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the size of his fist suddenly crumbled to dust. The hole grew larger.
A streamlined head poked through, peered nearsightedly up at him.
Shagrat's precious discipline went south. He was too horrified to shoot. He
screamed instead, as if he were some rich, pamperedTallinnTownwoman watching a
mouse scuttle across her polished floor.
"Drillbit!" he shouted, again and again. "Drillbit!" A moment later, the same
cry rose from another part of the wall not far away.
Grima cursed his enhanced hearing. He had been about tomountBadriwhen the
shouting started. He thought about going ahead regardless - she seemed even
more furious about submitting than usual, and
that always turned him on.
Then he realized what the troopers were yelling. He cursed again,
this time out loud and foully.
Wearing only an erection, he dashed for the wall.
His ardor wilted in the chill of second cycle night. The rest of his body
ignored the cold. The Soldiers in the courtyard had the good sense not to
notice how he was dressed.
Someone had finally decided to kill one of the drillbits. Another one waddled,
obscenely fat, close by the wall. The Brigade Leader's bare foot lashed out,
slammed the animal into the stone. It twitched and died.
Even as it did, though, a new outcry arose twenty meters away. Another brown
bullet head, ridiculous nose twitching, started to emerge from what should
have been solid rock.
Grima clapped a hand to his forehead. "The whole frigging wall might be
honeycombed with 'em!" he shouted - screamed might be a better word, if
screams come in deep, rasping baritone.
"What do we do, sir?" a Soldier asked nervously.
The Brigade Leader snatched the rifle out of the man's hands, fired at the
newest drillbit. The unaimed round spanged off stone thirty centimeters from
its head. The drillbit squeaked and pulled back into its hole.
"General alert!" Grima yelled back toward the barracks. "Somebody go set off
the general alert!"
As soon as Grima dashed away, Badri scrambled out of bed. She grudged the time
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she needed to throw on a robe, but took it nonetheless. Unlike her lord and
master - lips skinned back from teeth in a carnivore grin at that thought -
she would draw questions, running through the corridors naked.
As it happened, no one saw her before she got to Angband Base Command Central.
She barred the door behind her - Command Central, she'd learned from the TAC,
was intended to be a last redoubt, able to hold out against enemy assault no
matter what happened to the rest of the base. And not even
Sauron military paranoia, she thought, had imagined an enemy sprung from
within.
Too bad for the Saurons. Badri began pulling switches.
"General alert!" Grima cried once more, furious not just at the drillbits now
but also at his own men.
Was everyone asleep in the second cycle darkness? Red lights should have been
flashing, sirens wailing, and Soldiers piling out of the barracks, ready for
anything.
Only the Soldiers on the wall rushed toward the Brigade Leader's voice. Then
all the lights in the courtyard went out.
Beyond the side of the wall opposite the one where the drillbits had been
released, Juchi and his men stood waiting. When Angband Base plunged
into blackness, the nomad warleader thumped the plainsman next to him on
the shoulder. The whole band dashed forward, scaling ladders at the ready.
The first inkling Grima had of something seriously wrong - as opposed to a
monumental fuckup -
came when a very junior Assault Leader ran out of the main barracks,
shouting, "Sir, sir, Command
Central is locked from inside, and whoever's in there won't acknowledge
orders!"
While the Brigade Leader was still trying to digest that, the courtyard
lights came back on. They showed men on the walls, armed men not in
Soldier field-gray. The nomads started shooting down at the troopers by Grima.
The Soldiers returned fire. Stunned, outnumbered, and pinned down as they
were, they nonetheless tumbled invaders from their perches. But the
plainsmen's guns - they even had a couple of assault rifles, Grima saw with
dismay - hosed death through the Brigade Leader's companions.
The din of gunfire did what Grima's shouts had failed to do - it brought
Soldiers bouncing out of bed, weapons at the ready. And when the first of them
charged out through the doorways, the foes on the wall cut them down before
even Soldier's reactions could save them.
"Dede Korkut!" the nomads yelled. "Dede Korkut!"
Grima's heart, already thuttering near panic, almost stopped altogether when
he heard that cry. Here was the danger against which the TAC had warned him,
the danger that had caught him all too literally naked!
The plainsmen were descending into the courtyard now, and more and more of
them were on the walls. This had to be the whole clan, Grima thought,
appalled, and all its firepower. Somehow they'd
come unscathed through the minefield.
Connecting that improbability with the failure of the general alarm and the
Assault Leader's dreadful news, the Bridage Leader groaned, "Treason!" And
devastatingly effective treason, too - Grima was almost the only Soldier
in the courtyard still standing. Against the guns the nomads had massed,
against the surprise and disadvantageous position, genetically enhanced
fighting ability did not count enough.
Bullets singing around him, Grima ran for the barracks. Somehow he tumbled
through the doorway still unwounded. The Soldiers inside were not trying to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]