Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (18 page)

Rock opened his eyes as he felt Neferte’s warm arms wrap around him. She muttered some words in her own language, which Rock couldn’t understand but which were clearly utterances of fear. And even as he held her, listening for what in his dim state of mind he assumed was thunder from a passing storm, the elephants around the camp began letting loose with blaring trumpets of fear. The sounds increased by the second until the whole camp was alive with the thundering roars. Rock knew the animals were not easily spooked. They knew they were the toughest things around. So if they were scared—something was wrong, really wrong.

Neferte clung to Rock like a starfish around a clam, not wanting to let go of him, ever. She kept muttering “Qu’ul, Qu’ul.” Rock remembered hearing the word the day before—something to do with the levitation weapons of Killov and his forces. Thundering rocks—the
Qu’ul!
He remembered Rahallah telling him! And suddenly his eyes opened wide and his heart was beating fast, all senses on full alert. It was one of the things he liked about his mutant nervous system. Even with hardly any sleep and a good quart or so of fiery brew in his gizzard—when the shit hit the fan somehow he was on all systems within seconds.

“We gotta move, babe,” Rock said, suddenly throwing back the fur blanket which had kept the chill night air off them. “I pray I’m wrong—but I think Killov is making a move.” They dressed fast and ran to open the flap of the sand tent. The camp was already in chaos as elephants were being led or ridden all over the place. Men were pulling down the ivory-tusk supports posts of their sand tents—the things were coming down everywhere he looked.

But it was the sight to the north that caught Rockson’s attention. It was as if the sky had fallen to the earth and was churning up a caldron of steam and smoke of biblical proportions. Huge funnels of dust were rising everywhere as if a hundred tornadoes had touched down and each one was trying to wreak more havoc than the next. There was an immense cloud of dark dust which had risen to form a semi-globe over the desert a good ten, perhaps as much as twenty, miles wide. It was hard to tell just what was happening as the whole event was taking place miles away. But it looked bad whatever the hell it was. And it was coming their way fast.

“Rockson, Rockson,” a voice screamed down from a passing elephant that came to a lurching stop just yards away from him, its huge saucer eyes panicked and blinking. It was Rahallah, sitting high atop his war bull in full battle garb—sword slung around his shoulder and loose at his side, the long rifle that the officers carried, a blunderbuss of a weapon which Rock had seen take out whole palm trees.

“What the hell is going on?” Rock screamed up as Neferte came up behind him, tying her waist-long black hair into a quick ponytail so it wouldn’t toss in the wind. “That’s like no storm I’ve ever heard before.”

“It’s not a storm,” Rahallah shouted down, his own face showing a stark alarm. “It’s Killov—or at least some of his men. That’s what happens when they attack. The smashing rocks create these huge dust storms. One of Tutankhamen’s advance units—a party of twenty men on war bulls—went out early this morning to check the far off sounds.
Two
made it back, barely, with their lives. They say the Killov war party is heading right this way. We have less than half an hour. Maybe
way
less. They can move fast on horseback. The men are breaking down all the tents—they’ll be out of here fast. I’m heading out with an attack force of fifty war bulls with full battle-platform contingents to try to divert the Killov force—slow them down long enough for the army to escape. You can travel with Tutankhamen and I’ll meet you at—”

“The hell you will,” Rock screamed back up. “I’m coming with you. I didn’t come all this way just to fly out of here with the old ladies, the pots and the pans. Where’s Kral?”

“He’s still in the pens. They’re gathering them all to move them out en masse.” Rahallah seemed to debate internally as he bit his lip hard, and then nodded to Rockson. “Get on, mister—we’ll have to move. The diversion force is gathering at the north end of camp. They’re moving out in five minutes.”

“See you, toots,” Rock muttered as he kissed Neferte hard on her still-sleep-puffed lips. She looked angry at him, but as a particularly loud thundering sound from the north shook the entire camp, her fear took over and she ran off toward the women and children. They were mounting up on large pack elephants loaded down with all kinds of gear. Rock had seen others mount up on the elephants without having them kneel, instead leaping up onto the tusks and then up to the neck and back. He imitated the motion—without grabbing hold of the great bull elephant’s ears—and jumped along the animal’s head past Rahallah, sitting down in the empty battle platform behind him.

