Taylor
Tawfiq waved him away with her tail. “We can wait a few more moments. What of the foraging operation?”
“It launched a few moments ago. I can hear them begin.”
The Hardits flicked their ears, and Romulus strained his too. Powerful vehicle engines revved in the human areas of the city to the north. Then came the screams and gunshots.
“Try to keep them alive,” said Tawfiq. “Food is more enervating when it’s fresh enough to struggle.”
Tawfiq knew he was listening – of course she did – but Romulus gave her no reaction. The anger within still burned. With the telekinetic Hummer here, any attack on Tawfiq was likely doomed.
But Romulus remembered being raised as both a Marine and a Wolf. Neither tradition would ever give up, futile or not, and with every passing moment after rubbing his wrists against that nano-impregnated wax, he was remembering who he had once been.
He wasn’t done yet.
——
Arun McEwan
Imperial Mall
“You copy?” said Shocles.
It was the same toneless thought-to-speech computer translation that Arun had heard all his life, but he could picture the Hardit and imagine the speaker’s excitement exhibiting itself in tremors running along its rubbery lips.
“This is McEwan. Go ahead.”
“The mall is filled with what you have called Ultra Janissaries. From what we can smell, they are a significantly enhanced battle-optimized version of ourselves, much as you human Marines are improvements on the human civilians who surrendered your ancestors to the White Knights.”
Arun already knew that, but what he could see through the hidden camera was still shocking. This new evil was seriously boosted. Regular Hardits looked like a cross between wolves and monkeys, but this new batch were tigers crossed with bears.
“I told you that our Janissary scent is simpler than our ancestors’, and that means our loyalty conditioning is correspondingly complex to compensate. Tawfiq fears rivals among our commanders. Already, purges of senior commanders are widespread. The supreme commander seeks to solve this issue permanently by creating these Ultra Janissaries who are not merely stronger, but completely loyal to her and her alone.”
“I’m not so sure they are so fearsome,” said Arun. “They look lifeless.”
“This is what I am telling you. The individuals in the mall have not yet been activated. They will be woken and imprinted by the sight, scent, and sound of Tawfiq, binding them to her loyalty for as long as they live.”
“Okay, and how is she going to do that?”
“Tawfiq imagines herself a goddess. She craves spectacle. She will look down upon her assembled new race from the top of that tower that we call Victory Monument. From its pinnacle she will issue her imprint, not just to the hundreds of thousands or more Ultra Janissaries assembled here, but to others watching underground in the looms where they were made, and in other regions of this planet. If her plan succeeds, and this new race emerges with Tawfiq as its goddess–”
“Yeah, I get the picture,” snarled Arun. “But I’m not going to let her. We’ll blast that tower and Tawfiq’s new super race will be useless. Simple.”
“An excellent strategy,” said Shocles. “Assuming the supreme commander and her advisers have been too stupid to think of preparing backup systems.”
Damn! The Hardit was right. Arun didn’t rate Tawfiq as a general, but she was wily, and she always left herself exits and contingencies. This wasn’t going to be as simple as it looked. “Okay, I’ll buy it. I want more options for myself. Can you get us inside the monument?”
“There is a ground level gate on the east side, and the sliding doors you can see on the west that open from the inside. I believe we could gain entry and open the sliding doors.”
“Do it,” said Arun. “And thank you. I know what I ask of you is difficult, but down the centuries to come, people of all races will honor you for what you do today.”
“Only if we win, McEwan. Otherwise we will be reviled as traitors, and then quickly forgotten.”
“Then it’s up to us to make sure we’re on the winning side, Shocles. We’re watching you. McEwan out.”
“Well?” asked Scipio. “The suspense is killing me. Do I go in with my sword or my SA-71?”
“Both,” Arun replied. “Listen up, people. New information. New plan. Plan A – steal Tawfiq’s new army and use it to kill her and destroy the New Order.” Beside him, he sensed Springer bristle, but he didn’t stop to think why. “Plan B. Destroy that obelisk, kill Tawfiq, and then proceed as originally planned. Orbital Legion forces safe to pass through the corrosion barrier will descend on Victory City while the underground forces will advance northwest from their start lines in Florida. Any questions?”
