What it Takes to Fly-part 6

What it Takes to Fly-part 6

Ahead, bright lances of green and red shone in the gathering dark, and huge shadow beasts roared. Lance could see it now, as he ran along behind Talin, the huge druktakt that was attacking the sinking wagon. It towered above the top of the wagon, at least ten meters above it, and its four arms swung blindly, lightning fast, at the little beams of light that were striking it, like so many mosquitoes.

Running, lugging the RX sniper and a belt of grenades underneath his vest, Talin couldn’t stop. If he did, he’d have to take a breath, and he was too worried about other things to stop and think about himself. But, he thought, if they didn’t get to the truck soon enough, he’d keel over from exhaustion.

Behind, the cadet, Lance, was keeping up with him, which would have been impressive if not for the fact that he was carrying a thirty-kilo rifle. The blue didn’t seem to be having the same problems as he was, even though he was toting a bag of ammo and a scoping carbine. That had to weigh almost as much as whatever Talin was packing.

Heavy, heavy, heavy. It was beginning to slow him down. Talin could feel his leg muscles burning, and all of the weighty things he was carrying were all he could think about.

Looking up from the ground again, Talin could see the truck, now only fifty meters away, and the huge druk male, about three times that distance. And it was huge. Probably heavy, too. Snap! I gotta rest! I don’t know who I’m chiding, I can’t carry all this much longer without my lungs bursting!

“I don’t know what’s taking so long, Captain, but it would sure be nice for some backup, sir!” That was Artessa; Talin knew her voice anywhere. She and the others must still be alive and fighting. Which would also explain the frequent shots at the druktakt male.

“I sent Talin, Arye, and cadet Lance in your direction five min ago!” The captain sounded strained. “You’ll have to make do with them, because the merchants aren’t turning around or slowing down. They are...quite persuasive. Put bluntly, you’re on your own now, sergeant. Good luck. Over, and out.”

Talin swore, bringing up every single vehement word he had ever learned since he had left his village and joined the Hive Unit. It was extensive, and not limited to one single language or inflection. When he finally came to a halt at the base of the right front tire of the drowned truck, he was out of breath and out of swear words.

Dropping to his knees, Talin saw the ground swim before him, and he fell the rest of the way to the ground.

Dust and rocks flew into his nostrils, and a large clod hit the top of his head and broke apart. “Sorry,” he heard Lance say. “Man, you look tired. Ya want me to take your rifle for a bit?”

Rolling over, panting so hard he could only glare at the cadet, Talin lifted his rifle up to him. Lance took it, slung it over his shoulder, and was turning to find a way up when the entire vehicle shook above them, and the groaning of metal and the roar of the druktakt could be heard, blending together like some otherworldly scream of titans clashing. Large clods of dried dirt fell down from the undercarriage, one rather big one nearly missing Talin’s tail.

The red drak felt himself start to spit vitriolically at the offending amalgamation of dirt, but decided to do it from the safety of the shadow of the truck’s tire. His back to the huge mass of rubber, Talin could feel it move with the strikes of the druktakt on the far side of the truck.

Talin looked above him, at the empty harness where the pair of dizsons had been tethered up until seven min ago. If he could breathe, he could probably smell their stink, still wafting through the air, mixing with the sharp smell of their spilt blood.

Off maybe a few hundred meters yonder, by the Compass treeline, Talin could see a druktakt dragging a big mass. That would be the second dizson.

From what he’d heard, and from what he could see, someone had given the computer conflicting orders, and it, being the downgraded thinking machine that it was, had done the best it could: it had taken the last order input and confused it. What the orders were, Talin would have to ask later, after he could get his breath back.

As it were, he was still recovering from oxygen loss, and the loss of his RX. He didn’t know why he had given ol’ RX away to Lance, but at least he still had his grenades. And judging by the rumblings in the ground, they were about to come in handy.

Tire rubber under his hand, Talin pushed himself to his feet, watching his head for the falling debris from above, which now included parts of the cooling system and some odd assortment of pipes, which the red though looked oddly like septic tubes.

There were now two druktakt attacking the truck. Talin could hear the two separate beasts roaring, and the two sets of hugeamongous legs were hard to miss, kicking up dust and kicking the truck’s side, doing little damage but still tipping the wagon.

Near the treeline, the carcass of the dizson was rapidly becoming a buffet. There were now at least five druks around it, circling and ripping into it at random intervals.

Above him, the truck shook and groaned. Ahead of him, the pair of druktakt were attacking the truck. To his right was the feast. Talin made a beeline for the two monsters closest to him. It made walking easier, and he could breath much better now.

The area around the two beasts was a mixture of bloody mud and churned ground. Apparently the defenders were doing damage, but only really infuriating the beasts. Talin was about to change that.

