From all over the pavilion, Insurgents wrenched themselves away from bear hugs, kangaroo kickings and goat gorings, straggling to obey their colonel’s command.
Daivid opened his link to the Insurgents’ main channel. “Attention, Insurgent forces. I am Lt. Daivid Wolfe of the TWC Space Service. I’ve been sent by my commanding officer to negotiate a surrender.”
“Go ahead, then!” Ayala howled in his ear. “Save me the trouble of killing you all. Surrender!”
“Not us,” Daivid said, in exasperation, sticking his muzzle around the edge of the arch and firing off a blast. “You! Try to handle this like mature beings. You’re outnumbered a hundred to one.”
“Only a hundred to one? Hah! Then here is my answer!”
The boom! of a heavy gun firing made Wolfe and all of his squad flatten themselves to the ground. The embossed image of Bunny Hug above Daivid fractured into pieces no larger than his hand and rained down on them.
“That looks funny,” Norgy Porgy said. Daivid glanced up at the giant pig. A section of rebar from the pavement had penetrated through the big rose-colored body from end to end. Daivid leaped up and dashed forward in a hail of armor-piercing rounds to leap up to save Norgy, then realized he wasn’t really injured. The puppeteer controlling him was safe in a titanium-lined bunker. No one was hurt, but he had nearly gotten himself killed rescuing a doll. He dragged his attention back to what he was doing.
“Back at you,” he yelled at his opponent, and signalled to Ambering to fire the twinkie-gun.
A huge shell rocketed out of the barrel in a haze of brass. In Daivid’s scopes the streak that represented the white-hot core of depleted uranium arrowed through lighter obstructions, such as the Policeman’s Booth at the corner of Law St. and Order Blvd., and into the midst of Ayala’s forces. The pavement exploded, sending soldiers and pieces of soldiers flying in all directions. But their guns were not silenced. More shells blasted into the walls of the Carrot Palace. Wolfe dove for cover.
“Give me Wingle’s controller chip,” Ayala ordered him, as the two groups exchanged fire. “I do not want it damaged, and neither do you. Give it up, or we will destroy you and the controller.”
“No way,” Wolfe said. “If you attack this site I will destroy the chip. I have it right here.” He waved a citrine-encrusted silver box out the door at the Insurgent force. It was actually the soap dish from his hotel room. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it? You’re not going to make it, so you might as well go away!”
“You will give it up to me, at once,” Ayala shouted. “Or else!”
“Or else what?” Wolfe shouted back.
“Bring our leverage,” Ayala announced grandly. No one moved. Wolfe took a surreptitious look at his scopes to make certain no one else was sneaking up on them.
“Sir,” Thielind whispered urgently into his link, “I’m monitoring Any Street. A clear pod just left shuttle two, lifted straight up. It’s full of people. They’ve got hostages!”
Wolfe felt his heart pounding. “Can you see who they are?”
“No, sir. The infrared’s inconclusive, of course. They’ve all got bags over their heads. I think they wanted to fly that shuttle to the Carrot Palace, but it’s surrounded by parking droids. They’ve pulled off part of the drive housing. We didn’t know about the pod.”
“No one could have guessed, ensign,” Wolfe said. His nerves returned in full force. He stood on the edge of a moral precipice now. Anything he did from this point on would be successful, or a terrifying, criminal failure. The roiling in his gut reached nuclear reactor proportions.
“There’s nothing you can say that will make me give up this chip!” he announced, over Ayala’s frequency.
“We will see about that,” the colonel said. The fighting died around them as the pod set down in the pavilion. Two of the best armed Insurgents pushed open the escape panel and yanked one man at random from the huddle. They pushed the man, blindfolded and with bound wrists, toward Ayala, who took him by the collar of his shirt. He held up a small black control.
“Let them go, Ayala!” Wolfe shouted.
“I’m so glad you know who I am,” the scruffy-bearded man said, gazing coolly at the wavering shape that was his opponent, as if he could see right through the ghost effect. “So you know I mean business. All of these charming people,” he gestured at the hostages, “were trying to leave this town. I cannot imagine why they wouldn’t want to stay in this fine place, with such a fantastic attraction as Wingle World to amuse them! But they will die if you do not give me the chip. I have a box, you have a box. Mine detonates the escape pod. I will exchange it for yours. What is your answer?”
