Death Drop (40 page)

Gyumak’s painful scream shocked the crowd, and a collective oooh! rang out as the tentacle wrapped around Abalias’ head flew apart, zinging through the air and falling to the ground in huge quivering hunks. His freshly filleted stump was waving wildly in the air and spraying the frantic Berzerkers with blood. The beasts in the crowd didn’t care that he was a brother—there was no honor among insane, brainwashed murderers—and they drank Gyumak’s blood. They licked the dark nectar from their spattered faces with hasty tongues and sucked the sweet essence from clawed fingers with trembling lips. Killikbar was on his feet and baring his teeth at the Berzerker giant in disgust as he looked to see what had happened to the insolent Dissension colonel.

Luckily, the surprise and pain of having his arm sheared off had made the monster lurch backward, and Abalias had fallen at the base of the wall instead of into Killikbar’s lap. He lost his air, but the sand was relatively soft, and he was grateful that no more bones snapped during the fall. Abalias rolled to his knees as quickly as his battered body would let him and sucked in the hot air to inflate his lungs again. He didn’t have much time. The strips of razor ice now lined his body from head to toe. The spaces between the ridges meant that he didn’t have to use as much energy as he had when covering his entire body with ice armor or making a weapon, but the heat was relentless and he had to act before the desert melted his advantage. The arid wind pushed his uniform against the sharp edges and the thread separated as if by magic. He didn’t need a weapon made of ice—
he
was the weapon, and his eyes beamed their brilliant blue beneath thin, shimmering goggles as he sprinted all out toward the flailing, screeching monster in front of him.

Two of Gyumak’s remaining tentacles lashed out in a one-two combination as the colonel advanced. A big arm swiped at him from the side, and as he made ready to jump, another tentacle arced down from overhead like a felled tree. Abalias saw the ploy and adjusted his takeoff at the last moment, leaping slightly to the side. The hammer strike from above crashed down inches from his right leg and peppered him with sand that stuck to his goggles and blinded him. He kept running as hard as he could, and as he reached up to pluck the dirty lenses from his face, a huge shadow sped in from his left.

Abalias raised his left arm in an instinctive move to guard his face. The blow was hard, but not as hard as it would have been if he wasn’t the equivalent of a six-foot-three-inch sword, and he stumbled sideways several paces as he heard the sound of pierced meat and felt the wet spray of blood on his face and chest. He had a clean pair of goggles over his eyes as he redirected his body forward, and individual patches of ice now covered his ears, nose, and mouth. Gyumak was screeching and whipping his four good arms and two bloody stumps in the air as Abalias attacked, leaping from the ground and angling his body slightly to the left. He laid flat out, parallel to the ground with his arms stretched in front of him. He soared through the air and Gyumak swatted at him again, but this time, only half-heartedly—the colonel had cut off two of his arms and the giant was afraid.

Abalias the flying sword pierced Gyumak’s fleshy midsection at an angle—he doubted he could carry enough momentum to pass through the giant’s width head-on, and he decided that suffocating to death inside the beast would be a worse fate than having his brains squeezed to mush. He erupted through the other side and dive-rolled through the sand, rising to his feet and flexing his hands in a ‘who else wants some’ taunt to the crowd. He was covered in the giant’s guts and the liquid black suit of blood and pulp made him look like he belonged on the other side of the wall with the rest of the foul creatures now roaring and hissing for his death. Only the glow of radiant blue eyes beneath the oozing mask of gore identified the dark creature that just killed Gyumak the giant as Colonel Jerrel J. Abalias of the Dissension Army.

Gyumak let out a mottled screech followed by a soft, gurgling whimper. His immense body leaned to the side and then crumpled to the arena floor with a ground-shaking whoomp! Abalias looked at the holodex image above him and watched the scene. The enormous hole that was torn in Gyumak’s body gushed blood by the gallon, and Abalias waited for the slick, black liquid to flood around his ankles. But the deluge never arrived. The sand was parched and it drank up the monster’s life like a starved babe suckling at destruction’s decadent breast.

Abalias was bruised and sore and damn glad to be alive, but he knew he was far from safe. The persuaders closed in around him with their weapons leveled and their faces twisted in hatred, but he noticed that they weren’t entirely disappointed. Two of them slowed their advance, leaned in, and inhaled deeply over Gyumak’s freshly slain corpse.
“Goddam cannibals!”
he cursed to himself as they circled him.

