by Peter Nealen
He saw a M’tait slayer leap forward. It dropped flat just as an indig repeater boomed, and then a whining buzz and a strangled, rattling chirp sounded as the indig caught a borer in the side. He fell thrashing to the ground and cried out, his voice little more than dry, rattling rasps as the borer did its grisly work.
A human soldier popped up, his weapon tracking toward two M’tait slayers rushing toward the ditch. He hesitated for a second, freezing as he tried to process the two monsters running toward him and decide which one to shoot. In that momentary hesitation, a beam weapon lashed out and sliced his head from his shoulders.
Even as he coldly fired bolt after ravening bolt into the swarms of M’tait, some hitting, some missing the preternaturally agile creatures, he could see what was happening. They were cut off, surrounded, and being slowly and systematically picked off. And it all seemed carefully controlled. As if it was a game to the M’tait, an elegantly choreographed dance of systematic and cruel death.
He had just enough time to grasp that fact before a harsh buzzing whine dopplered in from behind him. A savage impact at the base of his spine shoved him forward. Then the pain began.
Even Corbinian Evrard screamed as the borer started to slowly pulp his innards.
20
No real gap opened up in the M’tait lines, but the bulk of the slayers they could see did seem to be moving toward the thunderous noise of the gunfight off to the west. It didn’t sound to Gaumarus like the diversionary attack had gotten nearly as far as he might have hoped, but from where he crouched, peering through a tiny gap in the camouflage at the edge of the pit, it looked like more and more of the M’tait’s attention was being drawn that way.
He looked back at Kan Tur and Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. This was the only chance they were going to get. Taking a deep breath, trying not to think too much about how he was about to die, he braced himself to surge up out of the pit and charge as fast as his weary legs could take him toward the target Huntership.
But Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s clawed hand stayed him. [Wait, Friend of Hunters,] the indig warrior signed. [There is one thing yet.]
Gaumarus stared at him. What else could there be? The first diversion had failed, and from the sounds of it, the second was soon to be overwhelmed. They had to move quickly, if they were to have any chance at all.
Kan Tur loomed next to him. “What is it?” He had a small, lozenge-shaped grenade in his hand. Gaumarus frowned at it; he had never seen a grenade quite like it before. But before he could either answer Kan Tur that he didn’t know what Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff wanted, or ask what the device in his hand was, they were nearly deafened by a ripping, sky-shredding roar overhead.
Rockets streaked overhead to slam into the ground and the massing M’tait only a few hundred meters away. Gaumarus ducked as dirt, smoke, and rocks blasted away from the impact points, fragmentation whickering overhead. Then Kan Tur clapped him on the shoulder.
“We couldn’t ask for better cover, friend Gaumarus,” he said as he dug in and surged up the bank, the grenade held ready in his hand. “Let’s go! None of us will live forever, anyway!”
Gaumarus cringed at the thought of running into that maelstrom, but he knew that Kan Tur was right. It was the best chance they had. Clearly, the indig had been bringing all the assets that they could spare to bear on the Plain, and follow-on trains must have been bringing loads of rockets in addition to the warriors and more portable weapons.
Given how deep the mountain tribes’ tunnel complexes seemed to go, he was surprised that they hadn’t produced tanks yet.
Gritting his teeth as another salvo of rockets pounded the M’tait in front of them, he got his feet under him and followed Kan Tur.
There was no coordination or guidance to that charge. The air was murky with dust, smoke, and fragmentation, and soon he couldn’t see more than a few meters in any direction. He could make out dim figures running beside him in the darkness, hear fragments whispering through the air that would probably take his head off if they hit him, but his world had quickly shrunk to what he could see, the ground under his boots, the pounding of his heart and rasp of his breath in his throat and lungs, the weight of his powergun in his hands.
His face shield was struggling to create an enhanced picture for him, but it lasted only a second before it suddenly fuzzed and jumped, the enhancement turning to glowing static in front of his eyes. What might have been a flaring, pulsing point of light and heat ahead blanked everything in that direction, even as the cloud ahead suddenly lit up with a blinding flash, followed less than a second later by the thunderclap report of a powergun bolt.
