As the android rose, the Great and Powerful Turtle formed a vast blip on his radar. He was picking up Swarm buds bodily, flinging them into the air, then letting them fall. It was like a cascade fountain. Flappers beat hopelessly at the armored shell. Their acids weren't enough to get through battleship armor.
The air crackled as it was torn apart by energized photons: Pulse, his body become light. The human laser ricocheted off enemy, brought a dozen down, then disappeared. When Pulse finally ran out of energy he would revert to human form, and then he would be vulnerable. The android hoped the flappers wouldn't find him.
Mistral rose overhead, colored like a battleflag. She was seventeen, a student at Columbia, and she dressed in bright patriot colors like her father, Cyclone. She was held aloft by the cloak she filled with the winds she generated, and she battered at the flappers with typhoons, flinging them, tearing them apart. Nothing came close to her.
Peregrine flew in circles around her, uselessly. She was too weak to go against the Swarm in any of its incarnations. None of this was enough. The Swarm kept moving through the gaps between the aces.
Wailing filled the air as jagged black shadows, Air Guard A-10s, fell through the sky, their guns hammering, turning the Delaware white. Bombs tumbled from beneath their wings, becoming bright blossoms of napalm.
The android fired until his generators were drained, and then he fought flappers with his bare hands. Despair filled him, then anger. Nothing seemed to help.
The enemy main body hit the river and began its swim. Few soldiers were alive to fight them. Most of the survivors were trying to hide or run away.
The Sixth Marine Regiment was dead on arrival, and nothing could alter the fact.
Between Trenton and Levittown, bombs and fire had turned the brown December landscape black. Swarm buds moved across the devastated landscape like a nightmare tide. Two more Marine regiments were entrenched in the Philadelphia suburbs, this time with artillery in support and a little group of light Marine armor.
The aces were waiting in a Howard Johnson's off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The plan was for them to be thrown into any counterattack.
A battery of 155s was set up in the parking lot, and fired steadily. The crescendo of sound had already blown out most of the restaurant's windows. The sound of jets was constant overhead.
Pulse was lying down in a hospital tent somewhere; he'd overstrained his energies and was on the brink oЂ collapse. Mistral was curled up sideways in a cheerful orange plastic booth. Her shoulders shook with every crash of the guns outside. Tears poured in rivers down her face. The Swarm hadn't come near her but she'd seen a lot of people die, and she had held together through the fight and the long nightmare of the retreat, but now the reaction had set in. Peregrine sat with her, talking to her in gentle tones the android couldn't hear. Modular Man followed Howler as the ex-sandhog searched the restaurant for something to eat. The man's chest was massive, the mutated voicebox widening the neck so that the android couldn't put his two hands around it. Howler wore a borrowed set of Marine battle dress: flapper acid had eaten his civvies. The android had had to fly him out at the end, holding the ace in hands that had been eaten down to the alloy bones.
"Canned turkey," Howler said. "Great. Let's have Thanksgiving." He looked at Modular Man. "You're a machine, right? Do you eat?"
The android jammed two alloy fingers into a light socket. There was a flash of light, the smell of ozone. "This works better," he said.
"They gonna put you into production soon? I can see the Pentagon taking an interest."
"I've given my creator's terms to General Carter. There's been no reply yet. I think the command structure is in disarray."
"Yeah. Tell me about it."
"Wait," said the android. Behind the crashing of the guns, the roar of jets, he began to hear another sound. The crackle oЂ small-arms fire.
A Marine officer raced into the restaurant, his hand holding his helmet. "It's started," he said. The android began running through systems checks.
Mistral looked up at the officer with streaming eyes. She looked a lot younger than seventeen.
"I'm ready," she said.
The Swarm was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two Marine regiments held, their strongpoints surrounded by walls of Swarm dead. The victory was made possible thanks to support from Air Force and Navy planes and from the battleship New Jersey, which flung 18-inch shells all the way from the Atlantic, Ocean; thanks also to Carter's National Guard and paratroops driving into the Swarm from their rear flank.
