Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (45 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
"Easier than spotlighting deer," Darius MacNeal laughed aloud. 1 could sense incredible arrogance from him, which did not strike me as unusual, but the confidence underlying it started to worry me. "Greetings, Mr. Loring, or Caine or whatever your name really is."
"Coyote," I heard Crowley whisper through the radio, "I'm back and not blind, but you are in my line of sight. You have to move if you want me to take him."
"1 see you decided to do your own dirty work when the Aryans failed." 1 let the MP-7 dangle from the trigger-guard, then I set it on the ground. I sensed other people slipping through the gate behind him and on the platforms down below. "I never really thought of you as a hands-on kind of guy—except perhaps with women."
"A glib tongue won't stop deer slugs, Loring, and the Teflon-coating means your body armor won't stop them, either. You made a big mistake assuming 1 would not monitor Watson Dodd's fax traffic."
I flashed him a genuine smile. "Actually, 1 counted on it. I hoped you would take command of the
security here, and I know that's not your forte." Still blinded by his light,
I shrugged. "If you want to surrender now, I'll let you live."
"Mo way, Loring. You underestimate me. Your two dozen commandos cannot take this base and secure it
long enough to blowthis area. I have twice as many people here ready to neutralize you."
"And I have a dozen dozen people throughout the site, Darius. The plans I faxed Dodd were incomplete."
More confidence surged through MacNeal. "So I assumed. That's why I've had engineers in the Lorica Citadel wiring it with explosives. Unless I give a check-code every 12 hours, they detonate it."
My jaw dropped open as I realized what he was saying. The destruction of the Lorica tower would kill
countless people both in the citadel and in Eclipse when it fell. That he could even conceive of such
a
plan struck me as monstrous, and that realization snapped shut a couple of other connections in my brain. "You really do know for whom you built this place and what it was created for, don't you?"
"That's why it's called a joint venture."
Through his pride and laughter I sensed another individual enter the chamber from the north. I glanced over, moving my head less than two inches, but could see nothing because of the light. Then, suddenly, my vision cleared and I saw Vetha pinned in place by MacNeal's spotlight. As I dove to the left, rolled and came up with the Wolf in my hand, Darius got off his first shot. He jacked a second round into the chamber as I flipped the safety off on the gun and we each fired simultaneously.
My shot went in low, hitting him in the right thigh. The leg immediately went out from under him, dropping him down and whipping him around to his left. He bounced up once, then a burst of automatic fire from
behind where Vetha had stood struck him in the chest and pitched his body back through the gateway into
Pygmalion's dimen-
sion.
The other men in MacNeal's fire-team had been relying on his light for illumination, so when he went down the darkness closed in on them like a tidal wave. Crowley come out of the narrow corridor behind me and
cleared the deck with a figure-8 ribbon of lead from the Mac-10 in his right hand. Two of the four men
remained on the platform when they went down, while the others pitched off the edge and fell screaming into the void below.
Gunfire came up from the platform directly below us, but it could only lance up at a steep angle between the platform on our level and the walkway ringing the core. I freed a fragmentation grenade from my harness,
pulled the pin, flipped the lever off then counted to two. "An egg is hot." 1 bowled it along the floor and it flew off into space on a gentle little arc. Its explosion filled the core with light for a moment, and shrapnel pinged off the guardrails surrounding the core, then as the thunder died, silence reclaimed the core.
"Kestrel-1, abandon CAP and head back to home base immediately. Begin an emergency evacuation of home base. Tell Scorpion that our tower has been rigged with explosives. I don't know where, 1 don't know all, but assume the tower is coming down. Sweat Watson Dodd— abduct his wife and child if you must—to get
information. By dawn, shut down
all,
repeat
all,
communication links in and out of Build-more, period."
"Alpha, copy. Luck."
A B B YY.c
"Roger, Kes
trel-1, and more of it to you."
"Omega Leader, start your assault."
"Wilco, Alpha."
Holstering the pistol and staying low, 1 scrambled over to where Bat and Crowley crouched beside Vetha.
Natch knelt on the floor and cradled the
MyrangeikkCs
head in her lap. One of the deer slugs had taken Vetha high in the
thorax while the other had hit much lower near the abdomen. Part of her clothes glistened with a luminescent green that I took as the goggle's way of painting her blood.
"She ran ahead," Bat offered in explanation.
