by Ryder Stacy
Fourteen
“I think he’s trying to say, ‘Get up on the elephant,’ ” Chen said as Rockson looked up, perplexed at the screaming black elephant-handler twelve feet above him. One of the elephants was brought forward, and Rock winced as he swore it was going to disintegrate them all with the beam weapon embedded in its trunk. But at the prodding of its handler, it got down on all fours and waited patiently. It had a rickety platform like the others, but there was no one in it, just the “driver” of the beast, who was perched forward atop its head, his legs draped down over its immense tent-sized ears.
“Well, I guess we’d better do what he wants.” Rock gulped as he looked into the cold eyes of the elephant, which was waving its strange weapon-implanted trunk around like a conductor’s baton, ready to strike up some bloody music. Rock prayed the creatures never got the notion to use the things on their own. God only knew what might make an elephant mad. But the handlers seemed to have the beasts under firm control, kicking them in the ears and poking them with the guide sticks to make them move. The Freefighters walked the few yards to the kneeling elephant, which kept looking at them out of the corner of its eye, and mounted up.
It was a tight squeeze with Archer, and Sheransky, who was now unconscious again, had to be propped sideways. But they fit—and the driver sitting ahead of them tapped the elephant on the side of the head, and it rose with surprising speed. Rock glanced around at the inside of the platform they were riding on. It was woven from some kind of reed like a wicker chair, tightly meshed, about an inch thick, and clearly quite strong. The material gave a little as they moved, but he could see that flexibility would be a virtue on top of a rocking and bumping elephant. Anything really firm would probably have cracked after a few weeks of use.
Their elephant was marched into line with the others, three in front, two behind, the armed riders letting their prisoners know that they were being watched at all times and shouldn’t even think of trying to escape. Rock studied the men as the elephant line picked up speed and began heading right back out into the desert, seemingly into the middle of nowhere. The riders were a cocoa-skinned group, with proud angular faces and straight-looking Greek-type noses. They wore gray and light-brown robes that stopped at the knees, with geometric designs covering them. Atop their heads they all wore what Rock could only think of as a Napoleonic-type tricornered hat. But it was made of gold, hammered into shape. He knew they were wearing some sort of padding underneath the hats, for no one could have endured the metal hats touching directly against their skin under the stern gaze of that burning North African sun.
The elephant men watched the Freefighters as well, looking around at them, studying them like bugs under a microscope, not even pretending to disguise their abject curiosity. Were the looks saying, “Aren’t we going to have fun cutting off your balls!”—words which Rock had seen in the eyes of other groups which had managed to take him prisoner over the course of his violent lifetime? No. Maybe they were sent by Rahallah after all. Yet if so, why didn’t they say anything friendly, or act a little friendlier? Why did they come in on the charge, ready to melt anything in sight? And those weapons! How the hell did a primitive bunch of elephant-riding nomads get hold of such advanced technology? The questions flew through his skull like a swarm of stinging wasps.
Whatever and wherever their destination was, it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. The elephant caravan just headed straight across the sand as it swirled around their tree-trunk-sized feet. From a good fourteen feet up where the Freefighters were located atop the woven platform, they could see for miles. But there was nothing to see but more white desert and the rising curtains of heat.
Rock was impressed by how easily the elephants traversed the sand and the dune slopes. He would have thought them not suited for desert travel, but their huge feet, which acted like snowshoes, spreading their weight out enough so they didn’t sink in all that deep, and their tremendous strength allowed them to move along as if they were cruising down a four-lane highway.
As the afternoon wore on and the sun grew even meaner, Rock reached around to take out a few things from his hip pack. The driver saw or sensed the motion and shouted, reaching back with his long two-pronged spear, which stopped just inches from Rockson’s chest bone.
