Strong Arm Tactics (39 page)

“Drop the spiders on ’em again, and scare them away,” Ewanowski shouted into his mike. “The lieutenant’ll be ready for them at the Carrot Palace!”

“No spiders left,” Aaooorru choked. He leaped up on the building. “Mr. Wingle, prepare to evacuate! Go to deeper ground!”

“Can’t! I’m busy. I’m sending Security!”

“No, don’t…!”

But it was done. Just behind the Inventor’s Workshoppe the big double doors of a blue-painted building popped open. From it sped an old-fashioned black van with a red light on top filled with police waving billy clubs. All of them had mustaches, tall, rounded hats and brass buttons down their long blue coats. The vehicle zoomed around the cottage and came to a screeching halt. The police jumped out and began to belabor the Insurgents with their clubs.

The shock was too much for the itterim. Disregarding their screaming captain, they began to fire bazookas and grenades at the cottage, the roller coaster, the puppets, and anything else more than two millimeters high. Ewanowski rolled as far away as he could, shooting at Insurgents, trying to spot Aaooorru. They put anything they had into the big weapon barrels. Fragmentation grenades flew overhead and burst. Explosives landed on every surface and detonated. Gas cylinders burst against walls.

“Dammit,” Oscar Wingle said over the helmet channel. “They never had that kind of effect before.”

O O O

Zebediah was beside herself with fury. The morons under her command were wasting every charge in their arsenal. One missile went rocketing over the head of a multilegged trooper in camo armor, into the foolishly named “Inventor’s Workshoppe,” and detonated against a wall, exposing a shiny metal conduit, missing the trooper completely. The hole seemed to act as a target for all the bullets, gas grenades, and mortar shells that followed. When she got the itterim under control again, she was going to kill them all personally.

O O O

Ayala shoved his way through the ridiculous battle going on around him. Something was happening at the Carrot Palace. He counted ten, twelve, fifteen red-in-blue shadows converging on the west steps and heading inside. The lieutenant must still be inside with the rest of the force.

“Oostern, heavy weapons to the Carrot Palace! Companies A, B and C, with me now!” he ordered over his helmet audio.

From all over the pavilion, Insurgents wrenched themselves away from bear hugs, kangaroo kickings and goat gorings, straggling to obey their colonel’s command.

Daivid opened his link to the Insurgents’ main channel. “Attention, Insurgent forces. I am Lt. Daivid Wolfe of the TWC Space Service. I’ve been sent by my commanding officer to negotiate a surrender.”

“Go ahead, then!” Ayala howled in his ear. “Save me the trouble of killing you all. Surrender!”

“Not
us,”
Daivid said, in exasperation, sticking his muzzle around the edge of the arch and firing off a blast. “You! Try to handle this like mature beings. You’re outnumbered a hundred to one.”

“Only a hundred to one? Hah! Then here is my answer!”

The boom! of a heavy gun firing made Wolfe and all of his squad flatten themselves to the ground. The embossed image of Bunny Hug above Daivid fractured into pieces no larger than his hand and rained down on them.

“That looks funny,” Norgy Porgy said. Daivid glanced up at the giant pig. A section of rebar from the pavement had penetrated through the big rose-colored body from end to end. Daivid leaped up and dashed forward in a hail of armor-piercing rounds to leap up to save Norgy, then realized he wasn’t really injured. The puppeteer controlling him was safe in a titanium-lined bunker. No one was hurt, but he had nearly gotten himself killed rescuing a doll. He dragged his attention back to what he was doing.

“Back at you,” he yelled at his opponent, and signalled to Ambering to fire the twinkie-gun.

A huge shell rocketed out of the barrel in a haze of brass. In Daivid’s scopes the streak that represented the white-hot core of depleted uranium arrowed through lighter obstructions, such as the Policeman’s Booth at the corner of Law St. and Order Blvd., and into the midst of Ayala’s forces. The pavement exploded, sending soldiers and pieces of soldiers flying in all directions. But their guns were not silenced. More shells blasted into the walls of the Carrot Palace. Wolfe dove for cover.

“Give me Wingle’s controller chip,” Ayala ordered him, as the two groups exchanged fire. “I do not want it damaged, and neither do you. Give it up, or we will destroy you and the controller.”

“No way,” Wolfe said. “If you attack this site I will destroy the chip. I have it right here.” He waved a citrine-encrusted silver box out the door at the Insurgent force. It was actually the soap dish from his hotel room. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it? You’re not going to make it, so you might as well go away!”

