Vault of Shadows (6 page)

He grabbed Barnaby's sleeve. “We have to get everyone out.”

The Cajun's face was filled with equal parts fear and anger. “I'll go. You get Lizabeth and the others out of here, you. I'll hold these
gros cafards
off, me.”

The big cockroaches, as Barnaby called them, were firing at everything that moved.

“With a bow and arrows?” demanded Shark. “You're nuts.”

Milo whipped his satchel open, pulled out the two pulse pistols, and shoved one into Barnaby's hands.

“How you get these—?”

“Christmas present. Go!”

Barnaby slung his bow, snatched the pistol, and immediately swung the barrel toward the drop-ship. “Eat this!”

He began firing the pistol, sending blue force blasts up through the burning leaves. His first five shots missed, but his sixth hit the arm of one of the 'troopers and blasted the creature from its perch. It fell like a cinder, burning and caterwauling until it vanished into the flames of the burning oak.

“I got this, me,” yelled Barnaby. “Go!”

Barnaby fired and fired, hitting two more of the 'troopers. Then the others spotted him through the smoke and trained their weapons down at him. Milo saw what was about to happen and shoved Barnaby as hard and fast as he could. The two of them fell into the mud, and the spot where the Cajun had stood seemed to erupt into a whirlwind of smoking dirt and burning grass.

Milo rolled onto one knee. “Shark, get Lizabeth and anyone else you can and go to the bolt-hole.”

“But—”

Milo threw the second pulse pistol to him.
“Go!”

“I want what you stole!”
roared the amplified voices.

Shark caught the gun, lost one second looking doubtful and confused, and then was gone, with Killer at his heels. Milo heard the gun fire and saw blue flashes in the woods.

Barnaby wheeled on him. “What you doing?”

Milo fished a pair of grenades from the bag. “I'm a lousy shot but I can throw.”

The Cajun grinned, then spun around to offer covering fire as the drop-ship began swooping toward them. Milo had never used a Bug grenade before, but it was like all their tech—incredibly simple. There was one switch and it had to be the arming mechanism. Most of the Dissosterin were dumb as boxes of hair, relying on hive mind guidance to fight. Their tech was designed so that even the stupidest of them could use it. Milo was a lot smarter than a Bug and he understood tech. He flipped the switch, prayed that the grenade had a good timer, wound up, and threw it with his best fastball pitch.

The grenade cut through the smoke, heading directly toward the drop-ship. Milo knew that he had no hope of a direct hit, not at that distance, but anything would help.

“I want what you stole!”

The pitch was good.

The grenade exploded thirty feet from the drop-ship, just as the 'troopers detached their sky-boards for a close assault. The blast shook the whole forest, knocking Milo and Barnaby flat, blowing out half the fires, and punching the drop-ship like a massive invisible fist. Three of the troopers fell off their boards and plummeted to the unforgiving ground. A fourth was in the direct path of the blast and caught the shrapnel in the chest. He flew apart. The
drop-ship canted sideways and, true to its name, dropped.

In all the wrong ways.

It fell sideways into the burning oak. Several of the 'troopers were still attached to the machine as it collided with the giant flaming tree.

Their screams were a dreadful thing to hear.

Barnaby got to his knees, but he was wobbly and when he tried to stand he keeled over, clutching his chest. Milo crawled to him and stared in abject horror at what he saw. A splinter—a piece of body armor from the 'trooper who'd been blown up—stood out from the Cajun's chest like a knife. Dark blood welled from the wound, and Barnaby's face went dead pale as the pain hit him.

“God, Barnaby!” cried Milo. “I'm sorry—”

Three shocktroopers were left and they dropped through the smoke on their sky-boards.

“I want what you stole!”
Now the voices were faint, the speakers damaged by the blast. The resulting distortion somehow made the demand more unreal and more dangerous.

“Leave . . . me . . . ,” gasped Barnaby. “I'm done. . . .”

