by Beck, Greig
He still needed to prove himself. If he were honorable, she would tell him everything. If he weren’t, then she would slay him without a second thought.
*
Sorenson kept his eyes tightly shut as the mound of bodies above him was pulled down. Next, his feet were roughly bound together. He heard the Panterran’s guttural talk as the hundreds of other bodies he had been collected up. Now they were all to be dragged back to the Lygon camp for a victory feast… with the meat of his dead kin the main fare.
He used every ounce of his will to appear lifeless as the stink of the Lygons enveloped him. They had felt his arms and thighs, squeezing the flesh, organizing the corpses into grades of ‘meat’ quality. He was to be in the inferior category – the flesh on his long, hard and muscled frame too stringy and tough.
Just as well, for he soon realized that making the grade meant he could have been broken up for a quick meal on the way back to the camp. He tried to shut out the sound of the splintering bones and of limbs being ripped from their sockets.
He gritted his teeth – he knew fighting a Lygon while unarmed and unarmored would be difficult. But trying to fight a small army of them would mean death. He would need to wait. He knew that the closest Lygon camp was nearly a day’s march – an opportunity would present itself. It must.
For now… he would lie still, and pray for strength.
The Lygons huddled and argued. It seemed that killing all the Wolfen had turned out to be a bad idea. Now, instead of making the prisoners march, the task of dragging all the fresh meat back to the camp would be the job of several of the Lygon… yet to be chosen.
The arguments quickly turned into physical confrontations and some of the giant beasts took to each other with hammer, club, tooth and claw, until a roar from one creature subdued them all.
This large brute pushed his way roughly to the front, slashing at the faces of the fighting Lygons. Sorenson lay still with his eyes half closed but easily recognized the beast – Goranx, the slayer of his king and his brother, and the leader of the Lygon army. Princess Eilif’s broken arrow shaft still protruded from his wrist.
Sorenson carefully worked his head below a corpse tied next to him. If Goranx found him, even if he believed he was dead, he’d probably take his head, or mutilate his body just for the amusement it would bring him. Swinging at the monster’s belt were the heads of some of the Man-Kind beings, and also his Wolfen brother, Strom. Sorenson turned away.
Another roar from the giant, and several dozen of the massive beasts shouldered the ropes, and started to drag the bodies, like bunches of bloody grapes. They bounced across all types of terrain, and Sorenson felt every rock and branch. Without armor, the travelling was harsh, and after several hours Sorenson knew that the fur and skin on his back was becoming raw. He couldn’t afford to begin bleeding again – dead bodies didn’t bleed.
They entered a deeper section of the forest, and now were dragged along overgrown paths and in amongst the bracken and fallen trees. Sorenson became alert – there was more shelter now, and it would only be a few more hours until they reached the Lygon camp. There, escape would be impossible. It would have to be soon. He tensed, alert for the opportunity.
Sorenson, like the rest of the corpses, had roughly a body length of rope tying him to the main bunch of dead Wolfen. He had observed that even if one of the corpses got itself snagged on something, the massive brutes simply pulled harder until it became free, worrying not if the body became torn, or a limb was ripped free.
Sorenson felt his heart leap. A chance approached – a tree stump up ahead, and to the side of the group where he was bound. He waited, praying that the brutes continued to face forward.
As he approached the stump, he quickly sat up, and jumped forward, giving himself some slack in his rope, which he then looped around the stump. He grabbed the length nearest his ankles and braced his feet, using the stump as a counter measure – either he’d be ripped over the top of the stump, the stump would be lifted from the ground, or…
The rope became taught, its fibers groaned for an instant, and the Lygons cursed. Sorenson strained to keep the rope in place, he ground his teeth, it was now or never, he thought as he silently prayed.
One of the Lygons began to turn, and Sorenson held his breath, but the others, too bored, or too dumb to care, simply bent their shoulders and pulled harder. The rope popped, and Sorenson rolled into the brush. He turned and waited, listening. Nothing stopped, no shouts came – just the low rumble of Lygon voices, receding, and the sound of his fallen Wolfen brothers and sisters as they were dragged away.
He quickly untied his feet, standing unsteadily, and rolling his stiff muscles. He balled his fists and raised his face to the darkening sky. Odin give me strength, he prayed, and then started to run.
Chapter 4
Time For a Little Payback
The line of matte-black SUVs with darkened windows powered towards the Fermilab facility. To anyone watching, they looked like a line of aggressive, armor-plated beetles in attack formation.
Inside the lead vehicle, Colonel Marion Briggs leaned forward to look at the sky above the facility. Bruise-colored clouds now hung there permanently, and had started a slow rotation above the acceleration chamber – an airborne whirlpool forming in an angry sky. Strangely, just a few miles further out was clear. It seemed the weird weather was confined to this area alone.
