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waiting for a battle that can end only in extermination of one side or the other.
The sensor lights went blank. They've stopped digging, I thought. Why?
"Here they come!" came a shout from the cave's mouth. I inadvertently turned to glance in that
direction....
The wall of the cave in front of me exploded, knocking all of us back onto the ground. I rolled over, my
rifle still in my hands, and saw a half-dozen of the brutes charging at us out of the smoke and rubble.
They were big, powerful, their broad, red-eyed faces snarling with fury and crystal spears in their raised
hands.
I fired pointblank at them. The rifle's beam cut the first two in half, but their momentum carried them into
me and they fell beside me as I rose to one knee and fired again. Ogun was firing too, but one of the
brutes reached him with a crystal spear. It barely grazed his helmet, but a shower of sparks erupted and I
heard Ogun scream in my earphones. His body spasmed, arched, then fell dead.
I ducked under the spear that was aimed at me and jammed the muzzle of my rifle into the brute's
midsection as I pulled the trigger. His body burst into flame, and he shrieked hideously as he bounced
away from me and into the others behind him.
Lissa had recovered her wits now and was firing into the brutes who were emerging from their newly
dug tunnel. I lost count of how many there were; we fired and dodged and fired again at them, killing
them left and right until their bodies jammed the entryway that they had blasted out of the rock.
Lissa leaped onto the barricade of flesh and lobbed a grenade into the tunnel. Its explosion shook the
whole cave stones fell from the ceiling; smoke filled the area.
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I staggered back a few steps, turned and glanced at the front of the cave. A huge gray-brown bear was
rearing on its hind legs, roaring and swinging its clawed paws at the troopers ringed around it like
midgets. A dozen rifles blasts hit it, but the bear stalked forward, into the cave, as the soldiers fell back.
Behind it I could see wolves and stinking great cats with saber fangs.
The cannon fired its searing beam of raw red energy into the bear's chest, blasting the beast in two,
blood and bone and flesh splattering in every direction. As it toppled to the cave floor, already slippery
with blood, the soldiers turned their weapons on the wolves and saber-toothed cats.
I looked back at the tunnel mouth we were guarding. Lissa was busily rigging explosive charges, sitting
on the floor, her back to the barricade of dead bodies, her rifle on the ground beside her.
I went to her and peered into the murky darkness of the tunnel.
"There don't seem to be any more of them coming from this direction," I said.
I could sense her nodding inside her helmet. "This will seal off the tunnel." She lifted with both hands a
set of grenades that she had wired together. "Then we can seal off the other one, farther back."
I agreed to her plan. Quickly she dropped her explosive package into the tunnel. We flattened out
against the solid rock wall as she counted off five seconds. The blast jarred me almost to my knees, but
when the smoke cleared, Lissa shone her helmet light into the tunnel and laughed lightheartedly.
"It'll take them awhile to dig throughthat ," she said triumphantly.
Within minutes she had blasted the other tunnel shut, and we joined the others at the front of the cave.
Wave after wave of animals attacked us, and we battled them back. Huge, ferocious bears, snarling
wolves and smaller dogs, saber-toothed mountain lions. We killed them by the dozens, by the score, by
the hundreds. The nighttime darkness was lit by the glow of our energy weapons; the stars themselves
faded from the sky in the blood-red light of our killing beams. Through the padding of my helmet and
earphones I could hear the screaming, howling, shrieking roars of pain and fury as the animals were
driven at us by Ahriman's diabolical powers, only to be slaughtered by the blazing energies of our guns.
Off in the distance, barely seen against the flickering shadows, I could now and then glimpse one of the
brutes, skulking among the poor savage beasts that they were commanding. But they never came close
enough to kill; they stayed their distance, as if they knew that what had happened to their comrades at the
tunnel would happen to them.
I heard a voice in my head calling to them, daring them, challenging them: Come and fight us yourselves!
Leave these poor dumb beasts alone and take up the fight, face to face. Come and meet the death you
hand out so freely to others.
But they hung back, keeping to the shadows.
After long hours of fighting, I realized that the cannon had gone silent. The lights in the cave were out; we
fought by the light of our weapons and the lamps built into our helmets now. My own rifle finally quit on
me, and I began to use my pistol, instead.
As dawn tinted the sky with a grayish pink, the attacks stopped. The ground in front of the cave, once
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smooth with pristine snow, was a blackened, bloodied shambles of dead beasts, shattered limbs, bodies
ripped open, flesh torn apart.
I looked around me. Four soldiers were down, their helmets and armor broken, blood-soaked.
Counting Ogun, back by the tunnel, we had lost five. There were only eleven of us left alive, and three of
them were wounded, including Kedar. His leg had been broken when a bear charged into the cave and
made it almost to the power packs.
Lissa and several others began tending to the wounded. I went to Adena, who was surveying the
battlefield with a powerful pair of electronically boosted binoculars.
"They're leaving," she said, as if she knew I was beside her. "The brutes are moving off to the south."
"We've won," I said.
She handed the binoculars to me. "Not until we've killed the last one of them."
I looked out toward the south. Through the magnification of the binoculars I saw eight people like
Ahriman shambling through the snow. There was no sign of any animals with them. No tracks except
their own. Not even a dog accompanied them.
"They've thrown everything they have at us," I said, "and we beat them off. They've lost."
Adena's visor was up, and I could see that her face was set in grim determination. "No, Orion. We may
have won this battle, but the war is not finished. Our task is to exterminate them."
"Those eight..."
She nodded. "Those last eight brutes must be killed, Orion. We have to go out after them."
"Is that Ormazd's command?" I asked her.
The corners of her mouth curved slightly in the beginning of a smile. "It ismy command, Orion. It is what
must be done."
CHAPTER 39
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