Thanks to the aces, who fought long into the night, fought on even after the Swarm hesitated in its onslaught, then began moving west, toward the distant Blue Mountains.
All night the Philadelphia airport was busy with transport bringing in another Marine division all the way from California.
The next morning the counterattack began.
After nightfall, the next day. A color television babbled earnestly from a corner of the departure lounge. Carter was getting ready to move his command post west to Allentown, and Modular Man had flown in with news of the latest Swarm movements. But Carter was busy right now, talking over the radio with his commanders in Kentucky, and so the android listened to news from the rest of the world.
Violence from Kentucky splashed across the screen. Images, taken from a safe distance through long lenses, jerked and snapped. In the midst of it was a tall man in fatigues without insignia, his body blazing like a golden star as he used a twenty-foot tree trunk to smash Swarm buds. There was an interview with him afterward: he looked no older than twenty, but his eyes had thousand-year ghosts in them. He didn't say much, made excuses, left to return to the war. Jack Braun, the Golden Boy of the forties and the Judas Ace of the fifties, back in action for the duration of the emergency.
More aces: Cyclone, Mistral's father, fighting the Swarm in Texas with the aid of his own personal camera crew, all armed with automatic weapons. The Swarm was in full retreat across the Mexican border, driven by armor from Forts Bliss and Hood, and by infantry from Fort Polk, the fliers decimated by widespread use of Vietnam-era defoliants. The Mexicans, slower to mobilize and with an army unprepared for modern large-scale warfare, weren't happy about the Swarm being pushed into Chihuahua and protested in vain.
More images, more locales, more bodies scattered across a torn landscape. Scenes from the autumn plains of northern Germany, where the Swarm had dropped right into the middle of a large-scale maneuver by the British Army of the Rhine, and where they had never even succeeded in concentrating. More troubled images from Thrace, where a Swarm onslaught was straddling the Greco-Turkish-Bulgarian border. The human governments weren't cooperating, and their people suffered.
Pictures of hope and prayer: scenes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, already packed with Christmas pilgrims, now filling the churches in long, endless rounds of murmured prayer.
Stark black-and-white images from China, refugees and long columns of PLA troops marching. Fifty million dead were estimated. Africa, the Near East, South America-pictures of the Swarm advance across the third world, images of an endless wave of death. No continent was untouched save Australia. Help was promised as soon as the superpowers cleaned up their own backyards.
There were speculations about what was going on in the Eastern bloc: though no one was talking, it seemed as if the Swarm had landed in southern Poland, in the Ukraine, and in at least two places in Siberia. Pact forces had mobilized and were moving into battle. Commentators were predicting widespread starvation in Russia: the full-scale mobilization had taken the trucks and railways the civilian population used for the transportation of food.
Old pictures came on the screen: Mistral flying immune in the sky; Carter giving a subdued, reluctant press conference; the mayor of Philadelphia on the verge of hysteria… the android turned away. He'd seen too many of these images. And then he felt something move through him, some ghost wind that touched his cybernetic heart. He felt suddenly weaker.
The television set hissed, its images gone. A rising babble came from the communications techs: some of their equipment had gone down. Modular Man was alarmed. Something was going on.
The ghost wind came again, touching his core. Time seemed to skip a beat. More communications down. The android moved toward Carter.
The general's hand trembled as he replaced his phone in its cradle. It was the first time the android had seen him frightened.
"That was electromagnetic pulse," Carter said. "Somebody's just gone nuclear, and I don't think it was us."
The papers still screamed invasion headlines. Children in the Midwest were being urged to avoid drinking milk: there was danger of poisoning from the airbursts the Soviets had used to smash the Siberian Swarms. Communications were still disrupted: the bombs had bounced enough radiation off the ionosphere to slag a lot of American computer chips.
People on the streets seemed furtive. There was a debate about whether New York should be blacked out or not, even though the Swarm was obviously on the run after six days of intensive combat.
