D & D - Tale of the Comet

by Roland Green

By now the water was shallowing. Even through the murk, Ohlt saw the tops of drowned trees. They were heading for a small ledge on what had been a hillside, that the flooding of the

  valley had turned into a beach.

  Two of the spider drones started down toward the beach. Human Doomed rode on the backs of two of them, and a third carried a Doomed hobgoblin in its pincers. Drones and Doomed alike fired as they descended, but they raised so much steam that all eight attackers were able to get their feet on the ground before anyone was hit.

  Soryega took one in the arm as she unpacked her grenade launcher. Half of one sleeve was burned off, and the exposed .kin looked as ugly as Erick Trussk's chest, but she seemed to be ignoring the pain as she slammed a magazine into the launcher and let fly.

  Hellandros had left the grenades alone. He had no spells to enhance the power of their explosions, and they were in any case already as powerful as one could safely use at close range. Soryega walked a burst of six grenades across the cliff, through the descending spider drones and Doomed. Smoke boiled up, and bits of rock and enemy showered into the lake.

  When the smoke had cleared away, the three Doomed were out of the fight, two had vanished completely, and the hobgoblin was dangling limply in the drone's pincers. The spider drones were still moving, still fighting.

  Their blaster fire raised more steam and sprayed the attackers with hot gravel before Zolaris opened up with his magnum cannon. The drones stopped fighting, having been transformed into expanding clouds of fragments that arced down into the lake. Half a score of heavy-striking rounds had shredded them like a tiger falling on a goat.

  By then all eight attackers were scrambling up the last of the dope to the replicator. No defender on this side of the valley had a good angle of fire on them. From Fworta or the far side of i he valley, no construct could shoot at them without danger of hitting the replicator. The Secondary Director would never allow that.

  The attackers had no such inhibitions. All of them made it to the top, including Soryega, slowed as she was by her burned arm. She stifled a cry, reloaded her grenade launcher, stepped hack as far as the ground allowed, and emptied the whole magazine upward, onto the roof of the replicator. Again, Overseer constructs and Doomed, in pieces, showered down everywhere. Several intact and loaded blasters and stunners, and a drum of magnum ammunition came with them.

  "Wrong caliber," Zolaris grumbled. Soryega started to reply, then her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted. Vorris yanked out his medikit, glared at Zolaris, and started working on the woman's burn.

  The replicator had a locked door. The attackers had blasters, explosive charges, and electronic devices for dealing with locks. One of Gregis's code-readers did the work in moments without any more explosions or fires, although the team did toss a couple of hand grenades in through the doorway to discourage anyone inside from loitering.

  Inside they found a fallen Doomed, and a living one who promptly joined its companion at the urging of Zolaris's blaster. A spider drone came next, but it looked either half-finished or half-repaired; it moved slowly and clumsily. Elda's shot was neither, and the spider's bodiless legs clattered down on the floor.

  Ohlt stared around him, trying not to gape like a child seeing his first dragon. It was as if a whole street of houses, and a patch of tropical jungle had been magically piled one atop the other, then jumbled together, then turned to metal and stone.

  Ohlt knew that what looked like vines, or immense serpents, were cables and hoses, carrying energy or material. Tree-like pipes carried other materials, including water. Machines as large as water mills sat and hummed quietly to themselves, without any noise of clashing wood, metal, or stone, and without any sign of movement.

  For a moment, lost in contemplating this place of gruesome wonders, Ohlt regretted having to destroy it. Then he remembered the charred corpses in the misty valley, Aston Tanak's dying words, and the tears that young Gredin might still have to shed, if she lived long enough.

  Thinking of the replicator as an evil wizard's lair eased Ohlt's mind. He still had little to do but stand guard, and when Vorris staggered in with Soryega on his shoulders, he helped the Rael put her down. Ohlt was left to guard her, while Vorris joined the rest of the team in swarming over the replicator.

  The Ha-Gelhers climbed high into the replicator's guts, and tied explosive charges to vital connections or threw them, attached to spears, into places they could not reach. M'lenda also climbed, trailing long cords like starved snakes. She tied them here, there, everywhere, and a few places that she seemed to conjure out of thin air.

