The Lilliput Legion Page 18

  “Well, I take the strongest possible exception to this,” the chief administrator protested.

  “I’ll make a note of it, sir,” said Harris.

  “Don’t you condescend to me, Sergeant—”

  “That’s Lieutenant,” Harris said.

  “Whatever. I demand to speak to your superior officer at once”

  “That would be Col. Steiger, sir”,” said Harris.

  “Fine, I’ll speak to him.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  “Well?” said Ericson.

  Harris sighed wearily. “Well, what? Sir.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to go and get Col. Steiger,’ of course!” the chief administrator said, as if Harris were a total idiot.

  Harris lost his patience. “What the hell do I look like to you, an errand boy? You think the acting base commander’s going to come running just because you snapped your fingers? In case it’s escaped your attention, Dr. Ericson, the base is on full alert and the reason General Forrester is in this hospital is because there have already been several attempts on his life and the last one damn near succeeded! Now I’m here to do a job and I don’t intend to leave my post simply because some prima donna doctors have been inconvenienced. Now if you want to speak to the acting base commander, I suggest you go through the proper channels and request an appointment. If Col. Steiger thinks that your request warrants sufficient priority, he’ll see you, but frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Now get the hell out of my face. I’ve got work to do.”

  The chief administrator looked as if he were about to have apoplexy. “How dare you speak to me like that? Who do you think you are? I’ll have your stripes for this!”

  “I haven’t got any goddamn stripes;” said Harris, rolling his eyes. “I’m a commissioned officer. Now I’m really trying not to lose my temper, but—”

  “You are the most arrogant, insolent, and uncooperative young man I’ve ever met!” Ericson said, puffing himself up like a blowfish. “Now I demand to see Col. Steiger this very instant, do you hear me? This very instant!”

  “That’s it,” Harris said, “I’ve had it. If you’re not out of here in three seconds, I’m placing you under arrest. One…”

  “Arrest?” The administrator’s face turned purple and his eyes bulged. “On what charge?”

  “Two…

  “You must be out of your mind! You wouldn’t dare—”

  Three, Donnelley, Kruger, place this man under arrest.” As the two men moved in to take the astonished hospital administrator into custody, a well-dressed man hurried past the checkpoint, carrying a briefcase.

  “Wait a minute!” Hums called after him.

  “Can’t stop now!” the man called back over his shoulder as he hurried on. “I’m Dr. Blake, I’m due in surgery! It’s an emergency!”

  “Stop!” shouted Harris.

  The man ignored him. “Stop that man! Right now!”

  Donnelly and Kruger forgot about the hospital administrator and rushed after Dr. Blake, drawing their weapons as they ran.

  “Now see here!” the chief administrator shouted as he hurried after them. “You men! Stop! You can’t do that! That man’s on his way to an emergency surgery! You can’t—”

  “Ericson!” Harris shouted. “Get back here!”

  Dr. Blake suddenly dropped his briefcase on the floor, sliding it towards the lift tubes. Then he pivoted around sharply, drawing a plasma pistol from a shoulder holster.

  “Look out!” yelled Kruger.

  Donnelly dived to the right while Kruger leaped to the left as “Blake” fired. The plasma charge took Dr. Ericson full in the chest as he came running up behind them. He screamed as the searing heat enveloped him and then an instant later, his charred remains fell to the floor. As the briefcase stopped sliding, there was a faint, explosive pop and the lid flew open. A bright, incandescent glow came from within the briefcase.

  Harris fired his weapon and dropped “Blake” in his tracks, but even as he did so, a swarm of lilliputians equipped with floater paks came rising up out of the briefcase.

  “Jesus Christ,” Harris said, grabbing for his communicator. “He’s got a chronoplate in there! Donnelly, Kruger! Fire! Fire!”

  As the two men laid down a crossfire in the hospital corridor, Harris shouted into the communicator.

  “Mayday! Mayday! Assault in progress at Post 1!”

