The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Seventeen

Chybbo stifled a laugh.  He could not believe his good fortune.  Standing in front of him, burdened by the weight of a wounded member of the Broken Mirror team held between them, were Major Holloway and Doctor Veneralli.  Each had crooked an arm under the hurt soldier’s armpits as they half-carried, half-dragged him across the battle zone.  They blinked disbelievingly as the Apocritan insectivorid strode arrogantly towards them, his lance-like disruptor weapon drawn and aimed.

 “You”, Doctor Veneralli said aloud, snarling at the Night Marshal leader.  “I saw you back at the beach.  You were directing those monsters who attacked us.  I saw you!”

 Holloway’s eyes narrowed.  He remembered seeing the insect-man from a distance, back at the beach, orchestrating the assault at Broken Mirror’s landing zone.  In different circumstances, Holloway would have marveled at the mutant creature’s existence and the natural way in which he interacted with his fellow killers, indicating that Chybbo and his kind were not that much of an aberration among the population of the Withered Land.  A human-like race of insect-people with a sophisticated warrior culture would be something which would have endlessly fascinated him.  It would have been fascinating to communicate with such a creature.  But recent memory had modified Holloway’s perceptions and changed the way he perceived life.

 The thing was a killer.  It had no interest in communicating with human beings.  It was a hostile.  It was an obstacle in the completion of his mission.  The mission was to get his men home safely inside the ninety-six hour window.  This thing was not going to let him do that without a fight.  And as such, it was subject to the soldier’s Rule of Four:

 Identify the enemy.

 Find the enemy.

 Isolate the enemy.

 Kill the enemy

 Chybbo tilted his misshapen head and appeared to weigh the anger behind the Doctor’s words.  It was obvious he understood what the Earth human was saying.

 It was just as obvious, though, that he didn’t care.

 Brent Holloway raised the muzzle of his assault rifle even as Veneralli swiftly raised and sighted down the sights of his own automatic pistol and, together, they fired again and again and again…

 

 

The Pilgrim had succumbed to a breathtakingly bestial paroxysm of rage.  He jogged the wide, winding corridors of the damaged dryfftnaught with a quartet of armed sentries who struggled to keep up with him.  The dark-garbed, fearsome sorcerer moved with a strange loping gait that covered more ground far more quickly than they expected, and following his loping strides as the floor of the vessel shook and trembled turbulently proved very challenging without use of their arms because those arms were carrying large, bulky rifles.  The sounds from the explosions rocking the tilting craft were deafening and ashen smoke had begun to flood the passageways.  Ceiling lights inset into the corridors shorted and exploded, raining hot glass down on anyone passing through.

 The Traveler in Red and his comrades had unexpectedly managed to short-out a good portion of the dryfftnaught’s electrical system and the short had blown one of the dynamos for the complex tunneling mechanism.  The drive engines had revved and the vessel had fiercely jerked forward and then slewed to one side, the stabilizing gyros losing the ability to keep the craft upright.

 The dryfftnaught had begun to sink deeper and further into the surrounding soil, burying itself.

 Pilgrim had raced to the engine room to oversee regaining control over the vessel’s propulsion and initiate the main safety protocols, but the damage had been more extensive than he’d expected and the ineffective, complacent Chief Engineer had been little more than a bureaucrat with a screwdriver.  There was far more at stake than the mere sinking of the dryfftnaught or the loss of the prisoners.  There was the loss of the precious stolen cargo the late, unlamented Lord Cr’Aughtin had stowed aboard the craft.  The Ikarenium.  If the vessel sank into the depths of the planetary crust, the Ikarenium would be lost.  He could not allow that to happen.  After all his careful planning, after all the deal-making, Chaos seemed to come for The Pilgrim from every avenue.  All this had served to send the Pilgrim over the edge.