The Apocalypse Troll

by David Weber

  Taggart felt the familiar visceral rage. It bubbled within him, yet for all its familiarity, it was different now, stronger than ever, as if his resentment had been honed and sharpened while he was unconscious. As if the last vestige of acceptance had been stripped away by a surgeon's scalpel, leaving only the cold fury of betrayal. He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue were as dead as the rest of his muscles.

  "If I choose to help you, Blake Taggart," the slow, grinding voice said, "you can regain all you have lost, and more. You will have your vengeance . . . and I will have mine. Do you understand, Blake Taggart?"

  The paralysis left his vocal cords. He made a strangled sound of surprise when he discovered that fact, then swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

  "W-What do you mean?" he asked finally, then grunted as anguish lashed his nerves. It vanished almost before he could feel it, but he swallowed again, harder, as he recognized its warning.

  "I am generous, Blake Taggart, but not . . . patient. You will do well to remember that. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," he whispered. Then, louder, "Yes!"

  "Better," the voice said. "Blake Taggart, I require a human assistant with certain talents. You may be that assistant."

  "For what?" It was odd how unafraid he was, as if his churning anger armored him against fear. Yet it was more than that, too. Somehow the voice was preventing him from fearing, he thought, but that meant nothing beside his sudden eagerness for the vengeance it promised him.

  "That will become clear," the voice replied, "if you have the strength to endure my mind touch. I have learned all I may from your unconscious mind; now you must open fully to me, willingly." There was a weird, horrible sound, one Taggart recognized only slowly as laughter. "You may die, Blake Taggart. Yes, you may well die. But if you live . . ." The voice trailed off tantalizingly.

  Taggart stared up at the metal ceiling and wondered just how much the voice had already done to him. His lack of fear, his fiery eagerness to avenge himself, his sharp, bright hatred—those were his, but they'd been strengthened. He knew they had, but he found that he did not care.

  "Sure," he said. "Come ahead."

  It was a pity Mordecai couldn't be here, Aston thought, looking around the huge cavern, but the Argentinos were showing more balls than brains, and McLain had preempted Morris for his nominal function.

  He looked at the two hulking M60A3 battle tanks, and even to him it seemed absurd that anything as small as Ludmilla's blaster could damage them. He turned to her, reflecting that she looked younger than ever in her brand-new uniform. Was that because he knew how old a Marine captain ought to look?

  "Ready?" he asked, and she nodded calmly. "Any special precautions?"

  "Just stand well back," she said, and checked her weapon settings as Aston joined Jayne Hastings beside the tripod-mounted camcorder behind her.

  "Now," Ludmilla continued when they were out of the way, "I know what sort of power settings I need with this—" she lifted her blaster slightly, finger clear of the firing stud "—to take out most Kanga combat mechs, and also the setting to kill a Troll combat chassis. By seeing what effect those settings have on your armored vehicles, we'll all be in a better position to estimate what weapons your strike teams need, Dick."

  "I just can't quite believe that—" Hastings indicated the blaster "—can really zap a tank, Milla. I'm trying, but . . ." She shrugged.

  Ludmilla glanced back at her and dimpled suddenly.

  " 'O, ye of little faith,' " she murmured, and raised her weapon.

  Once again, the blaster did absolutely nothing. Its complete silence, Aston thought, grew more uncanny, not less, each time he saw it, but there was no lack of other noise.

  A blue-white flash, no larger than the palm of his hand, burned with eye-tearing brilliance on the right-hand tank's glacis, directly under the gun. A wicked, whickering crash battered his ears like bottled thunder, and then there was silence . . . a silence broken only by the seething hiss of steaming metal.

  Aston stared at the damaged tank, momentarily stunned despite all of Ludmilla's warnings, then made himself walk over to it. Ludmilla and Jayne followed him as he bent over the glowing hole, careful to keep his hands away from its heat.

  A small, perfect circle had been bored through the five-inch armor, and he climbed up on the tank and peered down through the opened hatch. There was some internal damage, but not as much as he'd expected; almost all the power had been expended on the glacis, and surprisingly little splash had been flung about the driver's compartment.