Rahallah prodded the animal on the side with his guide stick, and it turned on a dime and headed back the other way, to fetch Kral.

It took only a minute or so to reach the large pen where nearly two hundred of the animals had been enjoying a calm night, munching away on palm leaves gathered from along the Nile. The elephant-handlers were already leading the immense beasts out from the pens with taut hide reins going from one to another. In small groups the animals were fairly manageable, but with numbers this large on the move, they got overexcited and could sometimes lose control.

Rock spotted Kral, and as Rahallah pulled up alongside him under Rockson’s direction, he jumped right across the two yards separating the beasts. Kral felt the weight of the man on his back, and looked around to see Rockson getting himself seated on the small saddle over the creature’s neck.

The animal was clearly used to Rock already, for it didn’t protest or even look at him funny.

“Let’s
move,
man,” Rahallah shouted. “If we’re going to join up with the diversion team—we’ll have to make time.”

“My men?” Rock suddenly blurted out.

“They’ll take care of themselves. The others will help them. I promise you they’ll not be forgotten, even in the midst of this madness.” Rahallah was right, Rockson realized as he tried to calm his rapid heart. Besides, he wasn’t their dorm-mother. They were men, Freefighters. They had to be able to take care of themselves—and would. He was heading into becoming a fuddy-duddy in his old age if he didn’t watch himself!

“Let’s go then!” Rockson said, slamming both legs against the elephant’s neck, not even caring if he angered the self-driving beast. There had to be a time for a man to take control of the animal beneath his legs—and this was it. Kral responded by moving fast, coming up alongside Rahallah’s bull. He seemed to want to be guided tonight, to want to know that someone—even an ear-puller—knew what the hell was going on with all the thunder cracking in his ears.

They tore through the center of camp, heading in the opposite direction from where most of the people and other animals were heading. Rock thought he saw Archer riding astride one of the beasts, along with a half dozen other fighters, but only for a second. It was too dusty with all the commotion to see clearly.

When they were out of the camp and about a quarter mile ahead, he could see the brunt of the attack force already tearing out ahead of them, heading straight into the dust maelstrom to the north. Rahallah shouted down into the flapping ear of his war bull, and the animal shot ahead as Rockson’s mount followed suit, speeding up their great driving legs so that they created their own mini-thunder slamming against the desert.

Rock turned around for just a few moments to look at the camp. He could see a steady line of men and beasts heading out from the southern end. They were moving fast, hoping that enough time would be bought by the defenders for them to retreat safely.

The elephant men were fast—but then out here with the enemies they faced, you’d better be fast or the sand centipedes were going to have some extra helpings.

They caught up with the rest of the force, which was literally galloping across the desert. Rahallah’s and Rockson’s war bulls were clearly among the fastest, for they pulled even with the herd soon, and then moved up alongside it to the lead.

Tutankhamen’s son, Ramses XXVII, whom Rockson had met briefly, was leading the charge. Unlike most armies, here it was expected that the top leadership would be right in the forefront of a battle, a fact that Rockson, as a long-time combat man having to deal with the chairbound leadership of Century City, noted with respect. Tutankhamen himself had reluctantly stayed to lead the main part of the army to safety.

Rock and Rahallah joined the younger man now. He was a fierce-looking bronze-skinned fellow, just inches short of Rahallah. Their three elephants synchronized their pace; they were moving at virtually identical speeds. Ramses raised his fighting spear high in salute to the two men’s arrival.

It didn’t take them long to reach the outer edges of the destruction that was being carried out. A cloud of dust suddenly enveloped them, and it was hard to see all that well, as if they were in a sandstorm. But as they came up over a high dune and reached the plateau, they could suddenly see for miles ahead—see the charnel grounds of death and total destruction. They could see the great “pounding rocks”—from the size of trucks to the size of buildings—rising up and coming down again and again like the boots of the gods, pounding the world into submission. What the hell could you do to fight
that?

There were villages here and there around the desert ahead, and they were being pulverized, turned into powder—men, beasts of burden, huts, whatever. It was all smashed down to the sand from which it had sprung. Rock felt a sick feeling in his guts as he watched the rising and falling rocks doing their dirty work, their blood-pressing.

