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A.R.Yngve
DARC AGES
Book Three
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Chapter 61

In the flagship, Sir Devis went livid with terror when he witnessed the volcanic eruption at close range. Himself a lower nobleman in service to the Paskos, he habitually avoided risks and clung to what little privilege he still had.

So he left Kamo and Dohan circling the crater while he turned the flagship around, and flew back south.

The village lay half-concealed in a narrow valley, covered by a patchwork of camouflage-nets on poles.

Darc stumbled into a clearing just outside the village and found it abandoned. He saw no sign of Mechao's secret weapon - and he dared not risk a closer look. But he needed to attract the approaching enemies - something Mechao had not managed to do on his own.

With grim determination, Darc set his rifle on low effect, and squeezed the trigger. He swept a continuous beam over the camouflage nets; they were burned off and collapsed over the huts.

A second laser pulse flickered from behind him. Darc ducked down, spun around - and saw Meijji, dreadlocks flowing in all directions from her oval brown face. She shot down the remaining camouflage nets in a few seconds - and urged him along with her, away from the deserted village.

"The others are moving away from the plateau," she explained, breathing hard, while they hurried through the terrain, further upward. "The invaders are closing in. Our people have left the beach."

She was quicker and less exerted. Darc pushed himself to the edge of collapse. By some miracle of will, he made it far enough to avoid being spotted by Pasko's advancing forces.

The enemy troops caught sight of the exposed, abandoned village. Tharlos ordered his signalman to flash a message to his flagship as it came into sight above - the ship was a surprise, but a welcome one.

The signalman aboard the flagship saw the message flash from the ground, and conveyed the message to the ship crew. Presently, the flagship strafed the village with a blazing fusillade. The dry huts and houses exploded into fire. Tharlos sent the spider robots ahead of him, to scout the village for traps.

The black robots clattered into the burning village, scanning for life signs. A few stray chicken, dogs, and cattle were blasted dead as they tried to escape.

The robots registered nothing they were programmed to avoid, and stopped - awaiting further orders from their master. Tharlos marched into the clearing with his knights and soldiers, on the alert for more mutated monsters like the flying reptiles on the beach.

The troops relaxed somewhat when they saw the deserted houses. Tharlos ordered them to proceed uphill along the trails, to the cliff mansion which loomed above the little valley.

But as the troops marched onward, a footsoldier began to cough hard. A sergeant yelled at him to stop coughing - and gasped, clawing at his own throat. Without warning, the hindmost troops toppled over like rows of dominoes. A hidden gas canister had been ruptured when the village was strafed.

All humans and animals that breathed in Mechao's invisible gas, now died horribly. Soldiers gargled, tore off their helmets in confused agony - and their brains instantly turned to liquid. Bleeding from eyes, ears, and noses, two companies were wiped out before they could outrun the unseen death-shroud.

Tharlos and his decimated troops escaped uphill, cursing the dumb robots that had walked through the poison gas unscathed. His soldiers were in disarray, firing randomly at the distant mansion, at the hot terrain, at imaginary horrors from their own feverish minds.

Short on stamina and ammunition, the troops were now also running out of courage. The knights' rallying cries were ignored, even scorned.

A panicking, raving footsoldier shouted to his sweat-soaked comrades: "We're all doomed! Tharlos led us into a forbidden place, and now the Goddess has awakened to swallow us all!"

One of the knights ignited his backpack jets, took a flying leap through the air, and shot down the soldier with a powerful blast of his gun.

"Quiet and fight!" he shouted to the troops. "Winning or losing, we stand by our commander - till the end!"

Laser fire hit the knight from behind, and his backpack exploded. He spun up through the air, and tumbled down the mountainside like a burning, twitching tin doll. Someone among Tharlos's own troops had fired the shot.

Soldiers deserted, scattered recklessly into the burning, smoking forest - heading for nowhere in an alien terrain. And despite the hopeless situation, Tharlos refused to retreat. He summoned his sole knight at hand, a handful of officers and footsoldiers, and his war robots.

They proceeded up the winding trails toward the vertical cliff face that lay ahead.

Kamo Yota glanced momentarily at the gauges on his control panel. His fuel supply depleted rapidly during the duel, and was now below a critical point - he would never make it back to Castilia in The Roaring Wind.

So he pushed the ship even harder, making one last effort to destroy his rival once and for all.

Dohan's fuel supply was higher - but he had no safe place to land, each island now being invaded by cohorts of Tharlos's allies. He flew the Sunray round and round the volcano's column of smoke, nudging closer by each turn.

In vain had he attempted to get behind Kamo and score a hit - but it was hopeless. His only chance was to let Kamo chase him, until...

