The Nuclear Druid: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SciFi, Military, Space Opera
ISBN: 1937396290
Amazon: B077RGFFZ8
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2017-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

THE MAGUS’S HEADQUARTERS ON Atletis extended for miles under the ground.

The rebels had fought for every square inch.

It turned out that the wind turbines had only been a backup for the Magus’s power grid. A deeply buried, and quite modern, hydrothermal generator ran the lights and air circulation in the underground maze. There were caverns full of machinery so rusty that it fell apart at a touch, and even Colm couldn’t tell what it had been designed to do.

The Mage Corps Headquarters occupied a small area within the complex. In this maze-within-a-maze, the spongy walls had been paneled over with wood, pictures hung, and candle sconces installed, to fool the mages into thinking the place was human-built. The Magus had been too proud to let it be known that he was squatting in a disused sentrienza base.

The Magus’s inner sanctum was a covered hall, like an ark plopped down in one of those great caverns, wired for power. Here the Magus made his last stand, flinging soldiers at the attackers faster than bullets fired from a machine-gun. The piles of corpses blocked the tunnels. Old ones at the bottom, fresh ones at the top. Colm ended it by having his Marines tunnel down 200 meters and drop charges down the shafts of the hydrothermal generator, blowing the pumps and shutting off power to the whole complex.

They found Dryjon and Diejen, along with several other prisoners from the Families of Kisperet, chained to the Magus’s throne like dogs.

After that no one wanted to spend another minute in the complex. With the power down, the air circulation had failed. The smell of rotting bodies was overpowering. They trekked back to the surface. Colm instructed his Marines to lay more charges in the egress tunnels, burying the dead where they had fallen. He half hoped the Marines themselves would be buried, too—he had come to hate them, unfairly, for their ruthless skill at butchery. To his disappointment, several of them clawed their way to the surface, emerging like beetles from the shallow end of the tunnel on top of the ridge.

During the battle the rebel forces had camped in Innismon, around the Son of Saturn. The rocket towered over their victory banquet, as it had once towered over parties back on Kisperet. Colm, the man of the hour, accepted toast after toast. The mead they had liberated from the outlying villages, where a small population of freemen had grown food for the Magus’s headquarters, packed a punch. Colm’s euphoria gradually dulled into misery, a reaction to the months of slaughter he had personally ordered and witnessed. He stumbled off into the fields and puked behind a hedge. He wiped his mouth, groaned, and straightened up. Then he looked around.

The limethion was watching him.

The creature was a puzzle to everyone, since it could not be copied, but could be taken from one place to another, as if it were a mage—but it was not. It was just an alien. It had become a sort of camp mascot for the Ghosts, who found its scavenging ways hilarious.

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