James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 07

by Yronwode

  Yronwode – Xiyyon

  As soon as the Accipiter touched the landing pad, Rook and Jordan dropped from the hatch and broke into a run toward the ornithopter ambulance, spurred on by Caliph’s warnings about an imminent detonation.

  They were just to the low concrete barrier that divided the landing pad when the side doors to the ‘thopter slid open and eight Xirong commandoes jumped out, dressed in chainmail armor and hoods, armed with weapons that fired off rapid rounds of metal bits propelled by chemical explosions. Bullets zinged off Rook and Jordan’s energy shields.

  There was no cover to be found on the open pad, the two warfighters rolled off to the sides, then backed up behind the half-wall under heavy fire.

  “We don’t have time for this!”

  “Explain it to them!” Max Jordan shouted. He poked his pulse rifle out from above and answered their metal with volleys of charged plasma.

  “Can you disarm the bombs now?” Rook asked.

  “I need to be in physical contact.”

  Rook gritted his teeth and rolled out onto the pad. The Xirong opened up on him and his shield sparkled as bits of metal zinged off of it. He adjusted his pulse rifle for high-energy, high-accuracy sniper bursts and picked off three of the Xirong, one-two-three, before his shield drained and he had to return to cover.

  Rook reached into his battle pouch. “Crap, no grenades. Max?”

  “Negative,” Max told him.

  “All right, give me a second to recharge my shields and we’ll hit them with a simultaneous suicide run.”

  “Suicide run?” Jordan was stunned. “But I just learned to love life.”

  “If you don’t get me to the bomb within the next few seconds,” Caliph told them,

  “Suicide will be a moot point.”

  Yronwode – Security Base One Command and Control Center Alkema crossed the command center to one of the displays that had was showing static as the result of a dragon attack. Amid the panicked activity in the war room, no one stopped him as he redirected it to one of the base’s on-site surveillance cameras, and pointed it in the direction of the northeastern sky, the better to see the hellfire that was soon to consume the base. He knew the command center was underground and reinforced, and they had at least a chance of surviving. Everyone above ground, though…

  “What fresh Hell is this?” Alkema asked out loud. He panned toward the view of eastern horizon, where a roaring brown cloud was rising from the desert sands.

  “A sandstorm?” Captain Steadfast guessed.

  Dark brown clouds rolled across the sky, blotting out the light and laying a kind of deep tan twilight darkness across the plain. The Midian security forces looked nervously toward the sky.

  “The sky has never done that before,” Parka told Alkema.

  The raging clouds were moving preternaturally fast, and furthermore, against the prevailing winds. It was as though a massive cyclonic storm had built, and was bee-lining toward the battlefield. The attack aircraft diverted away from it.

  The previous panicked chaos in the command center was replaced with a terrified awe.

  Kitaen went up close and squinted at the approaching storm. “Someone is out there,” he said. “Someone appears to be … riding on the storm.” He zoomed the camera in for a closer look.

  Alkema saw the figure too, and his disbelief almost made his mind explode.

  “Eddie Roebuck?”

  “Quick question,” Lear asked the others. “Was Eddie Roebuck 300 meters tall the last time you guys saw him?”

  Yronwode - The Demilitarized Zone.

  K-Rock was riding the lead dragon, soaring toward the Midian forward security base. Soon, his pack would rain fiery death upon it, then lay waste to the last line of defense, the Shield. Somewhere in between, he expected a fiery orange mushroom cloud would rise on the far side of that low mountain range, and the thousands of Tsi Bai below would know their time had come to take back their lands.

  But just as he approached the base, some kind of storm front came whirling up around him, and the sky turned black. Some of the clouds seemed to take on a human shape, and then he realized that was because they had taken on a vaguely familiar human shape; a tall, dark-skinned, rather puffy man dressed in purple and gold robes, with white glowing eyes, wearing a rather elaborate hat.

  The figure spoke to him, and by this time, K-Rock’s mind was as good as fried by the intensity of the combat and his conviction that he was K-Rock and his duty was to lead the Tsi Bai to conquest; so conversing with a 300 meter cloud man while riding on the back of a dragon seemed to make perfect sense to him.

