Dark Dragons (48 page)

*

Vanessa heard something to her left.

She couldn’t see anything but clearly made out the slow
clomp of feet nearby.  She tried to reach out and grab something but
couldn’t move.  She was horizontal, laying on some kind of machine. 
A breathing shadow appeared next to her.  Something cold and metallic
clasped over her head, and immediately she heard a voice.

Vanessa?  Vanessa, honey?  Where is the boy?

Mom?  Where are you?  I’m scared!

Where is the boy, honey?

Vanessa’s lips trembled, the only part of her that could
move
.  What boy?

The boy with the machine——the machine that can fly. 
Where is he?  We have to see him?

I don’t know who you’re talking about.  Mom, I’m
scared!  I want to go home!

The voice changed——Marcus.
  Hey, Van, where is
he?  I want to kick his ass.

Vanessa felt callow anger stir inside her, the tantrums of a
child released unexpectedly
.  No!  Marcus, don’t you hurt him!

You have to remember.  Who is he?  Where is he?

Darren Seymour.  Mr. Davis’s English class, fifth
hour, sits in the next row, five seats back.  Second lunch period, sits
with Tony Simmons.

Darren?  He’s a little cock!

No he’s not.  He’s just quiet.  Everyone teases
him.

A deep penetrating voice screamed,
Where is Darren? 
Where?
 The voice sounded ageless and void of gender, a sound not of a
living creature or a machine. 
Tell us where!

I don’t know.

Tell us!

I don’t know!  I want to go home!

A large brown bear rose up on its hind legs next to the
machine and roared.  Vanessa screamed, and her cry echoed off the cold
metal walls of the room.  She smelled the animal’s hot breath, like a
dog’s, scented its musty fur.  The bear slowly evaporated, its image
rippling like a reflection on water.

Remember the bear, Vanessa?
 Her mother
again. 
Yellowstone National Park?  When you were a little girl
wading in the stream?  Tell us where Darren is.

Don’t let it get me, mommy.

Then tell us where Darren is.

I don’t know!

A cackling clown somersaulted in the air and landed on the
machine between her legs, a red smile full of white fangs cut into its face,
its eyes wild, sparks spitting out of its ball of green hair.  Snickers
the Clown swooned with glee, eyes fluttering, hands upon his chest. 
Vanessa remembered Snickers from her fourth birthday party.  She
remembered him sliding through the front door like a hungry snake.  She
remembered screaming.

Vanessa squeezed her eyes shut and kept crying, the mind of
a terrified four-year old now controlling her emotions, evil memories torturing
her.

Where is Darren?
 Snickers popped a balloon, and
blood spattered out.  He giggled and did a little dance, twirling like a
circus monkey dancing for peanuts.  His face got suddenly serious and came
down inches from her’s.
  Where . . . is . . . Darren?
he whispered
inside her head.

“Let your plans be as dark
and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

——Sun Tzu

“I am
 En’rev’k Y’rid
Zet
——‘He Who Greets With Fire.’”

——Darren Seymour

Friday, May 21

As soon as the tunnel shields went down, the Dragonstars
roared one after the other.  Darren scanned their surroundings——a
mountainous desert terrain under a bright blue sky——and quickly located their
position on his scopes as central California.

A global map appeared on his visor, and the AMDS computer
cataloged twenty-two mass shadows 1,100 miles above the earth, all of them on
polar orbits.  One shadow in particular had less than half the mass of the
others.  Darren did not have to use his active sensors to precisely ID the
object to know that it was the needleship which Towsley had spoken of. 
Target Number One.

‘Warm up the ‘nightmares,’ guys,’ Darren ordered. ‘We’re
going fishing for the big sharks.’  He activated the proton destroyer
launcher to
STAND BY
.  Three beeps
in his helmet informed him that Tony, Nate and Jorge had done the same. 
‘Pair up and attack at close range ——one shooter, one wingman.  I see a
lot of fighter pods near us, and you can bet that Scorch is out there somewhere,
so keep your active-stealth on at all times.  Jorge, you’re with me.’

