No one else mattered anymore. As no one else was going to stop her.
***
Purple Eyes and his disciples surrounded Panno next. Panno’s Nomad faltered somewhat before the psychic mindfield of the freed Umbrage. But the creature ultimately pushed past them, blasting a path clear through the circle. Panno followed, smiling and nodding at his Nomad from his motorbike, which he steered between the running feet of the dinosaur. His Nomad too had been dwarfed. It too had a head height of just twenty-four feet. Plenty of room all the same for Panno to ride his motorcycle comfortably before the moving mountain of muscle above him and to either side of his bike.
***
Purple Eyes and his entourage surrounded Jacko next. Jacko did more than resist. He showed Purple Eyes Rainbow Eyes’ plans for him. He was to take Rainbow Eyes’ place as the leader of his people. He was being trained to do that now. Rainbow Eyes had assigned himself another mission. One that Jacko’s vision did not disclose. But all this, Purple Eyes already knew. What he didn’t know was that the devil was in the details.
Just what it took to oversee an entire Amazon rainforest. As if he could deign to do a better job than Jacko and the Ubuku people at the task.
The images pounded his mind. Of:
- The Ubuku using dart guns to bring down the polluters dumping toxic barrels into a tributary of the Amazon River. Only for the clandestine factory workers to end up following the snaking yellow ooze downriver with the barrels’ contents. Face down. Slowly dissolving in the toxic acid. By the time the piranha and river trout and stingrays and electric eels floated to the surface, the humans were just part of the noxious bouillabaisse, the stew percolating the last of their humanity off them.
- The Ubuku tracing a break in an oil line turning one of the Amazon River tributaries black for miles and miles. All the way back to the pumping station. The derricks bobbing up and down like draft cranes. The Ubuku set the workers afire. Let their own running and screaming alive as they burned set off the explosions that would claim the rest of the development.
- The Ubuku jumping out of the trees to ambush the drug traffickers making up the mule caravan. Snapping the riders’ necks, tossing them into the bush, and continuing on in their place. Their bird men tattoos hidden by the animal skins they’d stolen from the tribe in cahoots with the traffickers.
- The workers manning the hoses used to strip-mine the mountains. Dissolve them away with the pressure washers to expose the precious gold deposits. When the laborers kept disappearing, they were simply replaced. Until rumors spread and workers got harder to come by. So Corporate sent in investigators. They found the missing men. Embossed on the side of a strip-mined mountain, so flush with the stone they were like cave paintings. Hundreds of them. Telling of another bygone time.
- The companies retaliated by sending in mercs to protect their various operations. More lethal and more deadly than any native wielding a bow and an arrow and a blow gun. They wiped out entire tribes to make way for their operations. Only the Ubuku were able to stand up to them. They slaughtered the mercenaries in turn. Not losing even one of their men in the process.
The only reason Purple Eyes had been shown this much at all was to intimidate him, to make him feel small relative to the task at hand. The psy-ops game was working. He was all but ready to break.
Purple Eyes’ confidence wavered and with it the psychic mind field about him began to collapse.
Jacko’s Umbrage attacked.
But Rainbow Eyes filled Purple Eyes with positive emotions, pumping him up. “Your methods will simply be better,” Rainbow Eyes said in his ear. “You will find ways for all parties to thrive.” Eventually Rainbow Eyes had pushed the wave of anxieties Jacko had created in him back.
Jacko’s people arrested their charge the moment the mindfield went back up. Retreated to Jacko’s side to lend him cover. They walked the old man towards the compound.
The way Jacko was smiling at them, it was as if he hadn’t shown his entire hand yet. More psy-ops games? Or did the old man have another trick up his sleeve? In either case, the mindfield was still not strong enough to penetrate the hold Jacko had on the Umbrage in his employ.
There was no more Purple Eyes and his people could do. Not without taking out their own kind. And Rainbow Eyes would not give the order to do that. Instead he told them to stand down for now.