A shape lunged out of the cloud near him. Only the vague outline of a M’tait slayer registered in his consciousness, and he would have been dead if his powergun hadn’t already been vaguely pointed in that direction in the first place. Half-unconsciously, he mashed the trigger as he jumped, and the bolt blew one of the monster’s upper limbs off.
Off balance, the thing toppled, its weapon flailing, spewing whining, buzzing borers into the clouds of dust and debris. Gaumarus slowed just long enough to pump four more near-panicked powergun bolts into it. It let out a distorted shriek as the first punched into its torso. It fell silent, the shriek cut off by the hammering crack of the second. The third and fourth were unnecessary, but Gaumarus hardly noticed.
He looked to his right, and just caught a glimpse of Raesh sprinting forward, his powergun in his shoulder. He lifted his own as a shadow loomed out of the dust behind Raesh, but a borer slammed into the infantryman’s back before he could fire. Screaming and twitching, Raesh fell on his face, even as Gaumarus, sick to his stomach, put a powergun bolt through the M’tait’s head.
Then one of the Knights was beside him. “Keep moving!” the mechanical, translated voice barked. Remembering where he was and what they were doing, Gaumarus turned back toward the target ship and dove back into the darkness.
The bombardment thundered on. Charging into that felt like suicide, and when he tripped and fell headlong, he was sure he was dead. One of the next rockets was sure to land right on his head.
Two more figures ran through the dust and smoke to either side of him before he could regain his feet and sprint forward. One of them dropped suddenly, only a few paces ahead of him. As he ran past, he saw one of Verheyen’s men, his throat ripped open by a flying piece of fragmentation. He’d nearly been decapitated.
Only after the next few horrifying, brutal hundred meters did Gaumarus realize what was happening. The indig rocketeers weren’t just throwing ordnance in the general direction of the Hunterships; they had targeted either side of a definite corridor. It was still risky, but the explosions were all to hitting on one side or another. It was a remarkable bit of calculation and accuracy.
Then a dark wall loomed ahead of him, with the faint figures of half a dozen Knights, almost a dozen Provenian soldiers, and a handful of mountain tribesmen crouched at its base. He pounded up to it and nearly collapsed, sucking in breaths of hot, stinging air, laden with dust and smoke.
They’d reached the Huntership. He’d hardly dared think it possible.
Up close, there was something even more eerie about the ship. The hull looked like volcanic rock, a dark gray that was almost black, but it was warm to the touch and seemed to thrum with an energy that made it feel almost alive when he put his hand against it. He felt an echo of the induced fear he’d felt facing the M’tait before, only this was different. That had been like a small prey animal transfixed by the stare of a reptilian predator. This was worse. This felt like being an insect creeping around the feet of Leviathan.
He briefly wondered if, had they been able to make it, they would have even been able to move had they gotten all the way to the Mastership.
“Find us a way in,” Kan Tur ordered.
“What if there isn’t one?” Chauwens coughed.
“There has to be,” Xanar Dak replied. “They have to get in and out. And as monstrou
s as they may seem, they are still physical beings, that need doors and hatches.”
The question of whether they would be able to blast their way in if the hatch was closed went unasked.
Xanar Dak, the nuclear weapon bulking large on his back, started to lead the way around the massive, thrumming spire of the Huntership, his powergun raised. After a moment, Morav Dun stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder pauldron. He said something in the Knights’ own language, almost too softly for Gaumarus to hear, even if he’d been able to understand the words. But Xanar Dak looked at him for a moment before nodding and let him go ahead.
Slowly and carefully, trying to look in every direction at once, trying to point their weapons in every direction at once, the small group of surviving assaulters began to work their way around the grounded Huntership’s hull.
