David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

"Well, thank God for that," McLain said. "Jesus! We came that close to blowing the whole secret because of a bunch of ragged-assed kangaroos." He shook his head wonderingly, then glared at Morris. "I don't need any more surprises like this, Commander. Tell her that."

"Oh, I will, Sir. I will."

The Troll pivoted his fighter in a hovering circle, examining the hiding place. The Taggart human was right, he thought. It was perfect.

The cool darkness caressed the alloy skin of his vehicle/body, and he dropped another hundred meters, dipping into the oval valley. It was five and a half kilometers long and no more than two across at its greatest width, and night-struck trees were green-black below him, rising towards the star-strewn skies. There were no lights, no signs of human habitation, and his scanners peered and pried at the darkened forest, finding only life that flew, ran on four feet, or swam. Other scanners probed the darkened heavens, assuring him that no satellite or aircraft lingered overhead.

The silent fighter hovered twenty meters above the valley floor while the Troll selected the best spot. There. The slope was almost vertical behind that screen of trees.

He adjusted his position carefully, then activated the battery of special, low-powered power guns mounted under the fighter's prow, and muted blue lightning flared. It was far less brilliant than the sun-hot violence which had killed the cralkhi, and his heart-hunger for havoc longed for the beauty of that brighter, more savage power, but it was time for lesser thunders.

Azure brilliance splashed the mountain, and at its touch, destruction danced. Perhaps not the blazing, shuddering devastation he craved, but destruction nonetheless. Undergrowth and tree trunks vanished. Treetops plunged downward like spears, falling into the ring of light and vanishing with a near-silent whine, and then it was the turn of earth and stone.

The Troll's interior receptors watched his human bend over the vision screen his servomechs had built for it in the cramped "control room." He could feel the human's awe, and silent laughter rippled in his brain. So Blake Taggart thought this was power? What would it say if he told it that this was but an adaptation of a standard Shirmaksu mining tool? That, in the human's own terms, it was no more than a "drill"?

The mountain yielded more slowly than the vegetation which had crowned it, but the Troll chewed steadily deeper. Sixty meters in diameter he sank his shaft, and the humming power of his drill lined the bore with a slick, fused finish. Three hundred meters he pierced into the flank of the mountain, then the blue light died and he turned his ship and slid silently backward into the circular tunnel.

He settled to the floor of the tube and hatches opened, disgorging servomechs that scurried about, filling the tunnel mouth with earth for a depth of fifty meters. They left only one, smaller entrance, just large enough for the largest of the Troll's combat mechs ... or his own combat chassis. By dawn, every sign of his coming had been carefully camouflaged.

The Troll was satisfied in his hide. There were drawbacks, of course. It would take many minutes to extricate his fighter from its snug nest, and his onboard scanners were inoperable through the rock and soil above him. But he was safe from any chance detection, and the Blake Taggart human had been correct: this was an ideal location.

Indeed, his new servant was proving useful in many ways. It had known, for example, that the Annette human had been wrong about Oak Ridge. No weapons-grade fissionables had been produced there in many years, and it was unlikely that such materials would be available there in the quantities he required. But Blake Taggart had known, as the female had not, of what it called the "Savannah River Plant" where fissionables were produced.

In some respects, the Troll would have preferred to be closer to the source, but Blake Taggart was correct. This isolated hiding place was within range of his combat mechs if a direct assault on Savannah became necessary, and far better placed for the other portion of his ... No, be honest, the Troll thought, of their plan.

And for now, he preferred to avoid attacks on military installations. He wasn't yet certain his combat mechs were proof against the humans' heavy weapons: better to avoid exposure to them until he was. Besides, the human insisted no weapons assembly took place at Savannah, that the fissionables were shipped to other locations for that purpose. Sooner or later, one of those shipments would cross the Troll's area of mental influence.

"Obliging of them, especially after you almost wasted their zoo," Aston observed wryly. He grinned down at Ludmilla and she smiled back, but he knew the encounter had shaken her badly.

"Sorry," she said softly. "It was pure instinct, Dick. Seeing something that much like a live Kanga-brrrr!" She shivered, and he caressed the back of her neck gently. She accepted the comfort of the rare public gesture of affection gratefully.

"Anyway," she said with a less forced grin, "I think President Yakolev is trying to make up for how hard he was to convince."

"Yeah," Aston snorted, then chuckled. "But it makes a kind of sense to do it over here, too. For one thing, it's a real clincher for his technical people, and, for another, their power net is still unreliable enough that they can black out a main grid for a few hours without nearly as many explanations."

"True," Ludmilla agreed, turning back to the control room windows. She didn't care for what she'd seen so far of Russia, even if her ancestors had come from there. She'd never cared for the Soviet system, even when she'd studied it merely out of morbid historical curiosity, but now she had to deal with its actual transition period, and she could scarcely believe what people here managed to put up with. She'd always been rather proud of the Russian people's ability to endure and persevere, and of what the Russia of her own past had achieved (after, she admitted, the bloodbath of the self-inflicted conflagration of their nuclear exchange with Belarussia). But these Russians still weren't at all certain how to make democracy work ... or even if they truly wanted to. Several people had told her how much they admired democracy, and how firmly they believed democracy would solve their problems in time, and how deeply committed they were to making democracy work. But what she actually saw had best been summed up by the taxi driver who had delivered her and Aston to the Saint Petersburg Zoo.

"Democracy!" he had exclaimed when he recognized Aston's American accent. "It is a wonderful thing-or it will be when someone who knows how to make it work takes over at the top!"

It was apparent that the notion that representative government ought to be predicated on the electorate making the politicians "at the top" behave themselves and govern responsibly had never crossed the cabby's mind. He still wanted someone to make it work, with top-down direction, and that, she admitted sadly to herself, was what had made the Succession Wars inevitable. It had left the entire political field to authoritarians of one stripe or another, and those squabbling for power-even the most idealistic and committed "democrats"-had been all too willing to toss principle overboard in pursuit of tactical goals, as if none of them had realized that principles and limitations, precedents and what the people of her own time had still called "the rule of law," were the skeleton upon which any stable, self-governing state depended. Even Yakolev, much as she had found herself admiring his determination and personal integrity, was clearly more comfortable with the strongman image and the tactics that went with it than he was with the image of a parliamentary leader. He knew how to give orders, she thought; what he didn't know-what no Russian politico she had yet met knew-was how to forge a lasting consensus or achieve genuine compromise.