“Just taking out something for him,” Rock said slowly, moving his hands in slow motion as well. He pointed to the ailing Sheransky, and slowly took out the folded aluminized Shecter blanket, showing it wasn’t a weapon as he unfolded it. The elephant driver let his beast move along on full auto and kept the spear hovering just over Rock’s heart as he watched with curiosity and not a little fear. The unknown is always fearful to men, even if it’s the peeling of a banana!
Rock got the thing unfolded, and with Chen’s help spread it out over the prone Russian Freefighter, covering every part of him, even his head. The driver suddenly grinned as he realized what the function of the glittering blanket was, and smiled at Rock, the first time any of them had done anything friendly—which gesture encouraged the Freefighters a little. The driver pointed to his own metal hat and nodded, saying something totally incomprehensible to all of them. Then he tapped the side of his head and nodded approvingly. In any language that was clearly translatable as: “That’s using your noggin.”
The elephant caravan marched through the burning afternoon—if anything, picking up speed as they really got into their full open stride. Again moving slowly so as not to alarm anyone, Rock and the others took out food pellets and water from their packs. But as long as they did nothing too fast and showed their driver just what was being taken out, he allowed them to get what they wanted and move around within the confining papyrus-wicker platform with its surrounding three-foot-high walls.
Archer started getting a little moody after a few hours—he hated being confined, and apparently didn’t much care for riding elephants either. He kept grumbling, which grew louder as he shifted around, more and more ill at ease—which the driver began getting as well when he saw the commotion. But Chen rested a hand on the giant’s shoulder and talked softly to him, calming him down after a couple of minutes. Archer buried his face inside a corner of the reed platform and made low gurgling sounds.
Rock checked Sheransky every hour or so, and decided he had to change the man’s bandages around mid-afternoon. The elephant ride and its rocking, jarring motion as each large foot came crashing down had gotten the bleeding going again, even with the glue-like suturing of Chen’s miracle salve. The two men pulled back the Shecter blanket and took a look at Sheransky’s wounded arm and shoulder. It was bad. There must have been some sort of poison or high-rad toxic chemicals which the mutant fish had injected into the wound, for it was festering quickly, and had already turned a vibrant purple color. Rock swore he could almost see the damned thing throbbing. Whatever was happening was happening too fast. At this rate, the Russian Freefighter wouldn’t make it more than a day or two.
“I’m worried about him, man, really worried,” Rock said to Chen, who cleaned the wound as best he could with canteen water, and then put more of the white salve all over it. The color seemed to subside slightly, and the tension in Sheransky’s face relaxed just a touch.
“We can only do our human best,” Chen said softly as he bandaged up the wound again with fresh cloth and then set the Schecter space blanket back over the man. “The rest is fate.” The talking caught the driver’s attention and he nodded vigorously, pointing ahead with a broad smile on his face and slapping at his arm.
“I think he’s saying—there’s help ahead,” Rock muttered, not too convinced. Rock was dubious about just what kind of help there might be that could really be of any use to Sheransky. He needed nothing less than Century City’s modern medical facilities and a team of surgeons to get in there and root out the poison.
They seemed to move on forever, not a landmark or change in the stark desert scene. How their captors even knew where the hell they were going was beyond Rockson. There wa
s absolutely nothing to get any bearings on, except maybe the sun!
Fifteen
They marched on into the night, the great bull elephants with their tusks like immense sabres of bone glowing white in the light of the crescent moon and the trillion-starred heavens. Rock was awed by the beasts. It was a powerful feeling to sit atop one and feel its strength pounding through the sands. He could see why the handlers of the great proboscidans sat tall and proud, with looks of supreme confidence. Up here on one of these suckers, with its destructo-beam snout, there probably weren’t a hell of a lot of things that could take you out, even in this eerie wasteland of a world.
They had reached the end of the desert, at last. Rock kept a sharp eye on their surroundings, trying to pick up the slightest object that could be used as a mark later, in case of escape. A tree here, a moldering palm that had fallen over on its side, the carcass of an elephant—this one perhaps only a child, as it was but half the size of the monster he was riding. Anything that he could file into his mind for the return trip. Sheransky was out cold, even with the bumping ride. Archer slept through it all, his head back against the side of the mini-cabin in the sky. Chen, as usual, was taking his own silent notes with half-shut eyes, seeing everything.
