Dark Dragons (53 page)

Before anyone could turn and head for their parked
Dragonstars, Brutus signaled that nine humans were advancing quickly toward
them, coming over the hill from the Two California Plaza building to the
west.  Right behind them, the robot tagged 352 “subhuman bio-signals.”

“What the hell?”

A UAV helicopter about ten feet long with a rotary grenade
launcher underneath appeared over the hill, swooped back around and spat a frag
toward the ground.

Now there were 344 subhuman bio-signals.

Nine Marines appeared at the top of the hill near the
Angeles Flight railway and were in an absolute haul-ass dead run toward them, arms
pumping madly.  The grenade chopper fired again . . . and again.

“Get the fuck out of here!” a voice screamed at them over
the comm. “They’re right behind us!”

Darren, Jorge, and Nate raised their pulse rifles.

The subhuman bio-signals came over the hilltop. 
Children——grossly mutated, naked children, their hairless skin anemic and
translucent.  Darren couldn’t tell male from female.  The creatures
had sickly anorexic bodies with bone-blades for hands that curved out like
swords and long tentacles tipped with scorpion-like stingers thrashing wildly
from their backs and sides.  They moved hunched over like chimpanzees on
all fours but behaved erratically like insects.  Double-jointed ankles
gave them frightening speed.  The question of what occurred in the Third
Street Tunnel finally had an answer.

There were a few toddlers mixed in with the larger kids,
even several big teenagers, and the air around them sounded like the excited
cries from an elementary school playground.

Brutus, pre-set to kill only aliens, did not open
fire.  Darren guessed that if Jorge changed the directive, the robot would
start mowing down
every
human inside his range.

“Shoot those fuckers!” one of the Marines screamed. 
“Shoot ’em!”

Darren, too, had hesitated at the sight of this ghastly
swarm, but he was the first to open fire with his grenade launcher.  Jorge
and Nate went to work with their EPG’s, too.  Mutated bodies exploded,
limbs flew, red
human
blood pulsed out everywhere.  Still, the
swarm advanced, even the ones with their limbs blown off.  Brutus remained
still.

“Tony, we need your hydra shroud . . . now!” Darren
screamed.

‘It’s damaged!’ came Tony’s reply.

One of the Marines turned and fired his assault weapon to
give his eight buddies more time to widen their escape.  He brought down
two of the children before one leaped in the air and swiftly decapitated
him.  A group of them stopped to shred the armor off and fling the body’s
innards about.  One of the kids impaled the soldier’s head and stuck it
proudly in the air, jumping up and down and smiling with wide eyes.

“Jorge, override Brutus’s IFF!” Darren screamed.

The battle drone’s head twitched, and his BAS——Big Ass
Shotgun——came to life.  A long lick of flame spat out of Brutus’s abdomen,
and at least thirty children in front of the robot disintegrated in a cloud of
red mist, including the group that had paused to ravage the soldier’s
body.  Brutus racked another shell and fired.

‘Danger close!’  Tony swooped in and spat several
anti-personnel rockets at the back of the swarm near the hilltop, far enough
not to hurt his friends on the street.  Between him and Brutus, they
quickly reduced the massive insect swarm of mutants down to sporadic
pockets.  But still they advanced.

Several attackers encircled Brutus’s half-dome shield and
jumped him, but their bone-blades and tentacle stingers harmlessly glanced off
the robot’s skin.  A pulse of electricity sent them screaming into the
air.

Darren pumped his last grenade from the EPG before sweeping
his pulse rifle, backing up as fast as possible.  That’s when he saw that
they had tiny arms growing out of their chests.  Three of them made it
through his laser volleys and pounced him.  He felt his rifle torn from
his grip and watched it go flying.  He landed on his back, went for his
knife but one of his attackers snatched his wrist with a steel grip. 
Bone-blades and tentacle stingers tried to slice and pierce his armor, the
children wheezing with toothy smiles and shouting in Akkadian.

Darren screamed blasphemies back at them, kicking and
thrashing, but they were ungodly strong.  His left hand found his needle
pistol, and he fired from the hip.  One kid’s chest disappeared, and it
fell off him.  The others tried to go for his weapon, but Darren held the
trigger down before they could take it away.  One got it in the neck and
fell off.  The last kid, no longer smiling, went even more berserk,
mindlessly flailing away, trying to tear into his suit.

