A Rage for Revenge

57 The Colorado Infestation

Lizard reached overhead and unlocked a red cover marked CAMERA. There were three bars in the panel. She pressed the first one, and something in the belly of the chopper went rrrrr-THUNK! It sounded heavy.

Lizard pointed to the second bar. "See that? When I tell you to, hit that button."

"Right. Anything else you want me to do?"

"Enjoy the ride. I should warn you though, it's going to be a little bumpy."

"What is all this anyway?" I gestured to indicate the chopper controls and included some of the equipment stashed in the back. "I don't recognize half of this."

"Okay," she said, "that first cabinet is an industrial memory. We've got four high-speed, high-res stereo cameras hanging from the belly of this ship. We've got enough memory there to store about five minutes of input. We're shooting five times normal speed, so that uses up bytes in a hurry."

"Oh, "

"Those two big tanks-those'll release a spray of hot metal shavings to confuse any tracking devices on the ground or in the air. Actually, it's mostly a decoy, because we'll be detonating everything that's carrying a U.S. chip. We're putting out an angled beam. Only those weapons in an arc directly behind and beneath us will go off. That way, any observers will assume it's the result of some direct-action weaponry we're carrying.

"Those other two tanks are carrying bug spray. It's a pretty potent mix, with a six-day half-life. We still don't know what kind of vectors it'll produce though, so we're limiting its use to heavy infestations like the one we're about to hit.

"Hanging under the wings and belly, I've got thirty-four cluster missiles. Incendiary warheads. They'll come apart in midair and scatter every which way. Have you ever seen a Madball-VI in operation? No? Well, you will. Those things bounce and skitter like water on a hot griddle, leaving fires everywhere they touch. We're carrying five thousand of them."

"Sounds like the army isn't missing a trick."

"You haven't heard it all. That radar chaff we're dropping-it includes all kinds of things that will make this area unpleasant for days. There are these little nerve-gas tipped burrs which will kill anything that steps on them. No matter how they fall, there's always a point sticking up. Really cute. The bug spray-that's laced with isotopes. If the spray doesn't stop 'em, we'll know by the isotope concentrations in any worms we kill later on which sprays didn't work. Oh, yeah; we're also spraying napalm." She pointed at a locked switch on her board. "That's the master fire control. We hit that and it starts the whole party. It knows when to fire or release every single piece of ordinance this ship is carrying. The whole job will take less than thirty seconds. We fly directly across the worm camp only once and we leave a swath of destruction a kilometer wide. At least."

"That wide? You'll take out the whole encampment."

"Hmp," she said. "You think so?"

A warning chime went off, and the computer said quietly, "Three minutes to target."

She looked at me. "Strap yourself in, Jim."

I fumbled with the harness, adjusted it, and clipped it shut across my chest. Lizard was looking at me oddly.

"Is something wrong?"

"I'm wondering if I can trust you."

"Huh?"

"The thought has crossed my mind that you might actually have turned renegade."

"I haven't," I said.

"I can take your word for that, huh?"

"I thought you said you knew what happened at Family."

"Right. Sorry." She turned back to her controls. "Force of habit. I don't trust anything anymore."

She didn't say anything after that. Neither did I. I stared out the windshield at the ground rolling beneath us. Almost all the greenery had been replaced by dark patches of purple and occasional blossoms of red. Here and there were clusters of pink fuzzy things. They looked like balls of cotton candy.

Family was coming back to me again, flooding in like a firestorm. Whatever that pink stuff had been, it was wearing off. The walls were disintegrating fast.

Or maybe I was deciding that it was all right to hurt again. That wauld be nice.

Because maybe it meant that I wanted to trust Lizard.

I looked over at her. She was just letting go of her controls. They continued moving without her, as if they had a mind of their own. The autopilot was running this mission. She reached past the regular controls and unslung a pair of extra joysticks-auxiliary weapon controls. She would be adding her input to the targeting computer, picking out targets she especially wanted to hit.

She flipped down the goggle plate on her helmet, adjusting it to fit directly against her eyes. Now she had a target disk superimposed on her field of vision. Whatever she was looking at, she could destroy with just the touch of a button. Lizard leaned forward in her seat to scan the ground below, testing her range of vision.

She pointed at one particularly thick clump of pink cotton candy. "See that?" she said. "Puffballs. We're lucky it's late in the year."

I remembered the pink snow in California. "Yeah."

She pointed ahead. "We're coming up on it now. Switch on the cameras." She did things to her console, finishing up by hitting the master fire control. I stretched upward and tapped the middle bar. It beeped and lit up red.

