Was Once a Hero (38 page)

“Whatever,”
Fenaday said.
 
“Maybe it’s recovering
from its previous efforts.
 
I don’t think
we have much more time before it becomes aware of us.

“Mmok,
get the bomb rigged for the descent.
 
We’ve got D-rings and rope in the supplies.
 
Shasti, help me make a harness.
 
The rest of you, lay low and stay quiet.
 
Don’t even think loudly.
 
That goes double for you, Belwin.
 
I don’t want it to think of a live Enshari up
here.”

Mmok
and his robot team checked the hoist and hooked up the bomb.
 
They took special care with the bomb
trigger.
 
Fenaday and Shasti quickly
rigged a harness and D-rings, to allow him to slide down as well.
 
She put a line on him so he could be pulled
up easily.
 
They moved over to the
pit.
 
He nodded to Mmok.
 
The cyborg and Verdigris swung the bomb out
with the derrick erected by the deceased Enshari archeologists.
 
They stared anxiously as it descended into
the pit.
 
Despite their best efforts, the
bomb oscillated on the way down.
 

Fenaday
threw in his own rope.
 
He wanted to wait
till the bomb set down without drawing an attack before starting his drop.
 
The bomb reached bottom, but one swing banged
it into the side of the platform.
 
Everyone but Shasti and Verdigris
flinched away from the hole.
 
It landed
finally, canted at an angle.

“Just
what I was afraid of,” muttered Fenaday.
 
He moved into a position to rappel into the pit.
 
The
hardest part,
he thought,
is always
the first lean-back, trusting the rope.
 
He eased into the proper stance and looked up, catching Shasti’s
eye.
 
Her perfect face showed no emotion;
he read anxiety in her anyway.
 
He smiled
reassuringly.
 
She didn’t return it, just
watched him as he disappeared into the hole.

Fenaday
spun slowly in his harness, then eased his grip and started dropping fast,
hoping to present a moving target, in case the crypt had different defenses
against biologicals.
 
He reached the
floor in seconds and crouched near the bomb, laser in one hand and torch in the
other.
 
One of the crab robots extended a
lantern into the pit.
 
Its light didn’t
fully illuminate the chamber.
 
He
realized the chamber was far larger than he suspected.
 
Sidhe
could have docked in it.
 
The light
uncomfortably illuminated the immense skull, only five meters away.
 
He tried not to look at it.

Banks
upon banks of machinery hummed around him.
 
Many seemed active at a low level.
 
He saw an irregularity in the wall, well away from the platform.
 
He spun his hand torch to tight beam and
shone it in that direction.
 
The beam
diffused over distance, but he could definitely see a section of the wall bowed
in, though not breached.
 
Fenaday
remembered the stories Duna told of the rare, but devastating earthquakes that
destroyed Barjan several times in ancient days.
 
Perhaps some ancient earth movement had damaged the machinery.
 
No lights flickered there.

This has to be a confinement,
he thought
with a shock.
 
Someone meant to come back for the creature but never did.
 
Tended by the machines, yet somehow
conscious, it died, waiting for a parole that never came.

He
jerked his attention back to the here and now and reached for the arming
mechanism of the bomb, opening the first interlock.

The
waterfall sound that had faded to background suddenly rose.
 
Fenaday felt a consciousness fill the
chamber.
 
He heard a creaking groan, as
of huge rusted hinges pushed from frozen disuse.
 
Fenaday’s head snapped around.
 
The giant skull was shifting, turning toward
him.
 
Its eyeless sockets came to bear on
him.

“Who?”
hissed the voice in his mind,
with a malevolence he never dreamt existed.
 
Fingers of thought clawed at his brain.

Fenaday
screamed, a high, shrill sound of pain and terror.
 
He snapped up his pistol, firing
convulsively, shot after shot, into the horrific skull’s immensely thick
cranium.
 
Superheated bone chips flew.

*****

“Get
him out, get him out!” Shasti ordered.
 
“The thing is alive.”
 
She hefted
her tri-auto, but she had no clean shot.
 
She feared severing the rope or hitting Fenaday with a ricochet.
 
“I need a laser,” she yelled.

Telisan,
Mmok and the others leapt to the tripod, hauling on Fenaday’s safety rope.
 
Duna raced to the hole, brandishing his
energy weapon.
 
He leaned in for a shot
and saw the nemesis of his race stretched out in all its horror.
 
And it saw him.
 
The terrible head ceased moving.
 
The triple eye sockets bore into him,
devouring him with their emptiness.

A
blast of hatred, so intense as to have flavor and color, burst from the pit,
forcing everyone but Shasti back from the edge.
 
Shasti held her ground though it beat her to her knees.
 
She put her head between her hands.
 
For the first time in years and over a vow
she had sworn to herself, Shasti screamed in pain.

The
members of the landing force, wherever they were on the planet, heard the
scream of rage sound in their minds.

*****

On
the deck of the bulk-fluid hauler, Angelica Fury and Rask stumbled to their
feet, their eyes wild.
 
They stood on the
open cargo platform with the five others of Rask’s fire team.
 
The ramp was down.
 
On the field they could see Shellycoats of
many sizes forming from debris.
 
One stood
as tall as the giant marshals which had led the attack back on the island.
 
Fury wheeled on Rask.
 
“Oh my God, tell me you have the ramp’s power
restored.”

Rask
lunged for the portable generator and put it on maximum.
 
The ramp began grinding upward, cutting off
the view of the onrushing Shellycoats.
 
Someone screamed and firing broke out behind them.
 
They whirled.
 
Shellycoats had formed from the tools, fire
extinguishers and miscellaneous contents of the hold.
 