It appeared Jacko wasn’t the only one with an ace up his sleeve. Purple Eyes could read just enough of Rainbow Eyes’ mind to know their role in this war wasn’t over yet.
***
Cronos had barely made it out of the coliseum on his way to find some more “kibble” when Leon noticed the opposing Nomad juveniles and Umbrage falter. Something was once again affecting them. The Umbrage and Nomads defending him and Laney should have used the opportunity to pounce. But they held back. It was as if they sensed what was going on ahead of him.
“What is it?” Leon whispered to Laney, refusing to lower his weapon.
“I think they’re learning to detach from the pain. One of them must have figured out how and he is passing the teaching along to the rest.”
Many of the Umbrage and the Nomads under the influence of the triple threat removed their headgear—with and without emitting a cry for pain. They healed the gashes in the sides of their head created by ripping out the units every bit as unceremoniously.
The few still under the influence of the triple threat realized they were outnumbered now and fled the coliseum.
“Not like them to run, even when they’re outnumbered,” Laney said.
Leon lowered his weapon. He didn’t think he could hold it up any longer if he tried. His arm and shoulder muscles screamed at him with a fury rivaled only by Nomad roars. “Unless I miss my guess, they’re being recalled for a last stand.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I don’t. Nothing more dangerous than a wounded, cornered animal. We’re likely to see a side of the triple threat we haven’t seen before, one that would make Satan smile.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Cronos surveyed the scene before him, along the business end of his rifle. He’d clearly chosen the wrong hall to walk down. The walls and ceiling were crawling with morphing bots. It was like a nasty infestation of basketball-size wolf spiders, anyone of which could jump him before he twitched his finger on the trigger. They had the hall blocked in both directions. And they were merely flanking the Ubuku, who had him in their sights. Their assault weapons looked more bad-ass than his. Cronos nodded and smiled. Finally a battle scene he was not walking out of. He shouldered his gun, took out a cigarette, lit it, took a satisfying puff. “Well, what are you waiting on?”
Not ones to refuse an invitation, they charged.
Without warning, Mudra crashed through the wall. Presumably she’d dropped in on her Nomad from the hole left in the ceiling, the one Leon had made to gain entry to the compound, not too far away from Cronos’s current location. Her Nomad sandwiched the morphing bots and the Ubuku to the opposite wall as she and the animal fought to find their footing. The human-bots-pastiche now was little more than an avant-garde mural on the wall. She didn’t look like she was in a mood to mourn the loss of her own people; in fact she looked like she was on quite the tear.
She stared straight at him, her eyes filled with rage so intense the blood vessels in them were breaking. As she charged him he thought, “Okay, different story, same ending. Relax, Cronos.” But he may as well have been invisible.
She galloped right over him, took a sharp left and she was gone. “It’s not the end of the world.” Cronos sighed. “There’s plenty of Ubuku with weapons pointed at your back and their no-nonsense pets.” He turned to face them so he could meet his end like a man. Whereupon he witnessed Leon clearing the hall with a flash-bang. Temporarily blinding the Ubuku, long enough for him to mow them down with his automatic rifle. The robo-spiders had fled the vicinity. Clearly not reacting well to an overabundance of light or sound. A design flaw l
eave it to Leon to find in a hurry.
He took one look at Cronos and said, “What the hell? You on break?”
“Yeah.”
Leon harrumphed. “Why not?” He shouldered his weapon. Took out his pipe, stuffed it with some tobacco, lit it, took a puff, and sighed. “I might take one of these spiders home with me.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“They say in time we’re gonna have a maidbot for cleaning the house, a kitchen bot to cook our meals, a yard bot to mow the lawn. Where’s it gonna end? I can’t afford all that on my salary. One of these morphing guys should do nicely.”
“You realize it’ll need house training?”
“Well, every pet needs house training, Cronos. What’s your point?”
They turned at the sound of a motorbike getting closer. One of the Nomads came to a halting stop, throwing his torso against the same wall that Mudra’s creature had impacted earlier, using the wall as a braking device. Panno, riding the bike underneath it, spun his bike around to face the same direction as his dinosaur. Both of them stared straight at Cronos and Leon.
