Dark Dragons (62 page)

“These ones were holdouts from the Old Race,” Marcus
said.  “Those who vilified the grace of Ascension.  They stole aboard
the moonship many years ago and destroyed the parents of our precious shadow
spawn with their poison.”

“So that’s why you came back for seconds,” Middleton
said.  “To restock your pens.”

Marcus inhaled slowly.  “Can’t fight a war without the
best fighting breed this side of the galactic core.  Humans are the worst
monsters.  No other race stands a chance against the shadow spawn.”

“Why children?” Nate asked.

“Have you ever offered a child a piece of candy?”  He
paused to let everyone ruminate over the question.  “That’s why. 
They accept everything they lay their greedy little hands on.  Besides you
can’t teach an old adult new tricks.”

“Why not just clone human DNA and grow them in a lab?” First
Lieutenant Webber asked.  “Why invade Earth and steal our children from
us, you coward?”

Marcus shook his head, eyes closed with a smile, enjoying
his moment of haughty clarity.  “Because we can, human.  Did you not
witness the attack on Washington D.C.?  Was that by designs of
civility?  No.  Why display banality and weakness when you can
demonstrate power and brutality?  Why make cheap replicas in a test tube
when you can just tear babes from their mothers’ arms instead.  Nations
are built on rape and plunder.  Your race knows this very well,
lieutenant.”

“Jesus, you must feel right at home now, don’t you?” Tony
said.  “God knows you’ve demonstrated power and brutality on my face a
couple of times.  Just a month ago in gym class in fact.”

Marcus grinned but did not retort.

“So how’s your new status as an aborted, mutant fetus
working out so far?  Are you done baking, or is it going to slurp you back
in and give you tentacles?  It must suck having a tiny, mutated prick.”

“I accepted my new piety when I was inside. . . .” 
Marcus trailed off, his wandering eyes showing he was trying to describe his feelings. 
“It . . . it does things to you . . . shows you things.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Tony said.  “Shoves a phallic tentacle
in your mouth so you can breathe and eat.  Right?  Sticks its purple
penis up your ass and sucks out the waste while it shows you things . . . like
what?  Here’s one for you.”  Tony put a finger up to his helmet and
closed his eyes.  “Are you picking this up?  It’s the night your mom
gave me a hand job in your Corvette rolling down Sunset.”

Despite the environment of abomination surrounding them, a
few SAWDOG’s managed to chuckle at Tony’s crack.

Tony continued his vitriol.  “The only piety you’ve
accepted is the belief in an interdimensional meat bag with a
God-complex.  And stop using big words, talking like some clichéd James
Bond-villain.  You’re still a dumb fucking jock whose grammar competency
never passed
Green Eggs and Ham
.”

Marcus’s left arm twitched, and his face began to show an
all too familiar expression.  “Let me tell you why no one has answered our
SETI signals!” he screamed.  “For the past forty years humans have been
shooting signals into space and hoping to hear a reply, but the only radio show
we get is the
Great Silent Treatment Comedy Hour
.  Why? 
Because no one’s out there anymore!  We’re all alone, buddy!  We’re
the last crop in the neighborhood and it’s harvest time!”

They may have been the ones holding weapons, but Marcus had
control of the room like Jim Jones before the Kool-Aid.  He was simply
rambling, regurgitating random crap from his brain.  Or what remained of
it.

“I’ve felt other dimensions on my skin, smelled supernova .
. . played marbles with ions, and heard angles shout blasphemies at me from the
darkness.  I know . . . everything!”

“You don’t know shit,” Nate said.

“I know daddy was boning your big sister when she was
seven,” Marcus hissed.  “But mommy and little brother don’t want that
dirty little secret escaping the Douglas household . . . oops . . . already
out.”

“Ouch, you got me,” Nate said, clutching his heart. 
“You found my Kryptonite.”

Darren stopped partaking in the conversion going on and
turned his back on Marcus to face the huge field of stasis cells on the chamber
wall.  If Vanessa was still alive——and still human for that matter——she
would have to be there among the Old Race Proscions, contained in one of the
stasis cells.   But as he swept his rifle’s scope back and forth, up
and down, he did not see her.

“She’s not there, buddy,” Marcus said.

“Where is she?”