  "Well?" He climbed down with a thoughtful expression as Ludmilla spoke. "Can your weapons do that, Dick?"

  "I think so. The latest TOWs certainly can, but they're vehicle-mounted. I'd say the Predator—that's our newest man-portable antiarmor weapon—can do it, too."

  "Good." Her face was calm, but her voice was taut. "But that's the easy part. A Troll's armor can take a lot more damage, and he carries battle screen."

  "You mentioned that before," Aston said. "Just what is it?"

  "Think of it as a force field that interdicts incoming fire. Warship screens can absorb multimegaton explosions, but even a heavy Troll chassis isn't big enough to carry screen that powerful. The important thing to bear in mind about it, though, is that it can be overloaded locally by a lot less destructive energy than the entire screen can handle. We use sequenced attacks to do that to ship screen, then punch a missile through the weakened spot, but I doubt we can do that to the Troll because it takes such fine coordination. So we'll have to try to punch through with a single shot—and this is what kind of energy it will take."

  She herded her friends back into position and changed the settings on her weapon while Jayne slipped a filter over the camcorder's lens.

  "Cover your eyes," she said levelly, and squeezed the trigger again.

  The whiplash sound was far worse this time. The crackling roar was more protracted, with sounds like secondary explosions, and Aston was devoutly grateful that the tanks carried neither fuel nor ammo. The acrid stench of burning paint and molten metal assailed him, and raw, bitter heat pressed against the hands over his eyes.

  Then the noise ended.

  "All right," Ludmilla said, and he lowered his hands.

  No one said a word as the two twenty-first-century humans stared in awe at what had been a tank. Waves of heat shimmer danced above it, and the entire frontal plate glowed—white in the center, shading to bright cherry at the sides. The gun quivered, then drooped slowly to full depression, hanging on its trunnions, for the pulse from Ludmilla's weapon had cut the elevation actuator in half, sheared through the hydraulic system, and burned clear through the gun tube just in front of the breech. Aston knew it had, because he could see it through the two-foot hole in the frontal armor.

  He circled the smoking tank in silence. The blast of energy had torn completely through it—right through the heart of the transmission and the big, 750-horsepower diesel—and then gouged a nine-foot pit in the cavern wall twenty feet beyond it. He turned slowly and saw Jayne staring at the wreckage in shock.

  "That," he said, "is just a bit more than the best we can do, Milla. By a few thousand percent, I'd say."

  "I was afraid of that when I saw how much damage I did on low power." She holstered the blaster, and the little whisper as it went into its nest was loud against the quiet hiss and ping of cooling steel and stone.

  "My God." Hastings shook her head slowly. "What do we do now?"

  "I don't know," Aston said somberly. "I can organize teams to take out your combat mechs, Milla, but this—?" He shook his head slowly. "Maybe if we hit it with a shit pot of TOWs. . . ."

  "You can't do it that way, Dick," Ludmilla said. She stood beside him, looking at the carnage she'd wrought. "You can't sequence them tightly enough, and even if you could, he's almost certain to have set up a fallback by the time we find him. I don't know what it'll be, but I do know we have to take him out with a single shot, one that'll kill him before he ca
n suicide and take the entire planet with him."

  "We can't, Milla. I'm sorry, but we just can't."

  "I know." She smiled crookedly. "I half-suspected you wouldn't be able to. But—" she met his eyes levelly "—I can."

  She laid a hand on the butt of the holstered blaster which only she could fire, and he wanted—wanted more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life—to tell her no. To tell her that he didn't need her. That he wouldn't risk her.

  But instead, he nodded silently.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Major Daniel Abernathy, USMC, didn't look like a man on the brink of mayhem, and the casual observer could have no idea how much effort it took to keep from slamming one huge, dark-skinned fist into the tough plastic window beside him. He was rather proud of that.

  He set his teeth, staring down through that same window at the runways of Andrews AFB and hating the sight. He shouldn't be here. He should be back at Lejeune, engaged in a change of command ceremony which would have put him—him!—in command of the Second Marine Division's recon battalion. He'd sweated blood to earn that command, and he by God deserved it! Besides, the orders had already been cut . . . until some desk-bound asshole in Washington changed them.

