The Siege Against Tolkeen

There was a deep, booming sound, like thunder, and a Tolkeen fighter jet fell to the ground, black smoke blossoming from its engines. Donald Hartman smiled inside his armor, and held up his plasma revolvers. He fired again, and another one of the planes burst into flame. The remaining four began to open fire, spraying the modified Super SAMAS with a heavy coat of gunfire. Red lights and warning sirens began going off in the helmet, as the gunfire chipped away large bits of armor plating.

The flying APC threw itself to the ground, and its doors opened wide. A platoon of Tolkeen's finest crack troops began to emerge from those doors, their guns raised high, and a cry of triumph on their lips. They had their enemy outnumbered and outgunned...victory was surely theirs to savor. A platoon of soldiers backed up by a wing of fighter jets would be hard-pressed to lose against six ragtag soldiers and a power armor trooper. The Tolkeenites pressed forward, sensing a short and glorious battle ahead of them.

One of the HFA troops looked at the onrushing mass of soldiers, and suddenly turned and sprinted away. He ran behind the Mosquito, seemingly fleeing from his enemy. None of the soldiers bothered giving chase to him, concerning themselves instead with the five remaining terrorists who were firing upon them. The soldiers returned the fire, and two of the HFA men fell, in a blaze of lasers and hellfire. In the midst of battle, nobody noticed the thick, black block flung from behind the Mosquito.

There was a massive explosion, throwing the highly-trained Tolkeen soldiers around like they were rag dolls. Thirty men were knocked to the ground by the blast. Of those, twenty two never got up again. The survivors were badly disoriented, and many of them began to flee back to the transport. They dove behind their APC for cover, and from there began to resume the battle. A few of the soldiers never made it back to cover, and were pinned down and killed by the HFA.

Donald Hartman fired his twin revolvers, and two more of the jets plummeted to the ground. But his armor was in bad shape, his men were still badly outnumbered, and an enemy shot had disabled his CD player. The situation seemed grim.

Suddenly, there was the chatter of rail gun fire, and the Tolkeen soldiers began to melt away. Hartman looked over, and saw a Jager power armor emerging from the depths of the Mosquito, opening fire on the enemy troops. This newcomer was too much for the surviving soldiers, who fled back into their flying carrier. The doors to the ship reluctantly slammed shut, and the thrusters began to hum into life. "Oh no, you don't," growled Hartman, as he fired his guns again. The plasma rounds penetrated deep into the APC, and the enemy vessel exploded. The newcomer, meanwhile, busied himself by plucking the remaining jet fighters out of the sky.

There was an awkward moment of silence, as the survivors of the battle surveyed the wreckage and devastation. "Nice shooting," Hartman remarked, finally breaking the silence.

"I do my best," said the Jager pilot. "I'm Mr. Reiser. Let's get these weapons away from here before reinforcements arrive, shall we?"

Lucius Mallen breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the doctor step out of the emergency room. "How is he, doctor?" he asked anxiously, grabbing the man by the arm.

"Well," the doctor replied, his voice somewhat muffled by the surgical mask still on his face. "He's stable. We've managed to stop the bleeding and bandage the wound, and we'll get a magical healer as soon as possible to finish up the job."

"Were you able to save his arm?"

The doctor shook his head. "Sorry. There was too much nerve and muscle damage. If he had gotten in here twenty minutes earlier we might have been able to reattach the limb, but by the time we got him it was too late."

"Can you give him a transplant arm? You know, bio-systems?"

"No. Same principle. There's too much damage. We can give him a bionic arm, but that---"

"That would destroy his magic."

The doctor nodded. "We're going to leave the decision up to him, when he wakes up. We've got him on some heavy anesthetics right now, but he should be conscious by tomorrow morning. You can go in to see him if you want."

"Thanks, doctor," the Wolfen detective said, as he walked into the room. Pete Fransisco lay unconscious on a bed in the small, stark room. A bloodstained mass of bandages and wires adorned the shoulder where his arm had once been. IV tubes were jammed up his nose and into his remaining arm, and his breathing was labored.

"Hi, Pete," said Mallen softly. "I hate to see you like this, buddy."

The unconscious detective provided no reply.

"We shut down that arms dealer real good. The robot that did this to you is sitting in a scrap heap right now. The place's computer records were encrypted, but we've got a techno-wizard working on breaking their code. We oughta have it by the end of the week."

The Wolfen looked at his silent, sleeping partner once again.

