Dark Dragons (59 page)

“It’s a biodome,” one SAWDOG trooper said.  “I wonder
if phototrophic and chemotrophic cycles are present?”

“Shut the science down, sergeant,” Carruthers growled. 
“We’re here to vaporize the place, not collect samples.  Darren, recon
that town with your little camera scouts.  If it’s as dead as it looks, it
might be a nice spot to plant the nuke.”

*

After the RCS scouts positively ID’ed the ancient town as
uninhabited, it took everyone just under an hour of military-style jogging past
dead wheat fields and dry canals before reaching the open gate.  Darren
worried about Nate’s asthma, but when he looked back at his friend, he received
a reassuring smile and a thumb’s up.  No illness in that modified body.

A broken cart, its wood bleached white under the fake sun,
lay shattered against a low wall to their left that encircled a warren of
single- and two-storey mud brick houses.  Leather harnesses secured the
cart to a pair of horse skeletons lying on the ground.  They appeared to
have been dead for a very long time.

“I wonder what happened here.” Carruthers asked.  “Look
. . . there’s more remains lying in the street up ahead.  Not just animals
either.”

They continued up the palm-lined dirt street, encountering
human skeletons wearing ragged tunics and leather belts and shoes.  Their
deaths did not appear to have been the cause of some kind of uprising or battle
. . . no swords or spears lying on the ground or the shafts of arrows wedged in
rib cages.  Every living thing looked like it had dropped dead where it
stood.  Many of the skeletons, human and animal, looked grossly contorted.

“I recognize these postures,” Middleton said.  “Muscle
contraction from nerve gas exposure.”

“Uh-huh,” Carruthers replied.

Brutus had several scouts recon’ing the city and mapping its
many structures into their battle maps, every building perfectly preserved as
if just built yesterday.  The town formed the shape of a perfect square
two miles across from each side.  Two main streets lined with lush palms
cut through north to south, east to west, beginning from a gate at each wall to
the huge ziggurat in the center of town.  The southeast quadrant contained
only hundreds of mud brick houses clustered together, forming courtyards here
and there surrounded by arched cloisters and wooden walkways.  An empty
bazaar of broken shop stalls sold nothing to the human corpses lying in the
marketplace.  Conical stone ovens, their tops black with the soot of
countless fires were built out in the open to provide community cooking. 
The southwest quadrant also had living quarters, but these were constructed around
an oval-shaped temple over three hundred feet long and a hundred feet
high.  Northwest of the ziggurat lay more brick houses and bazaars and
some kind of citadel or thrown room according to several RCS’s that had
penetrated the structure’s interior.  A skeleton dressed in an immaculate
blue robe leaned to one side in a beautifully ornate thrown placed on a high
dais——a dead king who now presided over nothing but a room of skeletal nobles
laying on faded rugs and pillows.  Thousands of stone tablets filled long
alcoves in the walls of a library northeast of the ziggurat.  Those that
had smashed on the floors revealed ancient cuneiform that Darren could never
hope to read or understand.

And everywhere lingered signs of horrifying deaths
throughout the silent city.  Humans, goats, cattle, sheep, all manner of
life snuffed so quickly, none of them surely understanding the calamity killing
them so mysteriously and why.

“I wonder who or what did this?” Tony asked.  “It
couldn’t be the Vorvons.  Why wipe out their only source of human slave
troops?”

Carruthers turned and waved the HLJ driver up.  “Not
important.  Let’s move people.”

“Actually, it is important,” Darren interjected.  “What
if it was an enemy weapon of mass destruction?  As in Vorvon enemy. 
We might have an ally out there somewhere.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“It’s an intriguing inquiry, Mr. Seymour, but one we don’t
have time to discuss further.”

Darren agreed but stored the question for later.

The ziggurat stood 260 feet tall according to the battle map
drawn by Brutus’s scouts.  The temple was rectangular, 170 feet wide by
240 feet long.  Five tiers circumvented the monument, and a steep
staircase on the south face led to its top course where Darren could see palm
trees and wild vegetation growing unchecked down the sides.

