Dark Dragons (47 page)

Without warning, the voice on the other end changed. 
It wasn’t the cool, smug voice he had tolerated in the general’s office
yesterday.  It was now full of rage and insanity.  “There’s
five
of you, not four!  Your friend in his dragon fighter destroyed our orbital
weapons!  We could have plastered them all over the moon!  You’re
gonna——!”

“This guy’s gone,” Darren said.  “Listen to him. 
He’s schizo.”

“——kill all of us!  Major Forrester?  As soon as
they take one step into the hangar, you take them out!  That is an
absolute goddamn order!”

Long pause.

“Major Forrester?”

“Yes, sir, I concur.”

“Major Forrester?” Darren said.  “I would like to
apologize in advance for killing your brave men who are about to fight with
honor and sacrifice but die senselessly for Emperor Nero while Rome
burns.”  He shut off the radio comm.  “Nate, cover the door.”

“Come on Darren,” Tony moaned. “Let’s just chill the hell
out and think of something else.”

“I’m just curious, Tony, but what happened to the wild-eyed
kill-freak who got to ‘practice’ on bank robbers last weekend?”

“Those were bank robbers who killed some poor shmuck in cold
blood.  These guys are just following orders!”

“They’re standing between us and our Dragonstars, denying us
the enemy who is killing millions of people.  Somehow I don’t see the
disparity.  Nate, cover the fuckin’ door like I ordered!”

“Before I cover the door,” Nate said. “I want to know when
you decided to be squad leader?”

“For real?”
Darren cried.
  “We don’t have
time for this!”

Jorge had been standing off to the side, watching the three of
them go back and forth, before he slowly raised his hand.  “I think I
might have a solution,” he said.

“What’s that?” Darren shot.

“This will be a little . . . awkward . . . but . . . I’ve
been hiding a secret from you guys.”

“You’re gay,” Tony said.  “I’ve known about it for a
while.”

“That’s right, gringo, and I’m gonna make you my pink
punta!
” 
Jorge took a single threatening step in Tony’s direction.

“Alright, already!” Darren shouted. “What is it?”

Jorge paused to let his temperature drop.  Then said,
“I have a battle drone assistant stored aboard my Dragonstar.  Just behind
the cockpit.  It has a non-lethal riot control that might help us. 
But I’m the only one who can operate it.”

Darren’s jaw dropped.  Tony’s jaw dropped.  Nate’s
eyes went wide.

“A battle . . . drone. . . ?”

“. . . assistant,” Jorge finished.  “A robot.  I
named him Brutus.  He’s a nasty piece of work, too.  But I haven’t
had a chance to play with him yet.”

“Jorge, why in the hell didn’t you tell us this?” Darren
asked.  “It’s been a week!”

“I was told not to.  By that machine.  Not until
we started ground operations.  Something about the possibility that you
guys would force me to give up control and use it yourselves.”

“Why can’t we use it?” Darren asked.

“Because I have a cooler head than you guys.  Always
have.  It takes a soothing hand to control the beast.  You
hair-triggers would use a grenade to kill a mosquito.  That’s why I get
the robot sidekick with the itch for destruction, not you.”

Darren checked the RCS monitor.  The Response Team was
still waiting, all of them pinned behind the Strykers, the Dragonstars’ landing
legs, stacks of crates, and mobile computer stations.  A couple of guys
were setting up another direct-comm tracked vehicle to send in.  The stalemate
was not yet over.

“Does it talk?” Darren asked.  “Or have an artificial
intelligence?”

“No to both,” Jorge replied. “It’s actually a
virtual
intelligence that sends text messages on my visor.  It complies mostly
with fixed programs, but it can learn to adapt like an AI.”

“Non-lethal riot control, huh?”

Jorge nodded, smiled.  “Alien hippy pacification.”

“Alright, Jorge, let’s see it then.  Release the
kraken.”

Darren maneuvered his recon scout over to Jorge’s Dragonstar
to get a look.  A panel slid back and revealed a dark alcove behind the
fighter’s head.  Something stirred . . . and a jet-black praying mantis
nearly eight foot tall uncoiled out of its niche and hovered above the cockpit.

“Whoooaaa,”
everyone murmured.

