Yngve, AR - Darc Ages

by Darc Ages (lit)

  "Where have you been?" they asked.

  Mechao was too breathless to speak; he merely waved in an eastward direction.

  "The village? You ran all the way here from the village?" his children asked incredulously - the trail was at least half a kilometer long. He grinned faintly, then gestured for Darc to come closer.

  Mechao wheezed into his ear, barely audible: "Took drug to make the run... I planted... old forbidden weapon... in village... make the enemies go there - don't touch doors... then run away... from invisible gas."

  The old doctor fainted. His two oldest sons tended to him, while Darc ran off toward the village. He left his helmet and shield behind to make the effort; his injured arm was enough of a bother already.

  Skipping over rocks and logs, avoiding burning grass, coughing from the acrid air, it dawned on Darc what Mechao had been talking about. The old man had recreated one of the weapons from the Great Wars.

  Chapter 61

  In the flagship, Sir Devis went livid with terror when he witnessed the volcanic eruption at close range. Himself a lower nobleman in service to the Paskos, he habitually avoided risks and clung to what little privilege he still had.

  So he left Kamo and Dohan circling the crater while he turned the flagship around, and flew back south.

  The village lay half-concealed in a narrow valley, covered by a patchwork of camouflage-nets on poles.

  Darc stumbled into a clearing just outside the village and found it abandoned. He saw no sign of Mechao's secret weapon - and he dared not risk a closer look. But he needed to attract the approaching enemies - something Mechao had not managed to do on his own.

  With grim determination, Darc set his rifle on low effect, and squeezed the trigger. He swept a continuous beam over the camouflage nets; they were burned off and collapsed over the huts.

  A second laser pulse flickered from behind him. Darc ducked down, spun around - and saw Meijji, dreadlocks flowing in all directions from her oval brown face. She shot down the remaining camouflage nets in a few seconds - and urged him along with her, away from the deserted village.

  "The others are moving away from the plateau," she explained, breathing hard, while they hurried through the terrain, further upward. "The invaders are closing in. Our people have left the beach."

  She was quicker and less exerted. Darc pushed himself to the edge of collapse. By some miracle of will, he made it far enough to avoid being spotted by Pasko's advancing forces.

  The enemy troops caught sight of the exposed, abandoned village. Tharlos ordered his signalman to flash a message to his flagship as it came into sight above - the ship was a surprise, but a welcome one.

  The signalman aboard the flagship saw the message flash from the ground, and conveyed the message to the ship crew. Presently, the flagship strafed the village with a blazing fusillade. The dry huts and houses exploded into fire. Tharlos sent the spider robots ahead of him, to scout the village for traps.

  The black robots clattered into the burning village, scanning for life signs. A few stray chicken, dogs, and cattle were blasted dead as they tried to escape.

  The robots registered nothing they were programmed to avoid, and stopped - awaiting further orders from their master. Tharlos marched into the clearing with his knights and soldiers, on the alert for more mutated monsters like the flying reptiles on the beach.

  The troops relaxed somewhat when they saw the deserted houses. Tharlos ordered them to proceed uphill along the trails, to the cliff mansion which loomed above the little valley.

  But as the troops marched onward, a footsoldier began to cough hard. A sergeant yelled at him to stop coughing - and gasped, clawing at his own throat. Without warning, the hindmost troops toppled over like rows of dominoes. A hidden gas canister had been ruptured when the village was strafed.

  All humans and animals that breathed in Mechao's invisible gas, now died horribly. Soldiers gargled, tore off their helmets in confused agony - and their brains instantly turned to liquid. Bleeding from eyes, ears, and noses, two companies were wiped out before they could outrun the unseen death-shroud.

  Tharlos and his decimated troops escaped uphill, cursing the dumb robots that had walked through the poison gas unscathed. His soldiers were in disarray, firing randomly at the distant mansion, at the hot terrain, at imaginary horrors from their own feverish minds.

  Short on stamina and ammunition, the troops were now also running out of courage. The knights' rallying cries were ignored, even scorned.