Rachel Van Vugt, from Engineering, toppled
forward, her eyes unseeing.
 
A Shellycoat
had impaled her on a length of pipe.
 
The
other ASATs backed away, firing furiously, dropping the things as they formed.

“We
need a smaller place to defend,” screamed Fury.
 
Despair beat in her chest as she swept up Van Vugt’s fallen weapon,
blazing away, determined to sell her young life at the highest price she could
extract.

Rask
pointed to the raised area holding the cargo master’s crane controls.
 
“Only two ways in and out,” he shouted in
response.
 
“We can hold there.”

“For
how long?” she asked.

“For
as long as we got ammo,” snapped Rask.
 
“Come on.”

They
backed away, firing as they retreated.

*****

Exploding
claymore mines followed by gunfire told Daniel Rigg trouble had arrived.
 
He bolted to the main verandah, where the
guards were already firing out the windows.
 
Shellycoats advanced from all directions on their fortress camp.
 
Barrier wires sparked and blasted them, but
as one vaporized, another appeared, incorporating bits of the destroyed
one.
 
The shuttle gun crews began to
fire.

A
whine sounded at his feet.
 
Rigg looked
down.
 
Risky’s tail was between his
legs.
 
Rigg reached down, patting the
dog’s head.
 
“It looks like a fight,
boy.
 
We’ll give them a good one.
 
You look after yourself and wait for the next
expedition.
 
I promise you there will be
one.”

He
drew his heavy sidearm, opening his mike on the battle frequency and started
bawling orders.
 
“Everyone keep your eyes
on your own front.
 
Cut the firing rate,
controlled bursts.
 
We ain’t making ammo,
so mark your target.”

He
looked up as a shadow fell across the room.
 
A ‘marshal’ advanced toward the embassy.
 
Made of cars, it towered thirty meters into
the air.

Pooka’s
chain guns took it apart.
 
It fell with a horrific crash.
 
In the middle distance, he saw several cars
on the freeway ramp stir and crawl toward each other.

Chapter Eighteen

Fenaday
had dropped when the others let go of the rope.
 
He was not conscious of it.
 
His
body splayed out in a rictus of pain.
 
The laser hung from his hand by its lanyard.
 
His eyes were open but saw nothing of the
pit.

But
they did see.
 
The alien consciousness of
the pit grew.
 
It reached out to
him.
 
His body arced in torture as the
mind of the Titan, far too large and complex for his mortal brain,
invaded.
 
No longer conscious of himself,
he became one with the dead thing in the pit.

He saw himself as a giant, proud in his
service as the highest of the warrior monks of the Prekak order.
 
His duty was to protect his kind and the
lesser races with whom they dealt.
 
War
raged with a force of darkness, inimical to all life.
 
The Enemy was terrible and the Prekak fell
before them in desperate battles.
 
Lesser
races perished entirely.
 
Soon, the
Prekak fought the forces of darkness on the surface of their own homeworld.

Finally came a time of complete desperation,
as defeat and extinction threatened the Prekak.
 
The Order of Scientists conceived a last defense, the great
machine.
 
He, as the First, claimed the
honor of the risk of being wedded to the machine.
 
The telepathic powers of the Prekak, strongest
in those chosen for the Order, were all that stood between them and the
darkness of the enemy.

The machine worked.
 
He went from monk to Godhead with a mind so
powerful he could raise and animate matter with his own life’s essence.
 
He called these manifestations his soldiers
of light and air.
 
He gathered their
remaining armies.
 
With the deadly force
of his mind, with the power it wielded over the very elements of the planet and
with his soldiers of light and air, he descended on their enemies, driving them
from the Prekak homeworld with great slaughter.
 
There would be no escape from retribution.
 
He was raised to love justice and to judge
with mercy, but the Enemy’s nature would not countenance clemency, and their
sins demanded payment.
 
He and the forces
of the Prekak pursued.
 
Their attack was
made
more bitter
for all the helpless dead he and the
Order had failed to protect.

Finally the Enemy was driven to their own
homeworld, facing a maelstrom of destruction, wrought chiefly by his mind.
 
Continents quaked and volcanoes erupted.
 
He wielded lightning as if it were an energy
weapon.
 
The Enemy fell, but they too had
their scientists, and their final weapon was also a psionic attack.
 
As he closed in on their last fortress, it
struck his mind with mental talons.
 
He
quailed under terrible blows.
 
Soldiers
of light and air faltered and flickered.
 
The Enemy rallied, counterattacked.
 
The battle hung on a knife’s edge.

He reached deep inside himself, drawing on
the discipline of a lifetime in the Order.
 
He would not fail his people.
 
He
could not.
 
Were the dead to be left unavenged?
 
Were future helpless populations to
suffer?
 
He could not bear the
thought.
 
He drew the steel of his soul
and steadied.
 
Somehow he bore the unimaginable
agonies and struck back with mighty blows.
 
Despite terrible damage to his new mind, he hung onto the enemy, warping
the very substance of the planet, destroying their evil for all time.

The agony grew unendurable.
 
As he felt the last of the enemy die in
despair, his own mind gave way.
 
His
comrades drew near to give him their love and praise, as the greatest hero of
his race.
 
He looked upon them and saw
only more enemies.
 
Death poured out from
him.
 
His mind was severely damaged, or
none would have lived even for seconds.
 
The soldiers of light and air turned on their former allies.
 
They were now something lesser and needed to
manifest themselves in physical form to do injury.
 
As they originated in his mind and soul,
their number was almost endless.
 
The
Order battled back in dismay, calling, pleading with him to return to those who
loved him.