The Northern Army elephant force pulled to a halt just at the edge of the other side of the dunes which led down into the lush lower lands. The pounding rocks were now about five miles off and coming in fast, straight toward them. Ramses raised his royal baton and pointed to different sides, and the elephant force divided up into two groups, each twenty elephants strong. They formed up into a wedge-shaped force and suddenly went tearing down the long decline right into the storming hell.

“Point with the guide stick at what you want the elephant to fire at,” Rahallah screamed out at Rock as they galloped side by side straight toward the conflagration. Rockson reached around and grabbed hold of the long, elaborately carved guide stick, and watched as Rahallah and Ramses began firing. They did so by catching their elephants’ attention, then reaching down and aiming their guidesticks along the trunks so the elephants could see them—the beasts would point up at the target indicated. It was the beasts, amazingly, that actually controlled the firing. A mechanism within the trunk was twisted so as to activate the lasers.

Rock wasn’t even sure they could reach that far, but as the other war bulls opened up, he saw that the lasers’ light-beams held an absolutely straight path all the way to their targets, not wavering a millimeter. Still, the sheer mass of the immense boulders and rocks ripped right out of the earth made even the laser weapons, which had previously seemed completely awesome to Rock, now appear almost like peashooters.

Some of the smaller levitated boulders
did
erupt in explosions of dust and fire. But the large ones hardly seemed bothered by the blasts, turning around slightly, but not disappearing, not by a long shot.

Rock’s bull tore ass alongside Rahallah’s and Ramses’s mounts, all three elephants raising their trunks, firing and then firing again. Between the dust of the stampeding attack force and the dust that came ever closer from the anti-grav’d boulder mass, the whole world became hard to see, as if a carpet of night was being laid out over the desert.

The worst of it was that even when they managed to destroy one of the smashing rocks, they really hadn’t hurt the controllers of the levitation sticks—who all rode on camels a mile or so behind, according to Rahallah. Thus they were only getting the shells as it were—not the cannons themselves, or the men who were firing them.

Rock could see quickly that they were in trouble. Against an ordinary army the laser-equipped elephant force would have been a formidable adversary. But against the potent weapons of destruction Killov’s Southern Army wielded, their diversion force was laughable. He suddenly started getting a real sick feeling in his chest, as if something terrible was about to happen.

When it came, it came with such speed that there wasn’t time to react. All of a sudden out of the sandstorm that swirled around the desert, amidst peals of thunder as if the earth itself were shattering, came a building-sized chunk of debris right at them.

Rock and Rahallah were just outside where the crunching stone fist hit—but Ramses and about six other elephant-riders were not. Rockson saw them disappear beneath the crushing avalanches of rock, and didn’t hear even one scream. There wasn’t time to even know you were dying when one of those suckers hit.

When the boulder rose up again, there wasn’t a trace of men or beasts. Just a crater in the desert going down a good six feet, and a red slime that coated the surface sands throughout. It wasn’t fair.

“This way, this way,” Rahallah bellowed out over the din of battle, and Rockson, without a second thought, turned and followed the man. Or rather his war elephant did, for the beast could see the tide of battle wasn’t going their way at all as well as any. The two men rode hell-bent for leather as their charging bulls let loose with everything in them. All around them the mountains of looming death came down, smashing, grinding the men and elephants who dared attack them. Just for a second Rockson saw through the curtains of sand about a half a mile off. There! There were the handlers of the Qu’ul devices, riding atop their camels, their hands held high, pointing the death-dealing sticks upward to hold the attacking mountains aloft. Then the dust closed again, and a boulder the size of a small truck came down just yards to the right of Rockson, sending up a mini-geyser of earth.

He was momentarily blinded, but Kral, with his extra eyelids for just such emergencies, kept barreling along behind Rahallah’s massive steed. And they rode, galloped through the morning’s purple haze, firing their lasers, destroying the smaller of the sky-boulders. Death smashed all around them. Humans and elephants were wiped out like so many bugs beneath a hammer, ground down into the desert sands where nothing grew and aeons of men already lay buried.