“Whatever they hit her with hit her hard,” Dennis said. I can’t believe Veronica would do that!” he said for the twentieth time that day. “She knew exactly what Eliza would do . . .”
The door between the driver’s compartment and the prisoner’s compartment opened, and a familiar looking blonde woman stepped through, and the almost fifty people crammed into the prison transport expressed their outrage.
“Of course I knew exactly what she would do,” Veronica said smugly.
“Veronica?!?” Allyson said. “What the fuck are you . . .”
If Allyson had been confused by the blonde Hybrid’s presence, she was even more confused by what Veronica did next. She lifted Eliza’s head up, and Allyson saw that her friend and team leader was quite awake. Not only was Eliza awake, she was smiling from ear to ear. Then Veronica kissed her, and the entire captive crew was stunned into silence.
“What kept you?” Eliza asked when Veronica reluctantly pulled her lips away from Eliza’s.
“Had to wait for the sun to go down. Gives your guys the advantage.” Veronica hit a button on the driver’s side of the door, and the bar running down the middle of the bus released all the prisoners chains. Veronica handed a set of keys to a still-stunned Allyson. “This is for the cuffs on your wrists. Take yours off and pass ’em down.” Then she looked down the length of the bus. “All right everyone, once your hands are free, check under your seats. All the way back and under the seats, you’ll find some . . . gifts.”
Allyson finally got it. She looked at Eliza, her eyes growing wide. “You bitch! You set ANOTHER trap! Why didn’t you . . .”
“. . . Tell you?” Eliza finished as Veronica uncuffed her lover and kissed her again. “The fewer people that knew, the less chance someone could blow it. As soon as Veronica said how desperate they must be, I realized that she was right. And what better bait than a chance to wipe out all their enemies while they are unarmed, chained up and in the middle of nowhere, particularly if they are running out of options.”
Terillia had reached under her seat and pulled off a couple of rail-gun pistols and a bandoleer containing a number of strange looking grenades. “But we’re not unarmed . . .” she started, smiling a very pretty smile.
One of the vampires further back had pulled out a kinetic riot shield and a high-powered rail-gun rifle. “And we’re not chained up . . .”
“And that,” said Dennis, “is why it’s called a trap. Who else . . .”
“Valar knows,” Eliza interrupted. “I needed someone on the other bus to help organize things. And I’m hoping that Kertosis hates Valar enough to put in an appearance to make sure he’s dead. But Valar has a few nasty surprises up his sleeve, just in case. And Thug and the trolls all know. The Purity won’t make the same mistake they did back on the island. They’ll go for the trolls first, but they’ll be in for ANOTHER surprise.”
“Wait,” Allyson said. “How did you arrange all this? And what did they shoot you with?” she added, looking at Eliza.
“Telepathy, sweetie,” Veronica said. “At least in answer to the first part. We’ve been in contact since the Purity’s message. We had to have the argument to give me an excuse to leave and set things up with Captain Corbin. As for the second part of your question, the only thing in those darts was a harmless saline solution.”
“Harmless, my ass! Those little things hit like a mother!” Eliza was rubbing one of the spots where she had been tagged.
“So the Captain’s in on this too?” Dennis said. “Good. I’ve always liked him.”
“And we needed the trolls in on it to keep our people in check.”
“Goodness!” Terillia said. “The trolls weren’t there to keep the . . . Captain . . . from getting in. They were to keep us from going out!”
“Precisely. I REALLY didn’t want a fight to break out and ruin the war,” Eliza said. “And we made sure that the Border Patrol and Customs let them into the country . . . for a price of course. Didn’t want things to look too easy.” She grasped Veronica’s hand. “Now, we all get what we want . . .”
—————- ——————
Outside the caravan . . .
—————- ——————
Jonathan Coachmen had just received the signal to launch his attack. He gave a thumbs-up signal to his pilots. “This will be a memorable day!” he shouted before firing up his bird. The fifteen heavily armed helicopters rose steadily into the night sky with a thunderous roar. “From darkness they came,” he said, “so to darkness they return.”
Through his night vision goggles, he saw his comrades on the ground barreling out of dusty side roads and up from the ravines in their all-terrain armored transports. Kertosis was in the most heavily armored of the vehicles. He had proved himself a useful ally, and the Inner Circle wanted to keep him safe. They would hit the convoy all at once, leaving nothing behind but the echoes of the screams of the wicked.