Even as awe-inspiring as the thing had been at a distance, Gaumarus hadn’t realized just how huge it really was. It was a mountain transplanted onto the surface of the planet. The jagged peak of the Huntership’s nose had to be almost seven hundred meters above them. The hull rose sheer beside them as they advanced, less a ship than a geological feature.
Gaumarus’s eyes kept flitting from shadow to shadow; the Huntership was wreathed in the pall of smoke and debris from the continuing rocket bombardment. He knew that the indig gunners were going to run out of ordnance eventually, and that urgency gripped his chest, even as he watched for monsters looming out of the darkness, praying that he’d taken the right path along the Way so that they wouldn’t. The flash and report of a powergun bolt at that point would doubtless bring more of them swarming in on them.
He was so absorbed in watching for threats and trying to keep down the incipient panic that seemed to be seeping from the very skin of the ship within an arm’s length of him that he was surprised when Morav Dun abruptly stopped.
He looked around, confused. He didn’t see any M’tait coming out of the smoke. The rockets were still hammering the plain around them, the concussions washing over them and plucking at fatigues and long indig coats. They made his head ache. Between what probably amounted to a minor concussion and the crawling fear gnawing at his mind, it took him a moment to notice where they were.
They were right back where they’d started. They’d gone all the way around the Huntership.
“Where’s the hatch?” he asked, straining to make himself heard over the rumble of explosions and the fainter buzzing, howling, and crackling of more fighting going on out in the murk. It sounded like more of the indig fighters were out there, doing what damage they could, drawing the M’tait away from the raiders.
No one answered. Morav Dun was looking around, clearly frustrated. Most of the others were crouched down at the base of the ship, their powerguns and big repeaters aimed out into the roiling gloom, waiting for the first sign that they’d been spotted, soon to be overwhelmed by swarms of murderous M’tait slayers.
Suddenly, the Knight Subcommander looked up. His shoulders seemed to slump a little, but he recovered and pointed.
“It’s up there,” he said. “There must be a lift car or something.”
Despair threatened to close in on Gaumarus. To have come so far, only to be thwarted at the last moment, not by enemy action, but by simple engineering.
But Kan Tur shook his helmeted head. “No,” he said, pointing. “They climb.”
Gaumarus took the risk of turning his head and looking, rather than watching the perimeter. He squinted, trying to see what the Knight was talking about, but all he saw was the ship’s sheer hull rising above them.
Kan Tur wasn’t waiting for the rest of them to see it though. Slinging his powergun on his back, he reached up and jammed his gauntleted hand into what looked at first glance to be solid hull.
His hand went deep into a recess in the hull, a hinged cover sliding open as he did so. Getting a firmer grip, he pulled himself up and found another such handhold, almost too high up for a human to reach.
Step by step, Kan Tur led the way up. Morav Dun followed, then Verheyen started up after him. Xanar Dak followed more slowly, starting to strain under the weight of the charge strapped to his back.
Gaumarus looked up and got a little dizzy, even as he saw several of the indig fighters start to scramble up the cliff of the ship’s hull, seemingly finding hand and footholds off to either side of where the humans were climbing.
It wasn’t the height that made him nervous; he’d climbed before. He’d climbed cliffs almost as sheer as that hull. No, it was the exposure. He could just imagine a swarm of slayers coming out of the smoke and looking up. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d be burned off like insects.
But the alternative was to stay there on the ground until they were discovered and killed or worse, captured. He wanted to take a deep breath, but it caught in his throat with the amount of smoke and particulate matter in the air, so he just reached up and found a handhold as he slung his powergun on his back.
The handhold felt slick at first, and unnaturally warm. But his hand gripped it well enough, and he pulled up, stretching to reach the next. It was just out of reach, but his scrabbling boot seemed to find another purchase, and he was able to push himself up that last few centimeters.
So it went, step by step, handhold by handhold. The ground receded into the smoke and murk, even as the shockwaves continued to pummel him. Several times he almost slipped, stifling a cry, and clung to the Huntership’s hull, shaking, for a few moments before he could bring himself to continue.