Darren and Jorge throttled their Dragonstars east to ten
thousand knots.  They dropped to the surface and thought-activated their
first proton destroyers to
READY
mode.  Up ahead, the Mississippi River twisted across the green and brown
mottled landscape like a yellow snake in the bright afternoon sunlight.

His warning-receiver quickly snapped him out of his
pre-battle trance.  A powerful search sensor had just bounced off the
ionosphere from over the horizon.  The Vorvons were spewing out sensor
pulses in 360-degree sweeps, and not just light waves of fuzzy sensor fog but
high-energy blasts strong enough to produce dazzling fields of green, pulsating
aurora visible in the afternoon sunlight.  Darren had just caught the
blurry edge of the beam, and he banked to port to avoid the center of the
pulse.  He knew the active-stealth field was working as it should, but the
aliens’ probing sensors had given him a momentary pang of surprise anyway.

The number of enemy fighter formations began to increase,
too.  Several pods were zeroing in on North America from every direction
high up in the stratosphere, their tiny mass shadows represented as yellow dots
on Darren’s visor.  The Vorvons were actively searching for them, unaware
of the boys’ exact position but conscious of their close proximity. 
Darren began to feel that Scorch might have some kind of extra sensory
perception on them.  How else could the enemy have a vestigial cognizance
of their presence?

‘Mass shadow ahead, Darren,’ Jorge said.  ‘Might be
that needleship.’

The object gliding along five hundred miles above the
surface was not following a polar orbit like the assault cruisers but held an
easterly course toward Europe.  Darren had no choice but to verify and tag
the ship’s ID.  Simultaneously, he activated the Feint Mode and the
synthetic aperture laser-radar, transmitting a deceptive cloud of false radar
echoes across the sky thousands of miles in every direction and hoping to lose
their position within the illusion.  Five Vorvon pods around them reacted
and split into smaller, offensive formations.  The laser-radar echoes
returned a detailed picture of the needleship——eleven miles long, a bulbous stern
tapering to a fine, pointy bow.  Darren shut off the
FEINT
and he and Jorge accelerated toward their
target ahead and above them.

‘This one’s mine, Jorge.  You get the next shark.’

‘Roger that.’

Jorge peeled away, decelerated slightly, and put himself in
position on Darren’s six o’clock, two miles above to provide enemy fighter
defense.

With seven proton destroyers remaining, Darren would not
repeat the same mistake he made during the Jupiter battle.  This time, he
would pull within damn near point-blank and fire his nightmare upon the
enemy.  No intercepting asteroid would ruin his want for unleashed quantum
hell into the universe this time.

Some three hundred miles above the earth’s surface, the
atmosphere was finally thin enough for the main computer’s thought-resident,
lock-out command to permit Darren to fire his proton destroyer safely——and not
ignite the atmosphere and disintegrate the entire Earth in a blinding
conflagration of violent, atom-shredding superstrings.  Good thing.

 He heard Tony and Nate cheering and shouting curses at
the enemy.  They had just zapped their first assault cruisers, two of them
over the Pacific.

‘That was beautiful!’ Tony cried.  ‘I am the god of
hellfire!’

When Darren and Jorge closed within forty miles beneath the
needleship, Darren, thinking of millions of Washington D.C. residents who died
senselessly and unknowingly, put the optical crosshairs on the mighty vessel
and thought-fired his second proton destroyer.  The Dragonstar gave an
exhilarating shudder as the missile screamed ahead and the rotary carriage
retracted back into the fighter’s belly.  Five and half kilometers ahead,
the missile’s warhead ignited into a swelling, purple orb of sparking,
electrical tendrils.

The four anti-matter drives at the needleship’s stern ignited
like giant arc-welders, and the massive ship began to pull away surprisingly
quick out of the proton destroyer’s line-of-sight ingress.  Twenty-three
miles distant.

No!
he screamed in his mind. 
No!

