------------------------------------------------------------------------ Attack! Newsgroups: alt.devilbunnies From: adm4@po.cwru.edu (Aaron Mandelbaum) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 5 Sep 1994 07:16:29 GMT Organization: CWRU Aaron was awakened by a tickle on his nose. Slowly, he surfaced from dreams of squirrels, lurking beneath the city, waiting to boil up out of the ground like... Damn, he thinks, seeing the tiny silver squirrel sitting on his chest. It's real, isn't it. With a faint whirr, a small note extrudes from the tiny keyboard/display (and apparently printer) mounted on the its chest. "Get ready to attack?" he whispers, after turning on the desk lamp mounted above his bed (too far to reach the desk, of course), "Now?" The squirrel nods. "Urrghhh, what time is it, anyway?" Later, much later, five hundred impatient squirrels pack into a gray minivan, as the sun rises above the horizon. A silver-furred squirrel, one of maybe fifty, wakes the human driver and they pull out of the lot into the thankfully light six AM traffic, occasionally weaving back and forth as the driver tries to avoid falling asleep. Eventually, they reach the countryside, and the van pulls over into an unremarkable soybean field. A few people drive by, but no one sees more than a van parked by the side of the road. Specifically, no one sees the squirrels rushing across the field to plant their charges. The resulting explosion, however, is quite obvious. "Come on, hurry!" Aaron shouts as he leads the squirrels towards the smoking crater. Suddenly, he isn't tired at all. He swings his hockey stick overhead, the rising sun glinting off the sharpened, diamond coated edges. The explosion and the coming battle send adrenalin rushing through his veins, and, he thinks suddenly, his arteries as well, before he trips over a plant and falls flat on his face. He bounds to his feet, hardly slowed at all, and jumps into the shallow crater left by the shaped charges. At the bottom, a complex of shattered tunnels and chambers, with pieces of devilbunny and soybean strewn about -- but he doesn't think about that. Into the hole, into the warren, strike before they have a chance to form a new perimeter. A devilbunny leaps at him, but five different lasers shoot past him to skewer it, and it is dead by the time it bounces, limp, off his chest. One of the beams had come uncomfortably close to his arm. He slows down and lets the vanguard of the strike team pass him. Small contingents pour down every side tunnel, while the main force rushes to the warren's center, meeting little resistance. Five devilbunnies, none with BunnyArmor, let alone MorphArmor. Without that protection the lone bunnies are helpless against such a large force, for even though one or even two lasers might not be enough to stop one, ten or twelve do the job quite nicely. Scout squirrels bounce on ahead, flushing out potential ambushers, rebounding off walls, floor, and ceiling with equal frequency. Finally, they reach the central areas of the warren, but there are no labs, no control center, only a small computer and a smaller generator against ne wall of a cavernous chamber filled with bunnies, huddling near them. "We surrender!" one of them screams as the horde pours into the room, "This is a nonmilitary warren! Don't shoot!" A kit stares at him with big, puppy-dog eyes, as it quivers with fear across the room. "Okay," Aaron says, a little relieved. From what he'd seen in their rapid invasion, they were telling the truth. The only electronic device he'd seen was this computer here, the only electric the lights illuminating the tunnels, half of themand the tunnels had mostly been empty, the side chambers filled with stockpiled soybeans and corn. And they were so cute! How could he think of slaughtering these poor, defenseless, bunnies. "Get up against th--" At this point, the squirrels start firing. The bunnies burst into flame, or explode as their body fluids boil. They try to run, but there's nowhere to run to, the other exits all blocked by rubble where the passages collapsed in the explosion. "STOP IT!" he screams, horrified. Most of the squirrels stop and look at him, but the five silver furred ones still with the main group keep firing. Without thinking, he swings at them. SWISH! A head and the front half of a silver furred body go flying across the room, and like a rippling wave the rest of the squirrels fade away from him. The other three silver ones turn on him, pointing their hand lasers. "Drop the stick, symp!" one of them squeaks, but Aaron is already leaping at them. The lasers fire, but despite the fact that photons do exert pressure, squirrel sized hand lasers don't exert enough pressure to stop a human's mass rushing through the air at them. Aaron lands *on* them and rolls, crushing them underneath, and lies still. The rest of the squirrels just stand there, looking at the human and the crushed, sliced, and decapitated bodies of their comrades. With a groan, Aaron rolls over and staggeres to his feet, the red squirrels giving him plenty of room. Where did the lasers hit? He finds the burns where all three managed to burn through his shirt, but the wounds are cauterized and not deep, for all that they feel like drill bits... well... drilling into his flesh. He looks around for his stick, and notices that in the confusion the devilbunnies managed to get away. To where? Ah, the computer was a fake, the false front now lying several feet away, revealing a dark tunnel. He picks up his stick and goes to investigate. The tunnel is too small for him to fit through, but he can see the light filtering down from where it slopes sharply upward only a few feet in. If it hadn't escaped to the outside before, it did now, and all the bunnies were long gone. He hears a noise, and turns to see the mass of squirrels behind him, staring at him. "Plant the charges," he says, knowing that the teams that split off are doing that now, and that they don't have time to sit there gawking at each other. They have SOME time -- they'd penciled in a pitched battle, if a brief one -- but the preset timers wouldn't wait. The demo squirrels plant their bombs, and then they rush back the way they came in, Aaron bringing up the rear this time. He climbs out of the crater and drops to the ground, rolling away and covering his head. The ground shakes, and dirt and small pebbles drop on him for several minutes, while he gets to his feet and dashes across the field to the van. Strangely, considering the massive explosions, no one is nearby. He jumps into the van, long since loaded with squirrels, and squeals out onto the road, heading back for the city. The squirrels are restless all the way back, and the silver squirrels have to break up several fights. They look at Aaron strangely, but none of them say anything, or even type a note. "So," Loren says, when Aaron reports to his office for debriefing, "Geren, Tara, Wysi, Ken, and Sele were killed in action." "That's, um, right," Aaron replies, glancing at the floor but managing to keep his eyes locked to the squirrel's. He almost starts to elaborate, but thinks better of it. "Just them, and no one else." "Yep," Aaron answers. "And there is some reason why the bodies were not recovered?" Because they were sliced and crushed, not bitten to death, Aaron thinks, but says "I didn't think it was important to you. We were in a hurry with the explosives and all... WHICH went off a bit earlier than they were supposed to. We were ahead of schedule, or we might not have gotten out!" "The warren was a little larger than we thought," Loren replies, waving one paw off to the side as if to indicate that it's unimportant, "Still, five KIA was more than I expected." His whiskers twitch angrily. "You KNEW it was a noncombatant warren, didn't you!" "Well, we've never been in battle before," Loren answers, unruffled, "We could hardly start by attacking DenverWarren, could we? We needed a... practice run." Aaron glares at him, but stays quiet. "You can go now," Loren says, and Aaron leaves. After all those days wondering what was going on... he wishes he still did. But now he knows Loren doesn't lead the squirrels' warren for democratic reasons, and he knows Loren knows he knows. Now the question is, what happens next? -- Aaron Mandelbaum (I could look up a quote, but that would require effort, and its three in the morning.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Usenet Web 1.0.3 (development) / webmaster@netimages.com