The ground ahead was rising toward a crest. The grass beneath us had a bluish tinge. Chtorran grass? Probably. Or something tougher than grass. There were black and purple bushes scattered all over the hills. I leaned forward in my chair to follow a large orange Chtorran threading its way through the brush. Three more followed behind it. One of them looked like it had a human rider. But we were past it too fast to see. I'd have to wait and see what the cameras had caught.

"Get ready," said Lizard.

We lifted up toward the crest, came over it and-

"Holy shit!"

-dropped down the slope of the other side toward the largest Chtorran encampment I had ever seen!

I saw it all in the single moment we hung there above it. It was a wide, almost circular valley, shrouded in streaks of bluish haze. The western sun, shining through the haze lent it shades of chocolate, pink, and magenta. As we dropped down toward them, I could see the lavender mists were punctuated by the round pink bumps of Chtorran huts.

Everywhere, the landscape was dotted with huts-there were gumdrops everywhere-of all sizes! Most of them were small, one-family igloos. Many of them had corrals. I could see things in them, but I wasn't sure what. A few of the domes were clustered like berries to make larger structures. Streaks of gray mist clung to the ground, threaded between the huts and corrals. I wondered what it was.

Closer now, I could see orange and red and pink and purple blobs of fur. They were all moving toward us, streaking and screaming. I could hear them even over the chopper's roar. I saw humans running too!

The chopper lurched then-we bounced sideways, then up, and back, down and across

"What the-?"

"Hang on! I told you it'd be bumpy!"

Something was flashing orange beneath and behind us. I could feel the missiles firing from the wings of the chopper. The whole ship clanged every time one went off. We rang like the inside of a bell! We were headed directly toward the center of the Chtorran infestation-toward a huge, high, half-spherical dome. It was the mother of them all!

I pointed and shouted.

"I see it!" she screamed back. She was already firing. Two silver needles streaked out and ahead of us, leaving thready trails of white smoke. They angled forward directly toward the dome and entered it--

For the briefest of instants nothing happened.

Then the dome exploded with fur! The walls came apart in a thousand places as Chtorrans flung themselves outward! Red and yellow and orange and crimson and purple and pink and white and magenta and gray and a thousand other shades of fur! Too many of them! Too many colors!

And then the missiles actually went off! There were double fireballs-and then there was just one, climbing brightly into the sky. Streaks of phosphorus arced outward. I could feel the heat.

The chopper shuddered as the force of the blast hit us. We were already pulling up and leaning sideways into a turn toward the south end of the valley where it opened out onto a plain. The chopper jerked and bumped and bounced. Things were still roaring behind us.

There were more huts ahead of us-even more huts! Was there no end to this encampment? Lizard fired two more missiles toward another thick cluster of domes. She left the rest for the computer. I wished I had a window to look behind us. All I could see out of Lizard's side of the cockpit was a tower of black smoke. Something started beeping loudly.

Lizard said, "Shit!" and hit the panic button.

Something went Ka-BANG! behind us. Something else went THUMP! Then a whole lot of things released from the chopper all at once, and the jets cut in. We punched up into the air so fast the breath was knocked out of me. A wall of force slammed me deep down into my seat. I couldn't inhale. What the hell was this? Three gees? Five?

The air around us turned orange. And then it got even brighter.

A giant hand was pushing the chopper upward. We were buffeting in the air. I had the sense that the ground was sparkling with a thousand firework explosions, but that wasn't what was hurling us into the sky.

Lizard grabbed her controls and peeled us off sideways. For a moment, I had the feeling we were upside down-then we were plunging south and upward and leaving a column of burning air behind us.

"What happened?"

"They fired on us!"

"They what?"

"Ground-to-air missiles. Vipers probably. We nearly took one up the tail. We caught the rest before they got close. I did a no-no," she said. "I blew up every piece of ordnance in the camp." She pointed back. "Look how much they had."

I had to lean forward to peer past her. In the distance, almost on the horizon now, I could see the thick black pillar of smoke that marked the worm camp. There were still explosions going off in it. It was speckled with bright places. There were orange flames everywhere.

"Shit," she said.

"What's the matter? You did it! The mission was a success! You blew up the whole camp!"

She shook her head. She flipped up her goggle plate and wiped her eyes. "No, I didn't. You saw the size of it. I only cut a chunk out one edge. We didn't even get near the thickest part. I veered off when I knew we wouldn't have enough bombs. In a month, that camp will be bigger than ever. They'll have rebuilt everything we destroyed tonight. They're getting too big for us, Jim. Denver isn't going to like this."

"That wasn't the center of the infestation?"

"That wasn't even a suburb. That was an outlying village."

"Uh-"

"You know what this means, don't you?" I shook my head.

"We're going to have to use nukes."