The Siege Against Tolkeen

Rick Freedom looked down at his hand, and tried to hold it steady. His brain, enhanced by M.O.M. implants, should have been easily able to keep the limb as still as stone. But he could not. His hands were shaking to the point where he could hardly pick up a glass of water, never mind a weapon. He felt sweaty and feverish, yet was wracked with chills. An ordinary man would have interpreted these signs as being the onset of a cold. But Freedom knew differently. He knew that his mind was breaking down again.

The Crazy picked up a bottle of medication that lay on his nightstand and swallowed half a dozen pills in one swift gulp. Almost immediately, he could feel the sweet chemicals going to work, easing his nervous system and his shattered composure. His trembling began to stop, and the spinning, undulating bionic implants on his scalp stopped their mad dance. Freedom's sanity, or what little remained of it, was intact for the moment. But the pills were only a stopgap measure. They would not keep him sane forever. And he was starting to run out.

The Crazy got out of his lice-ridden bed in his tiny, dirty apartment. His legs felt like rubber, but he could still walk. He staggered over to his chest of drawers, trying to pick out some clothes. He had to get up, had to help Perrin prepare for the final attack against the pyramid. He opened up the top drawer, only to see a row of bloody skulls neatly arranged there. Other than their eyes, the decapitated heads had been totally shorn of flesh. But their eyes were still perfectly intact, still bright and blue and alive. Those terrible eyes looked up at Freedom, and the skulls said, It is your duty to slaughter the wicked, in an eerie unison. Then they began to laugh, and their laughter was fit to drive any man to madness.

Freedom screamed, shut his eyes, and held his hands over his ears. When he opened up his eyes again, the skulls were gone. The drawer contained only his clean and folded underwear, with no signs of the apparitions which had threatened him a moment ago. Rick Freedom, who had fought in dozens of battles and performed many an atrocity in his lifetime, thought of the skulls again, and began to cry.

"You're sure that this is their headquarters?" Lucius Mallen asked, holding the telephone so tightly that his paw marks were left on the plastic casing afterwards. "Okay, about how many of the terrorists do you think are in there? That many? Geez. We're going to have a real bloodbath on our hands. I'll see what I can do about getting some demons for when we raid them, but with or without demons we're going to be soaking up casualties." The Wolfen thought things over while he used his computer to pull up a map of the area.

"All right," he finally said, gazing at the screen. "Call for some backup, but DO NOT make your presence known. I want a couple of men watching every entrance and exit. If they start moving out or bringing in weapons or mobilizing for an attack, call back. Tomorrow morning, we'll hit them with the raid. If we're lucky, the psycho-killer associated with these bastards will be there and we'll get the personal pleasure of watching our demons hack the monster into fish bait. If he doesn't show, a nest of terrorists goes down nevertheless. I'll call you back in a few hours."

The detective hit the END button on his phone, and heard the beeping of a dial tone. After a moment of musing to himself, he dialed another number.

"Department of Summonings?" he asked. "This is Lucius Mallen, badge number 617-478-3C. I'm going to need the nastiest batch of devils you can conjure as back-up."

"I understand that, detective," said the bland voice of a bureaucrat from the other end of the line. "But we just got a new set of orders from the High Council, restricting our summoning privileges until after the solstice. We're not allowed to summon anything over a Class II entity."

"What's a Class II entity? Shedim? Night Owls?"

"Gremlins. If you want, I can have a strike force of about 16 gremlins ready and waiting for orders by tomorrow morning, but that's the most that I could possibly procure."

"Forget it," growled Mallen, as he hung up the phone. This is trouble, he thought. The damn bean-counters would have me and the tactical team walk into a terrorist lair with no demon backup. The military can't help me, because they'll be too busy holding the Dead Boys at the gates. Looks like my only option for victory is to circumvent the rules.

The Wolfen detective picked up the phone again, and dialed another number. "Hello, evidence warehouse?" he asked. "Remember a large shipment of Naruni Enterprises weaponry and military equipment that came in a while ago? The arms dealer is going on trial, and we need to present the weapons at court. I'll be down in a few minutes with my ID card to pick 'em up." Mallen hung up the phone, and then put his head in his hands. He was tired of all this, and the hardest part was still ahead of him. The detective picked up the phone one last time, and dialed another number.

"Hi baby," he said gently. "I want to take another stab at convincing you to leave..."

Hans Reiser wandered through the city streets, gazing at the great pyramid and the buildings which surrounded it as he planned his assault. The NGR agent was out of his league here, and he knew it. He was used to wiping out grubby little groups of Unmutuals or finding out the locations of gargoyle bases. Nobody had ever trained him for life as a secret agent in the midst of a city of magic. But here he was, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

It certainly is a fascinating place, he thought, seeing a flying carpet pass over his head while a group of centaurs passed by. Pity that I'm going to have to help our American allies blow it all to hell.

Suddenly, Reiser tensed. He could see one of the Brodkil guarding the pyramid look over at him. The demon had M.O.M. implants sticking out of its lumpy skull, which was often a sign of psionic powers. Was the monster mind-scanning him? Reiser had been taught how to deal with that, at least. There was a little hunk of metal in the back of his skull which sent out mental static to deal with telepaths. Furthermore, Reiser relaxed his mind, focusing on the image of a clean white slate.

The Brodkil grunted, and began rubbing its eyes. The mental defenses had worked. Still, now the demon would definitely know that something was up. This place was not safe. Reiser turned, and began to walk away. He had already figured out the best places to put the white noise generators, the holographic projectors, and the EMP generators. There wouldn't be time to set up any anti-targeting devices, and the Tolkeenites doubtless had countermeasures against the things anyway. All was in readiness.

The spy decided that he would spend the rest of the day walking through this city of wonders. Back home in Germany, they simply didn't have any spectacles of this magnitude. It was a pity, but Reiser didn't want to live his entire life surrounded by filthy D-Bee scum. Tolkeen was a nice enough place to visit, but he sure as hell wouldn't want to live here. Especially after the Coalition started bombing the hell out of everything.

As the alien intelligence shot over the landscape at tremendous speeds, he felt a soft buzzing at the base of his skull. Looking off into the distance, he could see the burning, blighted forests surrounding Tolkeen, and the massed armies of the pathetic humans. Even further off, he could see the spires of Tolkeen itself as they really were, without the feeble masking which the mortals had applied. It was there that his brother was imprisoned.

The alien intelligence slowed his flight, and then came down for a gentle landing. It would do no good for the humans to spot him and force the battle early. He would slip in unnoticed, and bring havoc to those who thought they could control gods. By the time that I am done, the monster thought, the mortals will never dare to insult us again.

Next Chapter

By David Haendler.

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