Turning into the empty dirt parking lot, the big silver-and-green bus crunched over the acorns, stopping beneath a stand of oak. "Fairfax Charters" read the lettering above the trim. From across the high white-picket fence, a calliope played.
The silver door swung wide. Out trooped the seniors, some leaning on canes. None were under sixty. Chattering, laughing, they followed the big white-bearded man up to the candy-striped admissions booth.
"Group reservation," he said, handing the attendant their yellow federal retirees' pass. "We're the Double Dippers." The attendant, a lean, tanned kid in Levis and an American U. T-shirt, smiled faintly, checking his clipboard. "Mr. McShane?"
Bob nodded.
"Welcome to Glen Echo, sir. We open in ten minutes." McShane raised his blackthorn Irish walker, pointing past the kid to where the Ferris wheel turned against a cloudless blue sky. "Your equipment is operating. We've paid enough for an extra ten minutes."
Even as the kid opened his mouth, the seniors were filing past, scattering into the park.
Need an underground command post? It's easy, if you're a S'Cotar transmute. Just teleport a clean, modest-sized nuclear weapon down to where it can be triggered without punching through to either surface or magma. Once the chamber you've created stabilizes, send down atmosphere and power generators, command and control systems. Finally, having carefully checked the life-support sensors, you may flick down your own green self. You're now a mile underground, sheltered in bedrock, impervious to standard K'Ronarin detectors and accessible only by telekinesis.
The command center under Glen Echo was small, just a single station with one transmute. Sug-Atra had had the good fortune to be outstationed on Terra Two when Pocsym blew the S'Cotar citadel to glory andT'Nil'sRevenge wiped the biofab fleet. That had been a year ago. Now he sat bored, watching the surface telltales and monitoring the portal's status.
Sug-Atra saw the reality of Glen Echo, not the illusion created by his transmutes on the surface. Elderly humans strolled the midway, playing imaginary games, buying invisible junk food. Seen only by each other, S'Cotar warriors patrolled in pairs. In a weed-choked lot, where intense humans ruefully lost quarters to nonexistent video games, three transmutes stood with antennae entwined, constantly refreshing the illusion of Glen Echo.
An alarm chirped. Flicking a tentacle, Sug-Atra brought up a tacscan of the nearby Potomac. Rotary-winged aircraft, thirty of them, were proceeding upriver toward West
Virginia. Not unusual. The last week had seen an increase in military air traffic.
In about a month, Sug-Atra knew, the Terrans and their quaint war machines would be ash.
He replaced the tacscan with a bootlegged recording of a double-tiered, three-patterned mating dance-warriors and transmutes. It was delightfully perverse and utterly explicit. Sug-Atra was totally engrossed when the alarm sounded again. Angrily, he snapped out a tentacle, bringing back the tacscan. The helicopters were coming in low and fast, a narrow phalanx charging straight at the nest.
Alert! Alert! Sug-Atra's thought went to every S'Cotar in the park. Air assault from the river. Ground defenses stand by to fire. Warriors deploy. Portal sentries alert Terra Two.
What about the humans in the nest? asked the next senior transmute, one of the three in the vacant lot.
Harmless, said Sug-Atra. Kill them later. Direct all fire at those helicopters.
I remind you all, he called, we are a sacrifice to the glory of the Race. We must hold this nest until our brothers in Terra Two can negate the portal.
As the two boys turned and bolted up the stairs, McShane raised his cane and fired. The narrow red beam knifed through the two, shattering the doorglass and vanishing into Xanadu.
Tumbling down the stairs, the bodies became those of S'Cotar warriors. They lay heaped on the ground, viscous green slime oozing from their wounds.
Glen Echo turned into a small corner of hell.
The infiltrators, K'Ronarin crew and Terran infantry, were blasting away at preselected targets, taking out S'Cotar weapons positions, warriors and the occasional innocent pushcart.
Stunned for an instant, the S'Cotar blasted back, azure beams crisscrossing with the red, turning the midway into a deadly net of energy beams.
Illusion faded as the transmutes fought for their lives. Shimmering, the bright red Ferris wheel with its gaily colored lights imploded into a ball of primary colors that burst outward, then contracted into a compact gray shape-a shape Sutherland recognized.
"Fusion cannon!" he cried, staring wide-eyed out the plexiglass cockpit of the third helicopter. Green figures scuttled around the weapon, its great ugly snout now only a few hundred yards away, locking onto the lead chopper.