  A panicking, raving footsoldier shouted to his sweat-soaked comrades: "We're all doomed! Tharlos led us into a forbidden place, and now the Goddess has awakened to swallow us all!"

  One of the knights ignited his backpack jets, took a flying leap through the air, and shot down the soldier with a powerful blast of his gun.

  "Quiet and fight!" he shouted to the troops. "Winning or losing, we stand by our commander - till the end!"

  Laser fire hit the knight from behind, and his backpack exploded. He spun up through the air, and tumbled down the mountainside like a burning, twitching tin doll. Someone among Tharlos's own troops had fired the shot.

  Soldiers deserted, scattered recklessly into the burning, smoking forest - heading for nowhere in an alien terrain. And despite the hopeless situation, Tharlos refused to retreat. He summoned his sole knight at hand, a handful of officers and footsoldiers, and his war robots.

  They proceeded up the winding trails toward the vertical cliff face that lay ahead.

  Kamo Yota glanced momentarily at the gauges on his control panel. His fuel supply depleted rapidly during the duel, and was now below a critical point - he would never make it back to Castilia in The Roaring Wind .

  So he pushed the ship even harder, making one last effort to destroy his rival once and for all.

  Dohan's fuel supply was higher - but he had no safe place to land, each island now being invaded by cohorts of Tharlos's allies. He flew the Sunray round and round the volcano's column of smoke, nudging closer by each turn.

  In vain had he attempted to get behind Kamo and score a hit - but it was hopeless. His only chance was to let Kamo chase him, until...

  Dohan heard another spray of laser pulses hit the rear of his craft. A fuse blew on his control panel, and smoke filled the cockpit. He reached for the fire extinguisher under his pilotseat, and quenched the small fire with chemical foam.

  This is very bad , he thought. He could literally feel the Sunray buckle and creak in the pushing heat waves from the volcano, and hear the discord of the engines.

  Invisible hands forced the craft up, then down; turbulence blew heavily. The cockpit had grown too hot, as if it were crowded with people; Dohan's hands were so sweaty they could barely hold the controls.

  "Do not desert me now, Sunray..."

  Suddenly, some miniscule rock fragment from the eruption hit the ship's nose, and the tremendous impact shook the ship. The wide windshield, one of the hardest objects Dohan knew, once salvaged from the Wasteland ruins to build the Sunray , cracked in the middle.

  The cabin's air pressure began to drop. Dohan whispered a prayer between trembling lips, that Meijji would be spared from the enemy. Kamo Yota also noticed how the polluted air damaged his own ship.

  The sensitive burn cycle of the jet engines was rapidly declining; for each second his velocity was sinking, approaching that of his rival. Kamo knew that he would have to rise higher to gain speed - but the air above was even worse.

  The Sunray still eluded him, ducking and rolling just a few hundred meters in front of The Roaring Wind.

  Then the volcano changed. The cascading eruptions dropped off, the smoke column drifted off - and the crater's interior suddenly became visible. A forceful draft pulled the Sunray inward.

  Without thinking, Dohan banked left and dived into the inferno. He glimpsed a boiling lake of red mist, whizzing past below his ship - and in his periscope, a small shape followed him. Kamo had swallowed the bait.

  As he flew a
cross the huge crater, Dohan banked again and throttled the engines, making the crossing last as long as possible - four seconds, instead of one at most. In that brief passage of time, Dohan felt as if he were falling into a red-hot oven.

  Kamo's much faster aircraft zipped past the crater in no time, then turned and came back after Dohan. When The Roaring Wind made its second turn across the crater, the Sunray accelerating out of it.

  Kamo squeezed the triggers of his cannons, and fired an uninterrupted volley. This, he thought, was glorious victory - and his next thought was his last.

  Turbulence!

  An unseen force pushed Kamo's powerful but light craft up, then sucked it down. In the fraction of a second, The Roaring Wind speeded straight into the inside of the smoldering crater wall - and exploded like a giant metal firecracker.

  Burning debris scattered over the lava streams and vaporized. Nothing remained of The Roaring Wind and its aspiring young pilot, except smoke and an unfulfilled promise of greatness.

