Desert Kings

“Is that their baron or some kinda god?” a trooper asked curiously. The statue was of a man carrying a longblaster and powder horn, so it had to be a sec man of some kind. He’d seen hunters wearing the same kind of fringed clothing back east. The fringe waved in the breeze and helped keep off the flies and skeeters.

“The great-grandfather of their baron, is more like it,” Delphi replied, running calculations inside his head. If the Boston Minuteman had been facing the southeast, then the main road should be to their right. Hopefully, the physics lab was still standing, or else this whole trip would be a waste. Delphi only had limited resources since being thrown out of Department Coldfire, and every failure threatened his very existence.

Just for an instant, the cyborg relived the awful moment when a friend told him that the executive council had ordered his termination for the failure to retrieve the test subject, aka Doctor Theophilus Tanner. The occasional lack of success on a mission was to be expected in the chaos of the Deathlands, but Delphi had broken too many rules, slaughtered too many gene-pure people, in his mad quest for Tanner. All would have been forgiven if he had accomplished the task, but this level of failure meant his doom. Knowing he had only minutes in which to act, Delphi had reluctantly killed his friend and used his Ident card to raid the main warehouse for spare body parts and supplies, then established a supply cache at an abandoned redoubt. Now he walked the planet amid the dirty savages, posing as a trader, exchanging trinkets for food and buying the loyalty of men with guns and bullets, searching, hunting, committed to another desperate quest, this time to gain his own salvation.

“Well, nuke me running,” a trooper muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Never would have supposed they had flintlocks back then. Thought that was something new.”

“Yeah?” Cotton asked, suddenly interested. “And who the frag has new flintlocks?”

The trooper started to reply when something moved in the trees, jumping from branch to branch with blurring speed, and coming their way.

“Volley fire!” Bellany shouted, and the troopers raised their BAR blasters to unleash a crackling discharge. The hail of bullets tore through the treetops, sending a score of leaves fluttering to the ground. Then a bloody screamwing plummeted into sight to bounce off the marquee of a vine-covered movie theater. The lifeless body flopped to a fire bush and the leaves closed around the small, leathery body, wrapping it tight to extract every ounce of nourishment.

“Watch for the mate,” Bellany commanded, using a thumb to switch his AK-47 from single shot to full-auto.

The words were barely spoken when a larger screamwing lanced out of the tree to swoop down and skim along the ground, its deadly beak and claws ready to kill. Without hesitation, the troopers opened fire, peppering the plant life with hot lead. But the winged mutie was too fast and the thing was almost upon them, shrieking in rage and fury, when Delphi fired once. In an explosion of gory, the head was blown off the screamwing and the body slammed into Cotton, knocking over the startled sec woman.

“Th-thanks, Chief,” the woman panted, getting back to her feet. “Nuking hell, that thing was fast! How could you ever—”

“Yes, yes, you’re welcome,” the cyborg interrupted, already contemplating other matters. “Come on, I think the building is this way!”

As he rushed off by himself, the others scrambled to catch up with Delphi as he darted from a stand of banyan trees to a sagging church. An old skeleton was lashed to the cross on top, only the ropes and jungle vines holding the dried bones in place. A plastic rosary still hung from the broken neck of the Catholic priest, a fiberglass arrow shaft going through his ribs exactly where his heart would have been located; another jutted from the left eye socket.

Ruefully, Delphi knew that after skydark, most of the survivors went temporarily mad. Terrified and starving, they turned against any symbol of authority, police officers, physicians, judges and even the clergy, killing the very people who could have helped them stay alive. Damned themselves to a century of barbarism by their own foolishness and fear. Not many people could read these days, and the word “whitecoat” was the most vile curse word. Advanced technology was suspect and considered magic by most norms. Traveling across the scorched continent, Delphi had no trouble finding sec men to join his convoy—blasters with unlimited ammo was a lure that none could resist—but very few wanted anything to do with the engines, power plant or electronic machinery.

“This place makes my skin crawl,” a trooper whispered. “It’s evil. I can feel it.”

“Frag that noise,” Bellany snapped irritably. “Watch for more screamwings and stay with the chief!”