It didn’t have legs but instead three anti-graviton spheres
under its curvy, upright torso.  In place of arms it had two large cannons
of some unknown utility, but Darren saw it did have clawed hands on short
mechanical arms under the barrels.  It had other appendages and
weapon-looking devices poking out everywhere.  The head bent down on a
segmented neck, and it had three concave eyes set forward into its metal skull
with one in the back and two on the sides.

It spread its two cannon-arms out to its sides above the
startled guards closest to it like some dark avenging angel of death. 
Darren could just barely make out what looked like shimmering heat waves
emanating out from its chest, blasting the guards hiding behind the
Dragonstars’ landing legs.  The men waved their arms around their heads as
if they were shooing flies, their faces contorted into looks of absolute agony
and panic as they backed away.

Brutus hovered down to the hangar floor and blasted more
guards.  Soon every man was running toward the elevator-stairwell alcove
halfway down the hangar.  That’s when the battle drone began cutting loose
on the now unoccupied vehicles, and the sight gave Darren the chills.  The
robot’s two arms were actually a pair of heavy disrupter cannons.  Red
lightning bolts, curling around one another, shot out and disintegrated the
front half of the closest Stryker vehicle with an ear-splitting ZZZZZZZZZ loud
enough to crack the glass in the lab’s front doors.  Brutus finished the
vehicle off with a second disrupter blast and pumped a single EPG grenade into
the Chevy technical.  The robot began to move slowly across the hangar,
destroying every object around it with a fluid, methodical bent, guards
scrambling like bugs in the chaos.

Tony cackled.  “It’s like
The A-Team
! 
Bullets and all manner of destruction whizzing everywhere but no one’s getting
a scratch!”

Sprinklers in the hangar’s ceiling kicked on from the clouds
of smoke roiling upward, and it turned into a deluge.  Suddenly, Brutus
appeared through the smoke outside the lab doors, hovered to a stop and turned
to face the hangar.

The 8-foot insectoid robot folded its two disrupter
arm-cannons across its chest.  Darren received Brutus’s info specs in the
lower box on his visor along with an exploded diagram.  Poking out of its
upright chest, the robot had an EPG grenade launcher, two 50 kilowatt laser
pulse guns——stubby versions of their pulse rifles——and a large-target utility,
automatic shotgun at the bottom.  This nasty weapon fired a supersonic
spray of tungsten BBs in a 30-degree spread.  The damn shells were the
size of baseballs.  Brutus also had eighteen reconnaissance camera scouts,
and a storage compartment containing extra ammo like grenades, shotgun shell
magazines, needle gun clips, and fully charged pulse rifle batteries. 
Demolition tools and invisi-mines with fragmentation or thermobaric cores
completed the inventory.

“C’mon,” Jorge said.  “Stay behind him and don’t stray
off.”

Brutus had activated a green-tinted force field——a forward facing,
half-dome shield about ten feet high and fifteen feet wide.  Darren
noticed that a half-inch hole formed in the shield wherever he pointed his
pulse rifle and traveled with his aim. 
Nice
, he thought
. 
Happy times ahead.

The force field wasn’t needed, however.  The Response
Team had cleared out of the hangar.

Darren leapt up onto the rungs of his Dragonstar, and hefted
himself over the cockpit onto the beast’s neck.  He trotted back to the
open access doors to examine the patch job the engineers had given his
fighter.  Like he had requested, they used a silver electric cable to
replace the superconductor gel tube and spun-glass insulators at the connection
points.  Incredulously, however, they used what looked like ordinary duct
tape to seal the bonds along the insulators.

“You got to be kidding me?”  He jumped down into his
fighter’s guts for a better inspection.  It
was
duct tape! 
They had at least coated the tape with some kind of clear epoxy.  There
wasn’t time to continue bitching, though.  He had to move.

Darren closed the access doors and jumped in the
cockpit.  As the canopy slid shut, he plugged the main computer cable into
the helmet socket.
 THOUGHT UNIT ENGAGED
flashed
on his visor, and his Dragonstar roared to life, Darren’s senses reaching into
the machine’s circuits as the fighter’s computer juiced his brain into a faster
rate of cognition.  The chair brace locked him into the seat, and the
pre-op check beeped in his helmet——flight operations ready.

Nate’s fighter was already rising on its anti-graviton
propulsion and rotating to face the tunnel opening at the end of the
hangar.  Darren went airborne next, followed last by Jorge and Tony.

