“Borden, haven’t you figured out by now that this pain in the butt just likes to say things to annoy people? I don’t know how he located your psychological buttons, but don’t let him push them.”
Sparky stuck out his tongue at Wolfe. “Spoilsport.”
***
Chapter 19
A cheering crowd greeted Oscar Wingle VII as he stepped out of his “personal shuttle” at the gates of Wingle World. A brass band played loud oom-pah-pah music on the side of the dais. Between the twin images of Bunny Hug, the great man hailed his audience. He held out his hands for silence.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad to have gone away from you …”
“Awwww!”
Wingle/Dudley gave them a playful, warm smile “… so I can fully enjoy the pleasure of coming back again. I am so happy to see all of you here! I’ve had a wonderful tour of our beautiful planet, and I feel refreshed once again. I’m going back to my secret laboratory in the Carrot Palace in the center of our beloved Wingle World to continue with my latest invention. I’m on the verge of a special breakthrough!”
A young male reporter in a red coat stepped forward. “Can you tell us about it, Mr. Wingle?”
“No, no,” he said, draping a friendly but avuncular arm over the youth’s shoulders. “Let’s just keep it a secret for now between us.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “I wouldn’t want any rival inventors stealing my idea. Thank you all! See you in ten days for the grand opening of Wingle World! Thank you all!”
“Good,” Daivid said, in his makeshift bunker among the concrete monoliths in the Carrot Palace, as the interviewer finished up with a little more gushing for the camera. He dusted his gloved hands together. Borden and the rest of the Cockroaches were wearing their ghost armor, most of them underneath costume shells, but he was in his blues so the Insurgents could mark and identify him. “That ought to bring them running. Where are they?”
Beside him, Borden checked her infopad, reading the planetary telemetry grid. “Halfway around the world. They’ve been flying in a zig-zag for hours since Dudley’s last broadcast.”
Wolfe activated his communications link. “Everyone on station?”
“Aye, sir,” Lin replied.
“Aye, aye,” said Boland.
“Triple aye,” added D-45.
“Noms de guerre only from this point on. The sum is thirteen, and the color is brown.”
“Aye,” came from the three squad chiefs.
Daivid changed frequencies. “Puppeteers on standby. You probably have an hour. Use it to rest, relieve yourselves or get something to eat.”
“We’re fine,” Connie’s voice said in his ear. “You be careful. You’re the ones who can bleed.”
“Launch the special hoverbus,” Daivid said.
“Aye, sir,” Streb’s voice replied. “They’re ready. And … it’s off!”
“Turn everything else on!”
“Got it,” Glaijet responded, from the central command center three stories below the ticket booths. “Rides, ambient music, the works, on … now!”
All around Daivid the silence was shattered by ten thousand speakers all coming to life at the same time. The most shrill was the calliope music that came from the gigantic carousel only ten meters away that began to revolve, its horses and other colorful painted animals rising and falling as if at the urging of invisible riders. Rainbows of light flashed, creating laser pictures and three-dimensional cartoons on the walls and pavements all around the huge building.
“Hi, children!” the voice of Bunny Hug boomed out from overhead. “Welcome to my Carrot Palace! There’s room here for everyone! Come and share a happy day with me! Welcome to Wingle World!” A short passage of cheerful music followed, then the message began to repeat.
“All right, folks,” Daivid said, pacing up and back, feeling the excitement dancing in his bones. “All we can do now is wait.”
“You there, sonny?” a familiar cranky voice inquired.
Daivid’s hand flew to his communication link. He exchanged glances with Borden. “I’m here, Mr. Wingle.”
“Good news, boy! I’m finished! This chip is possibly one of the finest inventions I have ever created. Under other circumstances I might have put it up for open auction, but since you’re going to so much trouble to safeguard my people it’s yours. I give you my word.”
“Thank you, sir,” Wolfe said, gratified.
“I’m putting it in a safe place. A very safe place. Now I can keep my mind on my characters. Everything else ready?”
Wolfe smiled. “We’re good to go, sir. Keep your head down.”