The proton destroyer might have missed the needleship were
it not for a single, pulsating finger of destruction that curled out and away
from the center mass like an electric whip and caught the rear of the vessel,
reeling the purple ball into the hull like a tight rubber band.  A
blinding, atomic cancer began to fester out from the point of impact. 
Darren could see the vessel’s guts——engine storage tanks, entire decks, giant
machinery of unknown utility——as the outer hull vaporized, then the guts were
gone too.  The anti-matter engines sputtered and died before they
disintegrated.  The entire bulbous stern had disappeared five seconds
after impact as the destructive chain reaction moved forward toward the tip;
Darren hoped the Vorvons on board died slowly and painfully but more than
likely went quick and mercifully.  He had a momentary jolt of terror go
through him when he spotted aurora-like shimmers of diluted atmosphere being
eaten around the ship but thankfully spreading no further downward.

Ten seconds or so later, the eleven mile long needleship was
finally gone to the ether.  Only withering glitters of nitrogen and oxygen
harmlessly ionized by diminishing gamma rays remained to mark where the ship
had once existed.

Darren’s heart raced.  It was beautiful.  And so
damn easy.

‘Here come the fighters!’ Tony said. ‘Keep ’em off me, Nate,
I’m going to pop those three cruisers ahead to port!’  Tony was racking up
an impressive number of kills already.  Darren had to get on the ball.

Judging by the aerial mass displacement scopes, their proton
destroyer attacks, successful thus far, had an immediate effect on the
remaining Vorvon assault cruisers, and it did not look good.  The signal
to launch troop carriers apparently had been sent because smaller mass shadows
began popping up on the scopes around the larger shadows.  This was not
what Darren had expected.  The bad guys were going for broke——enemy ground
forces would be landing.

‘Here comes the shit storm!’ Darren said.  ‘Split
up!  Tony, Nate, Jorge . . . attack as many assault cruisers as you can
before all of the troop carriers purge!’

Jorge broke off his wingman position and went for a single
cruiser coming up from the South Pole.  Darren already had one locked up
over Africa and jammed the mental-throttle forward.

He had not anticipated this.  Now the four of them
would be alone and at the mercy of Vorvon fighter swarms, not to mention the
nimble and unmerciful Scorch prowling somewhere.

*

Everyone in the Combat Operations Center was cheering.

Colonel Towsley sat in General Taggart’s Throne——which felt
very comfortable, thank you——with his hands interlocked across his lap. 
Medusa Stare did not have the precise magnification to pick up the boys’
fighters, but the absence of four . . .
now five
Vorvon assault cruisers
proved they were still alive and killing.  It seemed too easy, Towsley
thought.  He wouldn’t be popping the cork off the Champaign just yet,
however.  His glass-half-empty world view sensed something was
wrong.  There were still seventeen assault cruisers orbiting the planet
and the gargantuan moonship hanging above the world like an omen, an eclipse of
the ancient world heralding impending doom.  Who knew what hidden weapon,
if any, it had yet to unleash.

The cheering in the COC slacked off a bit when everyone
stopped to watch an assault cruiser over North America begin to pull out of
orbit.  The flight characteristics data next to its green radar icon
indicated that the ship was beginning to execute wild, evasive maneuvers,
rolling wildly and yawing about its vertical axis almost sixty degrees. 
Abruptly, the FCD box and the vessel’s radar signature disappeared.

*

Darren let out a war scream when the assault cruiser’s
clam-shaped bow took a direct hit through the gap between the shells.  The
proton destroyer ate the ship from the inside out.  It took a few seconds
for the blinding cancer to appear on the hull.  The giant x-wings along
the aft section separated from the body and flamed out like burning leaves on
the wind, taking out the troop carriers still moored to it.  The three
carriers that did manage to peel away from their berths met three of Darren’s
singularity missiles primed for 80 kilotons.  The assault cruiser’s demise
was impressive, but not as nearly surprising as the rather listless defense it
had put up.  Only a few banks of anti-spacecraft batteries amidships
across the main fuselage had challenged him, but his Dragonstar’s speed and
nimble maneuvering kept their wild shots far off his tail.  The active
stealth field around his fighter helped, too.

Darren had visual of a triangular troop carrier hovering
over Egypt at an altitude of sixty thousand feet and slowly heading
north-east.  With the zoom scope, he saw the ship covered with blisters of
anti-aircraft batteries like an alien chicken pox.  The monster was
heading into a flashing thunderstorm to find cover.