“No!” Milo tore a strip from his shirt and pressed it quickly and gently around the wound. He dared not pull the spike out, because that would almost certainly make Barnaby bleed to death. The spike, painful as it was, formed a kind of plug for the hole it had torn in the pod leader's chest. “It's going to hurt but I have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”

He tried to help Barnaby up, but the Cajun's legs buckled. When he crashed down, the impact tore a shrill scream from him. Blue pulse blasts exploded around them, but the 'troopers' aim was spoiled by the smoke and fire. That faint protection wouldn't last, Milo knew. He had to get Barnaby out.

And there were still the old and the sick aboard the red ship. Milo saw movement over there, and through the haze he saw an old woman—Ms. Han, the camp's assistant cook—lean out the hatch with a machine gun in her wrinkled hands. She began firing at the shocktroopers, the gun juddering in her grip, bullets flying everywhere and hitting nothing. One of the 'troopers whirled and fired at her, and Milo screamed as the old woman vanished in a ball of blue flame.

We're all going to die,
he thought.
Right here and right now.

In his pocket he could feel the weight of the thing he knew the shocktroopers wanted most of all. The red ship was really only a secondary objective. They wanted the crystal egg. That egg, and the Heart of Darkness, which was now in the possession of the Nightsiders. The egg was crucial to the survival of the Dissosterin species, while the Heart of Darkness was the last known link between the Nightsiders here on Earth and all the infinite magical worlds into which most of their kind had fled. Evangelyne and her friends hoped to somehow relearn the secrets of the Heart of Darkness so they could open those shut doors—maybe to escape, maybe to call back others of
their kind to help in this war and try to save the planet from the Swarm. However, for the Huntsman, the black jewel had a similar but much more destructive potential. He wanted to discover its secrets and open those doors—not to save the world, but to conquer all worlds and all dimensions, to use the Swarm to conquer all of time and space. The Huntsman was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of magic because the Swarm had reached a limit to their own technological growth. The monster they had created—the alien-human hybrid—was not content with destroying his homeworld. He wanted to be a new, dark god of the entire universe. Losing that stone to Milo and the Orphan Army had been devastating. Milo lived in terror of what the Huntsman would do to get it back.

He will burn the fields of the earth and topple mountains to find you and get back what you stole.
That's what the witch had told him.

So Milo had to ask himself what he was willing to do to stop these monsters.

Barnaby groaned in pain and tried to raise his pulse pistol, but he lacked even the strength to do that. There was no choice but to try to use another grenade. Milo fished one out and showed it to Barnaby.

“I have to . . . ,” he said apologetically.

The Cajun's face, though now gray with agony, twisted into a wicked grin. “You throw that thing and let's all go down together. Booyah!”

“You're crazy,” said Milo, but he flicked the arming
switch and hurled the grenade as far as he could. Then he pushed Barnaby flat and arched his own body over him, ready to shield his friend with his own vulnerable flesh.

The grenade vanished into the smoke.

“I want what you stole!”

Milo scrunched his eyes shut, waiting for the explosion, maybe waiting to die.

And absolutely nothing happened.

Nothing.

Until it did.

W
hat happened wasn't an explosion, though.

The grenade did not go off. Maybe he hadn't pushed the switch all the way, or maybe it was faulty. Milo never found out.

The shocktroopers kept advancing, their guns raised, their antennae clicking with the anticipation of an easy kill. Milo cracked one eye open and looked over his shoulder. Seeing the aliens, seeing their hideous faces, seeing the lenses of their glowing blue pulse pistols as each of them raised their weapons. . . .

And then something rose up from the ground between Milo and the 'troopers. The scorched grass lifted and the dirt tore apart as something pushed up from beneath. Chunks of limestone and granite, slabs of fossilized trees, and splinters of shale thrust upward as if pushed by some giant hand. Pebbles and stones and rocks slapped together, grinding and twisting to form powerful legs, a thick torso, and huge arms, and a boulder as big as a barrel rolled up against the pull of gravity and planted itself between the ponderous shoulders to form a head. Blunt stone split apart to form fingers, and
then those fingers clenched into fists like mallets.

The shocktroopers skidded to a halt, stunned and confused as the figure of rock towered over them. They chittered in fear as they swung their guns up toward the impossible creature.