As they got closer, several bas reliefs carved along the
south staircase’s bottom drew everyone’s attention.  Depictions of daily
life activities like gardening, playing lutes and purchasing goods in the
marketplace were incorporated with images of ancient humans worshiping deities
who conveniently looked like Vorvons who in turn were idolizing a human female
that stood above all others.

“Ishtar,” Lieutenant Webber said.  “The goddess of love
and sexuality.  Their veneration for her makes sense in light of these
terra cotta mosaics over here.”

Darren followed his direction to a series of brightly
colored, tiled reliefs showing females giving birth to “litters” of offspring.

“The humans were encouraged to produce as many children as
possible.”  Webber paused to read the pictures carefully.  “Every
third child was claimed by the Anunnaki, or Vorvons rather, for service.”

“Yeah . . . service as berserk shocktroops with tentacles.”

Webber shook his head.  “Strange.  Why didn’t they
just clone us?  Genetic engineering would be simpler and much more
productive.  Hell, you could crank out hundreds of humans in a lab in the
nine months it took for a single mother to bring one child to term.  Why
spend the time engineering an expansive and complicated biodome just to keep
these humans relatively happy?”

Darren noticed several mosaics depicted people being
punished by their Vorvon masters for secretly creating machines and elixirs,
and rewarding those who maintained crops, livestock, and the plentiful
procreation of children.  These images were nothing more than propaganda
pictures.  “Looks like learning science was a no-no.  See here?”

Webber nodded.  “Agrarian socialism . . . keep ’em down,
keep ’em dumb.  Just like Pol Pot and his Khmers back in the 70s . . . hmm
. . . alien commies.”

Darren had been aware for some time of a large tube rising
from the ziggurat’s roof, barely cloaked within a failing invisibility field in
an obvious state of neglect.

“I think I see our lift up to the processing chamber.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Carruthers said.  “Let’s
move people.”

*

Towsley opened the door to First Deck-Infirmary and slowly
stepped out of the stairwell.  The hallway was lit, but he could see that
the adjacent corridors were not.  Both labs were dark as well, but the
infirmary had lights.  He wanted to call out but didn't.  Instead, he
backed against the wall and slid to his right toward the cleaning room door,
sweeping the sweaty 9mm Beretta left and right.

The door to the small infirmary cleaning room was
ajar.  Towsley stopped, again suppressing the urge to call out, even to
whisper.  He checked behind him before he crossed the hallway and pushed
the door in with his foot, his trigger finger ready.

Geils was gone, which didn't surprise him.  Making
sure, he looked behind the tall shelves of floor cleaner and laundry detergents
and opened the mop and broom closet.  He had a scratch in his throat and
fought like hell not to cough.  He swallowed hard and stepped out of the
cleaning room.

Reminding himself that Caliban could see better in the dark
than he could, Towsley cautiously retraced his steps back toward the darkened
infirmary vestibule.  He stopped at the corner and leaned against the
wall, eyes roving back and forth.  No movement in the darkness. 
Towsley slid against the wall and peered into the small dentistry office just
off the vestibule.

“Geils, this is Colonel Towsley!” he rasped.

No answer.

He called out a little louder but still no reply.  He
expected Caliban to make some kind of move now——if the alien was indeed on
First Deck.

He was cognizant of a heavy iron smell, musty of death, and
realized it was the scent of blood.  Thoughts crept into his brain, images
of a poor little kid ravaged by an angry monster.  On the corner of his
eye, he detected the faint glow of a light on the floor down the corridor
leading to the laboratory.  He moved cautiously toward it, rounded the
corner, and beheld the sight of what remained of Sergeant Collins’s body
highlighted by a flashlight on the floor.

A twitch of anger tore up through the deep flood of terror
in his chest, and it gave him a little more juice in which to stir him into
further action.

He shouted, “Geils, can you hear me?”

A muffled reply in the distance: “I’m in here!”

Towsley turned his head as the kid shouted, trying to pin
down the location. 
Where in the hell is ‘here’?
  He wanted to
call out just one more time, but he caught movement in the shadows to his right
in an open door to a room he couldn’t remember.  The Beretta came up, his
finger ready, as he bent down to probe the floor for the flashlight somewhere
at his feet.