"Colonel Griswold," Sutherland called over the radio, "get 'em down now! Don't try for your primary LZ!"
The bulky troop carriers were still eighty yards up, making for the parking lot, when the cannon shrilled. A thick cobalt-blue fusion beam shot out, turning the lead chopper into a fiery ochre ball that hurled blackened bits of men and machine to earth.
The explosion was still echoing out over the Potomac when a second beam detonated another chopper.
Fifty yards above the parking lot, Sutherland saw the cannon lock onto his chopper.
"Shit," said the pilot, pulling the aircraft hard right.
Swooping in and over, the two escorting Apache gun-ships rocketed the cannon. The salvo went wide, small geysers of flame and dirt bursting around the S'Cotar position.
The cannon shrilled again, dissolving the tail rotor of Sutherland's chopper, then tracked right, firing short blue bursts. The Apaches exploded almost together, two flaming spheres touching as they dissolved into a rain of molten debris.
The earth rushed toward Sutherland, slamming him against a bulkhead. Blackness.
What was left of the real Ferris wheel lay between the midway and the cannon-only the motor housing itself, the motor and superstructure long since sold for scrap. Crawling low, McShane reached it just as the gunships were hit. He threw himself flat, hands over his head as flaming metal showered the area. As it ended, he peered cautiously over the rusting metal.
Most of the S'Cotar were deployed at the park's other end. The fusion cannon had only its four warrior crew: one in the gun chair, swiveling with the weapon, the other three maintaining tracking and energy feeds from a gray, all-weather console. Their broad green backs were to McShane. There was no sentry.
Remarkably stupid, thought McShane.
It had taken him five hard minutes to break from the firefight. He was tired, so tired. Sleep, his body told him, sleep. You'll sleep soon enough, he reminded himself.
Crawling along the midway, he'd wanted to stop a thousand times-stop, hide behind some piece of wreckage and close his eyes.
The screams had kept him going, brought him here. The screams of kids hit by S'Cotar fire, the commandos he'd sat with at briefing, joked with on the bus from McLean. The screams of the marines trapped and burning in the choppers' wreckage-high-pitched, keening, inhuman screams that finally, mercifully, died. Kids, all kids.
McShane wanted that cannon. And there it was, no more than one hundred feet away.
Twisting his blaster-cane to self-destruct, he stepped from cover, walking quickly into the clearing between him and the cannon, blaster held loosely at his side, its rising shrill lost in the whine and crash of blaster fire, the explosion of another helicopter as the cannon spat again.
The smoke, bedlam and his own surreal calm reminded McShane of Tarawa, a long time ago, crawling toward that pillbox, a grenade in hand.
At twenty feet he stopped, still unseen. Gripping the weapon by its muzzle, he spun it three times over his head, releasing it to land clanging against the gun console.
McShane had seen S'Cotar warriors in combat before. Their speed still amazed him. Whirling, the nearest three were out of their chairs before the blaster had barely touched the gray-mesh decking.
As the cannon shrilled again, two of them dove after the blaster, now screaming in terminal overload. Pulling his weapon, the third shot an unmoving McShane through the chest. Bob crumpled as a warrior scooped up his blaster-cane, tentacle arching to hurl it away.
Wah-whootnp! The blaster atomized the warriors and triggered the cannon's chargepac, vaporizing the gun. The explosion lit the Potomac Basin, a searing white flash seen from West Virginia to the Maryland shore.
As the cannon went up, Sug-Atra flicked to the surface, blaster in tentacle. Form on me! he ordered, standing at the foot of Xanadu's stairs.
The ninety surviving biofabs rallied, the warriors taking cover along the midway, fronting Xanadu, their last transmute appearing behind them. Beside him stood Sug-Atra.
Why is that portal still functioning? he demanded as the biofabs opened fire on the marines spilling from their choppers.
The portal sentries were killed, said the other transmute. I've sent two more. The one who remains will report when… The M16-round ripped through his thorax, throwing his body across the stairs.
Cursing, Sug-Atra flicked to cover.
You have blasters to their slug throwers! he raged. Cut them down!
They are too many, said the senior warrior. We have no cover. Their infiltrators have our flanks pinned.
Blaster beams and bullets rent the air. Gunfire and blaster shrilling mingled with the screams of the wounded and dying.
The S'Cotar were keeping the infantry at bay, blaster fire raking the marines' position. The Terrans' forward area was a charnel house-the blasted bodies of the point squad lay twisted among the smoldering wreckage of a chopper.