“My answer?” Wolfe echoed, hand plunging to his side and coming up with his pistol. “Here it is!”
“You’re going to shoot me?” Ayala scoffed, reading a weapon in the infrared scopes of his helmet.
“Not exactly!”
The phut of the Dockery 5002 machine pistol firing was barely audible, but the smack! as the round struck the hostage full in the chest might as well have been a nuclear explosion. Ayala stared in disbelief at the gaping black hole that went straight through the body. The man staggered backwards, arms flailing, but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t fall. And he didn’t bleed.
Ayala swept off the hood. The man stared at him.
“You’re too ugly to look at,” the puppet said derisively, making a face. “Put the hood back on.”
Ayala’s face turned red with rage. “Kill them!” he shouted, pointing at Wolfe. “Kill them all!”
Wolfe’s next shot took the controller out of Ayala’s hands. Jones zoomed down out of the sky on his dragon and caught it in mid-air. The sides of the rescue pod peeled down like the skin of a sectioned orange, and the puppets inside ran for cover. He shot again at Ayala, but the Insurgent chief had hit the dirt and was rolling out of the way.
“Defensive tactics!” Wolfe shouted.
The Cockroaches opened fire. The Insurgents pressed forward from every direction. The Cockroaches fled up the stairs, providing covering fire for one another. As they had planned, the uniformed ‘normals’ began to pop up a few at a time from behind the plascrete monoliths, shooting out of all four entrances. The Insurgents charged up the stairs, some falling as a lucky shot from one of the puppets hit them. Rebels clambered over the bodies of their fellows, trying to follow the ghostly outlines of the troopers. Most of them shot at the blue-uniformed troopers they could see. Every bullet fired at a puppet, Wolfe reasoned, was another bullet wasted.
“Keep it up,” he urged his ‘troops.’ “Lin, are you ready?”
“Standing by,” the senior chief said. She and Jones rode the dragons over the courtyard, drawing fire, but steadily urging the Insurgent forces upward and into the Carrot Palace. Hundreds of them crowded the archways. Silhouetted against the sun, they were easy targets. The Cockroaches blazed away at them. The survivors hunkered down behind concrete slabs, returning fire.
“Ambering, prepare to abandon ship!” Wolfe commanded.
“Aye, aye, sir,” the gunner shouted, as an explosion echoed through the communication link. “Whew! That one took out part of the ceiling, sir. I’ve only got about two meters of solid roof to lie on.”
“All right, everyone!” Wolfe said, “Down the rabbit hole!”
Steadily, the defenders began to withdraw towards the center of the Carrot Palace. Deliberately, he allowed them to lose ground, encouraging more and more of the Insurgents to crowd inside. He wanted more. He wanted them all!
“I’m over the hole, sir,” Borden said, over the mastoid link.
“Go, go, go!” Wolfe shouted. “They’re coming!”
O O O
“What is all this?” Ayala asked, scanning the interior of the Carrot Palace as they swarmed inward, firing at the bobbing heads. “What is all this garbage doing here?”
“Perhaps an art display,” Oostern suggested. “Or some kind of sacred site?”
“An art di
splay for children, with broken glass?” Ayala asked, picking up some of the debris and letting it sift from his glove to clink on the heap from which it had come.
Zing! Ayala dove for the floor even before his brain registered that he had been shot at. He picked out the heat images in his display, and aimed over the piles of rubble at the nearest source. It seemed to be vaguely humanoid in shape, but after the force he had faced so far, he was making no assumptions. Where were the blue images?
Signalling to his soldiers to spread out among the monoliths and boulders of plascrete, he kept up a steady return fire, pinpointing his targets. A large group was situated close to the northern door. With a quick hand signal he called for gas grenades.
“Knock them out!” he ordered. “I want that chip. That fool just might destroy it if we corner him.”
The grenadiers scurried to obey, launching the green cylinders in an arc that landed them squarely on top of the defenders.