“Just one,” said Kraevoi. “When do we start shooting?”
— Chapter 41 —
Arun McEwan
Imperial Mall
The doors on the west base of the obelisk slid open. Inside, Arun could see a lit open space that curled around the base of the pillar and began to rise away just out of sight, the kind of helical ramp beloved of Hardit architects.
Some of the Janissary guards on the perimeter turned around in surprise at the doors opening, but seeing no one inside, they quickly redirected their attention outward.
“I don’t see our little friends,” said Scipio. “This doesn’t look right.”
“Nonetheless,” said Kraevoi, “the Jotuns have a useful saying. When you glimpse an opportunity–”
“Seize it with all six limbs,” finished Scipio. “I know. There’s a difference between taking your chances and jumping into a trap headfirst.”
“Even if it’s a trap,” Arun replied, “it’s still the best chance we’re going to get. Remember, people, we want to capture whatever Tawfiq’s using to imprint her new army and use it for ourselves. Failing that, we blow shit up, starting with Tawfiq’s ugly carcass. For the Legion! For the Nest! Go! Go! Go!”
Before he’d finished speaking, Arun silently commanded the giant living digger machines to tunnel up and out. They were brutish creatures, so simple that they barely registered as sentients except with regard to the single topic of digging.
The strike team had snuck into the mall from the west, the diggers cutting a channel through the narrow gap between the ground and the top of the underground Hardit complex. Arun’s jacket still carried the mud splatters that had dripped down as they had tunneled beneath the Potomac River. As the lead digger cut their route, those that followed with the main party sealed it, and the digger at the rear collapsed it behind them. Beneath the Potomac, a digger sealing the tunnel walls in front of Arun had explained that the dirt separating them from the riverbed was less than the thickness of a human’s head, and Arun could see for himself that they couldn’t dig deeper because he was crawling over armor plate shielding the top of the Hardit installation below. And yet, amazingly, the Trogs had hardened the few inches of dirt until it could withstand the press of the river.
But now they were on the attack, and the diggers blitzed their way upward in a maelstrom of flying dirt, stones, and alien limbs. Within seconds, sunlight flooded into a gently sloping exit ramp along which Marines and Nest dragoons were charging.
The Janissaries guarding the obelisk perimeter wasted precious seconds, frozen in fear by the sight of Trogs bursting from the ground, a narrow window of opportunity that was claimed by Scipio and Kraevoi who sent railgun sabots spraying into the air and hypersonic darts through the heads of the stunned foe.
While the Sleeping Legion contingent occupied the nearest defenders and set up the heavy weapons, Escandala led the four dragoons in an arc that wheeled around the Janissaries to hit them from the south.
A wave of screams rose from the civilian sectors of the city. What the hell were the monkeys doing?
The burrowed exit complete, the diggers stood in the open ground, as lacking in purpose as the Ultra Janissaries who gave no indication
of noticing this invasion.
The familiar deadly whine of the SA-71 stung the Mark1 Janissaries into action. Arun winced as the armor crest of his new mount, Dane, chipped and splintered much faster than Hansel’s had done in Australia, and in the battle beneath the Mediterranean. But Dane’s crest was fresh and thick, and the lash of the Hardit rifles lasted only a few brutal moments before the dragoons crashed into the Janissary line.
They didn’t slacken the momentum of their charge as Escandala led them in an anticlockwise circuit of the obelisk, rolling up the Janissary flank. Dane, Gretel and the others flicked their heads to toss the Hardits on their twin horns, high in the air. Others were dealt stunning blows under the feet of the giant insects born for battle.
Third in the dragoon column of attack, Arun and Dane pushed through defenders scattered and stunned by first Escandala who rode Leon, and Springer on Gretel. Arun jabbed his lance at Hardits within reach, and threw energy blasts at any nearby who showed fight.
