Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  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 casualties, 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.

  It 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 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.

  “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 check by 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, it 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, it 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, it 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 it 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 felt 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!”

  He felt Crowley’s hands on his shoulders. “Easy, easy. Trying to breach that wall is not something you should do. We can 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.”

  Chapter 18

  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 rem
iniscent 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 Ultra-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 Paragons get lift during, or glide after, their leaps. Their weaponry became more formidable just with their increased bulk. He half-considered giving them some sort of missile weapon, but decided against 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 back from 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, it 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.

  “This isn’t going to be easy, guys.” Will gave them a half-smile and got nervous grins in response. “I’ll soften them up, then you’ve got to take them down. You can used the sledges to break heads or crack backs. Belly button to skull, front and back, those are your killing zones. These guys have some sort of armor on — real fanatics.”

  One of the guys waved Will’s last remark off. “You don’t need to lie to us, bro. Tadd gave us the word — we’re a long way from home, and something out there opened a gate to Hell.”

  “Okay, you’re up to speed.” Will ducked his head as gunfire started crackling down in the ravine. “They’re coming, and they’re not human. Kill all you want, they’ll make more.”

  The gun-thunder rose to a crescendo that filled the broad valley with deafening noise. Will strained to hear any screams, but he could hear nothing in the confused explosions. He tried to concentrate enough to push his mind out so he could see how the battle raged, but the fear from his men and the staccato popping distracted him. By the time the noise began to die, a great crashing sound began to build. Echoing from north to south and back again, the crashing grew louder as it came closer and told Will who had won and who had lost down below.

  Even having seen the troops Ryuhito had raised did not prepare Will for the spectacle of their arrival in the compound. Trees shivered and shook, then fell toward the compound as if being knocked down by a gigantic steamroller. When the last tree toppled, the enemy front line paused for a moment at the edge of the clearing.

  Tall and thick-limbed, the heavy creatures in the front line stared back at the human defenders with piggish eyes full of hatred. Their blocky fists ran with blood and plant juices, and a number of the creatures bled from open wounds. One by one they raised their muzzles to the sky and let out with a blood-curdling howl, then hunched their shoulders and charged.

  Their wide line narrowed toward the middle of the spike field, and Will opened up with his machine-pistol, it started to rise with the recoil on him, but he brought it under control and it came around in a tight little circle. It shattered the armor plate on one of the massive monster’s shoulders. Armor fragments and more bullets minced the flesh beneath and blew apart the shoulder-girdle. As the monster twisted around with the impact, its arm dangling by a thin strip of bleeding muscle, another charging creature hit it from behind and drove it into the stakes.

  Four sharpened wooden shafts pierced the lead monster’s body, but three others snapped off when they hit armor. The body, propelled forward by the momentum of its charge and the impact from behind, started to roll and flatted yet more stakes. Dead even before the heavy hooves of its companions stomped it to pulp, the creature Will had shot all but cleared a path through the stakes.

  Will hit the tab at the rear of the grip and slammed another clip home as the spent one dropped away. He felt the ground tremble as he brought the gun up again. A second monster, this one shot in the knee by Tadd, went down and opened a hole through the stakes. Leaping above him, the first of the behemoths started sprinting forward and his fellows followed in a tight arrow formation.

  Will tried to pick a target as the shaking ground toppled some of his sandbags. We are done! Ready to consign himself to death, his eyes narrowed, and he burned a clip at one of the approaching monsters. It fell, and he reloaded again, fully believing until he saw movement in the comer of his right eye, that he had two more seconds to live.

  From back behind the lines, having built up speed on a dead gallop through the center of the compound, the Plutonian Phantom Masons blasted into the monsters’ line like Cathaginian elephants crushing a Roman square. Will saw one of the behemoths lifted up and tossed like scrap paper through the air. The snapping sound of armor plates being crushed beneath titanic legs filled the air, and an acrid, cloying stink washed over the battlefield.

  Vetha, a bone-pale death-goddess, rode perched atop the lead Plutonian. Bursting through the behemoth line, she faced an immediate attack by the secondary troops. Will saw scale-stars flash through the sky and ricochet from her ivory form. One of the creatures leaped high in th
e air to attack her, but she speared a forelimb through its chest, then discarded the body before he had even reached the apex of his jump.

  As the Plutonian charge carried on through the behemoths, scattering them like mobile homes in a tornado, the smaller creatures poured through the openings. Will heard things whizzing through the night air and heard a gurgle as one of his men went down with a chitin-star in his throat. “Down, down!” he shouted. Raising his gun enough to clear the sandbags, he tracked a prolonged blast against the front.

  Twisting around with his back to the sandbags to reload, he saw two more of his six men down with the throwing stars embedding in their bodies. More importantly though, coming on the heels of the Plutonian attack, the Japanese cyberninjas poured into the battle. “Yee-ha! The Cavalry has arrived!” he shouted, then laughed insanely when he realized what he’d actually said.

  Their automatic rifles lipped flame in controlled bursts that sent the smaller creatures reeling. Moving up in fire teams, they covered each other and directed withering amount of fire into the boiling mass of bodies. Their concentrated effort ground the enemy advance down and started the tide to ebb.

  Will rose to one knee and poked the snout of his machine-pistol over the sandbags as one of the behemoths rose up two feet from him like a titan. The monster raised both of its fists for a crushing overhand blow, and Will started to fall back away from what would have been ground zero for the blow. He knew, as he fell and weakly kicked out to propel himself backward, he could not escape.

  Suddenly someone grabbed Will by the collar and yanked him back. Tossing him clear with the lower pair of arms, the Yidam stepped up and stuffed the muzzle of an improbably huge rifle up under the behemoth’s chin and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash shined out of the creature’s mouth and nostrils. A little fountain of blood spurted up out of the top of the monster’s skull, then the beast fell backward, crushing two of the smaller attackers beneath its bulk.