Sutherland staggered from the chopper, pistol in hand, blood oozing from a deep gash in his forehead. Running low, he zigzagged twenty yards to a light machine-gun position. "Where's the CP?" he shouted at the lance corporal feeding the belt.
The kid pointed to a shallow concrete drainage ditch skirting the shattered picket fence. Riflemen were spread along the ditch, raking the S'Cotar line.
Sutherland dashed off, covering half the distance before a heavy fusion beam touched the machine gun, scattering it and its crew like torn paper.
The CIA Director dived into the muddy ditch, azure beams crackling over his head. He looked up into Colonel Griswold's flint-gray eyes. "We got our asses wiped enough for you yet, Mr. Sutherland?"
"What time is it, Colonel?" Sitting, he rested against the concrete wall, breathing hard, pistol across his knee.
Griswold glanced at his watch. "Twelve twenty-eight. We are twenty-eight minutes into this debacle."
"Two more minutes, Griswold," said Sutherland. "Then you can take them."
Four men away, a gunnery sergeant dropped his rifle and fell backward, spasms jerking his body. His neck ended in a charred, smoldering stump.
The PFC to Griswold's right started screaming hysterically. The colonel brought the muzzle of his. 45 down behind the kid's left ear. He crumpled into the ditch, unconscious. Griswold turned him over, getting his face out of the brackish water.
"Why?" demanded the colonel, turning back to Sutherland. "I've lost over two hundred men in this idiocy. Why?"
Sutherland touched his forehead, feeling the sticky clot. "Can't hurt now. That building the S'Cotar are massed in front of?"
"Yes?"
"There's a K'Ronarin commando unit infdtrating it, from the rear."
"Are they taking the bugs from behind?"
Sutherland shook his head. "No. We're going to take them from the front. Those commandos will prevent the S'Cotar from accessing something in that building. Then they have a vital mission elsewhere. They're not to be wasted in this operation."
"And we are?" said Griswold, face pale.
"It's necessary," said Sutherland. "Otherwise, Colonel, in a few months, maybe sooner, you'd be fighting swarms of S'Cotar for this planet. Fighting and losing." He checked his watch. "Time."
Expressionless, the colonel spoke into his handset. "Red Pack Leader to Red Pack Pitcher. Execute, execute. Tango one niner."
From behind them came the dullkruump! of mortars firing.
"Fix bayonets!" shouted Griswold, looking up and down the line. "Fix bayonets!" He cocked his. 45.
"Bayonets…! Bayonets…!'' The command echoed down the line. Drawing his combat knife, Griswold stepped from the ditch, bracketed by blaster fire. "Follow me!" he cried, voice high above the din. "Forward!"
Kismet, thought Sutherland, as the line surged forward. I'm going to be killed fighting bugs in an amusement park.
Taking an M16 from the dead, he joined the charge.
The first mortar barrage fell short of the S'Cotar line, turning two concession stands to matchsticks.
The next six didn't, exploding among the warriors, halving their numbers, splattering Xanadu's red walls green.
Through his one remaining eye, Sug-Atra saw the marines coming, bayonets gleaming through the smoke and flames.
Assault! he ordered the warriors.
A ragged line, the S'Cotar charged, weapons blazing.
Bleeding in a dozen places, Sug-Atra tried to teleport inside. Nothing. A piece of shrapnel had done something profound to his special abilities. Turning, he limped painfully up Xanadu's stairs. As he reached the top stair, H'Nar L'Wrona stepped through the doors and shot him dead, tumbling his body back down the stairs.
The Margrave stood looking out over the carnage for a moment, watching the olive-drab wave roll over the S'Cotar, then went back inside.
Along the midway, marines with dripping combat knives stooped low, taking weregeld from the S'Cotar.
"You could have taken those bugs from the rear, Captain," said Griswold quietly. He looked too exhausted to be angry.
"We'd have been exposed to your fire, Colonel," said L'Wrona earnestly. "Worse, we'd have exposed this building to it. A single ember falling through to the wrong place, and every man who died today would have died in vain."
"You're a hard man, L'Wrona."
"I know."
The two stood on Xanadu's steps, backdropped by the amusement park's smoldering ruins. Firemen hosed the hot ash and twisted metal that had been weapons positions and kiddie rides, their lines snaking in from the yellow pumpers out on the MacArthur Boulevard. From the parking lot came the whirr of medevac choppers as triage teams hurried down the long rows of stretcher cases. Wounded with the best chance of survival if medevaced now would go first. The rest would either go later or in the fleet of ambulances clogging the far end of the parking lot. Many would die where they lay.