For a moment the old man sounded just as warmly avuncular as Dudley. “Same to you, sonny. Good luck.”
“All right, everyone, they’re landing! Anyone who is not a designated observer, into the tunnels.”
O O O
The four shuttles circled low over the park. Many structures reached up to the skies from the vast complex, but none so high or so majestic as the Carrot Palace. The carrot-shaped flags fluttering from flagpoles mounted upon its four identical tapered orange turrets were over 150 meters in the air. The building itself was a curious structure. Based upon its eponymous vegetable, the walls of the tall square structure were ribbed and slightly bulgy. In the round spots where rootlets might form on a real carrot were tiny windows rimmed with what appeared to be twinkling jewels, but were most likely only light-emitting diodes in bright colors. Colonel Ayala could not guess from energy emissions which one of those, if any, concealed the workshop of Oscar Wingle. With the din rising from the rides and attractions, sensors couldn’t pick up a low-level vibration like a heartbeat.
“Set down,” he ordered the four pilots.
“Where, sir?”
Ayala scanned the map on the navigator’s screen. “There isn’t room near the tower. There.” He pointed. “That’s plenty of space for us. Easy in, and easy out.”
“That gives us six routes toward the Carrot Palace,” Oostern said. “We should split up.”
“Good advice, Oostern,” Ayala said, nodding. “Thirty-five each way under a captain,” he said, fanning his hand out over the first three paths, to the southeast, east, northeast, southwest and west. “The remaining forty-five with me to the northwest, the most direct route. The attractions that way are the most all-enveloping, and will give the greatest cover. The rest of you, watch out that you do not attract attention. Report when you’re within range of the target. We want to surprise him, and not give him time to destroy the chip before we can get our hands on it.”
O O O
“Who’s got the extremes on the pool?” Boland asked, from his point of concealment in the freshly planted bushes around the entrance to Jungle Adventure Land.
“Streb says he’ll land right underneath the Carrot Palace,” Mose said. “Okumede says they’ll land in the parking lot. Everyone else took something in between.”
“Here he comes,” Wolfe barked, hunkered down uncomfortably with his squad just inside the Carrot Palace walls. “Stifle it.”
“Aye, sir,” the two men chorused.
“First blood,” Jones’s voice came.
“No!” Okumede protested. “I was going to say …”
Lin interrupted. “He called it. Let’s hear it, Songbird.”
“Ahem. ‘We Cockroaches find it is urgent / To face filthy rebels Insurgent / With puppets galore / We’ll even the score / And act as a Dudley detergent!’”
“Fantastic! You get the points, Songbird.”
“X-Ray, shut up!” Wolfe growled.
“Aye, sir,” they all replied.
The four shuttles whisked overhead, sputtering explosively.
“Those engines are missing pretty fiercely,” Thielind commented.
“Quiet, Tinker,” Wolfe said. “Just because it’s loud doesn’t mean they can’t pick up a stray transmission.”
“Sorry, Big Bad.”
Though intellectually he knew they couldn’t
see him, Wolfe ducked automatically as the shuttles screamed in another wide turn, descending rapidly in an obvious landing trajectory. When they dropped out of sight behind the buildings he followed their progress on a GPS map of the park in his helmet display.
“Any Street,” D-45 reported, confirming Wolfe’s telemetry. “They’re up near the band shelter right in the middle of Anyville, all four in a line. We’re on our way.”
“That was my guess!” Ambering cheered.
“Pay up,” Thielind said to Okumede through an open helmet channel, as they lay in wait thirty meters down Any Street in clumps of shrubbery on opposite sides. “You owe Spooky on your side bet. You said they’d split up, and he said they’d stay together.”
“I’ll owe him the ten credits,” the big man replied over the link.
“No chatter,” Wolfe warned them. “They might be scanning the frequencies. Necessary info only! I don’t want to have to tell you again. This isn’t the day room.”
“Sorry, sir,” they said in unison.