Frantically, Delphi looked around, then charged in a fresh direction. Yes, this was it. He was close, almost there! The main street of the ruins was made of red bricks, partially crumbled back into the moist earth, witch weed and dill growing thick between the irregular rows.

A large metallic shape filled an intersection and Delphi thought it was another army tank at first. But as he got closer he realized it was the bent wreckage of an ICBM missile. Probably one of the many that had been shot down during the brief war. The ceramic nose cone was still attached, and the cyborg nervously checked for any signs of life from the thermonuclear death machine, or worse, a radiation leak. But the missile registered as magnetically inert, and there was only the low-level background radiation that blanketed the world these days. The weapon that had killed the world was dead, Delphi noted sardonically. A sword beaten, not into a plowshare, but into landfill. The irony was almost poetic. In primordial harmony, sheet lightning thundered in the stormy sky.

Moving around the missile, Delphi paused, then moved forward with renewed vigor. There it was! At last!

The graphic arts building of the college was still standing, the marble walls intact, even if the facade was slightly tilting to the left, so that the front door was now a trapezoid. The window glass for all five stories was long gone, but stout bars still covered the lopsided openings.

“What a rad pit.” Bellany scowled, resting the stock of the Kalashnikov on a hip. “You sure there’s anything useful here, Chief?”

“Absolutely,” Delphi muttered, moving to the encrusted remains of the revolving door. The shatterproof glass was also missing from the frame, and he easily stepped through the portal and into the dim interior.

The terrazzo floor was thick with dirt, only a few very small plants having found the necessary purchase to grow on the resilient material. The furnishings in the lobby were draped with vines, the ceiling thick with cobwebs, and there was a definite reek of mildew in the air. Automatically, Delphi activated his nasal filters just in case there was any black mold in the structure.

“Use your handkerchiefs!” the cyborg snapped, pulling the knotted cloth over his nose and mouth.

Understanding the danger, the troopers rushed to obey, several of them sprinkling the cloths with a few drops of shine as additional protection.

Proceeding deeper into the building, Delphi felt his artificial eyes come alive and start to glow to counter the darkness. Instantly he countermanded the process and pulled around the lantern hanging at his side. Raising the flue, he flicked a butane lighter alive and applied the flame to the rag wick. When it caught, he lowered the flue and turned the wick all the way up for maximum illumination. The wick burned with an eerie blue light from the alcohol in the glass reservoir, which only served to give the darkness an additional n-earthly feel.

As the others did the same, the lobby came to life and Delphi could now see the trappings of civilization. Dead security cameras mounted on the walls, an ATM in the corner, pay phones, an alcove filled with candy and soda machines. The ghostly echoes of a bygone era.

Going to the reception desk, Delphi held the lantern high. Most of the lettering had fallen off over the intervening century, leaving behind only a cryptic scramble of partial words and names. Useless.

Looking around the lobby, Delphi saw two sets of double doors at opposite ends. One set was broken and hanging from the rusted hinges, the other still in place, the glass in the observation port cracked but intact.

Ipso facto, Delphi mentally chuckled, heading for them. However, the doors proved to be firmly locked. The IBM supercomputer had cost the college several million dollars. He had expected some decent security. Just not this good. Could…could this have been one of the hardpoints where the redoubts had been designed? Suddenly the cyborg felt a tingling rush of excitement. This could be the answer to his prayers! Not just a college, but a top-secret military laboratory!

“Blow it,” Delphi eagerly commanded, moving back a ways.

Now the troopers with the backpacks moved up, pulling out blocks of C-4 plastique. Taking over the work, Bellany cut the big blocks into small squares and attached them to the outside of the doors where the hinges should be located on the other side. Shoving in small detonators, the trooper trailed the wiring behind him as he got clear, then attached them to a small handheld generator.

“Hot plas!” he shouted in warning, then twisted the handle on top.

The little generator gave a low whine and the C-4 violently exploded, smashing the doors apart and sending a hurricane of exhaust across the lobby, creating a storm of dust. The entire predark building seemed to vibrate from the concussion.

“Davis! Hannon! Stay by the front of this drek hole and watch for stickies,” Cotton commanded, wiping her stinging eyes with the back of a hand. “That fucking boom might bring every mutie in the area down our nuking throats!”