  Dohan steered his ship away from the volcano - it was starting to erupt again. The tension across his chest eased, and he drew a long breath.

  "Thank you, great Goddess," he breathed out, and added: "Be merciful to my opponent, for he was brave."

  The damaged windshield had become scraped and dirtied by ash; Dohan strained to get a clear view, but the skies seemed even darker. He checked the clock, then the barometer; it was falling. Dohan had to land, before the craft was hit by stray lightning.

  He set course for the northern side of the main island. Red warning lights flashed on the control panel. The Sunray had not been properly overhauled in a long time; it was not going to last much longer.

  Lord Ue Yota could glimpse the distant air battle around Fogo through his spyglass. His forces had landed on one of the minor islands of the archipelago.

  Ue Yota could not see which ship left the vicinity of the volcano - but the sea carried the sound of its engines across to his ears. It was not the sound of The Roaring Wind.

  And Lord Yota knew in his hardened heart, that his favorite son had died. He showed no sorrow - and even if he would have wept, the armor and reflective glass would hide it. Lumbering across the beach in his mechanized suit of armor, Lord Yota desperately tried to lead his soldiers into a proper charge.

  From the moment their carrier craft had touched down on this island, no human enemy had appeared. Instead, an older breed of Mechao's guardian beasts had attacked the noisy newcomers. Scaly baboon-lizard chimeras came screeching at them from the palmtrees, chilling the hearts of the soldiers.

  The furry creatures leapt like frogs onto the riflemen, clawing and biting with fangs and claws. Their screeches sounded strangely half-human, and that was the worst part of it - soon, the rumor spread that these animals were Lepers, deformed humans. Panic spread out of control; the forces paralyzed and confused troops could not gather and attack.

  Ue Yota, a man with many Summer Jousts to his credit, fired at the strange creatures from a distance and missed.

  He cried out: "Somebody! Show me an enemy I can fight!"

  His innate phobia of anything even remotely like Lepers was beginning to win over his sense of honor. Had there been a human foe nearby, the prospect of surrender would have been acceptable to him - but in the absence of human enemies, surrender was unthinkable.

  A suffocating sense of futility filled the aging, wiry nobleman. What, he wondered bitterly, was this crusade being fought and died for?

  Only pride kept Lord Yota going, fighting his own fear, as he waited for a chance to retreat with honor.

  Chapter 62

  Gloomy afternoon turned into night. Lord Bes Orbes had his troops and knights scattered over three neighboring islands. These forces encountered much the same opposition as Yota's men: mutated, hostile beasts and no humans.

  Dispatches and light signals had been frequently used, as well as air support - and eventually, the incoming reports convinced Lord Orbes that the islands were abandoned. He ordered a full retreat to the southern main island, where he was to join their commander Lord Pasko.

  His soldiers and knight-sons were grateful to leave the frightening, cursed islands - yet the prospect of entering another witchdoctor's island frightened them more.

  Saburé and Kensaburé Orbes were sitting in the same ship as they approached the smoke-shrouded main island. Both of them brooded over the same question. Was Dohan Damon, Lord Damon's renegade son, present somewhere down there? Could they fight a former trusted friend and ally?

  A change occurred in mind of the younger brother Kensaburé - a notion that had been growing in his mind since before the war.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth to be heard over the engine noise, and spoke in his older brother's ear.

  "Saburé! You must not tell our father - but I think this is wrong, what we are doing today."

  Saburé glowered at his brother over the shoulder pad of his armor, too bewildered and tired to say anything.

  The younger brother persisted: "You know as well as I, that Tharlos is a scheming no-good traitor, ever since the Summer Joust! Why are we taking orders from him, against honest and noble people such as Dohan? Why?"

  Saburé took off one armored glove - with an effort, since his heavy, motorized armor was switched off for recharging - and slapped Kensaburé's forehead.

  "You fool!" he said tersely, anxiously checking that nobody heard them. "Are you asking to be shot as a deserter? Or have you soiled yourself?"