“Park Irregulars, get those parking droids out there. I want those shuttles immobilized as soon as they’re empty,” Wolfe ordered, changing channels to the one the employees were listening to. “I don’t want anyone able to lift off again.”
“Right on, Lieutenant!” Engineer Glaijet said eagerly.
“They’re down,” Thielind announced. “Unloading … Two hundred ten … two twenty, sir. There are some more bodies on the first ship, but they’re too close together to count. Only thirty of them have camo armor. The rest have ablative armor or just uniforms. Grenade launchers, five pieces of artillery. Everyone’s got rifles or machine guns. Swords. About six can openers. That’s all.”
“Noted, Tinker,” Wolfe said, keeping his voice calm. “Ready … steady … go!”
O O O
The sharpshooter squad led by D-45 had been swelled by a host of puppets from its customary seven to over a hundred. A few of them looked like the real thing—better turned out, in some cases—but most of them, in keeping with Lt. Wolfe’s plan, were licensed characters, to disguise the real Cockroaches among them. Over his ghost armor he was dressed as Waru the Snow Monkey, a wise old wrinkle-faced simian with a white ruff around his face. His second-in-command, Meyers, had a custom-made bear outfit, complete with star-shaped glasses frames and diamond-glitter bracelets. With weapons and ammunition cases, they more than filled the front seat of a personnel transport that ran through the metal-lined tunnels on wide, soft tires in eerie silence.
“You look like a bordello lampshade,” he told her over the mastoid implants.
“I do not!” she retorted, bridling. “This is the real me. Cuddly, fun …”
“And garish.”
“That’s very judgmental of you, Doug. I’m surprised,” Meyers replied, archly.
“Sorry, Allie,” D-45 said contritely, as the cart swung wide around a corner. His CBS,P web constricted around him to protect his internal organs, squeezing off his apology. The vehicle came to a halt so suddenly that everyone lurched forward. Above them, a hatch started to slide open, and a ramp dropped down almost to their feet.
“All right, sharpshooters, it’s business time,” the Egalitarian instructed his squad, living and non. “Everyone stay with your shooting buddy. No one gets left behind. If one of you goes down, your partner drags you back down here. Doc is in the middle of the park near the Inventor’s Workshoppe. Don’t be a hero.
“Now, remember,” D-45 added, unlimbering his machine gun from the strap over his shoulder and snapping off the safety with a crack, “shoot to annoy! Go, go, go!”
O O O
Crack!
A single slug winged past Ayala’s ear, slamming into the side of an Any Street shop. The brown-and-gray-clad Insurgents dropped to the cobbled streets, taking their weapons off safety.
“Where did that come from?” Ayala demanded. One of the itterim sergeants in camouflage armor pointed over to the right.
“About a dozen bodies in that direction, sir. And another twenty or more off that way.” He gestured across the street toward a row of potted plants.
Ayala frowned. “Human? Itterim?”
“I …” the noncom checked his scopes. “I can’t tell, sir. The readings are all over the place.”
“Never mind! Make for the Carrot Palace. You have your orders!”
“Yes, Colonel!” the captains replied. They signalled to their platoons, who began to belly-crawl toward their designated paths. More explosions sounded overhead. The soldiers dropped and began to shoot back.
From behind the shrubbery, a yellow fin rose up. A loose-lipped mouth opened, and a muzzle emerged, spraying bullets toward the Insurgents. One of the cloth-clad rebels howled.
“I’m hit! It shot me!”
Ayala blinked. He knew he was suffering from lack of sleep, but he did not think that he had reached the stage of hallucination. “Is that … a fish?” he demanded.
“It looks like one,” Oostern agreed. “And an octopus. And … I don’t know what that is, that purple beast. Those cannot be real! Fish cannot swim in air!”
“They’re characters,” Ayala snapped. “Robots, or people dressed up. Return fire!” he shouted at his soldiers. “So Wingle prepared for our arrival in more than one way. He brought in defenders. No more than I expected of such an intelligent man. He would have found out that we were seeking him. These are not important.” He looked back at the human who had been shot. “Bandage that and come on. You can’t be badly hurt. It was just a fish, after all. Make for the band shell! Go!”