“Hey, the war is that way, pal,” Cronos said. “We’re on break.”
Panno laughed.
Leon took another puff on his pipe. “What, you want me to draw you a map? You heard the man.”
With a taunting rev of his bike Panno said, “I came for you, Leon.”
Cronos turned to Leon. “Well, I guess your break is over. You want me to finish that pipe for you?”
Leon grimaced and gestured with his pipe. “I can take the man being a soulless slime to leak out of Hell’s shithole, what I can’t abide is the rudeness.”
“Why don’t you go find the two of you a cafeteria or a gym with some room to rumble?” Cronos suggested to Panno.
Panno laughed, revved his bike. “Sure, I can do that.” He did a one-eighty on the bike, and he and his nomad pet headed for bigger pastures inside the building.
After giving him a chance to disappear into the complex, Leon and Cronos walked in the same direction, just moving a good deal more leisurely. “You sure you don’t want me to fight him?” Cronos said. “I can’t die. No matter how hard I try.”
Something in Cronos’s tone. Leon took his pipe out of his mouth and did a double take, snapping his head toward him. “Survivor’s guilt?” He read his answer in Cronos’s face. “Must be hell working with me.”
“Certainly hasn’t improved my outlook any.”
“Only the good die young, Cronos, only the good.”
“I’m a good man.”
“Really?” Leon sighed. “That makes it a hell of a lot harder to bullshit you then.”
Cronos laughed despite himself.
“You gotta make a positive difference in the world now, not just for you but for them,” Leon said, gesturing with the pipe at the engineers in the distance trying desperately to be soldiers, some better than others.
“Now, I could see that rationalization doing a number on my mind if I sit with it a while.”
“I knew if I just kept throwing enough shit against the wall something would stick.”
They came up on the entrance to the auditorium. Leon shook his head at the sight of Panno on his motorbike idling beneath the legs of the Nomad. “I thought that bastard would have to hunt high and low to find a basketball stadium in this building for egg heads.”
“When it’s your time, it’s your time.”
Leon gave him a dirty look. “What? I thought we were still playing the bullshit rationalizations game.”
Leon handed him his pipe. With one fluid movement, he brought his weapon into position. Eyes set on Panno. “Go on, get out of here, Cronos. This is going to get ugly real fast.”
“Whatever. I’m sure I can find some friends to die next to. Not all alone, like you.” He squished the last of his cigarette beneath his feet, making room in his mouth for the pipe. Then he swung his rifle around and footed it down the hall.
SIXTY-NINE
Laney ran smack-dab into Mudra. The Ubuku goddess had crashed through from the floor above, saddled to her Nomad. Judging from the noise prefacing her entrance, she’d made use of a sonic weapon to procure this much damage. Doubtful the weight of the juvenile Nomad she was riding would have been enough. Mudra had made more than a big hole for herself. It looked like a missile impact site. She’d collapsed much of the building on the heads of the scientists. The ones still alive wormed their way out from the cracks and the air holes in the collapsed concrete. Others squirmed, impaled on exposed rebar. The intent was to make a buffet for her Nomad, who nibbled at the live food, taking off the heads of the ones crawling out from the rubble, and feasting on the entrails of the ones impaled on the rebar. The animal preferred live food because it wouldn’t touch the dead bodies. The screams and wails of its victims being eaten alive merely increased its appetite. Perhaps it was working out its frustrations on the humans that had caused it such pain. Perhaps it was little more than an extension of Mudra’s hopes and desires at this point, with its lesser intellect, a look at her unconscious, if not her conscious mind.
“My pet will be done with his meal soon,” Mudra said, “and then I can give you my undivided attention.”