Around midnight, as Rock looked down at his weather-, earthquake-, and acid-resistant longitude-self-adjusting combat watch to see just what time it was, they heard a thundering noise coming far from the west. It sounded like great booms, mountains falling atop one another. Rockson had never heard anything quite like it, even in a few major earthquakes he had lived through. Even the handlers lost their look of ultra-confidence as the elephants themselves grew agitated.
But they drove the beasts harder, and the sounds seemed to diminish as if going past them far off, perhaps twenty, even thirty miles away. Rock felt a terrible premonition deep in his chest. There was a feeling so dark contained within the sounds. So final! Then the thunder died out completely. Still, Rock swore he could feel the very earth move, right up through the elephant’s bones.
Rockson awoke with a start several hours later. He had fallen asleep despite his best efforts not to do so. He heard a sound, and turned to see what had awakened him. It was almost dawn. They had marched all night. They were approaching a village or—something. He rubbed his eyes as it looked most peculiar: tentlike structures in the shapes of small pyramids, ranging anywhere from ten to thirty feet high. They stood in concentric circles, nearly a hundred of them. They had to take up ten acres or more. Yet because they were covered somehow with sand or a sandlike material that coated them completely as if glued on, they appeared almost invisible. Rock realized that they were trying to hide themselves from aerial detection. From a few thousand feet up, these mounds were just more dunes in an endless, shifting desert. Even ground troops would say the same, unless they came very close. And with the heat put out by the sands, even the body heat of their inhabitants within would be concealed from infra-red detection.
Two guards stood on each side of a road that ran into the tent compound. Next to them were the same plastic devices that the elephants had in their trunks. Only these gleaming death-ray shooters were mounted on tripods, set up like machine guns.
The handlers of the elephant caravan waved and uttered some words. The guards laughed and stood up on their toes, trying to peer into the center elephant’s basket to see the prisoners. They waved the men through, the lead elephant stepping inside just as the already blazing sun broke free of its nightly hiding place and lit up the whole scene with eye-searing light and heat. When it got hot, it got hot fast out here!
The inhabitants of the hidden tent-city wore the same garb as the elephant men, the same steel and gold tricornered helmets, and had geometric patterns that looked like hieroglyphs covering their short robes. Some wore armor on their chests and backs. Suddenly Rock realized what it was he was looking at: an army. This wasn’t a civilian village but a troop camp. Somebody had gathered together a lot of men. And, as he passed a long, flat sand-covered tent-dwelling hundreds of feet long, he saw elephants in roped-off stalls inside. Man, they had enough mounts to carry a good deal of the mini-army to war!
They came to a higher, double-pyramid-shaped tent with connecting tunnel between the two halves, each half about twenty feet high. This tent structure was surrounded by men dug into trenches with all kinds of weaponry poking out. They were protecting somebody who carried mucho weight around here.
The elephants came to a stop right in front of the place, and Rock’s elephant again kneeled down. The driver turned and started yelling at them in that sharp, almost clicking language. It was like no other Rock had ever heard, even with his years of study of language patterns in Century City’s linguistics class—a must for a world in which on every mountain they spoke a different language. But this one sounded crazy, hardly related to modern tongues. Like it had evolved before modern language patterns had started to develop.
The Freefighters dragged Sheransky off the beast, and suddenly Rock saw the sand-coated tent material part like curtains in one of the pyramid shapes. A tall black man, very strong, stood there in a metal breastplate oufit. Rockson’s face lit up with optimism for the first time in twenty-four hours. It was Rahallah.