  He closed his eyes, leashing his temper yet again as the landing gear rumbled. He was a passionate, hard-driving man, and defeat—especially defeat which wasn't his fault—sat poorly with him. The fact that Second Force was on alert because of the South Atlantic War only made it worse. He'd trained for twelve years for what might be about to happen, and—

  He chopped the thought off, forcing his mind into neutral as the plane moved along the taxiway. It was hard, but he actually managed to smile at his neighbors as he collected his hand luggage.

  The Washington sun was as fierce as the one he'd left in North Carolina, and the muggy air felt suffocating. He settled his sunglasses, adjusted his cap, and followed the flow of the passengers. At least it would be air-conditioned inside.

  It was, and there was also someone waiting for him—someone with the four rockers, three chevrons, and star of a Marine sergeant major on his short khaki sleeves—and Abernathy's eyebrows rose behind his glasses. Too many years ago, Gunnery Sergeant Alvin Horton had seen to it that a painfully young Lieutenant Abernathy made less mistakes than most with his first platoon. He supposed every Marine officer always felt a special respect for "his" first gunnery sergeant, but he'd known even then that Alvin Horton really was special.

  The sergeant major snapped to attention and saluted, and Abernathy returned the salute. Then he removed his glasses left-handed and held out his right with his first genuine smile in the last twenty-one hours.

  "Gunny," he said, squeezing firmly. "What the hell is going on here?"

  "Sir?" Horton regarded him quizzically. "Why does the Major think the Sergeant Major knows anything he doesn't, Sir?"

  "Cut the crap, Gunny. If anyone knows, you do."

  "Major, I don't know anything. Honest."

  Abernathy's eyebrows tried to rise again. Sergeant Major Horton was the fourth ranking noncom in the United States Marine Corps. He had to know what was going on. But if he said he didn't, he didn't.

  "Excuse me, Sir," Horton broke into his thoughts, "but where's your baggage?"

  "You're looking at it, Gunny." Abernathy waved his single small bag. "They didn't give me much time to pack."

  "I see, Sir. If the Major would follow me, then?"

  Abernathy fell in beside the sergeant major, and a path opened before them, though neither consciously noticed it. Abernathy was a powerfully built man, his mahogany skin bulging over hard-trained muscles, and he made an imposing figure in uniform. He wasn't especially tall, but he moved with catlike grace and a sense of leashed power, and the ribbons below his parachutist's wings were impressive.

  For all that, and despite the gold leaf on his collar, Horton was even more impressive. He was four inches taller, the sandy hair under his cap cut so short it was all but invisible, and tanned almost as dark the major. He, too, wore jump wings, but the five rows of ribbons under his were headed by the white-barred blue one of the Navy Cross, followed by the red-white-and-blue one of the Silver Star with two clusters—each with the tiny "V" which indicated they'd been won the hard way: for valor.

  He guided the major across the baking hot asphalt to a staff car, and Abernathy got a fresh surprise when Horton opened the door for him, closed it behind him, and then slid behind the wheel. Sergeant majors are not normally chauffeurs, and Abernathy's sense of the extraordinary grew stronger as Horton started the engine and pulled away.

  "Tell me, Gunny," he said finally, "what do you know?"

  "Nothing positive, Sir." Horton never took his eyes from the road.

  "Last I heard, you were division command sergeant major at Pendleton," Abernathy mused aloud.

  "Yes, Sir. I've been reassigned."

  Abernathy digested that. Whoever had put the arm on him had also grabbed the senior noncom of the Third Marine Division. He didn't want to think about how General Watson had reacted to that.

  "All right, Gunny, what is it we've both been reassigned to?"

  "I understand the major and I will find out this afternoon, Sir."

  "From Rear Admiral R. K. Aston, I presume?"

  "Yes, Sir." Horton's tone caught Abernathy's attention, and his eyes narrowed. Aston . . . Aston. . . . Now that he thought about it, the name did have a familiar ring.

  "Just who is Admiral Aston, Gunny?" he asked finally.