  The lift tube doors revolved around and a group of hospital staff members stepped out right into the line of fire. Three of them were killed instantly, the rest dispersed, screaming and beating at their flaming clothing or clutching at themselves Where a dozen miniature lasers had sliced through bone and sinew as easily as if it were warm butter.

  The lilliputians swarmed into the lift tube and more kept on coming from the briefcase. Four security men came running down the hall and two of them went down at once. Donnelly, trying to get around the screaming wounded, caught several laser beams in his head and upper torso. He fell to the floor without a sound.

  “Harris, this is Steiger. What’s going on down there?”

  “It’s a goddamn invasion!” Harris shouted into the communicator as reinforcements from the other hospital entrances started to arrive upon the scene. “We’re got casualties down here! I’ve got several men down! They’re coming through a temporal transit field, Lilliputians, hundreds of them! I can’t get to it! They’ve gotten to a lift tube and they’re headed up your way!”

  “Damn it!” Steiger swore. “How the hell did they get through? Destroy that field, Harris! Cut ‘em off, right now, no matter what it takes!”

  “Right,” said Harris, gritting his teeth. He dropped the communicator and took out his plasma sidearm. “My goddamn fault. My own, stupid, goddamn fault …”

  He held his plasma pistol out before him, took a deep breath and starting running down the hall, right into the line of fire. He screamed, “Get down! Get down!” and fired as he ran, his pistol cycling rapidly. The Lilliputians returned his fire, but he kept on coming, right into the deadly web of laser beams, aiming at the briefcase that a small band of Lilliputians was frantically trying to shove into an open lift tube. Harris kept on coming, screaming as he charged them, firing into their midst, incinerating them as they swarmed up out of the temporal transit field and destroying the skirmish line they’d quickly set up in the lobby, pinning his men down. He was within fifteen feet of the lift tubes when his plasma pistol cycled through, the charge pak exhausted.

  With a roar of rage, he flung it at them and made a flying dive over their heads, crushing a half a dozen of them beneath him as he fell. Smashing at the Lilliputians with his fists and sweeping them out of the way, he scrambled for the briefcase, reaching inside and with his last breath, fumbling for the controls. He didn’t make it. He died before he could shut down the field.

  Steiger was running flat out down the hall, shouting instructions as he went.

  “They’re on their way up! Cover the stairs and fire exits! Cordon off the area around all access points to this corridor! Nobody gets through! Heads up, people! Here they come!”

  The first tube came up and the chime rang softly as the door revolved. Steiger’s men fired as it slid open. The interior of the lift tube was slagged with plasma, but not before some of the Lilliputians managed to get out, some coming out low, on foot, firing as they ran, while others came out high, swarming out in their floater paks and rapidly dispersing, firing down at the men in the corridor below them.

  At the same time, a cry went up from down the hall. A squad of airborne Lilliputians was coming up the fire stairs. The men covering the stairs immediately opened fire as Steiger ran from one point of conflict to the other. A filament-thin laser beam lanced past his left temple, missing his head by a quarter of an inch. He threw himself to one side, struck the corridor wall, and spun around. A Lilliputian in a floater pak came down at him from just below the ceiling, like a fighter on a straf
ing run, his tiny autopulser cycling rapidly. Steiger fired and the Lilliputian burst into flame, then exploded as the tanks on his tiny floater pak went up. Steiger shielded his face as little bits of burning shrapnel rained down on him.

  Behind him, down the hall, the corridor was in flames. The Lilliputians were outgunned, but the same plasma weapons that enabled Steiger’s men to shoot down such small and rapidly moving targets were also setting the hospital on fire. The sprinklers had gone off, but they were not sufficient to the task and Steiger couldn’t risk sending in the fire brigade until the battle was all over. It wasn’t simply a question of defeating the tiny invaders; they had to do it within the next few minutes or else the fire would endanger the patients on the lower floors.

  He rushed to the stairwell. Several of his men were dead, some killed by the tiny commandos, but at least two were killed by fire from their own men, trying to shoot down airborne Lilliputians who were darting among them like angry wasps. The walls and stairs were blackened and burning as Steiger came through the door, but none of the Lilliputians had gotten past his men. There was a pitched battle in the stairwell as the tiny invaders were being driven back.