The head of the rock figure split apart to create the jaws of a great mouth, and from that mouth issued a single word that was a challenge, a name, a threat, and a promise.

“MOOK!”

And then the rock elemental swung his fists at the shocktroopers. Mook struck one and tore it to pieces as surely as if the grenade had actually exploded.

“I want what—”

The tinny voice was cut off, replaced by the less mechanical but no less alien shriek of a dying shocktrooper.

The other soldiers tried to flee, but suddenly they were blocked by a tree behind them that had not been there before. It was made of living wood and scorched chunks of the dying oak. Nestled beneath a wreath of flowers, leaves, and twigs was a face that was twisted into a mask of terrible rage and hatred.

“What have you
done
?” bellowed Oakenayl as he thrust forward with hands from which long tendrils of vine shot like silk from a spider. The vines wrapped themselves around one of the troopers and then tightened like a fist, crushing the alien into green pulp. “Filthy parasites!”

The last of the '
troopers snapped off a few wild shots as he backpedaled away. Then he turned and ran for his sky-sled, the Dissosterin speakers still repeating the same demand. Something dropped from the limb of a smoking tree and coiled itself around the 'trooper's throat. Milo saw green scales marked with glowing red lines, saw claws and a flickering serpentine tongue, and then the 'trooper's head burst into a fireball. As the dead Bug fell, Iskiel the fire salamander dropped to the ground and scuttled off through the brush, seeking other prey.

Smoke swirled through the battlefield, but the tinny growl of the Huntsman was silent now.

“Milo!” called a voice. High, female, and urgent. He turned to see a girl standing near the ramp of the red ship. She had long pale hair that looked almost silver, and eyes the color of a winter moon. She pointed toward the eastern sky. “There's another drop-ship coming. It'll be here in minutes!”

“Evangelyne,” he yelled, “we have to get everyone out. . . .”

The girl nodded and vanished into the ship. Mook lumbered after her, while Oakenayl stood staring at the burning trees.

“I knew those trees,” he murmured in a voice filled with great sadness.

“I'm . . . I'm sorry . . . ,” began Milo, but the tree spirit ignored him, snatched up a barrel of drinking water, and hurried over to fight the flames. Milo heard a snatch of
the vile things he muttered as he went. Oakenayl said “Daylighters” exactly the same way he said “parasites.” As if he saw no real difference between the alien invaders and the human race.

A heartbeat later Mook reappeared, and in his massive arms he held a metal-framed bed that had clearly been torn from the wall of the ship. On it were four of the most badly injured survivors. Mook glanced east.

“Mook,” he said, then turned and ran into the forest. Evangelyne came next, leading the others out. Most of the survivors were in no condition to run, and the strongest had the weakest leaning on them for support.

“Head to the bolt-hole,” yelled Milo, and even though many of the survivors were older than him, they didn't stop to question his order. They shuffled off, moving as fast as they could. Evangelyne leaped from the ramp, changing mid-leap from an eleven-year-old girl into a wolf with silver fur. The off-white linen dress she wore, the leather belt, her shoes, her jewelry, and the small leather pouch that hung from her belt—all vanished. Milo kept meaning to ask her where her clothes went when she transformed, but there never seemed to be the right time for that kind of question.

Evangelyne landed and raced ahead of the survivors, sniffing out the safest route. That left Milo in the clearing with Barnaby, who had lapsed into unconsciousness.

“Oakenayl!” yelled Milo.

There was no answer.

“Oakenayl . . . please!”

When it was clear the tree spirit was not going to come help him, Milo stood, caught Barnaby under the armpits, and began to drag him from the burning camp. Barnaby was heavy, the terrain was not accommodating, and Milo ached from the shock of the blast. But he had to do the job or leave his friend to die.

Milo summoned all his strength and dragged Barnaby into the woods.

As the foliage closed behind them, Milo glanced up to see Oakenayl step out of the smoke and stand there. Watching him. Offering no help. The tree spirit looked pointedly at the twigs and branches covering the injured Cajun. Oakenayl spat a lump of sap onto the ground between them; then he turned away and stalked back into the smoke.