Coughing loudly, the two troopers shuffled away.

Hurrying closer, Delphi was stunned to see that the doors had not been removed, but instead were merely separated by a few feet, the adamantine portals still attached to the locking bar on the inside. However, the massive hinges were twisted and stretched like warm taffy, leaving a gap between the doors of about a foot.

“Shitfire, they sure built things strong before the big chill,” Bellany muttered, impressed in spite of himself. “That plas charge should have knocked down the whole damn wall!”

“Ah, but this is no ordinary building,” Delphi said, holding the lantern next to the gap. Past them was only darkness. “I think this might have been a mil base.”

“A fort?” Still blinking, Cotton furrowed her brow. “Thought you said it was a school,” she said.

“A little of both, and so much more,” the cyborg said excitedly. “Now stay close and follow my lead!”

Turning sideways, Delphi managed to squeeze through the slim opening and held the lantern high. There was another long corridor ahead of him, but this one was spotlessly clean, without any dust, vines or mold. There was a breeze coming from behind Delphi carrying the rank smells of the jungle, mixed with the tang of ages-old dust. But the air past the doors was flat and sterile, tasting rather similar to that of a redoubt. Sterile and clean. Simply amazing, he marveled. The installation seemed to be intact. The seals had to have held for a full century! And if that was true…

Unable to restrain himself further, Delphi ran forward past numerous doors marked only with project codenames—Broken Thunder, Delta Dawn, Maelstrom and the like—until reaching a plain door marked simply as Coldfire.

Eureka! Breathlessly the cyborg tapped an entry code onto the keypad and there was no response, which was not very surprising. Even the vaunted nuke batteries had limits.

Glancing behind to make sure the others coming through the doors were not close yet, the cyborg pushed up a sleeve and opened a small service panel in his arm. Pulling out a power cord, he attached it to the port of the keypad and tried again. This time a green light came on, there was a click and the door swung open wide. But before Delphi could move, there came the sound of running boots. Quickly he reclaimed the power cord just as Bellany, Davenport and the others arrived.

“Don’t like you going off by yourself, Chief,” the bald trooper growled, peering suspiciously into the open doorway. “What if you found a stickie, or a greenie, hiding in here?”

“I was in no danger,” Delphi replied tolerantly, pulling down his sleeve. “Now I want the rest of you to stay here in the hallway. I must do the next part alone.”

“Sir, I just said—” Bellany started, but was cut off by a curt hand gesture from the cyborg.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Delphi reiterated, unable to look away from the darkness. Everything he wanted, everything he needed, could be only feet away in the Stygian gloom. “Besides—”

“No.”

The word startled the cyborg and he slowly turned. “What was that you just said?” he demanded.

“I said no,” Bellany repeated gruffly. “Where you go, so do we, Chief. End of discussion.”

Impatiently, Delphi started to rally cogent arguments, but then saw the grim determination in the trooper’s face and accepted the situation. The only way to stop the man from following would be to kill him. Delphi had no real problem with that, but there were too many others that would also have to be killed, and in the ensuing fight, some of their bullets might damage the delicate equipment inside the predark lab, ruining the whole reason for coming here in the first place.

“All right, we stay together,” Delphi said, artfully masking his annoyance. “However—”

“I’m on point,” Bellany said, stepping in front of the cyborg and walking boldly into the blackness. Holding their blasters at the ready, the other troopers stayed close to Delphi.

The floor was bare concrete, thick power cables crisscrossing the expanse in a manner shockingly similar to the jungle outside. A huge supercomputer stood mute along a cinder-block wall, the huge tanks of liquid nitrogen used to cool the machine standing in a neat row inside a chained corral.

Mountains of machinery rose and fell around the group, the shadows cast by their alcohol lanterns making the equipment seem oddly animated.

“So what are we looking for?” Cotton asked, tightening her grip on the Kalashnikov.

Pausing in thought, Delphi debated how much to tell them when one of the troopers snorted in disgust.

“Blind Norad, it really stinks in here,” he said behind the mask covering his mouth. “Kinda reminds me of a latrine.”