Laney’s head turned at the sounds of snapping and snarling. The juvenile Nomads protecting her from attacks coming from all directions were chewing up the morphing robots. In the bots’ current configuration they looked more like robo-pit-bulls. The saliva from the teeth of her Nomads appeared to interfere with their morphing. Rusting them up. Causing them to sputter, spark, cease up, or get caught morphing halfway into something else before collapsing.
The Umbrage giving her cover doused their knife-edged boomerangs in the slobber from the juvenile Nomads, either dipping the blades in the drool on the floor or taking it right out of the creatures’ mouths by bravely and dexterously inserting their hands and scooping it out. They then flung the boomerangs at the never-ending supply of morphing bots coming their way. The Umbrage’s ability to wield the boomerangs allowed them to ricochet them off of several bots before the boomerangs returned to their handlers’ arms, thereby taking out a half-dozen or more at a stroke.
The Umbrage seemed to be competing with one another for just how many morphing bots they could put out of commission at once. The morphbots, once hit, languished much like the humans being feasted upon by Mudra’s Nomad, not quite alive, not quite dead, just twitching, emitting haunting outcries. The acids from the Nomad’s drool messing with them pretty badly.
Sizing up how long it would take to quiet the storm coming her way, Laney turned back to Mudra and said, “Your timing sounds about right.”
Seconds later Mudra’s Nomad was done feasting. It and she turned to focus their combined attention on Laney. Laney’s troops were no longer preoccupied. The juvenile Nomads protecting Laney lunged for the bigger Nomad Mudra was riding. Digging their claws and their fangs into the larger animal. It might have been impervious to most any kind of weapon’s fire, but the ever-evolving Nomads and Umbrage could still do harm to one another it seemed. Perhaps because they were each evolving along their own tangents now, and so had poisons in their arsenal the others hadn’t yet adapted to because they hadn’t been exposed. And the juvenile Nomads were rather adept at jabbing their teeth and their talons in between the otherwise impenetrable scales of the larger Nomad.
The Umbrage surrounding Laney opened up on Mudra, flailing their poison-tipped boomerangs at her to harass her and keep her sufficiently busy that she couldn’t entirely rescue the Nomad she was mounted on. She didn’t have time to usher commands by way of her headgear at it because she was too busy keeping herself from the deathly venom of the ricocheting boomerangs. Even when they didn’t hit her they rebounded off of other surfaces to come right back at her along trajectories that were very difficult to anticipate.
The fight was going Laney’s way until one by one her Umbrage started screaming and doubling over from pain. Unable to catch their own
returning boomerangs, far less throw them anymore. Instead the returning boomerangs cut into them, exposing them to the toxins on the blades, and putting a quick end to them.
The same thing started happening to the juvenile Nomads fighting for her. They fell off of the larger Nomad like fleas that had gotten some bad blood in their systems.
“What’s happening?! What are you doing to them?!” Laney screamed.
“It’s not her.” The deadpan voice was Cassandra’s, coming from behind her.
Laney turned, surprised by the stealth movements and appearance of her sister.
“It’s Jacko and his voodoo,” Cassandra explained, “taking full advantage of the psychically sensitive sentient serpents.” Cassandra took her eyes off Mudra and glared at Laney. “Pull back, get your team out of here. I got this.”
Laney stared into her sister’s eyes. One look and she had no doubt that Cassandra had this. Laney ordered the retreat. It just took a thought. She didn’t even have to open her mouth. She assisted the one among the Umbrage too weak to get up on his own. Several of the Umbrage helped pull their still-living peers out of harm’s way, leaving the dead behind. The juvenile Nomads stumbled her direction, falling, tripping, using their powerful heads and necks like crane scoops to get themselves moving along the floor again when their legs and arms were still too weak to do it. But so long as they were retreating they seemed immune to the needles Jacko was sticking in his voodoo dolls. Perhaps his psychic visions only extended to the immediate vicinity of his children.
The agonized cry of Mudra’s Nomad forced Laney to turn around. Somehow Cassandra had already managed to take the creature out, singlehandedly. Laney rushed back to glance into the creature’s eyes and lend it comfort, stroking its face.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 56