  And then another cry went up. They were coming out of a second lift tube. Steiger and his men ran out into the hall. Perhaps two dozen Lilliputians were in full flight, hurtling towards them down the corridor. Steiger’s men and the Lilliputians opened fire simultaneously. The man on Steiger’s right screamed briefly as a laser burned through his brain and he fell dead on the floor. Half a dozen Lilliputians went up in a blast of plasma, several of them spinning end over end, in flames and out of control, exploding as they hit the corridor walls and their propellant tanks went up.

  A few of them got past Steiger and he winced with pain as a laser burned his shoulder, then he was turning and sprinting after them. They were headed down the corridor, straight for Forrester’s room. Several of them hovered around the door lock, providing covering fire while two of them aimed their lasers at the lockwork. They burned through the door in a matter of seconds. Steiger and his men ran directly into the deadly laser fire, firing into the beams with their plasma weapons to break up their collimation.

  Steiger couldn’t believe it. The Lilliputians seemed to have no regard whatsoever for their own survival. Like miniature kamikazes, they flew right at him and his men, corkscrewing in erratic loop-de-loops with their jets on full power. It was like trying to shoot down a flight of crazed hummingbirds. The man on Steiger’s left fell. Steiger bent down and wrenched the plasma rifle out of the dead man’s grasp, but there wasn’t even enough time to slap a fresh charge pal: into it. He brought up the rifle stock sharply, smacking a Lilliputian in full flight. The Lilliputian caromed off the rifle stock like a baseball and tumbled end over end, his jets damaged and out of control. He slammed into another tiny commando and they exploded in mid air, the shrapnel from the floater paks lacerating Steiger’s face. He didn’t even feel it. He bolted straight for Forrester’s room, but the Lilliputians had already flown inside. They swooped down over the bed, their lasers playing over the shape beneath the covers. As Steiger burst into the room, he heard someone yell, “GET BACK!” and he recoiled as the blue mist of Cherenkov radiation flooded the room.

  The awesome weapon’s transponder lapped directly into the energy field of a neutron star by means of an internal chronocircuitry link with an Einstein-Rosen Generator in outer space. The result was a limitless supply of “ammunition” in the form of energy leached through a time warp from a star. The magnetic field generated around the muzzle formed an invisible forcing cone that allowed selective fire—a stream of neutrons fired on either a tight beam or a wide dispersal “spray.” The entire room glowed blue for an instant and the attacking Lilliputians disappeared, their atoms disrupted by the neutron stream.

  The bed also disappeared, as well as the night table, the drip I.V. stand, the lamp and the entire wall. A cold night wind blew in through the gaping hole where the wall had been. The edges of the hole were as smooth as melted glass. Forrester stood in the corner of the room, with his back against the wall. He lowered the strange looking weapon. It resembled a small flame-thrower, with a knurled pistol grip and an unusually shaped muzzle, only without the attached hose and tanks.

  Steiger walked over to the hole in the wall. It was about twelve feet across and eight feet high. Steiger stepped up to the edge and looked down 110 stories. The wind plucked at his hair and clothes, its coolness soothing to the wounds on his face.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, softly.

  Forrester came up to stand beside him, holding the disruptor in his right hand. It was difficult to believe that something the size of a sawed-off shotgun could have done such damage.

  “I think we’ve got a slight problem here with over penetration,” Forrester said, wryly. “Darkness always did overdo things. Sure works, though. If he ever gets all the bugs out, I might actually consider making these standard issue.”

  Steiger simply stared at him.

  “You look terrible,” said Forrester.

  “Yeah,” said Steiger. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then snapped on his communicator. “This is Steiger. All posts, report.”

  “Post 1, sir. Lafferty here. All secure down here.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Four dead, two wounded, sir. Should I send in the fire brigade, sir? We’ve got alarms going off all over the place.”