In the distance, from somewhere deep within the dark
confines surrounding the Invicid’s chamber, a long noise rose languidly. 
It was the eeriest, most savage roar Darren had ever heard.  The howl rose
again and sliced through the air like a slow blade.  It reached a high
octave, hung there, and then wound down with a throaty staccato.  That was
no machine.

“What is that?” Nate whispered.

“That,” Marcus said, “is the Guardian.  Protector of
the Invicid’s life chamber.  Kind of like a nasty watchdog with a violent
temper.  And I led you dumb, damsel-saving assess right to it.”

The hidden beast bellowed again.

“Where is she?” Darren repeated.

“You’re too late, buddy,” Marcus said, his voice now with a
strange eagerness to it, his acidic words fast.  “We fed her to the
Invicid, and she went kicking and screaming all the way.”  He pointed to one
of the fleshy mouth pods on the edge of the altar.  “Not before they let
me fuck her brains out, though.”  He let out a quick slurp.  “Finger
lickin’ good.  You should have seen the expression on her face, Darren,
that ‘I-can’t-believe-this-crazy-shit-is-happening-to-me look.’  She’ll
make a lovely wet nurse.”

A single blast from Darren’s pulse rifle put Marcus back
against the large orifice securing him to the Invicid, punching a ragged hole
in his chest.  His body slumped to the steel deck, one arm pinned behind
him.  Then the body gasped, smiled.  “Best piece of ass. . . .”

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Darren roared.  Tears forming,
throat tightening.  No, it wasn’t satisfying.  The desire which had
been burning inside him all school year to hurt Marcus, to kill him even, had
finally come, but it did not bring feelings of triumph or finality.  Only
coldness.  And more fear. 
I tried baby.  I’m sorry, but I
tried.
  “Where is she, goddamn it!”  Hot rage like snakes coiling
in his belly.  Madness.  “Where?”

Marcus suddenly popped his head up like a Jack-in-the-box,
eyes to the ceiling, his shoulders still hunched forward, and said, “I see
gamma rays, Darren.  Satan says ‘hello.’”  Then the umbilical on the
back of his head yanked his body back, and Marcus disappeared down the
pulsating gullet.

Ripples of pulsations coursed across the Invicid’s
body.  The hiss built up in their minds once again, and it nearly drowned
out sounds.  Several men brought their hands up to their helmets.

“Leave your helmets on!” Middleton ordered.  “Do not
take them off!”

From out of the unbearable hiss
. . .
you have rescued nothing Dar-ron . . . she lives
within me  . . . her mind is mine.

Darren detected a swirling cacophony of multiple
consciousnesses within the hiss.  Of humans.  He could not understand
what they were saying.  But he shut his eyes tightly, the roar of the
Guardian much closer.  Should he reach in?  Would he come back? 
He focused until his mind became a spear into the abyss, and suddenly. . . .

. . . they were screaming.  Children being dragged
toward gaping, pulsating mouths.  He saw countless visions of the same
sacrifice, and Vorvons dressed in red robes, presiding over the hideous
rituals.  Those that did not accept their new piety were destroyed inside
and liquified to feed the believers.  It was a long torture.  They
spent years inside the Invicid.  A milkmaid’s sunken eyes blinked at him,
her body ravaged by hungry demons just birthed from the alien viscera. 
Darren heard himself screaming with her.

The flash of Sammy Vasquez’s face looking up at him would
have blown away forever in the psychic maelstrom had Darren not recognized
Vanessa’s little brother and willed his mind to focus harder.  Darren
hugged him, reassured him.  Sammy looked up to him, but Darren was being
assaulted by two creatures and could comfort him no longer . . .
dragging
him away . . . securing him to a table . . . a ridiculous clown with fangs
dancing around him . . . his body being manipulated by a machine . . .
inserting him into a glass womb . . . a stasis cell.

A stasis cell!  Darren tore himself away as the
Invicid’s demon voice called out to him, cursing him, mocking him, and he
shouted back to be released, but the psychic tentacles had his mind firmly
seized.  It would never let go.

A girl’s angelic voice rose from the depths, and its jarring
presence shattered the Invicid’s hold.  Darren sped through the tunnel . .
. and halted before the horrified face of Tony Simmons.

“Darren, stop screaming!” Tony shouted at him.  “Wake
up!”

He was lying on the floor of the altar, staring up into
Tony’s agitated face.  His vocal cords were sore.

“Are you okay?  Talk to me buddy!”