“Hands on your head!” one of the creatures barked. “Back to the dungeon!”

Abalias did as he was told, turning numbly toward the end of the arena, his body buzzing with pain and exhaustion. The persuaders escorted him across the grounds, never turning their black eyes or their guns from him for an instant. As he shuffled through the sand and dust, he tried to anticipate Killikbar’s next move. He knew the only reason he was alive was because the dark general wanted to give him a gruesome spectacle of a death—one that would satisfy the sick cravings of his soldiers. Abalias was certain the event was being planned out in every demented detail with each scrape of his feet across the desert floor. He got enough of what he came for—he knew for sure there was a rogue Mewlatai and that the Serum was in danger—and now he and Graale had to find a way to escape with the information or they were certainly going to die in vain.

Chapter 30:
Clipped Wings

T
he two big Rolfing 88s at the end of the dock reared on their mounts and locked on the back half of the
Ghost
, ready to reduce her to scrap in the blink of an eye. “Shit!” Dezmara shouted as she scrambled up the cargo ramp. She turned sideways and squeezed between the rows of containers lashed to the deck of the ship. She shimmied awkwardly in the tight space with her hands at her sides and the kranos pinned facing back toward Luxon, and every second scraped through her brain like a dull blade across brushed metal. The guns were still locked on and the bright orange warning still flashed in her eyes. She had no idea why the portmaster didn’t open fire or what had happened to Simon or what they were going to do if she actually managed to get the
Ghost
in the air; she just kept on moving.

The warning in her helmet added to the pounding of her heart, and the noises melded into a hammering frenzy. Her wounds throbbed and her muscles ached as the impossibly cramped space between the cargo containers seemed to inch closer with each blast of the warning inside the kranos. “You should’ve faced the other damn way!” she cursed at herself. Normally Dezmara didn’t have any problems with tight spaces, but being forced to watch those two big guns begin to spin on their mounts was more than she could take. Just as a scream of panic roiled up from her stomach and clawed at the back of her clenched teeth, she shot out from between the canisters.

Dezmara staggered sideways into the opening at the back of the cargo bay before finding her balance. She turned and dashed the last few strides to the interior door and jabbed at the controls wildly with her right hand as she pounded on the portal itself with her left. “Simon, godammit! That asshole has us locked—let me in! Those guns are going to tear us apart. Take’em out! Simon, do you copy?!” Dezmara tried the current code, and the four previous, but the only response from the door was a series of loud, angry beeps each time she hit the ‘verify’ key. The oculo engaged automatically, as it was programmed to do in all cases of attack from behind, and the higher octave beep that distinguished its function from the rest of the gadgetry inside the kranos was the last sound she heard before the boom of large caliber machine gun fire.

Dezmara fell through the door and it slid shut behind her. She could feel the
Ghost
shake and hear the dull thunder of machine guns echo through its outer skin and fill the main deck. She scrambled to her feet and sprinted down the passage toward engineering. She skittered through the door, falling on her hands and knees and crashing into the back of Simon’s chair. She spun it around with a jerk, and it turned way too easily—Simon wasn’t there. “What the…” she said as frustration and fear tried to pull her mind apart. Simon’s multiple screens were flashing—some with strange shapes, others with different colors and still others with shocks of static that flicked on and off. Dezmara scanned the room briefly for signs of foul play, but besides the strange monitors, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She raced back into the hall and made her way toward the rest of the ship as fast as her aching body could carry her.

Dezmara burst through the infirmary door before it was completely open and stopped dead in her tracks. It was completely silent, and worst of all, the bed where she had lain Diodojo just a few hours ago was now empty. “Oh, hell…” she said and then backpedaled through the door and dashed away. She searched each of the remaining compartments of the ship in a flustered hurry, but the results were the same: neither the sleeping quarters nor the training room was occupied, and none of the spaces left any clues as to what happened to Simon or Diodojo.