Nate suddenly appeared above him and put a single laser
pulse into the creature’s brain.  Darren pushed the body off him and tried
to stand, but his muscles were seizing up.  He landed on his back again
and realized he couldn’t breathe!  One of the stingers had found a tiny
chink in the thin armor inside his right elbow joint.  His heart began
thrumming erratically.  Pain of incredible levels wracked him all over,
and his eyes went tunnel vision.

TOXICITY ALERT - TOXICITY
ALERT - TOXICITY ALERT.

His suit’s first aid kit went to work.  Five-cc’s of medical
nanobots already on patrol in his bloodstream began attacking the venom,
attaching their carbon-atom bodies to the poison’s molecular structure and
negating its effects.  Tiny hypodermics in the sub-suit’s arms and legs
pumped more nanobots into his body along with an oxygen-rich solution treating
circulatory shock.  The sub-suit began to heat up, keeping his skin warm.

Darren’s heart continued to beat erratically, and he
expected the defibrillator electrodes and chest-pumping constriction rings to hit
him any second.  But soon his heart began to smooth out.  His
diaphragm came back to life, and he slowly inhaled after about thirty agonizing
seconds.

His eyes focused again, and he sat up, Jorge and Nate
standing over him with looks of horror.  Darren felt a pain narcotic and
an anti-anxiety med mellowing him out.

TOXICITY NEGATED - SELECT
[HERE] FOR ANALYSIS / TREATMENT REPORT 01-001.

“I’m alright,” he said.

He stood up slowly and looked around.  What he saw was
worse than the Third Street Tunnel.  Four Marines had survived the attack,
one of their dead, everything above the waste anyway, lying across the
blood-spattered hood of a Ford sedan.

“Goddamn slave troops,” one of the Marines spat, walking
through the field of dead.  “Goddamn skirmishers!”

Someone else:  “What did they do to them?”

Jorge was whimpering like a little kid.  Nate mumbled
something undecipherable, his eyes fluttering madly.  Darren suddenly felt
incredible heat toward both of them.

“Suck it up!” he shouted.

Jorge spun his head in his direction, his eyes
bloodshot.  “They were just little kids!”

“Suck it up!” he repeated.  “The Vorvons forced us to
kill them . . . to demoralize us!  This wasn’t chance!”

Jorge stared at him longer and nodded his head slowly. 
“I’m okay.”

“Both of you take a med pump.  It’ll help.  Jorge,
I want you to hook Brutus up to one of these tentacle tykes and give us some
answers.”

His friend did not acknowledge him but only stood there
staring at the mutilated bodies, his chest heaving, bottom lip trembling.

“Hey, Lopez. . . .”

“I’m on it.”  Jorge turned away and summoned Brutus to
him.

Darren retrieved his pulse rifle.  “Tony, loiter right
here . . . don’t go anywhere.”

‘I got your back,’ Tony replied.  He hovered his
Dragonstar over the Grand Central Market building nearby and rotated his
fighter to the south.  ‘I got eyes on.’

“Are you guys the SAWDOG commandos we were told to expect
here?” one of the Marines asked.

“No,” Darren said, remembering Major Carruthers back at the
NESSTC.  “But we’re just as dangerous as those guys.”

Another one looked up at Tony’s Dragonstar.  “I hope
you boys are on our team.”

“Of course we are.”

“Here it is, Darren,” Jorge said over the comm. 
“They’re totally unresponsive to pain . . . Brutus says ‘serotonin is
neutralized by high-levels of adrenaline . . . neuronal connections in the
limbic system of the brain supporting aggression and survival are more numerous
and highly processed than the frontal lobes responsible for reasoning.’ 
Aggressive blood clotting, redundant nervous systems, secondary and tertiary
internal organs . . . fuckers were bred to stay alive even with their limbs
blown off.  Brutus also says they’re over four thousand years old.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah . . . he’s performed three different metabolic dating
procedures to verify.  Around four thousand, three hundred and fifty
years, thereabouts.”

“So they weren’t born this way from a mutated mama and
papa?”

“No.  They’re sterile.  ‘Extensive sequential
genomic DNA alteration’ is what Brutus is calling it.  ‘Somatic
hypermutation by foreign enzymic proteins’. . . basically
cancer
. 
They were physiologically transformed.  Somehow during the process, their
growth was stunted.  They’ve been the same age for over four thousand
years.  So there’s the brief, Darren.  The bad guys want to mutate
our children into hate-filled, hard-to-kill Frankensteins.”

