The Siege Against Tolkeen

"You're planning to...WHAT?!" asked Sonja angrily, slamming her fists down on the card table and nearly breaking the fragile wood.

"You heard me," said Perrin, more than a little amused at the Juicer's reaction. "I'm planning to spray one of Larsen's field bases with about 10 gallons of Rhino-Buffalo urine and then make off with one of his stolen Coalition APCs."

"Have you gone insane?!"

Perrin laughed as he opened up a can of beer. "No, wait!" he said. "Hear me out on this one. About maybe three or four years ago, Larsen's Brigade was helping out a Simvan tribe in the Pecos Badlands. The Sims had been hitting our supply transports to Lone Star, and then hired Larsen when we hit back. Back then the CS didn't have all the cool tanks that it does today, so we had to improvise a bit. What we'd do is have some flyboys like me distract and mislead enemy formations while the artillery and mortar people a mile off got ready. We'd fly off once the heavy guns were ready to go, and the bad guys would go boom."

"Now, the high brass noticed that Larsen used almost all mutant animals to guard his camps. It made sense. He had plenty of mutants in his mercenary army, they were tough, and they had sharp senses. So we decided to use that against him. When his troops were out in the field one fine day, me and the other flyboys in my squad shot over their base at low altitude, dropping mini-missiles full of this bad-smellin' shit they cooked up at Lone Star to handle the animals. To humans, the stuff stank. But mutant animals have much sharper senses than ours. They'd literally be rolling around on the ground, trying to hold their noses shut, that's how bad it smelled to them. The mercs in environmental body armor tried to shoot us down, but there weren't that many of them. And they didn't last too long when the artillery began popping its shells off."

"Now, Larsen came back a few hours later, after outmanuevering and slaughtering our boys, to find that this time, we'd outmanuevered him for a change! His main base and all the personnel in it were dead, all of the vehicles and robots he'd left there were either destroyed or gone, and his ammunition dump had been blown up. To his credit, Larsen kept on fighting for a while, but he evacced eventually, shooting through our lines and making his escape."

"Tolkeen hired Larsen a little while back, and it looks like he's learned from past mistakes. Instead of one big base, he's got something like three little ones. That's good, since I couldn't take on a big base by myself. And he's still using mutant animals for guard duty. So I'm going to do pretty much what I did last time. Fly overhead at low altitude in a hovercycle, pop stink bombs all over the base, then ditch the hovercycle, jump into one of his APCs, and then drive it into a garage I rented in Tolkeen."

Sonja thought it over for a moment, looking quite concerned. "But what if something goes wrong?" she asked. "What if the guards defending Larsen's motor pool are wearing air filters or something? You could get blown away."

"Don't worry," Perrin said, trying to sound reassuring but coming off as patronizing. "I'll have a neural mace with me for close-range combat and some sonic grenades for anyone who's out of melee range."

"Why nothing lethal?"

"Well, I don't feel like making Larsen into even more of an enemy. If I go in there and massacre his guards, he'll hunt me and all of you down like animals. If I just temporarily incapacitate his dogs, then I think he'll be much less inclined to waste time and manpower gunning for me."

"All right, then," said Sonja, turning to leave. "I've got a mission to go on, so I'll be out of this dimension for a few days. In case I don't get back in time, good luck. You're prob'ly gonna need it if you decide to go with that plan."

Perrin smiled wistfully as she walked away. Just then, Nick Thompson walked in, with a disapproving expression on his bespectacled face. Perrin looked up at the former mage.

"I trust you heard it all?" the pilot asked.

Thompson nodded. "For someone with typically sharp Juicer senses, she's a pretty lousy judge of somebody's intentions. You don't give a shit about Larsen's opinion of you, do you? So tell me, why aren't you just going to nerve gas those mutant mercenaries?"