Pursing his lips, Delphi started to mock the fellow. After all how could there be the smell of feces inside a lab that had been sealed for a hundred years? Then he smelled it, too. Fresh dung. But how was that possible unless…

“Muties!” Delphi shouted, smashing the hurricane lantern on the floor.

The glass reservoir crashed and the supply of shine ignited, creating a rush of light that caught something large and dark just outside the nimbus of illumination.

“Go back-to-back!” Bellany shouted, raising the AK-47. “Form a circle!”

“No, don’t shoot!’ Delphi cried, but then the shadows moved again and a trooper shrieked as his arm was torn off at the shoulder, taking his blaster with it.

As the others rushed to his aid, Cotton spun and triggered her rapid-fire. The muzzle-flash strobed in the darkness almost revealing something darting between the huge predark machines. The 7.62 mm rounds ricocheted off the hulking equipment, throwing off sprays.

“Damn it, that was an order!” Delphi raged, shaking his Kalashnikov at the norm. “I said no—”

But the sec woman fired again, a longer burst, just as Bellany fired his weapon in the opposite direction.

“Shitfire, there’s two of ’em!” a trooper snarled, pulling a gren.

Aghast, Delphi pointed the rapid-fire at the man and was about to shoot when there was movement above the group and a large black creature landed in the middle of them, right on top of the smashed lantern. The blue flames rose around the mutie, apparently doing no harm to it whatsoever, but revealing every feature. It was a huge catlike creature, almost the size of a pony. The smooth fur was dead-black, the mouth a crimson slash, the long fangs dripping blood from the recent kill, and the eyes were solid yellow. Then a writhing nest of tentacles rose from the back.

“Nuke me, it’s a hellhound!” a trooper screamed, backing away in terror. Then he convulsed and toppled over, revealing a second mutie retreating into the gloom with most of his spine dangling from its horrid jaws.

Dropping his AK-47, Bellany spun in a crouch, drew the Webley and fired. The booming muzzle-flame actually touched the hellhound, scoring a long bloody furrow along its side. Snarling insanely, the big cat charged through the crowd of troopers, bowling them over as it escaped into darkness.

As the gutted body hit the ground, the troopers began firing their weapons in every direction, the discharges illuminating the predark lab. Delicate machinery exploded into pieces as the two hellhounds circled the group, going in different directions, constantly moving.

“Sons of bitches are trying to confuse us!” Cotton bellowed, squeezing off a short burst from the Kalashnikov. “How fragging smart are these muties?”

The light from the smashed lantern was beginning to flicker and die, and as the illumination diminished, the hellhounds came ever closer. Oddly, the monstrous cats seemed unconcerned about the other lanterns.

“It’s not the light!” Cotton realized, shouting over her chattering longblaster. “They don’t like fire!”

“Chief, is there anything in here we can burn?” Bellany demanded, working the bolt to free a bent shell caught in the ejector port. He got it loose and the bent casing flew away.

“I have no idea!” Delphi replied, feeling both of his hearts pound in his chest.

Suddenly one of the creatures leaped on top of a comp, only to jump off again immediately. The jar sent the big machine tilting and men scrambled away as it crashed on the floor with a deafening noise, smashing one of the lanterns. As the light vanished, a scream from the other side of the group told of another chilling.

“The eyes!” Delphi shouted. “Aim for the eyes or the ears! Those are the only weak points!”

Kicking spent brass out of their way, the troopers shuffled closer together for protection.

“You heard the man!” Cotton shouted at the top of her lungs. “Eyes and ears, boys! Send it to hell!”

Dropping back, Delphi sprayed an entire clip of rounds at the hellhounds, then dropped the exhausted weapon and pulled a pistol from his gunbelt. At the grasp of his hand, the weapon audibly charged and an indicator light on top registered in the red. The battery inside the H&K needler was fully charged.

“Everybody out!” Delphi commanded, leveling the Kalashnikov and his pistol. “I can handle this alone!”

“No nuking way. We stand together!” Bellany snarled, snapping off shots with the Webley. Then the hammer clicked on a spent shell. Ducking, the bald trooper cracked the weapon to drop the empties and hastily thumb in fresh rounds. One live cartridge fell and rolled away under a wooden desk—and a hellhound jumped over the desk to land on top of Bellany.