"Sure hope you can make Uzieth's funeral. Well, anyway, I'll see you in a while." The Wolfen gently patted his friend on the head, and then walked away.

The doctor, looking in on this scene, wished that he could feel more sympathy. He'd seen too many one-sided conversations like this over the years that he felt numb to them. With the war going on, he had seen more and more such occurrences lately. The doctor sighed, and walked back to his office.

He opened up the door, and reached for the light switch.

"Turn on that light and I'll shoot you," said a female voice. The doctor looked into his dark room, and could make out the impression of a woman crouching on his desk, holding a pistol. The surgeon put his hands up in the air.

"Wh-what is this all about?" he demanded.

"Shut the door, doc," she said. The surgeon grudgingly complied, plunging the room into total, inky darkness.

"If it's money you want, I'll give you my wallet."

"Keep your money in your pocket, doc. What I need is a prescription. I've got a friend who's been magically tortured by the pigs who run this city. He's in a near-coma. What would you recommend for him?"

"Uh," said the doctor. "It's hard to say without examining him. But we sometimes get escaped POWs here who were tortured by the Coalition. I give them Verflex. It's a lot like Prozac, but it also gives them extra pep."

"Give me a prescription," said the woman, thrusting a pen and his prescription notecard into the doctor's hand. He filled the sheet out as best he could, and handed it to the woman.

"Thanks, doc," she said, climbing up into a ventilation shaft. "And remember, don't tell anyone about our little conversation." With that, she left the room, leaving the doctor in darkness.

A few minutes later, Sonja, dressed in street clothes and accompanied by Jack Perrin, used the prescription to buy a vial of Verflex from the hospital pharmacy. With the precious drugs in Jack's pocket, the two walked out of the hospital.

"We've got to do something nice for that doctor," said Perrin. "We owe the poor guy one."

"Provided that this stuff works," replied Sonja, mildly confused by her companion's attitude. "If he gave us poison pills, then I'm going to be paying him another visit."

"Not again," snarled Donald Hartman, glancing at his suit's radar screen as he hauled a crate of rail gun ammunition down towards the hole in the ground, where a few dozen hover-dollies waited to carry the precious cargo away. Other HFA troops had been showing up to help carry the NGR power armor away, but it was still going too slowly. "Hans!" the CS pilot yelled. "We've got more company coming!"

"No. We do not," replied the spy, grinning broadly. He had been fiddling around with a machine that had been in the plane, a machine which looked like an old-fashioned mortar with an ammunition drum. Reiser began to fire the thing up into the air, launching out six small mini-missiles which shot out towards Tolkeen at incredible speed.

"Six mini-missiles won't bring down those planes!" yelled Hartman. "There's like twenty jets headed at us!"

"Just watch your radar screen," said Hans.

"H-hey! They're turning back. The jets are turning back! What the hell did those mini-missiles do, buddy? Did you just fire miniature nukes at Tolkeen or something?!"

The spy shook his head. "Their sensors are going crazy right about now. According to their technological sensors, a massive air strike is headed towards Tolkeen right now. Their magical sensors won't read a thing, but that'll only scare them more."

"Cool!" said Hartman, as he got back to work. "Got anything else like that, or is it just armor and ammo?"

"It was supposed to be secret," said Hans reluctantly. "The NGR just finished up a major trade with the Coalition States. They gave us about five billion credits worth of top-quality composite steel, and we agreed to give them some of our nicer technological secrets in return."

"Example."

"Well, ever since the damn gargoyles learned about technology, we've been trying to use their own weapons against them. Gargoyles tend to overreact to danger, so we create false dangers, then outmaneuver the monsters and hit them with a lethal surprise. We use the Radar Missiles that I just showed you for that particular purpose. We've got code-breaking machines and fake voice modulators that we use to issue false orders onto their radio frequencies, and jammers that we use to prevent them from using their radios. My personal favorite has got to be the Mega-Hologram. It's a hologram projector that creates an enormous hologram we use to frighten or misdirect the gargoyles. Generally, we make holographic Devastator robots for the gargoyles to attack, so that they ignore the real troops. But we can reconfigure the thing to make holograms of evil gods, alien intelligences, or even massive explosions. Fun stuff."

"Oh, I think that Perrin is going to like you a lot," said Hartman. Off in the distance, the anti-aircraft guns of Tolkeen could be heard firing away at a threat that wasn't there.

Next Chapter

By David Haendler.

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