Leon rubbed the back of his stiff neck to get some more circulation to his brain before returning the free hand to the assault rifle’s trigger. “If I had to guess, being as the door we came in was precisely the one Truman came out earlier, when he fled the compound, this is where he kept the stuff he didn’t want anyone knowing about, not even his own people.”
“Where is it then?”
“Gone with him.”
“Didn’t you say Natty was going after him?”
“That’s what I said.”
“So, basically we’re playing with last year’s toys, and they’re still getting the better of us. But you sent Natty out against Truman who is fortified with his best stuff?”
“When you put it that way it does sound heartless of me.”
“No, no. Good thinking. Me and the kid never really got a chance to bond, and I for one would like some hope of getting home and getting laid again.”
“By your wife? I thought you two haven’t slept together in years.”
“After what I’ve been through? You haven’t heard of a pity fuck?”
Leon smiled and then his face turned stern. “Oh shit, this is the last thing I need.”
Cronos followed his sight line. Laney had entered the chamber with her contingent of juvenile Nomads and Umbrage. While they could use the reinforcements, Cronos thought, yeah, there were basically not enough of them to be much help. She, if anything, was just likely to start a feeding frenzy that would start with her and her entourage, but would end with Cronos and Leon.
She couldn’t have picked a worse time for her entrance. The last of the Nomads and Umbrage providing Leon and Cronos with cover had fallen to superior resistance.
A jeep tore through the double doors. Zigzagging right around Laney and her entourage. And heading full tilt for the center of the chamber. Pulling the focus off of her. The Nomads and Umbrage converging on her migrated towards the jeep instead. The HMMWV, sans the roof and the shell over the back, didn’t finish braking until it had pretty much hit the bullseye.
***
“Did I tell you to watch where you were driving, or did I not tell you to watch where you were driving?!” Sparrow squawked.
“Relax. We got the numbers on our side,” Bowman said.
“Only, they’re in the circle around the ones not on our side,” he said, gazing up at Laney and her entourage. Laney, mounted on her juvenile Nomad, and the rest of her alien-looking posse had followed them into the center of the chamber like a protective shield. Though providing them defense was probably never their intention.
Those forces were quickly pushed out of the way by Truman’s forces.
One of Truman’s Nomads picked up the box in back of the jeep Sparrow and Bowman had shepherded out of the armory and tossed it on the ground, shattering the crate. The case’s contents was like kibble for them. Even the Umbrage were joining in.
“They’re eating the bullets!” Bowman said.
“I told you to leave a good thing alone, but oh no, you just had to save the day.”
The lights were going out on the headsets on Truman’s forces. Nomads and Umbrage alike were pulling them off.
Sparrow pushed Bowman out of the driver’s seat, put the jeep in gear and tore ass out of the coliseum. He assumed that’s what this place was. He’d been to Springsteen avatar concerts—the guy had been dead and gone for years and was making more money than ever courtesy of the latest holographic technology and previously unreleased titles—with the songsmith belting out tunes in auditoriums that were smaller—that could still seat fifty thousand.
Screw Bowman. It was a cold thing to do but he saw no reason that he should be paying for Bowman’s karma, when he had his own to worry about.
***
“Looks like they’re out of kibble. You think he went to get more?” Cronos said.
Leon assessed the fleeing driver through the scope of his rifle. “Somehow I doubt it.”
“Well, they’ve evened the odds up some. But I still don’t like the chances of the defenseless female on stage. Unless that’s her swan song she’s planning on singing.”
Leon, distracted by the driver, only now realized that Laney had managed to make it to the performance area.
He sighed. “Yeah, let’s go save the day. I think it’s what we signed on for.”
“For the record, I don’t remember scribbling my name on any contract. Certainly not one etched in blood. I’d officially like to lodge my protest,” he said, hiking after Leon, walking back to back so they had three hundred sixty degrees of coverage. Or as close to it as they were going to get. God knows they were going to need every degree of range.