  “Yeah, send ‘em in. Make sure we get all the wounded out and stand by to evacuate patients…Get additional personnel in if you have to. Steiger out.”

  “Post 2, sir. Cpl. Steinberg reporting. Everybody’s dead. I’m the only one left. But we’re secure, sir. That is, I’m secure. I guess. I mean… hell, I don’t know, I—”

  “Pull yourself together, Steinberg. You all right?”

  “I’ve been hit, sir, but it’s not serious, I don’t think. I mean, I’ll manage. “

  “Good man. Hang in there, we’ll get someone to you as soon as we can. Stand by.”

  And on it went. Every single post, men dead, men wounded, but the attack had been repulsed. Fortunately, none of the hospital patients had been hurt. The Lilliputians had known exactly where to go and they had struck directly at the top floor. Now they were all dead. They had given no quarter and asked none. Steiger and Forrester went out into the corridor, filled with smoke and flames, steaming from the sprinklers interacting with the heat, blackened from the plasma blasts, scarred by laser fire, littered with bodies.

  “Oh, God damn it to hell,” said Forrester, his voice breaking slightly. “All this just because of me.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself, Moses,” Steiger said. “This is a war. And the Network has a lot to answer for.”

  “And they’re going to answer for it, believe me,” Forrester said grimly. “We were lucky this time, but the entire top part of this building will have to be evacuated. Christ, how many of them were there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Steiger. “It seemed like hundreds. But we stopped ‘em. We stopped ‘em cold.”

  “Yes, for now,” Forrester said. “But I can’t risk another attack like that. I can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous to the other patients and the hospital personnel.”

  “But you haven’t been released for duty—”

  “After this, I don’t think you’ll get any arguments from Dr. Hazen or any of the staff,” said Forrester. “Get me out of here, Creed. I’m going back to headquarters. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Chapter 10

  Lucas materialized in the middle of Washington Street. For a moment, he did not know where he was; then a blast from a diesel truck’s air horn caused him to leap to one side, narrowly avoiding being run down.

  “Get outta the road, asshole!” the trucker yelled out the open window as he rumbled by.

  Lucas looked around. The area he stood in resembled a war zone. The street was pockmarked with pot holes. The sidewalks were cracked and buckling
. The warehouses all around him were shuttered and boarded up and covered with graffiti. An abandoned car was rusting on its wheel hubs, the wheels long since stolen. The rest of the car had been stripped. the windows shattered and an uprooted traffic sign had been hurled through the windshield, like a harpoon transfixing a whale—an eloquent commentary on the mindless fury and frustration of the scuttlefish who crawled these streets at night.

  And it was getting dark.

  “New York City,” Lucas said, realizing where he was. “Damn. I’ve done it again.”

  He groaned and brought his hands up to his head, pressing them flat against his temples. His head felt as if it were about to burst. The pain rivaled the worst hangover he’d ever had. It kept fading in and out, as if someone were flickering a switch on and off.

  He cursed Darkness and his damned telempathic chronocircuitry although without his interference, Lucas knew he wouldn’t even be alive. Still, it was a mixed blessing. Each time he thought he had a handle on it, he’d somehow lose control and flip through time and space like some sort of leaf blown on a temporal wind. And the more often he did it, the greater the strain seemed to be. Obviously, he required a period of recuperation after each translocation. Darkness had warned him about that.

  Curiously, the amount of time and space he covered during each translocation seemed to make no difference. Whether he translocated from one side of a room to another or from Darkness’s secret laboratory headquarters all the way to Earth, it seemed to feel the same. The sensation upon arrival was not altogether unlike what most people felt upon making transition via the old chronoplates or the warp discs that superseded them, although the vertiginous feeling was minimized somewhat with the warp discs. The initial translocation—the departure—took place so fast that it was impossible to notice it happening. It occurred literally with the speed of thought. But immediately upon arrival, there was the unpleasant sensation of vertigo and a curious coldness, as if a chill mountain breeze were blowing through his body, whistling in between the bones and organs, making every single nerve fiber shiver. And he had noticed that the effects seemed to be increasing every time.