Briggs sat back and thought about the scientist, Harper, and his warning about the potential dangers of trying to force the anomaly closed. Even if they nuked the entire site, burning a few square miles down to nothing but slag, it might not fully close the breach. It might just mean the freaking hole Harper and his pencil-neck boffins had punched through time and space was just buried for a while. And then by the time it did re-emerge, it would be too large to do anything about, other than bend over and kiss our collective asses goodbye.
But, there was another option – an extremely dangerous and potentially suicidal option. They could enter the vortex and retrieve the red diamond initiator themselves. She had already lost one team, but Briggs knew that the sacrifice had been worthwhile. After all, what price good intel… and they had learned a lot.
She sat back and smiled. Things would be done right this time. Because this time, she was going. Those freakish monsters were about to get some of their own lessons. Lesson-one: Earth has its own monsters, and she would make the introductions personally.
Briggs laughed softly. The US military had been working hard to move away from its image as an aggressor. Normally, entering foreign territory with any high-powered kit would be vetoed immediately, but this time the creatures had attacked their people first, and now they had a human as a hostage. That gave her mission full combat legitimacy – she was free to make war, under Presidential order. It was all too perfect.
She licked her lips and thought again of the image feeds that had been sent back to them by the probe. There was a whole world there – pristine and vast, and one she fully intended to appropriate on behalf of the United States of America. She snorted; how many soldiers got to make a righteous war, rescue their citizens, and potentially stake a claim on an entire world in the name of their country. She’d be famous. She’d be Christopher Columbus and General Patton rolled into one tough Special Forces kick-ass package.
This time she would not be unprepared. The giant creatures that had attacked her previous team had been enormously powerful, armored, and aggressive. Further they were non-human – no doe-eyed Eloi dancing around maypoles to tug at week-kneed, liberal heart-strings. You saw one of these big bastards up close, you wanted it dead… before it damn well ate you.
Briggs looked over her shoulder at the four hulking frames of her soldiers sitting silently in the rear of her speeding vehicle, with the rest in the other nine SUVs. She had forty Special Forces Delta Team – the best of
the best – and she had something else… she had Samson. Her hand-picked Delta Ops captain, recommended multiple times for bravery awards, commendations, and also for immediate discharge on the basis of an aggressive psychopathic psychology. The man was a killing machine. But as a soldier he was fearless, hard to kill, and followed orders. He was perfect.
Those freaks got the jump on us last time. Time for a little payback, she thought, as they slowed at the entrance gates.
*
At his desk, Albert Harper leaned forward on his knuckles and exhaled miserably as he watched the line of black vehicles slow at the security gate. The guard looked briefly at the documentation, saluted, and then stepped back to the booth to open the electronic fence. He hadn’t needed to salute; he wasn’t armed forces and didn’t work for them. Seems the military assuming control of the project had confused just about everyone.
Harper sighed as his guard stayed at attention for each passing car. He guessed that Briggs had been in the lead car – her ferocious demeanor would make anyone obey or get the hell out of the way. That woman’s a nasty piece of work, he thought. The SUVs accelerated in unison, almost as if they had been chained together. Bringing up the rear was some sort of massive eighteen-wheeler painted a non-reflective matt black. He could only wonder at what it contained.
Harper squinted at the screen. Crack drivers, as well as marksman, frogmen, hand-to-hand combat specialists, demolition experts. He shook his head. Just as well they knew nothing about particle physics, or he might as well go home right now, he thought glumly.
He checked his watch: they’d be here, in his office, in around ten minutes. He knew that Briggs planned to enter the anomaly gate with several dozen fully armed elite soldiers. The breach in time and space needed to be closed, and finding the boy, and the acceleration initiator, was the priority, but by now they had no idea where he was in the world, and the world was a big one. He snorted. Well, of course it was – it was ours – just at some distant point in the future.
Harper ground his teeth, to try and settle the niggling feeling he was getting in the back ones that had once held metallic fillings. He didn’t know exactly how much time they had before a tipping point was reached, but based on how quickly the magnetic cores were degrading, he guessed it could only be a few more months, maybe weeks. But then what? He pulled at his lower lip. What happened if the distortion hole grew to a point where it started to pull large matter, all matter, into some sort of gravitational vortex? Would it be satisfied with just the building, the city, the continent, or would it continue growing until it scoured clean the surface of their world?
Harper straightened. Briggs had threatened to take him along for the ride this time. His colleague, Takeda, had accompanied the Green Berets on their first foray, and never made it back. He knew they had all died brutally The thought of it made him sick. Might as well shoot me here, he thought.
He looked at the monitor again and saw the cars slide to a halt. The hulking soldiers stepped from the vehicles. Briggs strode up and down their line, with her hands on her hips, the soldiers coming to attention. They looked professional, formidable, and deadly.
He turned to the door. Nothing to fear, but fear itself. What crap, he thought miserably, and went down to meet them.
*
Colonel Marion Briggs stood on the ramp at the back of the enormous truck that she had ordered parked across the front of Fermilab’s main building. It was eighty feet long and
thirty-five tons… and that was before they added another ten tons of armor plating. The monstrous vehicle was a mobile command centre, with enough ionized shielding to protect its occupants and their sensitive equipment against everything from a significant EMP wave to uranium tipped RPG strikes.