***
Sparrow felt the impact at the side of the Humvee before he registered the sight in his peripheral vision. The head of a nomad broadsiding him.
The jeep tumbled a few times in the air before landing upside down. He was still airborne, like the shotput spinning off an Olympian’s hand.
Ever since a kid he’d always wanted to fly, just like Superman. That’s just what it felt like, from the sternum up. Below that he felt nothing. The impact had clearly cracked his spine.
He landed softer than expected, like a ball in a catcher’s mitt. Only, the mitt was the open mouth of a Nomad. When the monster bit down, sadly not all the teeth caught the unfeeling part of his body.
Whoever said you see your life flash before your eyes as you die was full of shit. The pain, so intense, was translated into blinding flashes of light across his retinas. A form of synesthesia, like seeing colors when you should hear sound. Probably just a defense mechanism to help him cope with the pain. Maybe that’s what they meant by the light at the end of the tunnel.
***
Witnessing the fate of the driver fleeing the coliseum, Cronos sighed. “What’s say I go find us some more kibble?”
“You’re certainly the one to do it,” Leon said. “The only person getting past that defensive line is the one carrying God on his shoulders.”
Cronos gulped and charged in the same direction the jeep was headed. There was just the small matter of a room—that you could land a few Boeing 747s in and park them end to end—full of dinosaurs, and their even more high-functioning Umbrage friends to get past. Like Leon said, he was definitely the man for the job.
He ran as fast as he could. Holding on to his rifle like a damn tightrope walker holds on to his balance beam.
Cronos looked over his shoulder and noticed that one of the two that had dropped off the kibble, the one that remained behind, was running after him. He didn’t make it very far. Though the bottom half of him did maintain its forward momentum for a while. It was just a tad bizarre seeing the legs running without the upper half of the body from the navel on up.
The first pair of juvenile nomads Cronos managed to clear, he cleared because in their eagerness to charge him they head-butted one another. They were back there shaking it off now.
He was so busy looking over his shoulder at the ones coming up behind him that he missed the pool of blood in front of him. Lost his footing. Went down, depriving Flamer of the chance to flambé his ass. Instead, his bolus of fire ended up in the face of another juvenile Nomad. Who didn’t take too kindly to it. They were busy flaming one another now in a testosterone contest to which less endowed males of any species were best not invited.
The remaining juvenile Nomads that Cronos cleared, he cleared for the simple reason that the pool of blood had turned into a slick to rival a Whamo Slip-’N-Slide across a kid’s lawn. The boomerangs flung at him by the Umbrage were expecting to make contact with a running human, not one that could suddenly outrun a snail while using exactly the same propulsion method. Their boomerangs ended up harassing their own side instead, mostly the young Nomads who didn’t quite have the reflexes to deal with them.
The Umbrage were climbing the Nomads to retrieve their boomerangs wedged between the creatures’ scales when they didn’t come rebounding back.
Whe
n Cronos was back on his feet again, he was at the door. It was only when he was through it, leaning up against it on the other side, gasping for air, and registering the satisfying click of the latch in the door that he realized he was in the clear. Safely protected by the realm he’d just left behind if only by its surreal nature; it couldn’t touch him back here in the real world.
He stripped off his clothes, drenched in blood, rinsed them in the two-hundred gallon decorative fish tank, wrung them dry, and then put them back on. It was only then that he realized the fish were piranha. His blood had created a feeding frenzy and they were going at one another.
***
Leon approached Laney on stage to give cover. She had dismounted her Nomad to climb to the higher elevation. All of her Nomads had the sense to surround the stage in a protective perimeter without attempting to scale it, or they would surely have reduced it to splinters under their own weight.
He didn’t like how many reflections of himself he was seeing in those enemy Nomad eyeballs peering back at him with just one idea in mind.