Coleman Hubbard was too busy to care. He walked along Sixth Avenue, grinding his teeth, his head splitting with the effort his recent adventure had cost him.
He had failed. One of the more promising members of the Order, the boy Fabian, had been arrested on some stupid assault charge-the boy couldn't keep his hands off women, whether they were willing or not-and Hubbard had been sent to interview the police captain in charge. It wouldn't have required much, some lost paperwork perhaps, or a suggestion, implanted in the captain's head, that the evidence was insufficient… But the man's mind was slippery, and Hubbard hadn't been able to get ahold ou it. Finally Captain McPherson, snarling, had thrown him out. All Hubbard had done was to identify himself with Fabian's case, and perhaps cause the investigation to go further.
Lord Amun did not take failure well. His punishments could be savage. Hubbard rehearsed his defense in his mind. Then a rangy redheaded woman, wearing a proper executive Burberry, stepped into the street in front of Hubbard, almost running into him, then moving briskly up the street without offering an apology. She carried a leather case and wore tennis shoes. More acceptable footwear peeked out of a shoulder bag.
Anger stabbed into Hubbard. He hated rudeness.
And then his crooked smile began to spread across his face. He reached out with his mind, touching her thoughts, her consciousness. He sensed vulnerability there, an opening. The smile froze on his face as he summoned his power and struck.
The woman staggered as he seized control of her mind. Her case fell to the ground. He picked it up and took her elbow. "Here," he said. "You seem a little out of sorts."
She blinked at him. "What?" In her mind was only confusion. Gently, he soothed it.
"My apartment is just a little distance. Fifty-seventh Street. Maybe you should go there and rest."
"Apartment? What?"
Gently he took command of her mind and steered her up the street. Rarely did he find someone so pliable. A great bubble of joy welled up in him.
Once upon a time he only used his power to get laid, or maybe to help earn a promotion or two at work. Then he met Lord Amun and discovered what power was really for. He'd quit his job, and lived now as a dependent of the Order.
He'd stay in her mind for a few hours, he thought. Find out who she was, what secret terrors lived in her. And then do them to her, one and then another, living inside her mind and his, enjoying her cringing, her self-loathing, as he forced her to beg, right out loud, for everything he did to her. He would caress her mind, enjoy the growing madness as he made her plead for her every debasement, her every fear. These were only a few of the things he'd learned from watching Lord Amun. The things that made him come alive. For a few hours, at least, he could submerge himself in another's fear, and forget his own.
UNTO THE SIXTH GENERATION
Part Two
A freezing jet stream battered at the city, flown straight from Siberia. It tore down the gaps between buildings, tugged at the halfhearted Christmas decorations the city had put up, scattered minuscule bits of Russian fallout in the streets. This was the coldest winter in years. The New Jersey/Pennsylvania Swarm had been officially declared dead two days ago, and the aces, marines, and army had returned to a parade down Fifth Avenue. In another few days, American troops and whatever aces could be persuaded to join them would be flying north and south to deal with the Swarm's invasions of Africa, Canada, and South America.
The android jabbed a newly-fleshed finger at the slot of a pay phone and felt something click. One simply had to understand these things. He dialed a number.
"Hello, Cyndi. How's the job search coming?"
"Mod Man! Hey… I just wanted to say… yesterday was wonderful. I never thought I'd be riding in a parade next to a war hero."
"I'm sorry it took so long for me to call you back."
"I guess fighting the Swarm was a kind of priority. Don't worry. You made up for lost time." She laughed. "Last night was amazing."
"Oh, no." The android was receiving another police call. "I'm afraid I've got to go."
"They're not invading again, are they?"
"No. I don't think so. I'll call you, okay?"
"I'll be looking forward."
Something resembling a mucous-green gelatinous mass had erupted from a manhole into the streets of Jokertown, a Swarm bud that had escaped the showdown across the Hudson. The bud succeeded in devouring two Christmas shoppers and a hot-pretzel vendor before the emergency was called in and the police radios began to call.