He took the bandolier from under his vest and took a look at what he’d brought. There were nine incendiaries, two shrapnel, and nine concussion grens. Talin could almost feel tears at the corner of his eyes. He’d remembered to bring along incendiaries! While he hated using such violent weapons against other intelligent people, Talin felt he could make an exception for the dumb beasts attacking his charge.

Taking a concussion gren out of its pouch and replacing the bandolier back under his vest, Talin pulled the ignition pin from the side of the weapon and smiled. Weapons were his babies, and he made sure they always had a new home. There was no need to discriminate; they all did the same thing, in the end: kill something.

---
Lance found the ladder up on the side opposite the druktakt. He spent a few precious seconds jumping up and down, ineffectually trying to reach it, when on the fifth hop he snagged the bottom rung and managed to pull himself up, which took the better part of the next four minutes. All the while, he could feel the wagon shaking under his grip, and feel himself sway with each hit, as he hung ineffectually from the service ladder.

By the time he had climbed the ladder, and lay panting on the catwalk above, he realized that the shaking had stopped, but the howls of the druktakt had only increased in magnitude. Lance could only wonder at what the thing was doing as he pulled himself to his feet, picking up Talin’s RX and his carbine and racing towards the fore.

There would be a ladder there that he could use to climb up to the roof; there, he could meet up with Artessa and Arye, hopefully; he was hoping to find anyone with higher station than himself so he could get some orders. The blue drak had no idea what he was doing, only that he had to find someone, and that someone would be up top.

Weapons clanking against each other, and his legs, Lance was in full tilt, verging on panic; he had never been in a situation where so many lives had been at stake. And putting himself in that same crisis? Insane! His every instinct was to start running in the opposite direction, and keep going until he passed out from exhaustion. The stories he’d heard about druktakt scared him.

Moans and cries of the druktakt still echoed, but the wagon had yet to suffer another attack. He was still wondering about that when he heard the radio crackle in his ear, and Artessa’s voice spit out, “Captain, where the HELLS are my backup?”

Oddly, Lance could hear the woman’s voice from just up ahead, around the corner of the wagon. Captain Drumer was just replying as the blue drak rounded the corner and skidded into the railing, nearly spilling Talin’s caster over the side. Before him stood a few Hive Unit soldiers, among them Artessa and Arye.

“Cadet Palmer, reporting,” he gasped between breaths. “Ahh, so they are there,” the Captain’s voice came. “I’d check the druk before counting Evans out. Drumer out.”

Artessa looked up from the blank comp screen in front of her, glaring at Lance. “Where’s Talin? What took you two?”

“Sir, Talin is below, in the undercarriage; he needed to catch his breath, and I said I could bring his stuff up ahead of him.” Lance paused and shifted his weight, moving the big RX caster around. “We took so long because we do not have wings, sir.”

Artessa and Arye shared a look, and Artessa’s beak shifted in an avian smile. “Damn that Talin; he brought along some explosives.”

So that had been the sudden bass growl he’d heard.

Artessa was moving away, issuing orders, and Arye was heading for the comp, apparently to try to get it running again. Before Artessa got far, she turned and said to Lance, “Drop the ‘Sirs’, kid. This ain’t the army. Now, follow me. We have a perimeter to set up.”

---
Talin tossed the gren on the count of twenty, aiming for the first monster’s knee; it overshot and exploded at the level of it’s hearts. For a split second after the small device went off, the druk’s chest was suddenly turned into a five-meter-wide, five-meter-deep depression. Then the shockwave dissipated with a deep rumble, and the displaced flesh, muscle, bone, and organs all fell roughly back into place.

That was an approximation, Talin knew. By the way the big beast was looking right now, he knew that the grenade had done more damage than he had hoped. The druk was wobbling like a drunk from a blast that probably would have killed a smaller druktakt. What was amazing was that the big thing was still standing. Leaning heavily to one side, yes, but still standing.

The red drak looked on in curiosity as blood started to drip from its open, sagging jaw. All four forelimbs were slack at its side, though the upper left one had started twitching. A long, loud growl came from the druk as it swayed, unsteady, on it’s four legs.

Of course, that’s when he noticed that the other druktakt, the one he’d been intending to go for next, was growling and looking at its companion with a hungry look in it’s eyes. Talin took out another concussor, more for the feel of the grenade in his hand than anything else, as the larger of the two turned to attack its fellow creature, digging into the exposed flesh of the back and neck. Blood started raining as it spouted from the dying druktakt, and chunks of meat flew. One such slab landed on Talin’s chest, bleeding into his black uniform.