“She’s alive!” Darren said.  “I saw her . . . she’s
there.”  He grabbed his pulse rifle lying next to him and stood up, facing
the rows of stasis cells.

The steps to the altar curved down and leveled out fifteen
feet above the chamber floor.  The walkway there went two hundred feet
straight away before disappearing into a darkened tunnel just beneath the
bottom row of stasis cells.

“And it knows that I know.”  Darren broke into a dead
run down the altar steps.  Someone called out to him, but he did not stop.

The Guardian roared again, closer this time.  The trap
set for them was about to be sprung.  On the corner of his eyes he spotted
swarms of shadow spawn scrambling toward the base of the walkway.  They
began to form ladders just like ants, and Darren knew they would overwhelm him
before he could reach the tunnel ahead.

From behind him, Tony and Nate launched grenades from their
rifles and obliterated a cluster of the creatures that had reached the
top.  Darren moved his rifle to his left hand and pulled out one of
Jorge’s nasty grenades.  Priming the weapon for acid detonation with the
flick of his thumb on the appropriate button, he threw it to his right with a
wide side arm like he was skipping a stone over water.  The grenade
exploded with a horizontal cloud of yellow-green death just over the heads of
the monsters ahead of him.  Angry war screams turned to cries of agony
when the cloud descended and liquified the flesh of everything moving. 
The nano-acid splattered and jumped off those impacted to those who weren’t,
forming a ghastly chain reaction across the chamber floor which eventually
reached the Invicid’s birthing vessels.

Darren lobbed another acid grenade to his left to clear out
the mass of skirmishers aggregating at the base of the walkway there. 
Acrid yellow smoke filled the air, and he closed his visor quickly to keep out
the acidic choke.  He turned to see all three of his bros right behind him
and Vega Platoon following them, everyone firing rifles and throwing grenades.

He reached the tunnel entrance.  Twenty feet in, he
came to a stairwell that ascended to the base of another chamber hidden behind
the first front of stasis cells.  There were countless rows of tubes to
his left and right, all of them unoccupied.

 “Fast movers!”  Nate shouted.

Darren saw the blips on his surveillance scope.  Five
coming in hot through the tunnel.  Weapons fired . . . an explosion behind
him.  A squad of SAWDOG’s were killed instantly . . . by a grenade or
missile Darren couldn’t be sure.  Their bodies went flying in a cloud of
shrapnel and fire.  The flying Vorvons exited the tunnel and broke ranks,
fanning out in all directions to confound the gunfire from the humans seeking
shelter among the stasis cells below.

These were not shocktroopers, Darren realized, but the hover
knights Marcus had mentioned.  Their attackers wore gray heavy armor,
bulky with red markings on the chest and shoulders; armed with huge guns in
their right hand and some kind of weapon mounted on the left shoulder.

From outside the chamber, the Guardian screamed in wrath
again.  Darren faced the entrance to see a fleeting, dinosaur-size shadow
move against the dim lights and disappear.  Whatever the creature was, its
size prevented it from entering the tunnel.

Darren fired on one of the Vorvons making a pass on Nate
from behind and discovered that it took more than one blast to destroy the
hover knight’s heavy armor plating.  Three shots blew it out of the
air.  The dead alien took out several empty stasis cells when it crashed
to the deck.

One of the SAWDOG’s dropped his .50-caliber assault rifle
and picked up the dead alien’s weapon.  He managed to bring down one hover
knight with a single shot before being literally blown to gooey splatter by an
invisible blast of sonic energy, the aliens’ shoulder-mounted weapons revealed.

“Fuck!” Tony shouted.  He popped that Vorvon with a
well-placed contact grenade from his EPG.

“Shocktroopers!” Nate called out.

Darren saw them on his battle map.  Two large squads on
both flanks were moving up quickly through the rows of stasis tubes a hundred
feet away and closing fast.  Darren focused his pulse rifle scope on
them——lightly armored with shielded helmets and stubby laser rifles—— and
immediately noticed that more than half of them had to be human . . .
Akkadians.  They were much shorter than the average Vorvon and did not
have long limbs, short torsos and teardrop-shaped helmets like their alien
overlords.  To be sure, Darren put a single 50-kilowatt blast into the
chest of one who popped out from cover and was greeted with the sight of bright
red blood blowing out of his back.  “You gotta be kidding me?” he shouted. 
“Some of them are human!”