  The Rael did the same, except that they used grenade launchers to fire charges into odd corners. Meanwhile, Zolaris at tached the largest charge of all to what he said was a fuel tank, just in case the radio command to the fuses of all the other charges did not go off. The big charge, he said, had a time fuse.

  Ohlt was glad that Rael timekeeping devices were somewhat more accurate than temple water clocks.

  At last the bomb-layers began coming down. Brinus slid down a hose, landing rolling, and stood up with a grin nearly erasing the rest of his features. Elda followed, no less agile than her brother when aloft.

  At last it was done, as well as anyone could do it. They lormed up for the withdrawal, either to Fworta, or back to the lake, depending on where enemy resistance lay, and where their comrades needed them most.

  Two steps beyond the door, Zolaris stopped.

  "We go down," he said, gesturing with his free hand while he adjusted the shoulder harness of the magnum with the other.

  "Down?" Vorris said. "Soryega can barely walk—"

  "They're bringing up a deathstrike."

  That ended the argument. Ohlt thought that a deathstrike now was rather on the order of locking the barn door after the horse was stolen (or in this case, had been hamstrung). Or perhaps not. It could at least chase the horse thieves.

  He was also curious about the most formidable of the Overseer's constructs. This curiosity lasted all of the moment it took for the deathstrike to roll out of the dust and smoke, and into plain sight.

  Ohlt did not waste time regretting his curiosity. Instead, he helped Vorris move Soryega onto the slope, catching her as she started to slide. Zolaris was already halfway down to the water, for all the world as if he were fleeing—the more so in that he no longer carried the magnum cannon.

  "What is that fool—?" Elda snapped. Vorris looked ready to hit her.

  It was then that Ohlt saw where the magnum cannon lay, its dull metal invisible against a similarly hued patch of rock. He realized that Zolaris was indeed running—in a race whose stakes were all their lives.

  The deathstrike had too much power to be used wildly around the vital replicator. The Secondary Director must have given it strict orders to shoot only at certain kinds of targets, and not toward the replicator complex.

  For the moment, all of the team except Zolaris were too close to the replicator to be safely shot at. Zolaris, unarmed, did not look dangerous.

  Vorris tilted his head to one side, as if listening to a distant voice, and nodded. He turned to Ohlt and Chemuk.

  "On my signal, start shooting at the deathstrike."

  "At that—?" Brinus began, but this time it was Elda who brought silence by raising her blaster rifle.

  "It's mad, but so am I, brother. It's also the only way."

  Vorris had barely begun to raise his hand when Elda cracked off three shots. They did about as much harm to the deathstrike as a flea-bite does to a gargantua, and the dozen bolts that followed did hardly more.

  But they confronted the enemy tank with a dilemma too complicated for it to solve. How to deal with hostile fire coming from close to the replicator? It had to refer the matter up the sequence of command to a Secondary Director that was, at the moment, heavily loaded with other responsibilities. Indeed, perhaps a trifle overloaded.

  The deathstrike was still waiting for permission to fire when Zolaris scrambled up to his m
agnum cannon, snatched it on the run, slammed himself and it down near the top of the slope, and lired a complete heavy-striking drum into the tank's belly.

  No material, technology, or design allows an armored fighting vehicle to be equally well-protected all around. Or if it is, then it is equally ill-protected. The deathstrike's design made the normal compromise: heavy armor protecting the front of t he hull and the weapons, lighter armor elsewhere.

  Very light armor on the belly, where Zolaris had just hit it with a punch equivalent in destructive energy to a ship-mounted laser. Moreover, the magnum rounds had not only penetrated the armor, they had ripped into the fuel tank, placed forward to sit behind the heavy bow armor, and well away from the heat of the turbine engine.

  The fuel tanks were multiple, self-sealing, cellular, and well-equipped with fire-damping foam sprays. The magnum rounds shattered all of these protections. The fuel tanks spewed flame through every opening the deathstrike's design allowed, as well as those made by the magnum rounds.