Talin felt his hastily gobbled orange rise from his stomach as he felt the warm chunk slowly slide down and fall from him, to land with a soft smack on the hard-packed dirt. Tripping the mechanism on the grenade, Talin had to wait another bloody twenty count, watching the big monster rip apart what could have been a friend, a litter-mate, whatever; what really mattered was that he was still standing in the same spot when a part of the dying druk’s lung fell on his head, like an obscene hat, and warm, pulpy liquid seeped down from its innards.

Tossing the grenade at the carnage, not caring where it went, but hoping the other beast caught the blast, Talin made for the service ladder on the other side of the wagon and started up. He didn’t look when he felt the grenade detonate, but he took comfort in the fact that he had only used two grenades so far.

---
Lance and Arye were on the roof when the second grenade went off.

The two had been watching the carnage with a quiet, sickened fascination; it was not everyday you saw an animal attacking its food the way you did. And so it was that, with wide eyes, the drak and the gryphonic saw the little sphere appear out of nowhere, and disappear just as quickly into the bloody maw of the druktakt. Silently, they gripped their guns tighter.

“Is that what I think it is?” Lance asked.

“You did say that Talin had brought grenades, right?” Arye said, still looking down.

“Yeah. Should we duck back, or something?”

“Nah, I wanna see this. Talin’s s’posed to be a pro with explosives.”

At that moment, for one instant, the head of the second druktakt suddenly became, impossibly, a perfect sphere. Then it popped like a balloon, spraying blood and muscle and bone in all directions.

Lance felt a slap across his chest and face, and fell back on his rump. Arye flared her wings as she fell back, trying to keep her balance, but Lance still felt a thump as her butt contacted the metal of the wagon.

“Concussion grenade.” Arye said. “Wow. I never thought a skull could bend like that.”

The blue drak was busy looking at his uniform. What he saw should not have surprised him, but still... “Arye, did that thing really have that much blood in that tiny space?”

---
When the moon came above the horizon, Artessa called a meeting of the Unit members not on patrol; that included Arye, Talin, and Lance, and one other, a black drake, who had been wandering around in the cafeteria, looking for something to eat. Lance and Talin had brought her kicking and screaming; Talin said her name was Mary, and she was a notorious slacker. Undoubtedly, she had a post to be at, but, since she wasn’t, she would sit through the meeting with them.

They met outside the designated room, and waited while Arye knocked on the door and introduced them. Inside, Artessa and a yellow male drak, with the insignia “UGLY” on his vest and “PACI-FIST” on his shoulder, stood around a table that had been converted to show map data through the top. A blue glow filled the darkened room, emenating form the table’s display. Lance and Talin dragged Mary with them, following Arye.

“Ah, the old crew reunites,” the yellow male said. “And we get a newcomer, too.” He nodded at Lance. “Welcome aboard the POS Sunken!”

Artessa smiled at Lance and Talin, though he felt she was smiling for only one of them, truly.

“I’d really rather be at my post, now,” Mary said over her shoulder.

Artessa looked at the drake, tilting her head. “Nah, you’re stayin’ put, girl. Your coffee can wait. Right now, we need to discuss the future, and what we need to do to get on the road again.”

Mary groaned, but ceased her protests, so the two draks let her go. The four newcomers sidled up to the makeshift warroom table, each looking down at the blue surface. It was a topographic map, in realtime, of the surface of the planet, for about fifty kilometers in each direction around their wagon. At the edge, several large dots were moving slowly off of the edge; that had to be the rear end of the rest of the convoy. running nearly parallel to the line was a large, white mass; the treeline.

Artessa sighed, breaking the quiet. “Alright, the trouble started when one of the cadets input the wrong order codes into the computer; it misinterpreted the commands and started a shutoff. By the time I managed to put in the right codes, it was already halfway finished with shudown of the entire system. It took the time to go through with the second set of conflicting orders...”

“And then it went right ahead and kept shutting off,” Lance finished. “And, to make matters worse, it still had to finish it’s cooldown cycle, and you can’t start up a comp-run engine until the cooldown’s complete; which could take hours, or minutes.” Damn machines, he left unsaid.

“Yep, that’s the gist of it. The wagon’s cooldown takes three hours. After that, we can start the engines up again; unfortunately, there is no manual drive, else we’d be on our way again, and our other dizson met the druktakts, so we’ll be relying solely on our own power until we can purchase some more beasts of burden.”

Machines, Lance said to himself. It’s always machines that get the best of me. Why?

“In the meantime,” the yellow drak spoke up, “while we wait on the cooldown to finish, I want you four to make sure the merchants have everything they need, and report any problems with them to us, okay? Talin, you buddy-up with Mary; Arye, keep this blue cadet on his feet. Dismissed.”

The four snapped a salute, and then left the room.

Artessa looked down at the map. “I really wish this thing displayed what the druktakt were doing, right now.”

The yellow chuckled. “That would mean that they’d have to have triangulators implanted in them, and I’d hate to guess where they’d go.”

to be continued...