  The voice boomed at K-Rock like thunder.

  “So, we meet at last. We have been expecting you, K-Rock. We were beginning to think you wouldn’t show. Hopefully, now things will get more interesting around here.”

  “Hold!” Keeler halted his dragon in the air at the level of Eddie Roebuck’s face. “Do I know you?” he demanded.

  Eddie’s burning white eyes met K-Rock’s crazy ones.

  “I am Grexx Grebulon, Emissary Pontifex of Yronwode, and you shall not pass, Barbarian!”

  Keeler reared up his dragon. “Hazuzu, broil his ass!”

  The dragon roared, then unleashed a torrent of plasma-flame at Roebuck. The flaming continued for nearly a half-minute before the dragon ran out of fuel, and burned a hole in the clouds where it pushed out the moisture and dust.

  Eddie was still standing there, his upraised palm facing the dragon, his eyes still glowing.

  “Is that all you got?”

  “Look around yourself, Priest,” Keeler growled at him. “There are a

  hundred dragons and a hundred thousand men with me. Do you think you can

  hold us back.”

  “Look around yourself, Barbarian.”

  “I see nothing but a delusional priest. You have the power levels of a

  circus clown!”

  Roebuck laughed at him. ”Are you ready now to witness a power not seen for thousands of years?. Perhaps your miserable army would appreciate a light show.”

  K-Rock bristled, “I have yet to show you, priest, what I’m truly capable of.”

  Eddie Roebuck raised his arms and threw his head back. At that point, the black clouds began boiling around him. Lightning began to crash from cloud to cloud, and then from the clouds to the ground, striking down a hundred of Keeler’s men. Eddie’s voice thundered above it.

  “YOU!”

  “SHALL!”

  “NOT!”

  “PASS!”

  Yronwode - Midian Security Base One

  “What’s going on out there?” General Intrepid demanded.

  “Um…” Alkema began. What was happening was that the Pontifex, who used to be his ship’s bartender, was 300 meters tall and shooting lightning bolts at the leader of the Xirong invasion force, who was riding on a dragon. But Alkema couldn’t find a sane way to relay that information.

  “Let me Zoom in on the Xirong riding the back of that dragon,” Kitaen said, and he pointed and locked the surveillance camera on the Xirong leader so they could get a close-up of his face.

  “Holy shit,” Alkema exclaimed.

  Yronwode – The Demilitarized Zone.

  Out above the Demilitarized Zone, K-Rock on the back of his dragon and the 300-Meter Cloud-Man of Grexx Grebulon were circling each other and building up energy.

  K-Rock’s dragon reared and unleashed plasma in fury at the Pontifex, which the Pontifex simply deflected around himself. He then unleashed lightning and thunder on K-Rock, which similarly veered away from the shield created by his protective battle staff.

  “Enough with these games,” K-Rock shouted. “Let’s get it on, priest!”

  Grexxx Grebulon answered, “Why prolong the inevitable? I will kill you now!”

  K-Rock raised his staff, shined the blinding light of control at Grexxx Grebulon.

  The Pontifex prepared to unleash all the power at his command into the dragon force.

&
nbsp; Only one of them was going to survive this.

  Or neither.

  Yronwode – Xiyyon

  Just before their suicide run, Caliph flashed an urgent message to Rook and Jordan.

  “Hold on, guys. I think we just got back-up.”

  A pair of Midian Police ornithopters appeared over the landing pad. Trained Marksmen leaned from hatches on the side. The warfighters heard a pair of shots ring out and watched one of the Xirong stop in mid-stride with two sudden bursts of blood issuing from his neck. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  The other Xirong, startled, turned around and began firing wildly at the Police

  ‘thopters. A spray of bullet impacts appeared across the forward canopy of the lead craft.

  Max jumped out of his hiding placed and squeezed sniper rounds into two of the Xirong while their backs were turned.

  “We have to get to that bomb now!”