To the west, a blood-red sun shone through the smoke and haze.
The S'Cotar lay where they'd fallen.
"I lost over two hundred good men today, Captain," said Griswold, looking over the midway.
"We lost billions fighting those things," said L'Wrona. "Billions."
"I want to see that portal, Captain," said Griswold, turning back to La'Wrona. "I'm entitled."
"How did you know about the portal?" frowned L'Wrona. "Sutherland."
"Ah. Well, you're right. You are entitled." He opened a door, motioning Griswold in. "We're leaving in a few minutes. You can see us off."
"This is bigger than the Maximus portal," said John, staring at the pit filling Xanadu.
"How much bigger?" asked Lieutenant S'Til.
"Twice, at least. They must have widened the other end."
Looking at that too-dark pool, John felt what he'd first sensed on the side of the portal-deep, rippling power, lurking just below the surface-a power somehow controlled by a slim machine a universe away.
The portal nearly filled Xanadu. The building itself was facade, a slice of Hollywood on the Potomac. The back could be rolled open, two great garage doors that trundled on rubber casters across a cement apron. First seeing that, John had had a vision of something huge, gray and monstrous coming up from the pit, abristle with fusion turrets, moving silently out into the night on n-gravs, force field shimmering faintly in the moonlight.
The stench of burning men and machines wafted through the ragged blaster hole in the left door.
Led by L'Wrona, the commandos and the three Terrans had slipped in from the woods between Glen Echo and Mac Arthur Boulevard, the battle along the midway covering them as they'd moved through the fence, under the roller coaster and up to the building's rear. Blasting a hole through the wall, they'd poured in-there were no S'Cotar. Taking up positions, they'd waited, silently killing the four S'Cotar who'd come in.
The biofabs lay in a thick pool of green beside the door, necks slit by broad-bladed assault knives. The commandos lined the side of the pit, blastrifles at port arms, every other man facing out. Pacing slowly behind them, Lieutenant S'Til impatiently tapped the MllA's long barrel against her hard, slender leg. John stood to one side, away from the door.
"What are we waiting for?" he asked. "L'Wrona," said S'Til.
"Major Harkness," called Sutherland, spotting Gris-wold's XO. "Where's the colonel?"
Young, black, the untreated cut across his left cheek still bleeding, Harkness turned from the radio, eyes glazed with fatigue. "Behind those concessions stands," he said, waving toward a charred heap near the Ferris wheel.
Sutherland headed down the midway, treading carefully past the dead. Bodies often entwined, marines and warriors lay where they'd fallen, knives, bayonets and guns against knives, serrated mandibles and blasters.
Sutherland tried not to look at the faces. The assault had been bad enough, but it had been fast, a blur of motion: shoot, move, shoot, move. For the first time since Korea, he'd used a bayonet, performing a clumsy but tenable parry-and-long-thrust series. This was worse, he thought, stumbling over a helmet. Something out of Goya, those young, dead, tormented faces staring sightlessly, throats ripped out, necks broken, holes you could put your fist through. And everywhere the stench of burnt flesh, hanging in a low haze over the clouds of flies come to feast.
He found Griswold behind the concession stand, face down in the dirt, a neat round hole through each temple. There was no blood-just a dead man, his mind stolen.
Sutherland turned in time to see L'Wrona and Griswold enter Xanadu, a good hundred yards away. Communicator lost in the chopper wreckage, he cursed and began running.
The Terran colonel paused at his first sight of the portal, then advanced gingerly to the edge, peering down. Brushing past the commandos, L'Wrona followed.
"This is it?" asked Griswold, looking at L'Wrona.
The captain nodded. "A hole in the heart of the universe."
"Ever hear of George Bernard Shaw, Margrave?" asked the colonel. L'Wrona shook his head.
"A brilliant, crusty man. He said, 'The devil has all the best lines.' It's true."
"I don't understand."
"I'll give you an example, L'Wrona."Follow me and die.
L'Wrona fired as the transmute leaped into the portal. Sutherland burst through the door. "Transmute!" he gasped. "Griswold!"
Pulling his knife, L'Wrona jumped after transmute. "Go!" shouted S'Til.
John and the commandos plunged into the portal.
Sutherland stood alone in Xanadu, breathless, watching the ripples fade in the black pool.
He was still watching when the portal flicked off, leaving a deep raw gash in the red clay and sand.