by Ryder Stacy
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.
They rode and fired lasers and fought to keep back the welling tears at the devastating destruction of their own forces. All the elephants, the riders who would never see their wives or children again! The sheer hideous waste of it all! And perhaps worst of all, though they had undoubtedly gained time for the rest of the army to move out, Rockson knew one thing for certain. And it made his heart sink like a ball of lead into the ocean of his soul. There was no way in hell they were going to be able to defeat Killov even with ten thousand elephants.
Nineteen
If Rockson had basically thought of himself as a man without an overabundance of fear, other than a few palpitations here and there, he was disabused of that notion as he and Rahallah rode like the wind just one step ahead of the pursuing sky-mountains. It was one thing to be killed by a man, or even taken out by one or another of the rad beasts that filled the globe. But this was of a different order. Smashed into something resembling ketchup, less than ketchup—just melted into the ground along with everything else that happened to get caught beneath the falling death.
“Come on, baby, move that big ass,” Rock shouted as he leaned over toward the war bull’s flapping right ear. But the great beast didn’t need any prodding on that account. It was feeling its own brand of fear—an emotion that it hadn’t had much experience with either. Somehow it knew that many, if not all the others, of its species who had been riding alongside it just minutes before were kaput. There was a telepathic link between the animals. And it could feel them no more. Could make no contact—just empty ether when it reached out to touch their animal souls.
The falling mountains grew even closer, smashing down on every side of them, making thundering sounds that seemed as if they would crack their very eardrums. Rock had no idea how they weren’t crushed; so many of the things seemed to be landing only feet away. But though the crushing mountains were perhaps the deadliest weapon next to the atomic bomb ever invented, the handlers of the levitation stones riding far behind the damage they were causing perhaps couldn’t see exactly what it was they were crushing. Accuracy was not at a premium. But then it didn’t have to be.
They skirted along the leeward of a dune, Rahallah in the lead, his elephant ten yards ahead of Kral. On the other side of the wall of sand they could hear the immense stones stamping, searching out anything that lived. And then, luck. A thick fog bank rolled in right over the top of the desert sands. And within seconds the t
wo elephants were lost inside, invisible to the outside world. Rahallah’s elephant slowed automatically once it was a few hundred feet inside. Kral came up right behind him and grabbed his tail so they wouldn’t get lost—a result of the training that the creatures had undergone over the years.
They slid off sideways through the fog, along a set of dunes. The Amun weapons-handlers didn’t need to see much to guide their weapons—but they needed some sighting of targets every mile or so. As the rocks drove up and down, the two men shot away from the action. The moving mountains didn’t follow, the men could hear the thunder for miles. Then the stones were heading off due southeast, toward the Nile.
Rockson leaned far forward so his chest was lying atop the neck of the war beast. He could feel the animal below him, feel its power as the great dark legs churned through the sands like an oceanliner’s propellers through the sea. They seemed to go through the thick soupy mist for an hour after the great booms had disappeared miles off. The crazy bastards under Killov’s command didn’t seem to have any particular strategy for conquering the countryside. Just kill everything, let the devil sort it all out later. You couldn’t surrender or even agree to be on his side if he wasn’t interested. Just a madman uprooting his Earth garden’s human weeds with ruthless, mortal blows.
At last they emerged from the fog and could see the desert ahead for miles. Rahallah led them on, heading due south now. Rockson hadn’t the foggiest idea where he was. Doubtless both elephants had more sense of location than he did right now. Which made him feel just great, in addition to the wonderful morning it had already been.
They meandered for another half hour or so through increasingly complex interwoven patterns of dunes, like a veritable maze of sand, then reached a vast and chasmed plain at the start of which the earth sank down nearly a thousand feet with sharp jutting rock formations and caves everywhere. As if he were seeing traffic signs, Rahallah just kept his beast going, threading his way right through each crevasse and chasm. Suddenly, as they rounded a bend, ten lasers were aimed at them from the trunks of ten war elephants standing side by side. Not a sight one wanted to come on unprepared! But the handlers above recognized their own and opened their ranks, staring at the two silently as it was not their rank to question.