  Max Jordan heard Rook shooting behind him, but everything else became a slow motion blur as he charged. There was only one Xirong left. Max Jordan felt a curious sense of time telescoping. He was not consciously using the gift of altered perception to attain it. Nor was it because of the sensors built into his battlesuit to become aware of everything, simultaneously. He saw the Xirong raise his weapon, he heard the wings of the ornithopters beating in the background, saw the police bullets spanging on the pavement around him, kicking up chips of concrete, and seeing the flakes hang in the air. He felt his legs carrying his weight across that expanse, felt Caliph in his head urging him to hurry, hurry, hurry.

  The Xirong leveled his weapon right at Max Jordan’s gut and fired. Max felt the impact, like a hard kick to the stomach, but it didn’t matter much as his energy shield ate the bullets, turning them to dust and vapor. He jumped, using his battle gear for a strength assist and hit the Xirong with the force of truck. He plowed into him and carried him backwards almost to the Medical Ornithopter itself. Max brought up his arm, wrapped in an alloy of ceramic and titanium weave, and brought it down full force on the Xirong, breaking his neck and severing his spinal cord. He tossed the body aside, and got into the ornithopter.

  The three Hammerheads were lashed together in the middle of the deck.

  Someone had cracked up the warheads and linked them together using a small computing device as a nexus. Max reached up and touched the device. As he made contact, he felt Caliph furiously interfacing with the linking the device to cancel the detonation sequence. Then, she reached out to the bombs themselves and entered the abort codes.

  “Detonation sequence negated.”

  “How much time was left?” Max Jordan asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Yronwode – Security Base One

  “Your commander is the Xirong leader!” Intrepid thundered at them.

  Trajan Lear shrugged. “Why not? The ship’s bartender is your Pontifex.”

  “What are they doing?” Parka asked.

  “They were just shouting at each other,” Alkema. “Now, they’ve stopped.” He peered through his big, long-range Spex. “I think they’re getting ready to kill each other.” Suddenly, the ground began to shake. The Command and Control Center shuddered, loose objects, writing implements, and little electronic gadgets began to dance across the surfaces of the work-stations.

  “Groundquake?” Alkema said.

  General Noble shook his head. “This area of the planet is seismically stable.

  We’ve never had a groundquake.”

  “The timing can not be coincidental,” said Kitaen.

  “General,” said one of the lieutenants at the lead tactical control station. “You better see this.” He zoomed the external display on the main viewer to a point high above the battle zone, a place where the clouds were burning red, and boiling away ahead of light brighter then the sun.

  “What the Hell is happening?” General Sure asked.

  “It’s the Fourth Coming!” the male lieutenant cried out. “It’s Jesus H. Christ. He’s returning to judge our world!”

  “Stay at your post, lieutenant,” General Noble ordered.

  But the lieutenant was already on his knees. “Dear Lord, I am sorry for those pictures of the Xirong girls spraying each other with vegetable oil. I’m sorry for shooting my holy seed all over…”

  “Enough, lieutenant!” General Noble barked again. But by this time, the light from the sky was brighter than even the bright-hot star that was Yronwode’s primary.

  Then, with a sound like thunder, the clouds parted, moving away in a blast wave, as though from a thermonuclear detonation. The blast scattered the dragons and the Midian fighters in every direction.

  And in the middle of the bright-white sky was the Pathfinder Shop Pegasus, holding barely 3,000 meters above the ground.

  “Eliza Jane Change, you crazy she-demon,” Alkema whispered. He couldn’t imagine the stress the ship’s inertial dampers and gravity fields were under to go this deep into a gravity well.

  Then dozens of little silver specks alighted from around Pegasus and formed up like a flock of birds. En masse, they dove toward the sky between the dragons and the heavy tactical aircraft.

  General Kitaen intoned solemnly, “I am not one to tell you how how to run your air defense, but if I were you, I would recall all my fighters right… screaming… now!” General Noble fumbled for his radio. “Air Command, recall all fighters. Repeat, recall all fighters to base.”

  Yronwode - The Demilitarized Zone

  The arrival of Pegasus unleashed a sonic boom and an atmospheric blast wave that knocked Keeler, Roebuck, and most of the assembled armies flat on the ground, and sent the ones to the rear running back to the western horizon.