And fight they did. Arun and the human riders of Nest Hortez wore black battledress. From the flanks and rear, they were immensely vulnerable. He saw Escandala take a wound in her arm that made her drop her lance.
Then he felt a sting in his back and knew he’d been hit. How bad? he thought at Barney, and tried to look down at his wound. He couldn’t twist back far enough to see. There was a lot of blood there, but it was oozing from Dane’s thorax.
I can’t tell, Barney responded. You’re not wearing a suit, remember? Hey! Watch it!
Out of the confusion, a low whitewashed annex appeared – the guard house protecting the east entrance that Shocles and Wokmar had mentioned.
Dane leapt, and Arun sensed his pain as his thorax wound opened up with the movement. They landed on the flat roof, Dane’s six legs skittering for purchase. He found a little because as their momentum carried them over the top of the guard house, Dane made a semi-controlled leap onto the Janissary gun crew who had been setting up a heavy weapon in what they thought was the safe lea of the guard house.
Dane crashed into them and sprinted away. Arun twisted around and sent a lance blast into the weapon’s ammunition boxes.
The explosion sent Dane and Arun rolling along the grass, as it did the rearmost Dragoon pair – Hyper on Bwilt – but the dragoons found their feet as easily as a gymnast, and by the time they had cleared the northern edge of the perimeter and came across the slaughter inflicted by Scipio’s Marines, the Janissary guns had fallen silent. The dazed survivors throwing their weapons to the ground and stumbling to their feet with arms and tails held high.
And the massed ranks of Ultra Janissaries who could have torn the assault team limb from limb if they so chose, stood in perfect lines facing the marble statue of Tawfiq in her temple as if nothing had happened.
“Cease fire!” commanded a computerized voice from inside the base of the obelisk. “All Janissaries are to cease firing and assemble on me.”
Through the sliding doors came two Janissaries, also with arms and tails raised in surrender, but dressed in the officer uniforms and scents stolen hours earlier. Arun struggled to tell one Hardit from another, but Barney was linked to the senses in his helmet and confirmed that they were indeed Shocles and Wokmar.
A third Janissary walked closely behind the two turncoats.
That’s good to know, thought Arun, but who’s the other one?
Alarm bells sounded in his head because this one wore the uniform of a Janissary senior officer in the pattern of the earliest years of their existence, back in the days before Tawfiq had claimed leadership of her entire species.
Not only was this officer not raising her hands in surrender, but her posture conveyed the same gloating arrogance he knew so well in Tawfiq.
“Arun McEwan,” said the officer. “My name is General Dine-Alegg. It’s a relief to see you finally. For a while there, I thought you weren’t coming.”
— Chapter 42 —
Marine Annalise Dranjer
Imperial Mall
From her kneeling position a hundred yards to the west of the Janissaries who were supposed to be on their side – an idea that still needed a lot of persuading – Annalise altered the load feed to her PLS-11 shoulder launch missile system. Her HUD targeting overlay replaced the red target cluster brackets around the Hardits milling outside the entrance with colored hatching showing the estimated value of firing the new type-21 load at a variety of nearby targets. Type-21 munitions – nicknamed Structure Destructors – fired a sonic pulse tuned to render sturdy mortar and concrete into friable filler, followed by old school high explosive to blow it all to frakk.
Two rounds through those doors, four-second interval, and that obelisk was coming down.
“Come on, McEwan,” she whispered, “give me the order. What are you waiting for?”
The answer, incredibly, was a parlay, an attempt to win these Janissaries to the Legion cause against Tawfiq.
Behind her, and on the far side of the obelisk the Ultra Janissary zombies just stood there in their hundreds of thousands like frakking robots on standby. They creeped her out. And, it seemed, some of the Janissaries felt the same way. Without their guns, and many of them bleeding from the Legion attack, some listened to Wokmar and Shocles who stood just outside the sliding door, pleading with them to change sides, though more of them were too busy looking nervously at the Trogs while they patched their wounds.