“You will give it up to me, at once,” Ayala shouted. “Or else!”

“Or else what?” Wolfe shouted back.

“Bring our leverage,” Ayala announced grandly. No one moved. Wolfe took a surreptitious look at his scopes to make certain no one else was sneaking up on them.

“Sir,” Thielind whispered urgently into his link, “I’m monitoring Any Street. A clear pod just left shuttle two, lifted straight up. It’s full of people. They’ve got hostages!”

Wolfe felt his heart pounding. “Can you see who they are?”

“No, sir. The infrared’s inconclusive, of course. They’ve all got bags over their heads. I think they wanted to fly that shuttle to the Carrot Palace, but it’s surrounded by parking droids. They’ve pulled off part of the drive housing. We didn’t know about the pod.”

“No one could have guessed, ensign,” Wolfe said. His nerves returned in full force. He stood on the edge of a moral precipice now. Anything he did from this point on would be successful, or a terrifying, criminal failure. The roiling in his gut reached nuclear reactor proportions.

“There’s nothing you can say that will make me give up this chip!” he announced, over Ayala’s frequency.

“We will see about that,” the colonel said. The fighting died around them as the pod set down in the pavilion. Two of the best armed Insurgents pushed open the escape panel and yanked one man at random from the huddle. They pushed the man, blindfolded and with bound wrists, toward Ayala, who took him by the collar of his shirt. He held up a small black control.

“Let them go, Ayala!” Wolfe shouted.

“I’m so glad you know who I am,” the scruffy-bearded man said, gazing coolly at the wavering shape that was his opponent, as if he could see right through the ghost effect. “So you know I mean business. All of these charming people,” he gestured at the hostages, “were trying to leave this town. I cannot imagine why they wouldn’t want to stay in this fine place, with such a fantastic attraction as Wingle World to amuse them! But they will die if you do not give me the chip. I have a box, you have a box. Mine detonates the escape pod. I will exchange it for yours. What is your answer?”

“My answer?” Wolfe echoed, hand plunging to his side and coming up with his pistol. “Here it is!”

“You’re going to shoot me?” Ayala scoffed, reading a weapon in the infrared scopes of his helmet.

“Not exactly!”

The phut of the Dockery 5002 machine pistol firing was barely audible, but the smack! as the round struck the hostage full in the chest might as well have been a nuclear explosion. Ayala stared in disbelief at the gaping black hole that went straight through the body. The man staggered backwards, arms flailing, but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t fall. And he didn’t bleed.

Ayala swept off the hood. The man stared at him.

“You’re too ugly to look at,” the puppet said derisively, making a face. “Put the hood back on.”

Ayala’s face turned red with rage. “Kill them!” he shouted, pointing at Wolfe. “Kill them all!”

Wolfe’s next shot took the controller out of Ayala’s hands. Jones zoomed down out of the sky on his dragon and caught it in mid-air. The sides of the rescue pod peeled down like the skin of a sectioned orange, and the puppets inside ran for cover. He shot again at Ayala, but the Insurgent chief had hit the dirt and was rolling out of the way.

“Defensive tactics!” Wolfe shouted.

The Cockroaches opened fire. The Insurgents pressed forward from every direction. The Cockroaches fled up the stairs, providing covering fire for one another. As they had planned, the uniformed ‘normals’ began to pop up a few at a time from behind the plascrete monoliths, shooting out of all four entrances. The Insurgents charged up the stairs, some falling as a lucky shot from one of the puppets hit them. Rebels clambered over the bodies of their fellows, trying to follow the ghostly outlines of the troopers. Most of them shot at the blue-uniformed troopers they could see. Every bullet fired at a puppet, Wolfe reasoned, was another bullet wasted.

“Keep it up,” he urged his ‘troops.’ “Lin, are you ready?”

“Standing by,” the senior chief said. She and Jones rode the dragons over the courtyard, drawing fire, but steadily urging the Insurgent forces upward and into the Carrot Palace. Hundreds of them crowded the archways. Silhouetted against the sun, they were easy targets. The Cockroaches blazed away at them. The survivors hunkered down behind concrete slabs, returning fire.

“Ambering, prepare to abandon ship!” Wolfe commanded.

“Aye, aye, sir,” the gunner shouted, as an explosion echoed through the communication link. “Whew! That one took out part of the ceiling, sir. I’ve only got about two meters of solid roof to lie on.”

“All right, everyone!” Wolfe said, “Down the rabbit hole!”