Darren led his squadron into the tunnel, but stopped halfway
to the surface when he saw that the tunnel’s blast shield was still
secured.  He fired his laser cannons but only managed to gouge blackened
pits into its surface.  The guns would overheat if he continued. 
Darren popped the mental-safety to the electromagnetic gauss cannon and let
loose.  The stream of kinetic energy slugs managed to slice through the
shield, but through the hole Darren spotted another shield beyond that. 
He was not about to empty his magazines of precious gauss shots.  He
contemplated using a singularity missile, a half-kiloton explosion certainly
able to do the trick, but that would also blow the top of the mountain off like
a volcano and destroy the base underneath.

‘Son-of-a-bitch!’  He opened the channel the Response
Teams had been using and tuned his comm’s inverse-signal processor so the
persons receiving his message could understand his faster rate of
communication.  ‘Somebody down there better open these doors!’ he shouted,
then activated the mental
TRANSMIT
key.

‘And if we don’t?’ Taggart’s computer-processed voice replied
in his earphones.

*

The guards who had survived Brutus’s alien version of hippy
control were slowly returning to the hangar when Darren reappeared and hovered
to a stop.  He cut loose on a stack of fifty-five-gallon diesel drums with
the laser cannons.  A billowing mountain of flame shot upward and rolled
across the ceiling.  He put the cross-hairs on three five-ton diesel
trucks parked together to his left, cutting them in half with the gauss
cannon.  The Dragonstar rotated to the right and pumped a single
optical-guided grenade-rocket into the Learjet’s cockpit, scattering the
aircraft in a million, flaming pieces.

‘My next shot is going into the electronics lab . . . now
open the doors!’ 
TRANSMIT
.

*

“Open them,” the president ordered.

Taggart turned to face his commander-in-chief.  “Sir,
you don’t understand.  These boys——”

“I understand enough, general,” the president replied
placidly.  His face did not show composure, however.  “Open the
door.”

Taggart felt his knees weaken.  “Mr. President, this situation
has gotten way out of hand.”

“No shit it has.”

“These boys are dangerous.  Look at what they’ve done
to the hangar.”

The elevator door into the COC suddenly whizzed open, and
Major Forrester stormed in with four of his men, weapons drawn.  The major
had rivulets of blood running down his forehead, his teeth clamped around one
of Taggart’s Cuban cigars.  “Open the door, sir.”

“Major, you’re out of line!”  Taggart could feel the
world slipping away, the enemy moving in like oily snakes, ready to pump the
poison.

Forrester took the cigar out of his mouth and aimed his SCAR
assault rifle at Taggart’s chest.  “No. 
You
are out of
line.  Sergeant Mitchell, open those blast shields.”

“Yes, sir.”  The sergeant hit a switch on his computer
console.

“You’ll be arrested for this, Major Forrester!” Taggart
said.  “I swear to God and Jesus!”

The president shook his head.  “I’m afraid you are the
one who will be arrested, general.”

“This is outrageous!” Taggart screamed.
  Repel
boarders!
 “You’ll all be hung for this.  I’ll see to it!”
 
Repel boarders!

*

Forrester had known Taggart for years and had never seen his
commanding officer behave this way.  The general’s sweaty face had puffed
out.  His eyes were bloodshot, his lips trembling like a child’s. 
Forrester never saw a man so completely gone from his senses.  It was
frightening to watch Taggart go down like this.

“You hear me?” Taggart shouted again.  “Hung!  By
the rafters!”  The veins in his neck sprung out like tight cords of rope, his
face turning a shade pinker.

Forrester said to his men, “Confine General Taggart to the
brig and put him on suicide watch.”

“They’re gonna get us!” Taggart cried.  “Can’t you
see?  They’re gonna get us!”

“Come on, sir.”

Finally, Taggart fell silent.  His eyes went around to
each face, looking for sympathy and accordance, but the judging faces that
encircled him only showed sorrow, anger, disgrace.  Nothing the general
sought.  The Secretary of Defense had tears in his eyes.

Two of Forrester’s security men grabbed Taggart’s arms and
led him to the elevator.

“Admiral Breuer, you’re in command now,” Forrester said.

Breuer simply smiled.  “In command?”  The admiral
looked around the now inactive Combat Operations Center and the sullen people
watching him from their consoles.  “In command of what?” he cracked.