“Rockson,” Rahallah said as he came forward with a concerned look on his ebony face, seeing that one of them was hurt. “I’m afraid there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. These men weren’t supposed to attack you, but to bring you back here. Their squad leader, the only one who knew the exact situation, was bitten by a rad-wasp along the way and died within hours. I hope my—my men didn’t do that to your Freefighter.” Rahallah spoke anxiously as he kneeled down and looked closely at Sheransky.
“No, it happened when we had to eject from our jet and landed in the ocean. We were attacked by something that should only be in horror movies.”
“He’s hurt badly,” the black man said, his full-lipped face and wide brown eyes looking in full concentration at Sheransky’s face as he pressed his thumb against the man’s neck artery. “He’s in trouble. Lost too much blood. Bring him quickly into our headquarters.”
A tall mocha-complexioned man came up. “Rockson, this is Tutankhamen, the head of the whole army you see here,” Rahallah said as he rose. “He’s a good man—and on the right side. The side we’re all on, pledged to stop Killov no matter what the cost.”
“Any man that’s an enemy of the colonel is a friend of mine,” Rock said, holding out his hand. He took notice of the man next to Rahallah for the first time. He was about fifty, with closely trimmed silver beard and hair, very firm square jaw, and the same burning eyes as Rahallah. He reminded Rockson instantly of drawings he’d seen in books of the pharaohs of primordial Egypt.
The man smiled and held out both hands, covering Rockson’s, an act of warm acceptance. “Honored that you have come all this way to help us,” Tutankhamen said. “You and your fellow Freefighters are welcome to all that is ours. Among my people, we share everything. You are of my people now.”
“You speak English,” Rockson said with some pleasure. It would sure make it a hell of a lot easier to communicate with him than the clicking, all-consonants dialect that the elephant drivers spoke.
“English is the language of the gods,” Tutankhamen replied, bowing toward the east. “The high priests of my people and I, those of us who must communicate with the gods, may speak in their language.” Just how laser-carrying, elephant-riding Egyptian pharaohs spoke English with a decidedly Oxford accent was something Rockson would ponder much later.
“My home,” the pharaoh king said dramatically, his arms high on each side as if he were acting out the part of Moses, “is your home. My food, women, hunting dogs . . . You shall consider them as yours, to do with as you want to. And now, while Rahallah attends to you and your men, I shall see to my troops. It is hard keeping so many warriors caged up like this. You, Rockson, are a great general, I’ve been told. You would understand. But we’ve waited. Waited for y
our advice on how to take on the dark one’s forces. Waited for your help. There can be—no mistakes.”
He turned and walked off with half a dozen heavily armed guards walking on all sides of him, hands on the curved razor-sharp swords which sat in jeweled sheaths at their sides.
“This whole thing is like Ali Baba and the forty thieves,” Rockson exclaimed to Rahallah as they started inside the twin tents. The black man of royal African descent had been kidnapped by Russians when just a child, Rock knew, and brought to Russia, where through the strange twists of fate he had become first Premier Vassily’s servant, and then, over the years, his most trusted confidant. Rahallah now wielded immense power. In his own way, nearly as much as the premier himself. Which many in the Kremlin didn’t like, to say the least! There had been numerous attempts on his life, from explosions to poisons and everything in between. But none had succeeded. The black man was as strong both mentally and physically as Rockson himself. In all the world, Rockson knew that this man alone equalled him on any level of combat. He prayed they’d never have to fight against one another.
“Here, we must work on this wounded man immediately,” Rahallah exclaimed. “I’ll take him into my private medical chambers through the connecting tunnel. Why don’t you and your men go into this room over here. There’s food, bathing, sleep.”
“They’ll go,” Rock said, motioning for Archer and Chen to take ten. Both obliged, walking in, Archer yawning loudly and scratching himself like a flea-bitten bear as his nose began wriggling around his face, smelling food ahead.
“But I’ll come with you,” Rock added. “I’d like to keep an eye on just what’s going to be done to him. You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” Rahallah replied as he carried the 175-pound Sheransky along like a large rag doll. The man had muscles like anacondas stretching beneath the steel meshed robe.