  "He's good people, Sir," Horton said, and he wasn't a man who awarded accolades easily. "He started out with the Swift boats right at the end in Nam, then switched over to the SEALs, Sir."

  "D'you mean Captain Dick Aston?"

  "Yes, Sir," Horton said with a slight smile. "He's an admiral now."

  "Well I will be dipped in shit," Abernathy said softly. Horton didn't respond, and Abernathy leaned back. That put a different slant on things. A very different slant. No wonder the name sounded familiar. No man had a higher reputation among the elite forces of the United States, and very few had one as good. It was Aston who'd pulled out the Lebanese hostages, he remembered, and then-Commander Aston's SEAL teams had fought their own short, victorious, and extremely nasty personal little war in Iraq, both before and during the Gulf War. It had been his SEAL teams that retook the Exxon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, too—without, as Abernathy recalled, a single civilian fatality or a single terrorist survivor. If he was involved, things might prove very interesting indeed, and he suddenly realized why Horton seemed so cheerful. The sergeant major had an instinct for these things.

  "Well, now, Gunny," he said after a long, thoughtful moment, "I do believe this may not be such a waste of time as I thought."

  "As the Major says," Horton said cheerfully.

  "But you can't do it that way—sir," Blake Taggart said. He sat in an oddly proportioned chair facing a featureless metal bulkhead and felt no desire to smile at the absurdity of talking to a—what? A machine? A disembodied voice? A . . . presence? Not after tasting its driving, limitless hatred in his own mind. The experience had not been pleasant. No indeed. Not pleasant at all.

  "Indeed?" The voice was still cold and mechanical, but it was picking up human-sounding emphasis patterns at almost frightening speed.

  "No, sir." Taggart licked his lips. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't human—and not all that tightly wrapped, either. It scared the shit out of him, actually, but he'd already accepted that. He'd been a bit surprised by how readily he did accept it, and he wondered if this . . . thing . . . had done something to make him. There was no way of knowing, and it didn't matter. Taggart had seen too much of this incredible ship. Sane or not, the voice could do what it promised.

  He smiled—a cold, amused smile—as he remembered his Bible. He had been taken up on a mountain and offered all the powers of the world. Only as a viceroy and not a ruler in his own right, to be sure, but offered nonetheless. Yet powerful as the voice w
as, it lacked any instinctive knowledge of people.

  "Why not, Blake Taggart?" the voice demanded coldly.

  "Assume for a moment that you can control the President," Taggart said. "Or, hell, assume you control the Vice President and knock Armbruster off. Either way, you control the White House, but it won't do you any good."

  "He is the head of state," the Troll said flatly.

  "But he doesn't work in a vacuum . . . sir. There's Congress and the Supreme Court, just for starters. If he suddenly starts acting strangely, there are plenty of people in positions to get in your way. No. If you want to take over, you have to start at the bottom. Build an organization and move in gradually." Taggart smiled nastily. "Do it right, and in a few years you can elect your own President—with a Congress that'll do anything you want."

  "Wait," the Troll said, and considered the human's words. The Taggart human was unaware that he could hear its inner thoughts, that he knew it was already considering how to displace him, but that was all right. The Troll had selected it for its ambition, after all, and the human was unaware of the controls he had already set deep within it. A flick of thought could activate them, shutting down its fragile heart and lungs instantly. Not that those controls would be required; judiciously applied pain would provide all the effectiveness the Troll was likely to need.

  But in addition to its ambition, the Troll had chosen it for its knowledge and the instincts he lacked. Unlike its master, it knew the workings of this world from the inside, and the Troll studied the fuzz of half-coherent concepts leaking from its thoughts. He already saw the basic workings of its plan, and what he saw pleased him.

  "Very well, Blake Taggart," the Troll said. "Explain this to me."

  "Yes, Sir," Taggart said eagerly. "First—"

  "What I don't understand," Morris said, watching the taped destruction of the tanks, "is how that peashooter works, Milla. Where's the laser-tinted death? Where's the glowing ray of mass destruction? In short, where's the action?"

  "Forgive him, Milla," Jayne Hastings said disgustedly. "Remember he's only a crude, unlettered savage."