The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [29]
Wary but increasingly confident, the Helion soldiers advanced beneath it. Spinning, levitating, the lambent orb of pale energy resembled some kind of aerial marker, or perhaps a distress signal. If the latter, it had been deployed too late. Every member of the Necromonger platoon lay dead or dying on the plaza. Watching their perimeter, the Helion force continued to advance across the devastated plaza.
Within the shadows of the rotunda, Imam struggled to rise. “Lajjun and Ziza—they’re out there.”
“Out there where?” Riddick asked him.
Restrained in the big man’s grasp, the delegate could only flail helplessly in his family’s direction. “Southwest side, under a broken roof. I’ve got to get to them. They don’t know what’s happening, don’t know where I am. Just let me—”
Riddick held him back, the way an owner would a puppy. “When it’s over.”
“When it’s over? When it’s over?” Rising as much as Riddick would allow, Imam gestured in the direction of the recent firefight. “Didn’t you see what happened? This group of invaders, they’re all dead. It is over, at least for the moment.” He struggled to rise. “Let me go . I need to be with—”
“When it’s over,” Riddick repeated. Despite what Imam implied, the big man had seen what had happened. And it hadn’t made any sense to him. No thinking fighter, however well motivated or brain-washed or drugged, went marching stoically into the face of visibly superior firepower without some purpose in mind. Distraction, perhaps. Something more—they would know, as he had told Imam, when it was over. Which to Riddick’s way of thinking was Not Yet.
The rotating energy orb did not dissipate, nor did it change position. Increasingly convinced that, whatever it signified, it might be something more threatening than a distress signal, the officer in charge of the Helion unit ordered his troops to back off. They would go around the plaza. Standing out in the open any longer than was necessary was an invitation to attack. Voices crackled in his suit communicator. Something about something—behind them.
The Necromonger soldiers who had appeared behind the Helion brigade had materialized as silently as their comrades in the plaza had died. Now perhaps a hundred of them blocked the street the brigade had used to enter the plaza. A check of another street revealed another hundred or so of the enemy had already taken up defensive positions there.
Approaching from across the plaza came a third group. Threatening and unexpected, but not invincible. All they had to do, the Helion commander realized, was attack any one of the three columns and reduce it while defending themselves against the other two. They were outflanked, but not outnumbered or outgunned. Inclining his lips toward the pickup in his helmet, he prepared to issue the necessary orders.
At the front of the Necromonger column that was advancing on the plaza, a senior officer halted. Vaako was a favored commander, unusually young to have achieved such a high rank. For an instant, he observed the preparations taking place among the Helion force. It appeared that they were going to make a charge, in his direction. Another officer in a similar battlefield situation might have been concerned, might have rushed to prepare his own troops to withstand the frontal assault.
Instead, Vaako removed from one pocket a compact signaling device. It was small in size, but not in import. Unhesitatingly, he raised his gaze until it was focused on the pale orb of energy that continued to drift above the plaza. It was significant not for what it displayed, but for what it represented. He pressed the single button on the mechanism, transmitting a certain signal