The Champion

by Taran Matharu

  “What do we—” Scott began.

  A new timer had appeared, counting down the hour.

  00:59:59

  00:59:58

  00:59:57

  At the same time, Cade felt a strange sprinkle of liquid, like a fine mist sprayed from above.

  “What the hell is that?” Scott hissed.

  “Pheromones,” Cade said, near gagging at the stench of it. “To get them to attack.”

  He cursed under his breath. Had he triggered the EMP, the ants might never have attacked at all. But it was too late to think about that now.

  The ants seemed to turn as one, their antennae twitching. Mandibles chattered, the sound setting Cade’s teeth on edge.

  And then, as if by some hidden signal … they came.

  The creatures were fast, swarming toward the keep in a wave of red-black bodies, running upright in a bowlegged sprint, their claws outstretched.

  Yet as the frontrunners passed into the bone fields, the force field appeared again. One ant, caught halfway, was sliced in two, black ichor spurting as its momentum hurled its front half forward.

  “Hold!” Marius called as the first sling stones were hurled toward the enemy. “Hold!”

  The stones pattered short, and the overeager men rushed to reload their slings. On the ants came, and now Cade could see the black pits of their insectile eyes. There were over a hundred in this first wave, more than one for every legionary.

  Marius raised his arm.

  “Funditores!” Slingers.

  The stones whipped out, a hailstorm of stone bullets. There was a crackle as the projectiles hit home, ants thrown back or tumbling to the ground.

  Men cheered at the sight. Yet even as they did so, ants returned to their feet. Their carapaces were cracked, and they followed slowly behind those that had not been hit, but they came on regardless. Few remained motionless on the ground.

  “Pilorum!”

  Now, the men pitched their javelins with all their might, a mass of dark poles whipping into the sky. They rose, rose, then tilted and fell, pattering like heavy rain on the oncoming horde.

  Again, the sound of projectiles striking home, this time quieter than before. Yet to Cade’s horror, few ants were knocked from their feet. Javelins glanced from their shells, or struck and fell away, leaving shallow dents that seemed to hardly hurt at all.

  “Funditores, iterum!” Slingers, again.

  More sling stones buzzed across the field, but the ants were close now. Their insectile feet tripped and stumbled over the sharp spikes hidden in the ground, yet that was all they did—slow them.

  As for the rows of stakes, their great pincers snapped them as easily as stalks of grass, mowing them aside before pushing through the stumps left behind.

  Still, the slingers worked, almost every soldier on the rampart. Only the old contenders did not take part, instead hurling spare javelins, though they did little good.

  Now, the first ants reached the base of the wall, mandibles clattering as they looked up. But to Cade’s horror, the beasts did not climb as he had expected. Instead, they began to claw at the walls, their crab-like claws scraping into the ancient concrete.

  The first boulders were pushed from the ramparts, thudding into mud and ants in a deluge of rockfall. Marius bellowed at men to hold back, but panic had set in to them, having seen the ineffectualness of their weapons.

  Of the hundred or so ants that had crossed into the bone fields, only ten had fallen in their journey to the walls. Now, ants massed at the bottom, beating their mandibles and claws, corkscrewing them like drills as chips of mortar and stone dusted the bodies of those behind.

  Rocks fell and fell again, punching great holes in the insectile mass beneath. These, it seemed, put the ants down for good, as prehensile limbs twitched and black ichor sprayed high at the impact.

  And then, the second row of ants began to climb. They clambered over the diggers with ease, their claws finding purchase in the crumbling facade.

  Men screamed, pushing the last of the boulders, the angle too tight to use their slings. By now, almost half the enemy’s number was gone.

  Beneath him, Cade saw the first opponent clamber just outside sword range, close enough for him to see the hexagons of its eyes. It chattered its mandibles and scrambled toward him, pincers snapping.

  Cade speared down, two handed, his blade slipping over the hard surface of its chitinous head and into a geometric eye. The beast froze, its claws deep in the wall. Then it plummeted to the ground.

  “The eyes!” Cade yelled. “Go for the eyes! Oculi, oculi!”

  To his right, a legionary stabbed with his blade, only for the sword to be clasped within a pincer and yanked from his grip. He panicked, lashing out with a foot, and the ant took the man’s boot in its mandibles, dangling its weight to pull him down. Cade swung his blade and cut it off at the head.

  But it was too late, for as the ant fell away, the man teetered over the edge, Cade’s snatched handful of cloth slipping from his fingers as the legionary tumbled to the ground.

  Cade heard a single, short scream before he disappeared into the mass of seething insects.

  Another appeared beneath Cade, chattering its mandibles, a claw snapping in front of it in anticipation of his blade. But as Cade stabbed, the ground shifted beneath his feet, throwing his blow wide.

  “Get off the wall!” Yoshi screamed.

  The wall to Cade’s right was swaying now, and Romans scrambled for the stairs, some leaping from halfway down the steps as the wall collapsed around them. The entire facade was buckling inward on itself, rocks falling loose from ancient mortar.

  Many soldiers were not so lucky, and as Cade ran for it himself, he saw men disappear into the mass of falling stone, tumbling down in an avalanche of rubble.

  Cade jostled and pushed through a frantic mess of running soldiers, men who were retreating into the courtyard and forming a makeshift shield wall. With no shield, Cade hung at the back, his heart near bursting with relief as his friends, one by one, came to join him.

  The entire wall swayed before beginning the same slow collapse. Ants appeared on the ramparts, seemingly unaware of the swaying wall.