Dezmara was running like she had never run before. Her numb legs were pumping through the air, powered by fear of what could have happened to her only two friends.
“Is this part of the game? Does that goddam bastard have them?!”
she thought to herself. And then a sickening suspicion overcame her: the portmaster had captured Simon and Diodojo and he was using them as bait. He was always a step ahead and it made perfect sense to toy with her—to give her a glimpse of hope at each step and then snatch it away with increasing cruelty until he had broken her spirit. “No!” she screamed through the kranos as she slammed her hand into the portal control and bolted through the open doorway into the last place she had left to look on the ship. A dark shape filled her vision and it crashed into her with a solid thump! She fell to the floor with her ribs on fire again and her mind screaming,
“This is it! This is it! Now you’re going to die too!”

The cockpit was completely dark, but Dezmara knew better than to waste precious time tapping the kranos and engaging the dark-vision. The mysterious figure hovered over her. Something long and silvery, like the edge of a sword, caught the smallest stream of yellow light from the dockyard and flashed in the shadows just above her head. The light disappeared as the figure raised the sword to strike, and Dezmara’s hands flew to her sides to draw her autos before the blade slashed her apart. The barrels of her guns had barely cleared the tops of their holsters when a loud pop erupted from the darkness and light flooded the compartment. Dezmara was sitting on the floor taking small, painful sips of air and pointing her guns at Simon’s back. He was facing the control console with one hand on the end of a large, silver power conduit that he had just plugged into a socket beneath an opened panel, and the other was rapping mercilessly at one of several keyboards next to him.

“Dammit, luv! Watchit!” he shouted without looking up from his screen. His furry fingers were typing faster than Dezmara thought possible and his tone was sharp.

“What in the hell is going on, man? Why in the hell didn’t you help me? What the shit, Simon!” she shouted.

Simon turned with one hand still rapping on a keyboard and looked at Dezmara, then jumped involuntarily before turning back. “Bloody hell, luv! I ‘ate it when you wear that thing, gives me the ‘eeby-jeebies!”

“Answer the question, Simon! Why in the shit did you almost let me get killed by those four assholes?!” she roared as she peeled off the kranos and glared at the Kaniderelle with vengeful eyes.

“Well, luv, it’s like this,” Simon said nervously, “our friend the portmaster ‘as some tricks an’ bloody programmin’ I’ve never seen before an’…well…’ones’ly, luv…’es the best hacker I’ve ever been up against.” Dezmara looked at Simon skeptically as he hunkered over his various keyboards and attacked them with a fury she had never seen before. In three years, there had never been a system or a hacker that could match Simon—he was a genius—but the frightened look on his face and the tone of his voice gave Dezmara a bad feeling.

“How
good
is he, Simon?”

“Well, luv, that ‘ole episode with you an’ the lolly bunch out on the dock just a moment ago?”

“Uh-huh?”

“It started with Libby. I take it you noticed the box still sittin’ on the bloody dock, yeah?”

“Hard to miss,” she said with irritation.

“Started ‘bout ten minutes after you strolled through the front door. Started movin’ to ‘er left a touch so I ‘ad to nudge the stick each time she loaded another container. Not a big deal, but you know me an’ my gadgets—like ‘em tip-top at all times. At first, I thought somethin’ was wrong with ‘er programmin’—she’s older than dirt, you know—so I ran a diagnostic while continuin’ my loadin’ duties and daydreamin’ ‘bout the frothy bubbles of stout that would soon be ticklin’ my lips. It was genius, it was, the way the bloody virus was disguised. Shut down our systems strategically, it did. I ‘ardly noticed anything at all—the link to the kranos was the first thing to go an’ I just thought you switched off—until I saw them four tosspots wavin’ their bloody shoo’ers at the ship, so I fire a salvo to warn the wankers off an’ then WHAMMO! He’s got Libby shut down on the dock and” Simon fell silent and the surge of taps and clicks from the console filled the cockpit like gunfire. “Ah, bloody hell!”

“
And
?!” Dezmara pushed on.

“And then ev’rythin’ shut down! That bastard ‘acked into the ol’ girl here and killed ev’rythin’—me terminal in engineering, locked down the outer doors, the weapons systems, flight controls—
ev’rythin’
! I ‘ad to come up here to access another terminal. I’ve been throwin’ ev’rythin’ I know at ‘im since I found out the dir’y little bugger was inside, an’ we’ve been going back an’ forth ever since. Now, if you don’t mind, I just got ahead of ‘im—that’s how I was able to let you in an’ blow them guns over the door to bits—an’ if you want me to get us out of here, I suggest you let me bloody concentrate!”