The android arrived first. As he dived into the canyon street he saw something that looked like a thirty-foot-wide bowl of gelatin that had been in the refrigerator far too long. In the gelatin were black currants that were its victims, which it was slowly digesting.
The android hovered over the creature and began firing his laser, trying to avoid the currants in hope they might prove revivable. The gelatin began to boil where the silent, invisible beam struck. The bud made a futile effort to reach his flying tormentor with a pseudopod, but failed. The creature began to roll in the direction of an alley, looking for escape. It was too hungry or too stupid to abandon its food and seek shelter in the sewers.
The creature squeezed into the alley and rushed down it. The android continued to fire. Bits were sizzling away and the thing seemed to be losing energy rapidly. Modular Man looked ahead and saw a bent figure ahead in the alley.
The figure was female and white, dressed in layers of clothing, all worn, all dirty. A floppy felt hat was pulled down over an ex-Navy watch cap. A pair of shopping bags drooped from her arms. Tangled gray hair hung over her forehead. She was rummaging in a dumpster, tossing crumpled newspapers over her shoulder into the alley. Modular Man increased his speed, firing radar-directed shots over his shoulder as he barreled through the cold drizzly air. He dropped to the pavement in front of the dumpster, his knees cushioning the impact.
"So I says to Maxine, I says…" the lady was saying. "Excuse me," said the android. He seized the woman and sped upward. Behind him, writhing under the barrage of coherent microwaves, the Swarm bud was evaporating.
"Maxine says, my mother broke her hip this morning, and you won't believe…" The old lady was flailing at him while she continued her monologue. He silently absorbed an elbow to his jaw and floated to a landing on the nearest roof. He let go his passenger. She turned to him flushed with anger.
"Okay, bunky," she said. "Time to see what Hildy's got in her bag."
"I'll fly you down later," Modular Man said. He was already turning to pursue the creature when, out of the corner ou his eye, he saw the lady opening her bag.
There was something black in there. The black thing was getting bigger.
The android tried to move, to fly away. Something had hold of him and wouldn't let him go.
Whatever was in the shopping bag was getting larger. It grew larger very quickly. Whatever had hold of the android was dragging him to
ward the shopping bag.
"Stop," he said simply. The thing wouldn't stop. The android tried to fight it, but his laser discharges had cost him a lot of power and he didn't seem to have the strength left.
The blackness grew until it enveloped him. He felt as if he were falling. Then he felt nothing at all.
New York's aces, responding to the emergency, finally conquered the Swarm bud. What was left of it, blobs of dark green, froze into lumps of dirty ice. Its victims, partially eaten, were identified by the non-edible credit cards and laminated ID they were carrying.
By nightfall, the hardened inhabitants of Jokertown were referring to the creature as the Amazing Colossal Snot Monster. None of them had noticed the bag lady as she came down the fire escape and wandered into the freezing streets.
The android awoke in a dumpster in an alley behind 52nd Street. Internal checks showed damage: his microwave laser had been bent into a sine wave; his flux monitor was wrecked; his flight module had been twisted as if by the hands of a giant. He flung back the dumpster lid with a bang. Carefully he looked up and down the alley.
There was no one in sight.
The god Amun glowed in Hubbard's mind. The ram's eyes blazed with anger, and the god held the ankh and staff with clenched fists.
"TIAMAT," he said, "has been defeated." Hubbard winced with the force of Amun's anger. "The Shakti device was not readied in time."
Hubbard shrugged. "The defeat was temporary," he said.
"The Dark Sister will return. She could be anywhere in the solar system-the military have no way of finding her or identifying her. We have not lived in secret all these centuries only to be defeated now."
The loft was quite neat compared to the earlier chaos. Travnicek's notes had been neatly assembled and classified, as far as possible, by subject. Travnicek had made a start at wading through them. It was hard going.
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