  Without needing a single order, everyone threw themselves flat. They had just hit the ground when the flames reached the ammunition and power cells for the weaponry.

  The explosion actually lifted the deathstrike into the air. It also hurled fragments, mostly white-hot, in all directions. Some of them pierced the replicator. Warning lights, screaming alarms, and what sounded to Ohlt like the hissing of giant snakes, all sprang to life.

  "The Secondary Director is going to be very unhappy—" Elda began.

  "We'll be worse than unhappy if we don't go on running," Vorris interrupted. "Some of the charges in the replicator may go off prematurely."

  Nothing happened before they reached the water's edge.

  Several spider drones and a handful of Doomed had assembled around the flaming wreckage of the deathstrike, but they were not shooting.

  "The old orders probably still control them," Ohlt called as he ran. "Or maybe the heat from the fire makes it hard for them to pick us out."

  Vorris nodded to Ohlt in respect and approval.

  In the next moment, the charges laid in the replicator started going off. The first few explosions reached the attackers' ears as distinct sounds, then vanished in the general pandemonium as everything that could explode or burn did so.

  The replicator did not blow apart like the deathstrike. It was too large in proportion to the size of the explosions within. But flames again shot out of every opening, the door the attackers had used flew off its hinges and over their heads into the lake, and the walls quivered and shook like a man with a palsy.

  By then the attackers were on the shore and loading their weapons aboard the logs. Ohlt would have gladly stripped to his bare skin to run or swim faster, but knew the day's fighting was not yet over. The issue of Fworta remained undecided, as far as he could tell from what Vorris said of the messages from Jazra.

  Then, at last, the time-fused charge in the replicator's fuel tank went off. Haifa wall blew out, turning from solid metal into a sleet of hot fragments hurtling across the lake like bolts from a giant's crossbow.

  Ready to push off, Ohlt froze as Zolaris frantically waved everybody back up the hill. He had taken about three steps when he saw the Rael's point.

  Flying fragments, and now blaster fire from totally confused spider drones and Doomed, tore across the lake. They ripped into the swollen metal belly of the fuel tank. Where gleaming metal had been, there was a swelling ball of fire.

  Although it dwarfed any fireball Hellandros had ever made, the explosion seemed to Ohlt oddly smaller than it should have been. A moment later the ground slammed upward against his feet, and he felt as if he were about to fly into the air, so high that

  he would need the wings of a bird to not fall and shatter himself.

  A wave rushed across the lake, upstream, and toward the dam. It rose higher than the waist of a large ship, and it boiled over the top of the dam as if it were a child's sand castle. When II struck the near shore, foam and filthy water roared up the rock to within paces of the team.

  When the water receded, the slope lay scoured down to naked rock. Then the wave roared back, and Ohlt realized that i he fuel explosion's being mostly underground might not save i hem. The dreaded disaster of a broken dam was on them, and i he water in the lake would be pouring through Fworta, wreaking further havoc on its way to sweeping away Jazra's people.

  "Soryega?"

  The note in Vorris's single word drew more of Ohlt's atten-lion than all the explosions since the battle commenced. He looked, to see Vorris hold the limp body of his comrade. The liagment had left a small, ragged hole in the Rael woman's throat, and a large, jagged one in the back of her skull.

  "She couldn't have felt anything," Elda said, resting a hand un Vorris's shoulder. He looked at her, then nodded slowly. He even reached up and gripped her hand with one of his, lowering Soryega to the ground with the other.

  "Anyone else hurt?" Ohlt asked. "I hope the logs survived—"

  "By the Authority!" Zolaris shouted. "The dam's still there. It didn't breach!"

  Ohlt looked. The dam indeed still spread across the valley I torn one hillside to the other. In fact, it seemed to stand higher 1 HIT of the water than before. Was that just a trick of the waves, i ill splashing back and forth?

  Or was something else draining the lake?