Then he thought he saw something resembling a large bird flitting up in front of the lead gun-ship. But it didn’t look like any bird he had ever seen before. “It looks almost . . .” It was then that Jonathan Coachman, Knight of the First Order of the Purity, experienced a moment of clarity. That wasn’t a bird, it was a succubus. Actually, there were several succubae flying up towards the choppers with incredible speed and agility. They had come from the bus. He saw one of them juggled a round object in its hand a couple of times. Then the creature threw the object.
“Oh, sh. . .”
————– —————
Out in the sky . . .
————– —————
Terillia knew she was taking a risk by getting in front of the chopper. She was prepared to make evasive maneuvers, but she wanted this scum to know . . . she wanted him to see who had beaten him. She tossed her EMP grenade up once in the air, activated it and threw it into the helicopter’s propeller. There was a blinding flash of light, then the target helicopter’s power systems simply turned off. And a helicopter without power didn’t fly very well, unless you counted bouncing. Terillia didn’t thinking that bouncing should count. Then the remaining choppers let loose with a barrage of automatic weapon fire, but Terillia was long gone, diving towards the planet’s surface like a deep-rolling pigeon. Her fellow succubae swooped in from the side and let loose with a number of EMP grenades, and helicopters were dropping like flies. A few of the winged Terrans were hit by stray gunfire and one was sucked into a helicopter’s updraft and was shredded to pieces. The war was on.
————— —————
On the ground . . .
————— —————
“I think we have a problem,” said Jerry Snow, Knight of the Second Order of the Purity and leader of one of the three squads of land vehicles involved in the assault. His second in command looked into the sky and saw explosions and gunfire that wasn’t directed at the caravan in any way. But he didn’t have much time to analyze things as his vehicle approached one of the guard transports. “Prepare to strafe the sides,” he ordered of his gunman.
But at that moment, the canvas-covered rear of the vehicle was eject from the back. And there weren’t any soldiers in the back . . . just a single, hulking mass.
“That’s a troll!” the second in command screamed. “Aren’t those supposed to be in the semi in the back?!?”
Jerry Snow’s eyes were wide as the creature raised what appeared to be a hand-held cannon and pointed it directly at his vehicle. Just before his transport erupted in flames and exploded, the Knight of the Second Order screamed into his communicator, “It’s a trap! It’s a . . .”
———— ———————————–
On the other end of the cannon . . .
———— ———————————–
Lorazok was actually a fairly mellow creature most of the time, even for a troll. He had been working with rescue teams on Earth, helping moved debris from people who had become trapped in explosions or cave ins when more traditional machinery was too bulky or too slow to get to the scene. He had been given the nickname of “Tiny” by the company he had worked for, and the sarcasm hadn’t been lost on him. Tiny stood nine-and-a-half feet tall and weighed close to fifteen hundred pounds. Like most trolls, Tiny had held great reverence for the Vampire known as Kelik due to the respect that particular man had always shown to the troll race. So when Thug had informed the troll of their plan and had handed one of these H&K Displacer Cannons that Thug enjoyed so much, Tiny had been imagining a moment just like this one. Tiny was smiling as the front of one of the vehicles moved directly into the troll’s sights, and was outright grinning as one shot from the cannon reduced the target to smoldering wreckage.
Tiny strapped the cannon to his back and jumped from the speeding vehicle directly into the front of another enemy transport, which reacting as most vehicles would when it collided with something the size of Tiny. It sent the troll flying, but the transport looked like it had hit a tree and most of the passengers were dead or dying.
The caravan’s tires began to squeal as the “prison” transports ground to a halt. Soon, heavily armed vampires came pouring out the sides of the buses and took positions behind the rocks and boulders lining the road. The lumbering gargoyles took to the sky to aid the succubae in the air war. They were much slower than their Terran comrades but were tough as stone. The other trolls, all of whom had been hiding on the guard transports, had all blown their covers and were firing their cannons into the largest conglomerations of the enemy vehicles. Soon, the Purity was abandoning their vehicles to do battle in the broken terrain. They still had the numbers advantage, but they were in a state of panic.