  Yronwode - Midian Security Base One

  Then there came another sound, like the roar of ten thousand rocket engines roaring across the sky. And suddenly, Pegasus was surrounded by a cloud of dragons, spitting plasma fire at her. Immediately, Pegasus activated her pulse cannons and blazed back at them.

  Colonel Brave and the others stared at the scenes playing out on the plains.

  “That’s your starship, it’s beautiful.”

  Alkema looked at it. The effect of its shields and the composites of Pegasus’s ventral hull made for a shimmering iridescent gold effect. It was beautiful. “It’s not supposed to be this low. I don’t know how they’re going to get back to orbit without setting off a gravity wave that will turn this entire peninsula into a crop circle.”

  “And there is still the Containment System,” General Noble reminded them. “For every dragon her guns take out, two more appear.”

  “She’s launching something,” Colonel Brave said. A missile shot out of Pegasus’s forward launch rail.

  “Tracking missile,” a lieutenant announced.

  “Is it attacking Midian?” Parka demanded.

  “Negative, the missile is tracking due north, at a speed of…” she broke off, unable to believe “130,000 kilometers per hour.”

  “Wherever it’s going, it should arrive quickly,” Noble muttered.

  “Is the ship launching additional missiles?” Parka demanded.

  “Negative, it’s just…” the lieutenant stared into the main screen. “She’s just holding position and continuing to attack the dragons.”

  “Some of the Xirong are firing missiles at the ship,” Alkema added. One of the readouts was showing suicide missiles flying toward Pegasus, bouncing off her shields, and then falling back to the ground, where they detonated among clusters of Xirong troops.

  “They’re not… the most proficient of enemies, are they?” Alkema commented.

  Suddenly, the lights in the bunker flickered, then went out along with all display screens. “What happened?” Alkema demanded.

  “Massive EM Pulse,” Steadfast reported. She opened a junction box in the wall above her station. “Redundant system activating.”

  She switched to alternate display and power systems. Lights flickered back on, and the display
monitors reactivated one-by-one. Two-thirds of them displayed the image of Eliza Jane Change sitting in the Command Seat on Pegasus’s Main Bridge.

  “… can you hear me now?”

  Almea opened his COM link. “This is Tactical Lieutenant Commander David Alkema. It’s good to see you Pegasus. We knew you’d find a way to defeat the containment system.”

  Eliza Change continued. “We can’t disable the planetary defense system, it is integrated into the planet’s electromagnetic field. The only way to disable it would be to destroy the planet… and we are assuming that would be too extreme.”

  “Right,” Alkema agreed.

  Change went on, “But we can temporarily jam the system. Can you pull the teams together?”

  “We have no operable Aves,” Alkema said. “And our team is scattered across the peninsula. And the commander’s missing.”

  Change turned and said something to her communications officer. A picture of the Xirong leader was projected next to her. “Here, he is. He should be unconscious somewhere on the plain below. How long would you need to reassemble your landing teams?”

  “Give us five planetary days,” Alkema old her.

  “I can dispatch an Aves at that time,” she offered.

  “We’ll manage,” Alkema told her.

  “Three days, then.” She cut her signal, and Pegasus slowly began to rise in the atmosphere. The dragons had vanished with the EMP, and the ship was unmolested as it rose, gracefully, toward space. The ground shook, but Change was taking it slowly, to minimize the ground effect.

  Lt. Obedient had retaken his station. “They have achieve 4,000 meters…

  5,000… 7,000… 9,000…They have cleared 10,000.”

  CHAPTER: 16

  After the battle was over, the humans tried to clean things up. Something like 40,000 Xirong were killed in the battle, another 90,000 were killed in rioting in Nimali that followed the appearance of Pegasus and the blackouts, storms, and groundquakes that came with her, and another 15,000 from the reactor accident in Fett-Al-Birt. The Midians lost about 400 of their security forces.

  For all these reasons, I think they were all pretty happy to be rid of us.

  Yronwode – Security Base One