“Cough,” Wolfe shouted to the defending puppets, then crawled away behind the concrete chunks, trying to stay out of sight of the invading force. The ‘troopers’ broke into dramatic hacking and wheezing. He grinned. He would have believed in their discomfort, if he hadn’t known for certain none of them had lungs.
“A-heck-heck-heck,” choked Sparky, clutching his throat with pathos.
“You win the acting award,” Wolfe informed him sourly. “Now, come on. We have to leave.”
“Do my best,” Sparky said. “Always … love my work.”
“What?”
The puppet posed suddenly, with a raised forefinger as if he was about to speak again, and froze in place. It dawned suddenly on Wolfe that Sparky was not playing around for dramatic effect. Had something gone wrong in the old man’s laboratory?
“Spidey, respond!” he shouted.
“Aye, sir!” the high-pitched voice squeaked.
“What just happened? Wingle’s puppet just stopped talking. He never stops talking.” A screaming noise on the channel interrupted the corlist’s transmission. “Repeat? What did you say?”
O O O
The corlist fired round after round at the party of Insurgents flattened underneath the ruined carousel. His bulbous eyes kept swiveling back to the smoke coming out of the ruined conduit leading down into the tunnel. He activated his link again.
“I am sorry, Big Bad. I have failed. The Inventor’s Workshoppe was hit. I am sending a team below to see what has happened.”
“I’ll go,” Ewanowski said, and signed for two of his puppet aides to give him covering fire as he headed for the hidden ramp. “You don’t need me up here.”
A few moments later, the semicat signalled through from the laboratory. “He’s gone. Gas. At least it was quick.”
Aaooorru’s stalk eyes drooped inside his helmet. He reported back to Wolfe.
“Let them through, Spidey,” Wolfe’s voice said sadly, but resolutely “Follow on. I don’t need you there any longer.”
O O O
Full of anger, Wolfe looked around him for targets. He popped up to shoot, now with his machine gun, now with the Dockery pistol. The screaming of dying Insurgents only made him hungry for more. How could he have been so careless? He couldn’t blame Aaooorru. Everything that happened here, today, was his responsibility, and his alone. The pain in his head as an armor-piercing round creased his helmet brought him back to his senses. He suddenly realized he couldn’t see any more trooper ID tags over the red-in-blue shapes in his heads-up-display. He was the last Cockroach in the Carrot Palace.
“Is everybody down?” he asked.
“Aye, sir,” Borden said. “We’re all retreating from the zone. Quickly, sir!”
“How many have we got in here?”
“At least eighty on my scopes, sir.”
“Puppets, retreat! Lin!” Wolfe shouted, diving for the hole. “Blow the place. Now!”
“You’re too close,” the chief’s voice replied. “The concussion will kill you!”
“Just blow it!” Wolfe said, swinging into the tunnel, not waiting for the ramp to lower under him. He dropped to the floor and began to run. It was dark in the passageway except for the tiny red eyes of the emergency lights, so he used his helmet map to navigate. The nearest corner was over ninety meters away. Even with the assist of his power suit he couldn’t get there before the blast came. Thirty meters. Forty.
Suddenly, with a roar like a volcano erupting the floor lifted up and flung him forward. His back pressed into his chest, and the world went black.
O O O
“Find them!” Ayala shouted. The troopers had escaped again. No one was left inside the Carrot Palace except blue-suited automata. He strode out into the courtyard, flanked by his officers. “Where could they have gone?”
“This park covers hectares,” Oostern said. “There’s no way to know wh—”
A noise louder than a starship engine burst behind them. Ayala was only aware of the thunder in his ears as he was thrown out over the Meadow Pavilion and into the empty escape pod. Gravel and debris shot outward, peppering the safety pod. Ayala ducked automatically against the deafening rumble, but he was safe. Outside his shelter, Armageddon was descending.
Individual blasts of white fire erupted all the way around the base of the Carrot Palace. Huge chunks of orange plascrete shot outward, scoring the green cobbled pavement as they tumbled. The sides splintered into long shards and fell. All four of the carrot-shaped turrets tilted in toward the center of the building and almost seemed to turn inside out, then disappeared into the deafening clouds of dust. Ayala was unable to move, but the plastic shell protected him while he watched with utter disbelief as the walls of the Carrot Palace collapsed under their own weight.