Perrin's facade of having it all together collapsed, and he sank down onto a chair like an old man who needs some support. There was a long silence. "I think I'm going soft from living here in Tolkeen," he finally said. "Out in the field, I never had any problems with the killing. Out in the field, I was fighting with enemy soldiers, Xiticix, Mechanoids, the real enemies of the human race, and I loved it. I thought I was doing the world a favor by killing evil D-Bees, and most of the time I probably was. And then my wife died, and I got real pissed at the monsters. I wanted them all to burn in hell for killing her, even if I had to put them all there myself. I accepted the Coalition's little recon assignment and leadership of this effin' nuthouse because, you know, vengeance. I thought it was one step closer towards tossing the D-Bees into the boneyard. But I've been in Tolkeen too long with the little D-Bee children and the D-Bee women and the D-Bee civilians and all the other damn D-Bees who haven't done shit! It's just...every time I see them, I see my wife and the kid that I never had, just with fur and fangs and stuff. I need to destroy this fucking city, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to bring myself to do it when the shit hits the fan. The innocent people are the ones who fuck with my head."

Thompson took a moment to digest it all. "Maybe not destroying the place is the right thing to do, Jack."

"But if I don't destroy Tolkeen and that damn pyramid nukes Chi-Town, even more innocents will have died. I've got thousands of D-Bee innocents on one hand, and thousands of humans on the other." He took out a cigarette and lit it up. "And here I am, stuck in the middle with you."

"Reminds me of an old movie I saw once," said Thompson, lighting a cigarette of his own.

Hubert Possman was laughing inwardly. He had endured horrible torture for days, for hours on end. His body had been scorched by the magical devices of torture. His arms had nearly been pulled from their sockets by constantly hanging from chains. His belly was cramped and aching from the slop they had force-fed him to keep him alive. But he hadn't given them anything. His will had remained firm. And today he would be free. Today his tormentor was going to use the magic wand that had the squid inside it.

The D-Bee mage in the black robes was carefully examining the wand, pressing buttons to push out and retract the squirming little squid-thing which oozed mucous and pus. The torturer smiled. "Don't look so chipper," he said, in his German-accented English. "This thing will hurt your soul. It isn't made by the Splugorth, but it looks to be almost as good."

Keep on smiling, you son of a bitch, thought Possman. Soon you will be dead and I will be free. "Just try it," Possman managed to cough out through his parched, scabrous mouth. "Just try it."

The D-Bee put the wand to his head, and the alien squid-thing emerged gleefully, with a loud squealing noise. Its tentacles wrapped around his lips and forced his mouth open, an invasive, hollow tongue from the center of the creature began to extend down his throat. The thing smelled of disease, and tasted of it, too. But Possman was thrilled to have it in his mouth. He had been waiting all day for this.

The CS Ranger bit down on the creature, with strength he didn't know his jaws possessed. The little monster began thrashing in his mouth as his teeth burst its organs and packets of fluid within it spilled open. The horrified torturer tried to pull the precious creature back, but it was stuck tight. Whitish, disgusting liquids and brackish blood exploded out of the thing's fragile little body. Once its flailings had stopped, Possman began to carefully chew the thing, probing it with his tongue. He looked up at the torturer with a wild gleam in his eyes.

The D-Bee mage looked very nauseated. It had killed dozens of men in its lifetime without feeling a twinge of regret. It had burned down helpless villages without feeling remorse later. But now it was looking at a man, obviously crazed, chewing on a dead hunk of skin with great relish, and the D-Bee very nearly vomited. It shook its head, amazed at Possman's brutality, and left the room to compose its thoughts.

Possman spit the loathsome piece of meat out of his mouth. He had gotten what he needed from it. A slim, needle-like bone, still damp with the creature's blood, lay in his cheeks. The Ranger carefully stuck the bone out from between his lips, and reached down with his hands as far as the manacles would allow. After what seemed an eternity, he grasped the piece of bone in the fingers of his right hand, and proceeded to pick the lock.

After Possman was free of the manacles, he began nosing through the instruments of torture. He finally settled on a promising-looking device consisting of a jar containing thousands of writhing, faintly glowing maggots, and then sat down and waited for his torturer to return.

Next Chapter

By David Haendler.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 David Haendler. All Rights Reserved.