All the while, he was waiting for and dreading their inevitable discovery by the M’tait below. Or above. The alien monsters had to know that someone was climbing the ship. They’d detected the tunnelers approaching for the diversionary attack, after all.
Maybe it was all a game to them. Maybe they were watching and laughing, or whatever their alien equivalent was. Cruelly allowing their prey to come right inside their ship before suddenly descending on them.
Looking up, he saw that Kan Tur was no longer in sight. He must have reached the hatch. Even as he watched, Morav Dun disappeared inside the rocky hull.
Gritting his teeth, he tried to climb faster. It proved to be impossible; the hand and foot holds were set too irregularly. He suddenly wondered if that was deliberate, a way of slowing down an attacker trying just this. Or was it simply that the M’tait disdained symmetry? All of their tech that he’d seen since they’d landed had displayed that same weird asymmetry.
He was utterly exhausted by the time he finally reached the hatchway. It was an irregular hole in the side of the ship, the hatch itself seeming to have been withdrawn into the walls in sections. There were no handholds in the deck beneath him as he crawled inside, but Verheyen and Kan Tur grabbed him by the forearms and dragged him in. For a moment he just slumped on the deck, gasping.
He had to crawl out of the way for another of the Provenians to get through the hatch. Rolling over, he looked around him.
They might have been in an embarkation bay. It was utterly dark past a few meters in front of the hatchway, but somehow it seemed vast, like a cavern in the depths of a mountain. Except that, unlike the caves the indig lived in, this one seemed to house a brooding sense of menace that went deeper than the mere fear of hostile action. There was something inherently creepy about the place, that spoke directly to the deepest animal instincts in Gaumarus’s mind.
He wanted to run away and hide.
If Kan Tur and Xanar Dak felt the same lurking terror, they didn’t show it. They seemed to be looking around, doubtless using whatever sensors they had in their helmets to penetrate the brooding gloom. But when Gaumarus looked at Morav Dun, he saw that the Knight Subcommander was staying back by the hatchway, his back to the darkness, helping the rest of the Knights and Provenian soldiers inside.
His legs were rubbery and shaky, and he didn’t think it was just fatigue from running nearly a kilometer and then climbing a hundred meters up a sheer starship’s hull. But he forced himself to
his feet and joined Kan Tur and Xanar Dak.
Kan Tur looked at him. “There seems to be a central lift or ladderway in that column,” he said, pointing toward the center of the chamber. “Your guess is as good as ours in here, friend Gaumarus. Which way do you think we should take the bomb?”
With his face shield’s light enhancement turned up, he could just make out the faint shadow of the structure that Kan Tur was speaking of. He peered up at the ceiling overhead. He couldn’t see any details, but it seemed almost like it was made up of sections of volcanic rock. It didn’t look like a made artifact at all.
“The drives are down, I would think,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be where the bomb could do the most damage?”
Kan Tur nodded. “Xanar Dak thinks the same thing. The truth is, we know nothing about the inside of one of these ships. One way could be as good, or as bad, as another.”
“What does Morav Dun think?” Gaumarus asked.
Xanar Dak glanced back toward the hatchway. Morav Dun was still pointedly facing away. “He has not ventured an opinion.”
“Well,” Kan Tur said. “We have two votes for down. I would be almost inclined to go high, to try to spread as much destruction as possible. But if the reactor—if this thing even has a reactor—could amplify the blast when it goes...” He nodded, as if taking a deep breath. “Down it is.”
The rest were all up on the deck, at least as many as were coming. It seemed like a pathetic strike force with which to try to stab at the center of a M’tait starship. Five Knights, seven Provenian soldiers, and around twenty indig fighters, their lever action repeaters looking ancient and strange surrounded by tech so advanced that it was a mystery to races who regularly threw themselves through the gaps between stars.
Weapons raised, they started toward the central column. The wan light from outside receded and the unnatural gloom closed in on them.