A whisper:  “Darren.”

He turned to his left.  The female voice sounded
nearby, almost next to him.  Nate and Jorge didn’t seem to notice. 
“Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“It sounded like a girl’s voice.”

“Darren, help me.”

“That!  Did you hear that?”

Nate and Jorge just stood there, gawking at him like a pair
of shrinks watching their patient swing from the lights.  Darren walked
away from them and looked down the street.

“Darren, help me.”  A whisper now.  “Darren,
they’re going to do it.”

Vanessa.

“Darren, please help me, they’re going to do it!”

“Do what?” Darren murmured, his blood freezing.

“I hear it,” Jorge said.  “Just barely.  It’s coming
over the comm.”

It sounded like Vanessa’s voice all right, but it sounded
processed somehow, altered.  Was it really her?

“They’re going to do it!” she screamed.

“Jesus Christ!” Darren cried, the life going out of him,
everything spinning.  He suddenly felt charged, galvanized to do
something, but he just didn’t know what.  How did they get her?

He answered his question quickly.  Last Monday. 
The night he sat in the bushes outside her house and tricked her dad
home.  Something in the bushes rustling the leaves when he left. 
That goddamn Vorvon assassin?   Yes . . . watching him watching her.

“Oh no, they have her,” Darren whispered.  He looked at
the moonship’s icon on the tiny space battle map 932,000 miles from Earth on
the other side of the moon.  “Oh no, what have I done?”

“Who?”

“Vanessa Vasquez!  They got her. . . .”

Vanessa’s fading voice:  “Darren help me!”

‘I’m sorry dude,’ Tony said.  ‘I really am.’  He
meant it too.

Nate and Jorge nodded in agreement.

“I’m not.”  Darren looked south down Hill Street toward
the direction of Pershing Square.  Ideas began to take shape, plans of
action hatched, absolutely insane plots of suicidal audacity.  He looked
Nate and Jorge both square.  “I’m going after her.”

‘Goddamn it, I knew you were going to say that!’ Tony
spat.  ‘That long pause gave it away.  Now is not the time for a
rescue mission.  Planet Earth is priority one, pal.’

“That’s why I’m going alone.”

“What?”
Nate, Jorge and Tony shouted together.

“Jorge, let me have Brutus.  Transmit his OP-SPEC’s to
me.  Hopefully he can help me find my way around that moonship.”

“Your fighter doesn’t have a spot for him, and you can’t fly
my Dragonstar,” Jorge said.

“That’s why we’re going down the street——”  Darren
shoved a thumb in the direction of Pershing Square  “——and kick some ass
all over that fucking place so Brutus and I can hijack one of those
dropships.  He should be able to fly it, right Jorge?”

Jorge folded his arms with a look of choler.  “Yeah,
with his Omni-Interface Tool he’ll figure it out.”

“Remember what you just told me and Jorge about the enemy
demoralizing us by forcing us to shoot children?” Nate asked. 
“Psychological ops, Darren.  Their attack on Washington D.C. was the top
of the pyramid.  Think about it.  They’re messing with your head.”

‘Not to mention that it’s a trap!’ Tony said.

“I know it’s a trap.  Me and the robot will handle
it.  Jorge . . . those OP-SPEC’s?”

A few seconds later, Darren received Brutus’s operational
specification software and jam-proof remote control.  “Thank you.”

‘Uh, Darren?  It looks like the bad guys are beginning
to bug out.’

*

Everyone stood on the corner of Hill and Fifth Street in
invisibility mode, including Brutus.

Pershing Square and the big parking lot across Fifth Street
looked like the roof of the U.S. embassy during the Fall of Saigon, an area of
moderately controlled chaos.  Troopers were lining up all over the park,
waiting for immediate evacuation, while others had formed squad-size guard
positions on the perimeter.  One nearby dropship——the vehicles looked like
upside-down crabs——closed up the rear hatch and pulled out with a full load.

“What’s up with the evac?” Nate asked.

“Who knows?” Darren said.  “This attack never made
sense anyway.”

‘I doubt that,’ Tony said, hovering a few blocks away. 
‘These Vorvons are smart.  It had to have had a purpose.  Darren, why
don’t you let me pop these dropships as soon as all those SAM’s are loaded and
I’ll leave one for you and Brutus.’

“Negative.  We need to blend in with the pack. 
It’ll look more inconspicuous when we board the moonship.”