"I know," I told him.
The light in Vetha's eyes moved listlessly and one of her fingers tapped nervously against the floor. She looked up at me, moving her mandibles apart. I nodded and patted her twitching hand, then the light went out of her eyes. Natch blinked away tears, and 1 saw her shoulders heave with a sob, then she gently laid Vetha's head on the floor and pulled the
MyrangeikkCs
hood up to hide her face.
As Bat and Match moved off and around toward the west, I turned to start back toward the east to recover my MP-7. Before I could move away from the body, Crowley grabbed my right arm and swung me around to face
him. "What was that about?"
I stared at him blankly. "What?"
"You got her killed, and she knew it." He nodded toward Vetha's body. "Her finger. In Morse code she tapped out 'I not us happy.' Want to explain?"
"Yeah. She didn't want to surrender her freedom a second time." 1 sighed heavily. "She was afraid she would betray us to Fiddleback, against her will. This was her way of making sure it did not happen."
"You knew all this and did not tell anyone?"
1 pulled off my nightvision goggles. "We all have our secrets. Meed to know, just like Ryuhito's location."
Crowley stiffened for a moment, but I still got nothing from him. Even so, I knew our relationship had
changed at that point, probably irrevocably. 1 reached out and clapped him on his shoulders. "We can sort this out when we have eliminated all the Dark Lords, okay? When they're no longer a threat."
"When they're all gone." Crowley nodded solemnly,
speaking over the first distant echoes of gunfire from our advancing mercenaries. "Then we've got some things to thrash out, man-to-man."
"Man-to-man." I nodded and keyed my radio. "Delta, come into the core. We've got work to do."
Dark Conspiracy 3-33.jpg
Bat, Crowley and I mounted the ramps to the platform from the south, avoiding the mess made by the leaking bodies on the other side. Dropping to one knee, 1 saw that box on the platform was a painfully simple little device that coupled a motion detector with a wide-angle, infrared sensor that pinpointed us the second we entered the core. A wire trailed from it into the gate. "Sensor array with monitors in Pygmalion's dimension.
They might know we're coming."
Crowley shook his head. "MacNeal's people might have known we were coming, but not Pygmalion. If he
had, he would have sent his warriors over to clean us out."
"Point. Let's go." Remaining low, I darted through the gate and instantly found myself in Pygmalion's hot and incredibly bright dimension. Darius MacNeal stared up at me with dead eyes, his crumpled body nestled amid the legs of a card table with the security monitors on it. Looking up and away from his body, 1 squinted
against the sun, but that did not prevent me from seeing four Build-more security men rounding a comer on a dead run toward my platform.
Shifting to the right to let the card table with the monitors on it shield me, 1 opened fire on the guards. Two bullets blew the lead man back off the tower. A third punched another man's Adam's apple out through his
spine. Bat opened on the other two with his Ml 6, sending them spinning away off the azure tower.
"Radio check, nice shooting." Even though the monitors clearly worked, I wanted to be certain our radios would function in Pygmalion's dimension.
"Copy."
Leaving Bat and Crowley to secure the platform, I ducked back through the gate and waved the ops team
through. "Clear, let's go."
Sin and Jytte came through first, followed by Nero and Rajani, with Hal, Natch and Mickey bringing up the rear. They followed Crowley and Bat down the northern ramp, and we quickly worked our way to the ground.
We encountered no more resistance and saw no sign of alarm from the city below the tower, even though we
knew the sounds of gunfire had to have carried an incredible distance through the clear air.
On the ground, we moved well away from the base of the crystalline tower. Nero Loring heaved the long,
cylindrical case off his shoulder in Bat's direction. Loring grabbed a clear cable from the center of it, then pointed Bat toward the tower. "Hitch me in to the power grid."
Bat hefted the cannisterand ranbacktoward one of the blue-crystal tower legs. He doled out the fiber-optic cable as he went, and 1 moved to help him. Working together— which meant he tolerated my presence during
the operation—we played the line out quickly.
A B B YY.c
At the tow
er leg, Bat popped the caps off either end of the cylinder and produced two clear disks roug
hly the
size and shape of
hockey pucks. The fiber-optic cable hung from each of the disks like a tai
l. He peeled brown
paper off one side of each of them and stuck the disks on either side of the pillar. He glanced back at Nero, and when the