When the dust cleared, shards of the orange façade lay in a rough circle on the raised pavement. Cries for help and screams of pain arose out of the ruin. Bodies sprawled covered with dust on the torn green cobbles. Ayala rose gingerly, his limbs shaking with unaccustomed weakness, to try and help his soldiers. Oostern crawled to assist. One of his upper forelimbs had been torn off, and his head was gashed.
“It was a trap,” Ayala whispered, staggering forward. “They brought us here to destroy us! They must all die!”
O O O
Daivid felt hands pounding on his chest, and an urgent voice calling his name. “Lt. Wolfe! Lt. Wolfe, answer me!”
Daivid batted feebly at the hands. He pried his eyes open, even though it hurt to do so. “Stop hitting me,” he murmured.
“I’m not hitting you,” D-45 said.
“What? I can’t hear you!”
“I say, I’m not hitting you!” the squad leader shouted. “You got caught in the blast!” The trooper leaned over him as Gire helped him to sit up. Together they helped him take off his helmet. “Your web suit’s been giving you CPR. Doc said your heart stopped for a while. Borden’s been frantic wondering if you bought it. You okay?”
“I … yes.” Daivid licked his lips, and Gire snapped his fingers.
“Nurse!”
A three-eyed green bug-eyed monster sidled up and handed the doctor a water bottle with a straw. He put it to Daivid’s lips.
The lieutenant drank greedily. The CBS,P observed his tight shoulders and began running its backrub program. Daivid sighed with relief. He nodded toward the BEM. “I thought you were afraid of them.”
Gire beamed. “These are good aliens,” he said, enunciating carefully so Daivid could read his lips. “They told me I can dream about them. I think I will. They’ll help keep away the bad ones. Your vitals are returning to normal. I would like to tell you to rest for a while, but you won’t.”
“No, I won’t.” Daivid put a hand on the floor to push himself up. He turned to face D-45. “Wingle’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Gas. Painless. Aaooorru’s kicking himself with all his feet, but I keep telling him he is not to blame.”
Wolfe bowed his head for a moment. “Any other casualties?”
�
�None of ours.”
“How about Ayala?”
“Still out there,” D-45 said. “But we killed about eighty of his people.”
“I want him,” Daivid said, resolutely, taking the helmet back. “Wingle would have wanted me to take him out. Ayala still owes blood for murdering his staff. Let’s go get him.”
O O O
“Welcome back, sir,” Lin’s voice said in his ear as he strode out into the daylight from the shelter of the carousel. He had to turn the volume up to maximum. The explosion had deafened him so badly that the calliope music from the carousel was a faint whistle in the background.
“Thank you,” Wolfe said, admiring the ruins of the Carrot Palace. The entire structure had collapsed in a gigantic ring of orange debris topped by the four giant carrots that had been the turrets. Two of them still had flags to wave. A few pieces had fallen on the pavilion, where they were being used as cover by the remaining Insurgent soldiers. “Nice work! Have you ever thought of a sideline in demolitions?”
“How do you think I make pin money?”
“I was thinking sheep herding?” Wolfe suggested. “How about rounding up the rest of these bastards?”
“I’d love to,” the chief replied. Whatever was wrong between them had been put to the side for now.
“Good. All right, all of you slackers!” he shouted. “Lock and load! Special Auxiliaries, ground troops and shock troops, into the Meadow Pavilion right now! Dragons, front and center.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Lin and Jones replied.
“Aye, aye, sir,” added a new, raspy voice.
“Let’s see how they like these apples,” Wolfe said. He threw a new magazine into his machine gun and hefted it, marching into the fray. Behind him came the costumed characters, more and more seeming to arise out of the ground as he closed in on the Carrot Palace.
The two scout vehicles zoomed out of the air, hammering the Insurgents on the ground with tracer bullets. Where troops tried to break and run, they let loose with a burst of plasma fire that scorched the pavement. The Insurgents ran back and forth, peppering the pilots with gunfire that pinged off the protective shields like rain, but they were being herded steadily into the center of the pavilion.
Strong Arm Tactics Page 40