  Kensaburé blushed, and felt a strong urge to punch his brother - neither of them were clever with words, and they were easily angered.

  "I'm not a little brat any longer, Saburé! I'm a real knight now - I've been in battle, and I'm not putting up with your bullying."

  Saburé merely grunted at this, and turned away to watch the steadily approaching main island.

  "Besides," Kensaburé added, "the signs are against us. What if Darc really is the Singing King - what if the Goddess is trying to warn us not to attack! That burning mountain..."

  Saburé stiffened with fear, but kept his indifferent stance. Infuriated, Kensaburé blurted out a secret that would make his older brother take notice.

  "And I've been listening to Darc's radio transmissions! I think he speaks the truth -"

  Before Kensaburé finished, Saburé slammed his bare hand over his brother's mouth. White-faced, he hissed: "Be quiet!"

  The soldiers, strapped to their seats nearby, saw the brothers quarrel and drew their own conclusions. Fighting morale among the passengers dropped fast.

  The Orbes clan's jet fleet landed on the beach. The knights screwed on their helmets and gloves, and switched on their armor motors. Lord Orbes stepped out first, leading his troops over to the parked fleet of Lord Tharlos. He was quickly briefed on the present situation.

  Orbes raised his broadsword, switched on the loudspeaker in his armor, and bellowed: "Red company stays behind to guard the ships! Behind me, sons... for the greater good of Castilia... we join the main force! Attack the enemy stronghold! CHARGE!"

  Bes and his sons ignited their jetpacks. As they soared above the beach and speeded up across the burning, blackened hillside, their footsoldiers paced after them.

  After a brief hassle with the guards, Awonso was allowed inside the castle. Heavily armed soldiers were posted all over the fortress, and the tension was evident among the household staff.

  Awonso was ordered to wait until the busy Lady Bwynn and Librian had time to meet him. He sat down on a stool outside the entrance to the war room, and watched people pass by.

  After an agonizing wait, a guard Awonso did not recognize came up to him.

  "Awonso?" the guard asked casually. "Follow me into the library. Librian will see you there."

  The man escorted him down the stairs. They walked into the library - and the soldier bolted the main door, shutting them both in. Awonso could see no sign of Librian in the dusty halls. He turned and saw the sword gleam in the soldier's hand
.

  The soldier stepped closer, more business-minded than exalted. "You should've listened to our offer while you still had the chance, brat," he stated. "The Merchants' Lodge can't afford you to stand in our way."

  The apprentice librarian darted away with a speed the man had not expected. He ran for the door to Librian's small private office, slammed the door shut behind him and knocked over a bookshelf, blocking the door.

  The man threw his weight at the door. Awonso heard him shout: "You can't escape! There's no way out!"

  Awonso saw the thin door creak and bulge as the assassin battered it. In the course of a few seconds, he would get through - and the only weapon Awonso carried was a tiny penknife.

  He searched frantically among the bookshelves for some concealed weapon or escape route. Naturally, no laser-weapons lay in store in the highly flammable library.

  The soldier kept ramming the door, teasing him with blasphemous words; some merchants still secretely revered the old, forbidden god of greed.

  " Ho-ho-ho , brat! Setan-Klaws is coming to put you in his big sack!"

  Awonso spotted a thick power cable which ran along a far corner, disappearing behind a stack of books. He brushed aside the books and found a tall metal locker with a signplate:

  -DANGER-

  RESERVED BY CITY LAW FOR THE GUILD OF ELECTROMECHANICS

  This room wasn't built for storing books, Awonso thought absent-mindedly. He wedged open the locker door with his penknife. Inside, he found a humming nest of brightly colored wires, levers, and fuses - all bearing obscure code letters and numbers, that only proper guild-members could decipher.

  Behind Awonso, only meters away, the door finally broke off its hinges and crashed down. The man stumbled in, pushing and groping at the overturned shelf that lay in his way.

  With a groan, he made a forceful heave and shoved the shelf to the floor. The frightened bright eyes of the apprentice scholar met the assassin's cold butcher's eyes. The man thrust out with his sword and the tip reached less than a meter from Awonso's heart.