The ‘beast’, as it was affectionately known, would watch and listen to everything that went on – in this world or wherever Briggs decided to take her team.
Satisfied that everything was in order, she jumped down from the ramp so she could pace along the line of men and women assembled before her. All over six feet tall, they had been chosen for their aggression, skills, and unique ability to survive hostile terrain, and act as a fully autonomous unit on foreign soil. Where they were going was about as foreign as it got.
The Delta Force team’s brutal and scarred faces, though young, reflected a life of hard trauma and pain, testimony to theatres of conflict all across the globe – though none of the missions would ever be found in any publicly available dossier.
Each of them wore a black, non-reflective uniform, interwoven with a Kevlar thread at the joints to give maximum rotational ability. Larger areas, like the chest, thighs and biceps were covered in ceramic plating, with armadillo strips down over torso – the composites virtually weightless but harder than steel. She nodded her approval.
The team stood stock-still, HK416 assault rifles strapped at their chest, with accessories for night vision, sound suppressors and grenade launchers. The carbine was a variant, replacing the M4, but with a shorter barrel for close-quarters combat. The A5 carbine had a gas piston kick to ramp up projectile velocity – it was short, light and deadly. Each carried a variety of knives at their hip, mostly K-Bar with night blackened blades and a tanto edge – like sloping chisels – guaranteed not to break or dull against rock, steel or bone.
She stopped in front of one huge man and looked him up and down. He stared straight ahead, his blue eyes unwavering.
‘All right there, Teacher?’
‘Delta is always right, ma’am.’ Big Jim Teacher, or Teach to his comrades, stood a little straighter. He was one of her leading Specs Ops agents, an excellent strategist, as well as an unnaturally-gifted combat specialist.
‘Good.’ She put her hands on her hips, feeling her own blades nestling there. She nodded; they were ready. She turned and squinted at sound of an approaching Fermilab guard – slightly overweight and graying at the temples, he jogged towards them, puffing hard and holding up a hand. By his side, trotted an enormous German Shepherd dog.
The animal’s eyes were like gun barrels, such was the intensity of its gaze… and focused directly on Briggs. The animal’s eyes unnerved her. They were way too intelligent. The guard yelled to her, but she ignored him and turned back to her team, running a hand up and across her head, feeling the military crew-cut bristles spiking at her palm. Her mouse-blond hair, normally pulled back into a severe bun, was no more – in the field pragmatism was required, not aesthetics.
Briggs circled her hand in the air, and the team turned as one toward the large doors.
‘Hold up, you can’t park there.’ The guard increased his pace, and tilted his head down to speak a few words to the dog, who sprinted forward. It immediately began to nose in amongst the soldiers, sniffing each in turn. When it came to Briggs she swatted it away. To her surprise, the dog stood on its hind legs, now taller than the colonel, and stared down into her face, the eerie cold eyes, seeming to burn right through her.
‘Piss off.’ She went to take a step, but the huge dog moved to place itself between her and the front of the building.
The guard chuckled. ‘Don’t mind…’
Briggs balled her fists. ‘I warned Harper to keep these freaks outta my face.’ She backhanded the animal across the nose – hard – the ceramic knuckles on her gloves ensuring it was a painful blow. She turned away again, and started giving a few more instructions to her team.
The guard’s good humor fell away in an instant. ‘Hey, cut that out.’ He strode towards Briggs, and made the mistake of reaching out a hand to place it on her shoulder, and tug.
Briggs reacted immediately. Like lightening, she spun, grabbed his wrist and twisted, making the man cry out in shock and pain. She looked at his name-tag.
‘Listen, Mr. Loeman…’
Things happened quickly. The dog snarled and leapt for the Colonel’s hand, b
ut before the animal could grab her forearm, one of the soldiers had materialized beside her. The man moved unnaturally fast and silently for someone who was easily six and a half feet tall. He landed a cracking blow into the side of the dog’s head that sent it sprawling. The blow would have left a man unconscious, especially as it was delivered with the heavily-plated gloves.
But, a German Shepherd’s skull is thicker than a human’s and covered in a layer of fur, so the animal came back fast, this time its eyes round with fury and long teeth bared like white daggers. It leapt to attack. The soldier barely moved, just holding up one arm, the forearm horizontal to protect his neck and face, and also present an armored barrier for the dog to latch on to. The animal did as expected; it bit down hard on his arm. In a single smooth motion, the soldier pulled his longest blade from its sheath, and brought it up between the animal’s ribs.
There was a bloodcurdling scream of pain, and then the animal fell away from his arm. He leant to wipe the blade on the dog’s coat.
The guard came at the enormous Special Forces soldier, but Briggs shouted to him: ‘Halt, or you’ll be next.’
Her voice froze him. The enormous soldier with the blond flat-top crewcut stood motionless, holding the dark blade at his side, but kept an unwavering gaze on the guard. There was a slight satisfied smile on his lips.