Free Armageddon?? by Stuart Slade Page B

you. We
know they’ve hurt you. We’re going to hurt them back, and we’d like your help.”
    It
was tempting. She’d always thought of them as enemies, even when they were
telling her the truth. But they’d been enemies of her enemies, and so they had
been her friends. But now, this man was offering his help to her, to her …
“DON’T LISTEN TO THEM!” screamed a voice, and spots erupted behind her eyes as
Randi morphed, grew – black scales erupted on his face, horns growing from his
bald head, his glasses falling to the desk, shattering; furred bat wings
unfurled, spread, brushed the walls and ceiling, looming over her. And now a
smell like rotten eggs was strengthening; the room was darkening, and she could
hear faint screams in the distance, like a chorus of damned souls.
    She
was dimly aware of her own screaming, of the stabs of pain spiking through her;
the thing across the desk was prodding her with a pitchfork, leering at her. It
stepped backward and lustily licked its lips, grabbing a giant organ from
between its legs and –
    The
hellish scene shimmered and faded suddenly, and the previous scene returned
with the bald, grandfatherly man looking concernedly down at her and two men
with chiseled faces hovering right above her. One of the men said, “Hold still,
sister. You’re almost safe.” There was a prick in her arm, and then she was
happy, floating free down toward blessed oblivion.
    Randi
straightened up and looked over toward the door. The psychiatrists and a lab
technician were filing through the door. “Did you guys get it?”
    “Yes
James, we did,” said Bullman. “Before we hashed the room with electronic white
noise, the electronic surveillance system we had set up caught a faint signal.
It was a miracle we picked it up at all, it was right on the edge of the
spectrum covered by the ESM but it was there and we’ve recorded it. It has some
strange properties, and we’re sending the records to the physicists next door.
They’ll digitize it, feed it into our threat libraries and we’ll be able to
monitor for it. Also, if we can feed the waveform into the computers controlling
our own emitter systems, we should be able to transmit ourselves.
    “Much
more importantly, we’ve already figured out how to keep her, and others like
her, safe and sound from any further interference.”
    Randi
cocked his head curiously. “And what’s that?”
    “Well,
James, the signal in question isn’t that much different from an electromagnetic
pulse, you know that thing the scare stories have claimed would wipe out
electronics worldwide. We’ve known how to defend against that for decades and
the power levels are much lower here. So, building on that experience.” Bullman
grinned and pulled a shiny contraption from his lab coat. “A hat made of
aluminum foil.”
    Recon
Team Tango One-Five, Wadi Haran, Western Iraq.
    “Control,
we have baldricks, column advancing along the Pipeline Route. Estimated
battalion force with company-level harpy cover.”
    “Very
good. Engage and harass.”
    Lieutenant
Jade “Broomstick” Kim acknowledged, the transferred her attention back to the
mast-mounted sight on her AH-6J helicopter. A deft touch on the controls and
the aircraft rose slightly so that the ball of the sight just peaked over the
ridge. The picture hadn’t changed much, even though the column was mounted on
the rhinolobsters, they were moving slowly. Well, slowly by United States Army
standards, Broomstick guessed that by medieval standards they were fairly
galloping along. That was excruciatingly slow when compared with the way the
First Armored Division was moving up.
    A
long rectangle of rhinolobsters, each with its rider and a small group out in
front. They’d have to be the command group. The primary subject of interest,
the cream of the crop in this target-rich environment. Eliminate the command
structure first, leave the combat elements floundering around without orders.
It was a process the