  • • •

  Jazra knew that the ground-shaking explosion had to be the enemy's main fuel supply. Her one thought was to take advan-l age of the surprise to redeploy her people out of the way of the flood. She started the orders flowing, without even taking time to curse the luck that had doomed Fworta to be flooded. The water could do irreparable damage to the gate.

  Within moments she had redeployed her team. They were as dispersed as they could be, and still be able to concentrate fire and stay in visual contact.

  She saw her people moving off, as the command frequency squalled in her ear, "Jazra, we've got water trouble."

  The Rael officer's considerably strained temper snapped. "Get off the air, you son of a Thuvian! We're in a battle, in case you hadn't—"

  "Truly, mistress, I had," the voice came again. This time Jazra recognized Chakfor Stonebreaker's peculiar sarcasm.

  The dwarf had remained with Hellandros because he could not swim, nor move fast enough to keep up with the other attacking parties. He had trained well enough with Rael weapons to be a decent bodyguard for the wizard, but he wasn't supposed to have learned about radio.

  "How did you learn—?"

  "Tell you later, would be best," Chakfor said curtly. "Water's come over the dam since that big thump, but the dam's held. My guess is, they put most of the fuel in a natural cave, and the blast was mostly underground. Could have cracked open a cave lower down, though. I think the lake's draining out."

  Jazra realized that the dwarf's curtness was not bad manners so much as great haste. Before she could ask how much water, she saw brown liquid gushing out through cracks and fractures in the ship's hull, and flowing up from under the wreckage. The water looked hideous, she thought she could smell its vileness, and she would not have cared to have it touch her bare skin.

  But it was not coming through the gate section of Fworta, at least not yet. And it was doing more harm to the enemy than to the attackers.

  Doomed and spider drones alike had been knocked off their feet by the explosion, and the landing gear of one reconnaissance drone had collapsed. The spider drones and Doomed were just regaining their feet when the gushing water coalesced into a shallow flood, and overtook them.

  It was no more than knee-deep, but the spider drones at least had far too much improvised circuitry to be amphibious. Sparks danced over the water as the drones shorted out. The water was too shallow to let them sink out of sight, and in moments it was flowing onward.

  Some Doomed went down too, and either hit their heads or drowned before the flood receded. For a moment Jazra's people had undisturbed target practice on the remaining perimeter sensor
s. Their shooting was not as accurate as it might have been, but it was good enough.

  This triggered the target recognition and firing sequences in the weapons mounted on Fworta's hull and the firestorm tank, lust as the blasters and grenade launchers opened fire, the surviving Doomed staggered to their feet and opened fire as well.

  Blaster fire ceased at once, but a grenade in midair could not be stopped. "Friendly" grenades rained down among the Doomed. Those who had been standing when the grenades were launched had mostly fallen before the last grenade exploded.

  Some of the grenade fragments pinged off rocks close to lazra. She sprang to her feet, then dove for cover again as the grenade-proof firestorm blasted the area around her. This time fragments of rock pinged off her armor, some of them hard enough to make her ears ring.

  Suddenly, the blaster fire was rising toward the sky, and so was the stream of tracers from the tank's magnum cannon. Jazra had to look twice, seasoned fighter that she was, before realizing i hat the firestorm had bogged down in a patch of flood-softened ground and tilted. Its turret was turning, but now the fire was going too low instead of too high.

  Mud, dirt, and rock fountained as the firestorm tore at the ground. Hoping that this would screen her from the weapons on the ship, Jazra dashed forward. She pulled a grenade from her pouch, but made no other hostile gesture as she closed.

  There had been enough partly-armored Rael among the Doomed to make her want to weep or curse. There had also been enough so that the sensors might think she was one of the Doomed, if she didn't do anything to persuade them otherwise.

  When the hull weapons did open up, they were shooting at other Rael, who also seemed to have the same idea as Jazra. Her peripheral vision caught one Rael doubling up from a heavy blaster strike and going down. She was moving too fast to see if the soldier rose again.

  She closed with the firestorm. They had a turret hatch for maintenance, and it was gaping open. She rammed her first grenade into the gap between the turret and the armor that protected its base. A blast there had the best chance of reaching something vital.