The only reason he’d made it this far, he presumed, was, he wasn’t trying to flee the coliseum, like the others before him. And the sentient serpents preferred playing defense to offense in the final analysis. They much rather see what his weapons could do to them, if only for the chance to become even more immune to attacks. And he’d yet to fire his. So who knew what it had in store for them?
He continued to point his muzzle from one scary countenance to another, playing a game of, “Who’s feeling lucky?”
“Where’s your friend going?” Laney said.
“Cronos? He’s like that guy who reads about the lost treasure of Cortez, doesn’t stop to think for a second that it’s a lot of hooey, and sets sail the next day.”
“What if there is a lost treasure of Cortez?”
Leon sighed. “Well, let me put it this way, I like his chances right now better than I like ours.”
“It’s one-liners like that that make me glad I married an optimist.”
***
Cassandra found her way into the FORESCO armory. It didn’t take much inspection to figure out what this generation of weapons was about. She set one of the explosives to wipe the arsenal off the map before it could be used on the Nomads and Umbrage. Whether or not that was the right thing to do. She realized she might just be forestalling the age of sentient serpent invulnerability. But until every last one of them was free of the headsets allowing the triple threat to manipulate them, invulnerability wasn’t in their best interests.
On her way out the door she sighted the tennis ball-size spheres. She picked one up, pulled the two halves apart. Yet another bomb. She didn’t have any use for what was inside, but the shell could come in handy.
An idea was forming.
SIXTY-SIX
THE INNER PERIMETER OUTSIDE THE FORESCO COMPOUND
Quinny fought with the controls of his robot-suit. Edging the Goliath-Bot forward. Inside it he was as tall as one of the full-grown Nomads. At nearly a hundred feet. No longer the frail sickly kid who could never stand up to the bully on the schoolyard.
The sight of the enemy’s adult Nomads turning back towards the compound to bar Leon and his men from going further, and seizing any more of FORESCO’s chief assets, was what prompted the engineers to suggest the recruitment of the Goliath-Bots.
But Quinny wasn’t having any more luck with this device than any other he ever laid his hands on. The truck with its AI overrides, just coming up the mountain, prior to this debacle, hadn’t thought much of his efforts to drive it, fighting him every step of the way. He’d never touched any electronic device that didn’t give him trouble. It was probably why he wasn’t about to graduate up to OMEGA FORCE from ALPHA UNIT anytime soon. God forbid the contraption have an AI. Then he was really in for some trouble. He never met an AI that didn’t want to torture his ass. First it would just play hard to get with its programming. Then it would outright spit in his face and go on strike with every command prompt from his keyboard. This Goliath-Bot was proving to be no exception.
The robot in his hands staggered, repeatedly on the verge of falling down. “I thought the skull caps were supposed to make these things easy to navigate! Like hell.”
Marty, his partner—everyone in ALPHA UNIT was partnered; it was their job to look after one another— piloting another Goliath-Bot with an eye to protecting his flank, said, “Hey, nice. I’ve been trying to master Jackie Chan’s drunken warrior fighting style for years now. You’re a natural.”
“Very funny. In case you haven’t noticed,” Quinny said, speaking to his partner by way of his ear mike, “I’m trying to fight off this bad ass Nomad. Leave me to find the one that’s ten feet taller than all the other adults.”
Marty observed Quinny stumble out of the way of several direct charges by the beast. Duck a bolus of flames by arching back in his robot suit so the robot was practically doing a backbend. And then tackle the creature to the ground. “You’re doing great!” Marty coached. “Best drunken warrior I’ve seen. Your jujitsu isn’t bad either. Where did you learn to wrestle like that?”
“I’m trying to scratch my nose! I was trying to scratch my ass earlier, when I tackled him,” Quinny confessed with exasperation.
“No need to be humble, pal. Plenty of glory to steal around here. Oh shit!” Marty studied the adult Nomad charging him head on. He tackled Marty to the ground. It was all he could do to roll out of the way as the creature kept trying to stomp him into scrap metal. “Hey, don’t look now, but I’m doing the monster mash!”