Their rifle squad laid down covering fire. Ayala drew his sidearm and sent blasts of plasma fire at the exaggerated faces that rose up on both sides of the wide avenue as he ran. They were trying to throw him off by making the troops disgusting or bizarre. A clever stratagem, but one that was going to fail, he thought. A blaze of hot fire took an animated bird-of-paradise flower straight in the pistil. It shrieked, beating at its burning petals with its leaves. The lobster behind it saw his arm rise and ducked. The white flame seared above its quivering eyestalks.
The defenders returned fire. A slow-moving charge came whistling directly at Ayala’s face. He dove, and it exploded against the wall over his head. He looked up. Nothing remained of the charge but ash and bits of colored paper. Hundreds of cylinders followed. They detonated in a shower of white-hot sparks and screaming worms of light. Confetti rained down on the Insurgents.
“What kind of weaponry are they using? Are they toying with us?” Oostern demanded, crushing the paper in his pincer. Some of the soldiers who wore ordinary uniforms batted at sparks burning holes in their tunics, but no one was killed. “Do they consider this a game?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ayala said. “Kill them, and get it over with. We need to get to the Carrot Palace.”
From their concealed position they opened heavy direct fire with machine guns and explosive shells. One after another the planters concealing the defenders leaped into the air in pieces. The furbearing forces revealed fumbled with their guns as if surprised to be so suddenly exposed. They appeared to regain their wits, and carried on firing at the Insurgents.
At Ayala’s signal, two itterim crawled forward; four limbs on the ground and two each hauling grenade launchers. Charges arched over the heads of the fish and octopi on the front lines, into the heaving sea of pink, blue, and red fur he could see behind them.
One of the grenadiers counted. “One, two … three!” And ducked. The explosion shook the very air. Ayala watched, disdaining even to turn down the volume on his audio.
A tornado of multicolored fluff rose on high, accompanied by shrieks and yells of pain. To judge by the drop in the rate of fire coming from the shrubbery, the explosives had hit their mark, taking out a core group of snipers.
“Colonel,” Signal-itter Riis said, “our other companies report that they are under attack from costumed troops.”
“Go!” Ayala shouted at his soldiers. “Wingle is t
he target! We will kill all the others later if we must.”
O O O
Daivid strained his eyes to follow the opening conflict on his scope. The Insurgents had made it away from the band shell, as he had hoped. Security eyes all over the park were picking up different views of the action. He’d never had multi-camera coverage of a battle before. The War College ought to be notified how useful that was for picking out superior vantage points to place heavy weapons.
“Big Bad,” D-45’s voice said in his ear.
“Go ahead, Numbers.”
“They’re on their way to the next point.”
“Any losses?”
“Three puppets blown up. We made it sound a lot worse than it was.”
“Get ahead of them. I want all the companies arriving at the Carrot Palace about the same time.”
“Aye, sir. On our way.”
Under the gaze of the security eye, the white-ruffed monkey, the aqua bear, and their motley crew hustled down a chute, which sealed tightly behind them, leaving no trace of their passage.
O O O
You Are Now Entering Fairy Hollow! said the rustic wooden sign on the upright of the ornately twisted arch. Prepare For Magic! Beyond the fanciful swirls of giant flowers and jeweled butterflies was a dense artificial forest. Insurgent Company D could see only a few meters of crushed gemstone pathway underneath the thick growth.
Captain Erez Chen snorted, as he knocked trailing vines aside with his machine gun muzzle. “Magic. What a load of crap.”
His second lieutenant, Naal, a female itterim in her second decade, clicked her mandibles. “When I was small we came here and believed. All was so real.”
“I suppose you believe in dragons, too.”
Naal swiveled her long face towards him with an expression of scorn. “Dragons are real. You never been to the frontier? You call them lizzzards.”
“Yeah, but Terran legend says they breathe fire. That doesn’t happen.”
Strong Arm Tactics Page 36