Finding it, he aimed the light toward the darkened
doorway.  A coat hanging still on a wooden rack had just moved.  Or
maybe not.  His mind conjuring nocturnal spooks perhaps.

“I’m here!”

The kid was behind him, back in the
Infirmary-Dentistry.  Where Towsley had been not three fucking minutes
ago.

“Geils, I want you to stay where you are and don’t make a
sound.”

“I'm in the operating room!”

Towsley screamed daggers in his head at Geils.  He
poked his head into the corridor like an eager bird and ducked back. 
Clear.  He moved swiftly along the wall back toward the infirmary,
occasionally checking behind him for moving shadows, pissed at himself for
coming undone.

“Get me outta here!”

Towsley almost came out of his skin this time and came near
to shouting medieval blasphemes.  Once more in the vestibule, he made his
way toward Op Room 1, the first door in the hallway which bisected the
infirmary, and opened the double swinging entry.  Geils was sitting on the
floor in the back corner, holding two paddles of a portable defibrillator in
his hands.

“You have a heart attack, kid?” Towsley whispered.

Geils shook his head.  “It’s the only weapon I could
find.”

“Turn it off, and let’s go.”  He checked both ends of
the corridor once more.

“There’s a dead guy in the other hall who looks like he got
mangled in a plate press.”

“Yeah, I know.  C’mon, put that shit down and let’s
go.”

Geils stood up and turned off the defibrillator.  Both
of them stepped out of the infirmary and quickly tiptoed toward the stairwell.

“Where we going anyway?” Geils asked with his high-pitched
voice.

Towsley grabbed the kid’s shoulder, spun him around and
hissed into his ear, “I want you to keep your mouth shut, do you
understand?  You’re talking too loud.”  Most people clammed up when
they were scared.  Apparently Geils’s fight or flight response pushed his
voice volume to extreme levels.

Towsley raised his eyebrows and waited for Geils to nod an
affirmative.  Instead, the kid’s eyes grew bigger.  He heard him suck
air, whimper, and watched his lips begin to tremble.  Geils was looking
over Towsley’s——

Oh God, he’s looking over my shoulder!

He tried to move but his muscles seized up.  He felt
the life go out of him even before he felt a warm hand wrap around his neck,
the claws poking into his flesh.  A dozen possible evasive maneuvers went
through his head, but he realized he was dead as a careless antelope separated
from the herd.

Geils backed away from him, turned and ran for the
stairwell.

From behind, another hand snatched the 9mm Beretta from his
grip.  Fear had already trickled out of him, leaving only the apprehensive
pang of surrender which he accepted almost graciously.

Caliban lifted Towsley off the floor by the neck and threw
him hard against the far wall.

*

At the ziggurat’s top floor, they entered a square room
lined with stone-carved bas reliefs of ancient children reveling in the joys of
everyday childhood:  playing musical instruments, dancing around fires,
chasing butterflies, kissing under palm trees . . . and not a single adult
represented anywhere.  It reminded Darren of the large murals hanging in
an elementary school hallway.  One consistent feature in each bas relief
was an open-armed female deity surrounded by Vorvons lifting their own arms up
to her.

In the center of the room lay a colored, glass mosaic
embedded into the stone floor before a wide entrance onto a metal platform. 
The picture depicted a line of children being led into a brilliant portal by
Vorvons dressed in red robes, the open-armed goddess standing in the entryway
beckoning them.  This is where they brought them, Darren thought. 
This
room.  A promise of heaven and ascension.

“Looks like the aliens corrupted the image of Ishtar to
deceive the old humans,” Middleton said.  “Used her to legitimize their
agenda.”  He stared at the mosaic for a bit longer before muttering, “This
fucking place. . . .”

Carruthers turned to Darren.  “When we get to this
processing chamber, or whatever the hell it is, I’m going to quickly ascertain
whether this girl’s extraction is going to be a problem and a danger to my
team.  If so, we’re going to bug out ricky-tick and hump it back
here.  You and your boys can decide whether you’re going to stay or
not.  Sorry buddy, but that’s the way it works in my world.”

“I understand,” Darren said.  “They’re your guys.”