“I think you mean he is,” Quinny said.
“Leave it to a fellow engineer to be so technical.”
***
Raker had lost track of Satellite, his number two guy. They were supposed to be married at the hip. Instead he was fighting alongside Kurt. They were both a couple of self-professed rednecks from Detroit. Honestly, they seemed like a better fit for one another, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t worried about his friend Satellite. God forbid he hadn’t found a Goliath-Bot to crawl into. Between the hundred foot giant walls of metal-glass and steel that were the robo-suits, and the hundred-foot-tall Nomads, the ground was no place for a soldier right now. Far less an engineer.
He glanced over at Kurt. Both of them were fighting inside the giant robo-suits against bad guy Goliath-Bots doing their best to hold their own. The mind-caps that gave them handless control helped, and it meant they could spread themselves thin, one soldier per robo-suit, but all that didn’t make them instantly better fighters. “Hey, is that a replay of the 1971 Ali-Frazier fight?”
“Yeah,” Kurt confessed. “I think I pulled one of the B-string guys from Truman’s team. He’s about as into this beating on one another, ass-kicking shit as I am. So we programmed the robosuits to look like we were in a death match to end all death-matches. Meanwhile, I’m catching reruns of ‘I Love Lucy’ on the GPS screen built into the dash. Hell if I know what he’s doing to pass the time.”
“What’s a self-professed redneck doing watching reruns of I Love Lucy?”
“You’re such a bigot. I can’t be shallow and well-rounded?”
“Check that. What’s a white guy in a lab coat doing piloting a Goliath-Bot for Truman?”
“I think he’s one of the defecting scientists laying low so he doesn’t get his head bitten off for playing turncoat.”
“You’re shitting me. Okay, now that we’ve got that settled… That Ali-Frazier tussle was what, the fight of the century? I need to stop playing Beastmaster over here, send this Nomad to fetch a stick so I can watch the fight.” Raker fired one of his in-forearm rocket propelled grenades at the Nomad’s girlfriend. It lodged, unexploded, in her backside and sent her running off, hysterical. That sent the boyfriend chasing after her, instead of fighting off Raker like he was supposed to. “That turned out to be easier than I expected,” Raker said. He pulled up a seat for himself on a rock outcropping and promptly commenced to get los
t in the Ali-Frazier reenactment being played out in the hundred-foot-tall robo-suits.
Raker couldn’t help aping some of Ali’s arm work from his armchair position on the fight mumbling, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He raised his voice to Kurt, “Why couldn’t you pick Ali? Now you’ve got me rooting for the other guy!”
“Quiet,” Kurt chastised, “Lucy is getting ready to do something classic. This is the one where she’s in the chocolate factory trying to keep up with the assembly line.”
Raker sighed. “It’s moments like this that make me ashamed to be an engineer. The battle of the millennium and what do we have to say for ourselves? You’re watching I Love Lucy, and I’m looking around for the hotdog guy in the bleachers, begging to shout, ‘Over here! Over here!”
***
“I bought this deep sea diving suit for collecting up piranha to see if they were mutating in the face of all the pollutants floating down river,” Mandrake muttered in frustration. He pulled himself out of the hole he’d been mashed into by a stampeding Nomad adult who hadn’t even bothered to look down at the insect he’d squashed.
The diving suit was rated for deep ocean dives down to the bottom of the Mariana trench; of course the guy who pawned it off on him was probably overselling it just to get it off his shelf. While Mandrake wasn’t sure about its ability to survive the Mariana trench, it was holding up pretty well against the stomping feet of adult Nomads and hundred foot robots alike.
He could testify to that firsthand because as soon as he’d climbed out of his early grave, one of the soldiers wielding a Goliath-Bot—caught up in a reenactment of the Ali-Frazier fight, or so it looked from down here—unwittingly mashed him into the ground like a colorful rainforest version of a potato bug beneath his feet.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 54
