Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [100]
His left eye was useless. He struggled to focus with his right. Something had changed. The Cybermen seemed more alert now; more aware of what was happening to them. In an instant they had formed themselves into two ranks, back to back, firing their weapons in a continuous rhythm of energy pulses at the suddenly disorganised German troops.
Suddenly their melee tactics get in close, hit the giants with everything they had, then get clear didn't seem to be working.
Now it was his troops who were taking a pounding a chorus line of broken German bodies were dancing like rag dolls under a hail of enemy fire.
'Fall back!' Hartmann screamed.
CHAPTER 25
The dignified, graceful, mellifluous tones of German civilisation could no longer drown out the screams and roars of German barbarism.
Colonel Schott lifted the needle on Strauss and ended his dream of better days.
Outside his room they were dragging bodies back from the Cyberchamber.
He opened the door and emerged on to a scene that took his mind flying back to 1917. How many times had he stood in his trench on the Western Front and watched the ragged lines of dead and dying soldiers returning to shelter or the burial pit in the aftermath of battle? Only the mud and the blood were missing from this retreating army: in their place burns, lesions, suppurating sores the inevitable kiss of Cyberfire. Massive internal damage too, had Schott but known it. He remembered, twentyodd years ago, standing by a French roadside watching a cohort of German infantry limping back from the front line after a mustardgas attack by the British at Ypres. The same burns, blistering, horrible, yellowbrown mutilations. They had been like tormented beasts, blind and wailing and begging to die.
That was what this reminded him of. The burns and the pleas were the same.
Only now it was his men. Good men.
Boys.
Captain Hartmann staggered along the corridor, one hand clasped over his face.
'Hartmann.' Schott could barely stop his voice from trembling. 'What happened?'
'They're strong,' the captain spat. He lurched past the colonel, clutching the wall for support. His hand fell away from his face. 'My God...' Schott felt sick.
Hartmann had no hair on the left side of his head. His skin fromthe top of his head to his neck was blistering as he stood there, seething with hundreds of tiny, swelling and popping bubbles. His left ear had melted from his head. His left eye was closed, the lid sunk deep into the socket.
Schott struggled to compose himself.
'How many men have we lost?' he asked.
'Probably thirty,' Hartmann replied. 'Dead or dying.'
A young medical orderly ran past. Hartmann grabbed him by the shoulder.
'Give me a shot of morphine,' he ordered.
The orderly froze, staring at the captain's head. His mouth trembled; the colour drained from his face.
'Give me a shot of morphine!' Hartmann demanded.
The orderly fumbled in his medical bag. Clumsily, he prepared a syringe as Hartmann rolled up his sleeve. He closed his one remaining eye and drew in a deep, shuddering breath as the drug entered his bloodstream.
He could still see the Spear.
After a moment he shook himself, then lurched off down the corridor.
'Bring that gun forward!' he barked. 'We'll finish this once and for all.'
Schott watched as Hartmann's twisted figure turned the corner. No. This was absurd. Thirty men. There couldn't be more than half a dozen soldiers army or SS left in the compound. It wouldn't do. Most of these were Schott's men and Schott would not stand by and see the few that remained butchered on some deathorglory whim of Hartmann's.
Along the corridor he could see the heavy Spandau gun being dragged forward.
He retreated into