“McEwan to Dranjer. You got your pipe pointed through those doors?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thought so. Listen up, everyone. Time’s running out for Dine-Alegg to come over to our side. On my mark, I want Hunter and Ree to give the downstairs a two-second tickle with your cannon. Scipio and Kraevoi, put some rounds up through the viewport on the top pyramid. Dragoons will follow the cannon burst inside. Hyper and Bwilt, you take point. And Dranjer, if you think things have gone to drent inside, or if no one contacts you within sixty seconds of Hyper and Bwilt charging through those doors, then I want you to take the building down. Don’t wait for an order. Don’t wait for us to get out. Just do it.”
“Understood, sir. You can count on me.”
“I know I can, Dranjer. You may have had the misfortune to have been raised by those degenerates of Beta City, but you’re still a Marine.”
“So are you, sir. Despite being one of those Detroit drent-heads.”
Will you stop the silly human talk already? snapped her AI. I’m trying to listen to the monkeys.
Annalise grimaced. Solara still performed as an exceptional combat AI but hadn’t come out of that last cryo sleep as her old self. She had become clingy. Jealous. But they’d been through so much together during the Second Tranquility Campaign that Annalise shut up and let Solara crank up the volume of the Hardit conversation.
“Don’t you realize that Tawfiq will have no further use for you?” Wokmar was saying to her fellow Janissaries.
“What the deserters say is true,” said Dine-Alegg, which won tail-twitching astonishment from her troops. “The new race the supreme commander plans to awaken today will replace ours. The traitors are right, as you must surely realize, even though you have obeyed your orders impeccably.”
“Listen to the human, McEwan,” Wokmar implored. “There are male Hardits on this planet who have chosen to ally with his Legion rather than bow down before Tawfiq.”
“This sounds promising,” McEwan said over BattleNet.
“Again, the traitors speak truly,” said Dine-Alegg to the confused perimeter guard survivors. “McEwan has indeed brought along primitive members of our race as pets and servants, and they will soon die like the traitors they are.” The general gestured with her tail to the massed ranks of silent Ultra Janissaries. “And although these waiting husks are the future for the New Order, the supreme commander has plenty of use for us yet. All you listening, wherever you are, note that well. Now, let me release these two scoundrels from their misconceptions about New Order politics.”
“Go!�
�� screamed McEwan.
Dine-Alegg casually shot Wokmar and Shocles in the head while her panicked soldiers leaped for their fallen weapons.
A little to Annalise’s left, Hunter and Ree opened fire with their GX-cannon, sending heavy darts ricocheting off an invisible barrier that protected the double doors. Deflected rounds struck sparks off the pillar’s stone and clattered off dragoon head crests like deadly hail stones.
Annalise stopped breathing as she watched the leading Trog hit the force barrier at speed. She saw the armored head snap hard to one side but make a little progress in pushing inside. McEwan’s mount came at the force wall more steadily. It looked as if time was running at a hundredth of its normal rate inside the force shield, but it was running nonetheless, and the dragoons would eventually get through.
McEwan decided progress wasn’t fast enough.
“Dranjer,” he said over BattleNet, “destroy that building.”
Fire was coming down on them from windows set along the pillar’s length, but she ignored them for now. “Consider it down,” she replied as she sent the first missile streaking toward the pillar.
Assuming that the force shield would neutralize any launch aimed at the door, Annalise had already shifted her aim to the corner of the north and west wall a third of the way up where the stone abruptly changed color.
Gotta be a weak point, said Solara. Come on! Oh… drent!
The missile failed to explode. Annalise sent the second Type-21 at the wall while she was still trying to figure out why.
Solara had guessed. She enhanced the view, so Annalise could see the pale blue beams flicker out from blisters set almost flush against the wall when her round was ten feet out from the target.
Fermi beams.
Caught in these defensive weapons that could scramble the most hardened electronics, her missile died inside and bounced off to land harmlessly on the grass.