Shrieking obscenities, the man went down, firing the handcannon point-blank into the chest of the thing. A single swipe of the powerful claws removed his throat, while the tentacles lanced outward, spearing two other troopers, scoring minor wounds. Their rapid-fires dropped with a clatter, firing off a few rounds before stopping.

Recoiling, Delphi paused for only a second, then aimed both of his weapons and fired them simultaneously. The chattering of the assault rifle completely masked the soft hiss of the H&K coil gun. The 7.62 mm bullets bounced off the body of the beast, but the 2.5 mm depleted uranium slivers punched clean through the sleek, muscular body.

Pumping out piss-yellow blood, the hellhound snarled over a shoulder, and all of its tentacles stabbed for the cyborg. He ducked, and they missed by less than an inch. Staying in a crouch, he fired again and again, scoring hits both times.

Now the others trained their blasters on the wounded beast, hammering it with lead and steel.

Gushing sticky golden fluids, the creature sprang for the cyborg and missed, but knocked the Kalashnikov out of his hands, the rapid-fire taking the needler along with it. But as the animal landed on the desk, Davenport shoved her Ruger .357 into one of its ears and fired. The backblast threw the woman down, but the head of the beast cracked open, yellow blood erupting from the mouth and exploding the eyes. Weaving drunkenly on its legs for a long moment, the beast went still and gently laid down as if it was merely going to sleep. As the head listed sideways, the life fluids ceased to flow from the ghastly wounds and the big hellhound went still.

Taking heart from the chill, the few remaining troopers cheered wildly, now able to concentrate on the last man-killer. Trying for the nimble creature, they succeeded only in finishing the destruction of the predark lab.

Recovering his needler, Delphi cursed when he saw another trooper fall and made a command decision. The resources of the lab were already lost. Time to save what he could.

“Use the grens!” the cyborg bellowed, pulling the crystal wand from his shoulder holster.

Taking defensive positions behind the toppled comps, the troopers readied the explosive charges, ripping off the safety tape holding the arming level in place.

As if understanding the danger, the hellhound turned and looped for the door. Already facing that direction, Delphi waited until it was directly in sight, then squeezed the wand.

A scintillating laser beam stabbed out from the tip, hitting the big cat in the neck. Yellow blood formed a geyser from the punctured artery and as it turned, Delphi increased the power to maximum and burned a long burst straight down its throat. The beast went stock-still as the mauling power ray burned down its gullet. Now the grens arrived, raining down around the beast and thunderously detonating, ripping the body apart into bloody gobbets.

As the smoky blasts dissipated, Cotton walked over to inspect the corpse.

“Yeah, that’s aced proper,” she said with grim satisfaction. Then the woman hawked and spit on the tattered remains. “All right, gather the blasters and boots! Leave the bodies. They’d only be dug up during the night by animals.”

Moving slow, as if they were drunk, the exhausted men moved among their fallen comrades, taking what was necessary and ignoring the rest. Death was part of their job. Later they would mourn for lost friends, but right now there was still work to be done as quietly and efficiently as possible.

Realizing this was his best chance, Delphi holstered the laser, then took it out again, just in case there was another of the creatures hiding somewhere. Bio-weapons! Somebody was going to pay for that dearly. There was no doubt in his mind that this had been a trap set just for him. How else could animals have gotten inside a room supposedly sealed for a hundred years? Clearly, they had been placed there recently, the doors resealed. And the people in charge of all biological weapons worked for TITAN. This was bad, Delphi acknowledged.

Going to the smashed comp, Delphi looked over the wreckage and sighed. He had hoped that something might have survived the battle, but the IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer was utterly destroyed. The huge comp was the finest and fastest of its kind in the predark world, and used some of the prototype for the circuits inside his body. The cyborg had fervently hoped to find something he could use here, but that was impossible now. The circuit cubes were broken, the digital wafers shattered, and the plasma chips warped from a series of massive short circuits. Gone, all gone.

With diminishing hope, Delphi went from one server to the next, finding only trash. The last two servers had bullet holes in them, yet were still serviceable and capable of working. Good news indeed. Except that they contained none of the experimental microprocessors that he required.