Steadily, the defenders began to withdraw towards the center of the Carrot Palace. Deliberately, he allowed them to lose ground, encouraging more and more of the Insurgents to crowd inside. He wanted more. He wanted them all!

“I’m over the hole, sir,” Borden said, over the mastoid link.

“Go, go, go!” Wolfe shouted. “They’re coming!”

O O O

“What is all this?” Ayala asked, scanning the interior of the Carrot Palace as they swarmed inward, firing at the bobbing heads. “What is all this garbage doing here?”

“Perhaps an art display,” Oostern suggested. “Or some kind of sacred site?”

“An art display for children, with broken glass?” Ayala asked, picking up some of the debris and letting it sift from his glove to clink on the heap from which it had come.

Zing!
Ayala dove for the floor even before his brain registered that he had been shot at. He picked out the heat images in his display, and aimed over the piles of rubble at the nearest source. It seemed to be vaguely humanoid in shape, but after the force he had faced so far, he was making no assumptions. Where were the blue images?

Signalling to his soldiers to spread out among the monoliths and boulders of plascrete, he kept up a steady return fire, pinpointing his targets. A large group was situated close to the northern door. With a quick hand signal he called for gas grenades.

“Knock them out!” he ordered. “I want that chip. That fool just might destroy it if we corner him.”

The grenadiers scurried to obey, launching the green cylinders in an arc that landed them squarely on top of the defenders.

“Cough,” Wolfe shouted to the defending puppets, then crawled away behind the concrete chunks, trying to stay out of sight of the invading force. The ‘troopers’ broke into dramatic hacking and wheezing. He grinned. He would have believed in their discomfort, if he hadn’t known for certain none of them had lungs.

“A-heck-heck-heck,” choked Sparky, clutching his throat with pathos.

“You win the acting award,” Wolfe informed him sourly. “Now, come on. We have to leave.”

“Do my best,” Sparky said. “Always … love my work.”

“What?”

The puppet posed suddenly, with a raised forefinger as if he was about to speak again, and froze in place. It dawned suddenly on Wolfe that Sparky was not playing around for dramatic effect. Had something gone wrong in the old man’s laboratory?

“Spidey, respond!” he shouted.

“Aye, sir!” the high-pitched voice squeaked.

“What just happened? Wingle’s puppet just stopped talking. He
never
stops talking.” A screaming noise on the channel interrupted the corlist’s transmission. “Repeat? What did you say?”

O O O

The corlist fired round after round at the party of Insurgents flattened underneath the ruined carousel. His bulbous eyes kept swiveling back to the smoke coming out of the ruined conduit leading down into the tunnel. He activated his link again.

“I am sorry, Big Bad. I have failed. The Inventor’s Workshoppe was hit. I am sending a team below to see what has happened.”

“I’ll go,” Ewanowski said, and signed for two of his puppet aides to give him covering fire as he headed for the hidden ramp. “You don’t need me up here.”

A few moments later, the semicat signalled through from the laboratory. “He’s gone. Gas. At least it was quick.”

Aaooorru’s stalk eyes drooped inside his helmet. He reported back to Wolfe.

“Let them through, Spidey,” Wolfe’s voice said sadly, but resolutely “Follow on. I don’t need you there any longer.”

O O O

Full of anger, Wolfe looked around him for targets. He popped up to shoot, now with his machine gun, now with the Dockery pistol. The screaming of dying Insurgents only made him hungry for more. How could he have been so careless? He couldn’t blame Aaooorru. Everything that happened here, today, was his responsibility, and his alone. The pain in his head as an armor-piercing round creased his helmet brought him back to his senses. He suddenly realized he couldn’t see any more trooper ID tags over the red-in-blue shapes in his heads-up-display. He was the last Cockroach in the Carrot Palace.

“Is everybody down?” he asked.

“Aye, sir,” Borden said. “We’re all retreating from the zone. Quickly, sir!”

“How many have we got in here?”

“At least eighty on my scopes, sir.”

“Puppets, retreat! Lin!” Wolfe shouted, diving for the hole. “Blow the place. Now!”

“You’re too close,” the chief’s voice replied. “The concussion will kill you!”

“Just blow it!” Wolfe said, swinging into the tunnel, not waiting for the ramp to lower under him. He dropped to the floor and began to run. It was dark in the passageway except for the tiny red eyes of the emergency lights, so he used his helmet map to navigate. The nearest corner was over ninety meters away. Even with the assist of his power suit he couldn’t get there before the blast came. Thirty meters. Forty.