Dohan heard another spray of laser pulses hit the rear of his craft. A fuse blew on his control panel, and smoke filled the cockpit. He reached for the fire extinguisher under his pilotseat, and quenched the small fire with chemical foam.

This is very bad, he thought. He could literally feel the Sunray buckle and creak in the pushing heat waves from the volcano, and hear the discord of the engines.

Invisible hands forced the craft up, then down; turbulence blew heavily. The cockpit had grown too hot, as if it were crowded with people; Dohan's hands were so sweaty they could barely hold the controls.

"Do not desert me now, Sunray..."

Suddenly, some miniscule rock fragment from the eruption hit the ship's nose, and the tremendous impact shook the ship. The wide windshield, one of the hardest objects Dohan knew, once salvaged from the Wasteland ruins to build the Sunray, cracked in the middle.

The cabin's air pressure began to drop. Dohan whispered a prayer between trembling lips, that Meijji would be spared from the enemy. Kamo Yota also noticed how the polluted air damaged his own ship.

The sensitive burn cycle of the jet engines was rapidly declining; for each second his velocity was sinking, approaching that of his rival. Kamo knew that he would have to rise higher to gain speed - but the air above was even worse.

The Sunray still eluded him, ducking and rolling just a few hundred meters in front of The Roaring Wind.

Then the volcano changed. The cascading eruptions dropped off, the smoke column drifted off - and the crater's interior suddenly became visible. A forceful draft pulled the Sunray inward.

Without thinking, Dohan banked left and dived into the inferno. He glimpsed a boiling lake of red mist, whizzing past below his ship - and in his periscope, a small shape followed him. Kamo had swallowed the bait.

As he flew across the huge crater, Dohan banked again and throttled the engines, making the crossing last as long as possible - four seconds, instead of one at most. In that brief passage of time, Dohan felt as if he were falling into a red-hot oven.

Kamo's much faster aircraft zipped past the crater in no time, then turned and came back after Dohan. When The Roaring Wind made its second turn across the crater, the Sunray accelerating out of it.

Kamo squeezed the triggers of his cannons, and fired an uninterrupted volley. This, he thought, was glorious victory - and his next thought was his last.

Turbulence!

An unseen force pushed Kamo's powerful but light craft up, then sucked it down. In the fraction of a second, The Roaring Wind speeded straight into the inside of the smoldering crater wall - and exploded like a giant metal firecracker.

Burning debris scattered over the lava streams and vaporized. Nothing remained of The Roaring Wind and its aspiring young pilot, except smoke and an unfulfilled promise of greatness.

Dohan steered his ship away from the volcano - it was starting to erupt again. The tension across his chest eased, and he drew a long breath.

"Thank you, great Goddess," he breathed out, and added: "Be merciful to my opponent, for he was brave."

The damaged windshield had become scraped and dirtied by ash; Dohan strained to get a clear view, but the skies seemed even darker. He checked the clock, then the barometer; it was falling. Dohan had to land, before the craft was hit by stray lightning.

He set course for the northern side of the main island. Red warning lights flashed on the control panel. The Sunray had not been properly overhauled in a long time; it was not going to last much longer.

Lord Ue Yota could glimpse the distant air battle around Fogo through his spyglass. His forces had landed on one of the minor islands of the archipelago.

Ue Yota could not see which ship left the vicinity of the volcano - but the sea carried the sound of its engines across to his ears. It was not the sound of The Roaring Wind.

And Lord Yota knew in his hardened heart, that his favorite son had died. He showed no sorrow - and even if he would have wept, the armor and reflective glass would hide it. Lumbering across the beach in his mechanized suit of armor, Lord Yota desperately tried to lead his soldiers into a proper charge.

From the moment their carrier craft had touched down on this island, no human enemy had appeared. Instead, an older breed of Mechao's guardian beasts had attacked the noisy newcomers. Scaly baboon-lizard chimeras came screeching at them from the palmtrees, chilling the hearts of the soldiers.

The furry creatures leapt like frogs onto the riflemen, clawing and biting with fangs and claws. Their screeches sounded strangely half-human, and that was the worst part of it - soon, the rumor spread that these animals were Lepers, deformed humans. Panic spread out of control; the forces paralyzed and confused troops could not gather and attack.

Ue Yota, a man with many Summer Jousts to his credit, fired at the strange creatures from a distance and missed.

He cried out: "Somebody! Show me an enemy I can fight!"

His innate phobia of anything even remotely like Lepers was beginning to win over his sense of honor. Had there been a human foe nearby, the prospect of surrender would have been acceptable to him - but in the absence of human enemies, surrender was unthinkable.

A suffocating sense of futility filled the aging, wiry nobleman. What, he wondered bitterly, was this crusade being fought and died for?

Only pride kept Lord Yota going, fighting his own fear, as he waited for a chance to retreat with honor.

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