  Then, in a sudden chain reaction, the wall collapsed in a great wave. Dust erupted in a haze, caustic in Cade’s nose and mouth. Men dragged themselves, bloodied and broken, from the wreckage of the western wall, while the braver of the soldiers left the safety of the wall to gather the injured.

  “Marius!” a man called in Latin. “What do we do?”

  CHAPTER

  59

  Cade looked at the timer, feeling sick.

  00:40:12

  00:40:11

  00:40:10

  “We can’t hold the keep,” Cade coughed, trying to clear the dust from his throat. “They’ll punch through it in minutes.”

  “And a shield wall will be better?” Amber demanded.

  Cade rubbed his gritty eyes, staring into the rubble.

  A handful of ants crawled along its top, pincering their claws into dead and dying men. Beyond that, there didn’t seem to be any ants alive at all.

  “They killed themselves,” Cade whispered. “The wall took them out completely.”

  “Why would they do that?” Scott asked.

  “Because they’re a hive mind,” Cade said. “They’re not individuals. More like appendages of a greater intelligence.”

  Marius bellowed with fury. He was screaming orders, pushing men into line. But as the pair of ants on the walls skewered a crawling man’s back, he raised his sword.

  “Retake the walls!” he bellowed.

  The legionaries charged en masse, leaving Cade and his friends behind. They didn’t need help anyway. The group of ants was soon swamped beneath a tumult of rising and falling swords.

  “We’ve got ten minutes before the final wave hits,” Cade said. “Less, actually.”

  “Marius!” Cade called.

  The commander turned, his face spattered with
black ichor, and sanity seemed to descend upon him in a sudden shock.

  “The tunnels,” Cade called. “Hurry!”

  He didn’t wait to see if Marius would follow, nor even his friends. Instead, he sprinted to where he had laid the gun, his mind blanking as he tried to plan his next move.

  The gun was where he had left it, ugly as sin, bathed in the light of the other end of the tunnel. It was a long tunnel, and he was out of breath when he emerged from its darkness on the other side.

  Luckily, the Romans had placed torches at intervals along the borehole, though Cade had not stopped to light them. As he turned to sight the gun, careful not to place his finger on the trigger, he could see the torches being lit by the exhausted legionaries, each frantically striking their gladius with flint.

  In this tunnel, seven men could stand abreast, though the soldiers at the outer edges would have to stand awkwardly on the curve. Marius had around seventy soldiers left, by Cade’s estimation. It was enough to make a shield wall that was ten men deep. In that, the ant numbers would stand for very little.

  Marius arrived first, leading his men with hoarse shouts of encouragement. He leaned on his knees, panting, but asked the same question Cade had been pondering.

  “What now?”

  Cade considered his options. The ants would come fast, and he could not be sure at which range to shoot the gun. Too soon and he’d waste his ammunition. Too late and they’d overwhelm him before his clip was spent. He looked at the timer.

  00:33:45

  00:33:44

  00:33:43

  “We need a wall,” Cade whispered. “A barrier to protect the gun.”

  Marius lifted his head, looking at Cade as if he was mad.

  “In three minutes?” he asked.

  “They’ll take some time to realize where we’ve gone. I’ll make a shield wall for now. We can use the real wall you’ll build for when they begin to overwhelm us. Something to fall back to.”

  He hoped they had time for that. Marius looked doubtful, but Cade couldn’t spare a moment to second-guess himself.

  Instead, he pointed to the waterfall, some hundred feet away.

  “Send half your men. Gather the boulders in the rock pool, dig up tree stumps if you have to, and create a semicircular barrier around the mouth of the cave. They’ll be blinded by the light and surrounded.”

  “And the rest?” Marius asked.

  “Task them to follow me and Quintus. I’ll fire into the tunnel.”

  Marius nodded and gave the order.

  “What can we do?” Scott asked.

  The others were there. His friends … if he could still call them that. It was some relief to see that none were injured—it seemed the ants’ sacrificial attack had meant there had been little hand-to-hand fighting so far.

  “Can you help with the rocks?” Cade asked. “You’ll be no good in the shield wall.”

  They did not look happy to take his orders, but moved to help the legionaries. Watching them go, Cade dragged the gun deeper into the cave. By now, he was exhausted.

  But then, he had just been chased by two enormous dinosaurs less than an hour ago.

  When the gun was finally in place and he had gone back for the ammunition, he was glad of the light of the timer, for the torchlight was dim. He counted down the seconds as the legionaries shuffled into position.

  00:30:02

  00:30:01

  00:30:00

  It was time. He could almost feel the force field on the other side of the tunnel descending. By his guess, some two hundred ants would be pouring into the tunnel, and there would be no rockfall to decimate them.

  There were over thirty soldiers in the cave behind Cade, talking in panicked voices as Cade worked his futuristic magic.

  Gritting his teeth, Cade stared down the tunnel and set himself up at the machine gun. Peering down the corridor of perfectly smooth rock was like looking down the barrel of a gun, and Cade was tempted to fire a few shots to test the accuracy.

  Instead, he waited. Better to do it when the ants were in the tunnel.

  Cade centered the gun, balanced precariously on the tripod, and he hoped he’d have the strength to hold it steady. As if his mind had been read, Quintus appeared at his side, crouching in front of the gun and letting Cade rest it upon his shoulder. Cade raised his shield and called out in a strong voice:

  “Testudo!”

  Cade did not turn, but he heard the clatter of men moving into position. The world darkened as a shield was lifted over his head, protecting him from who knew what. Men took their places on either side of him and Quintus, and Cade elbowed himself a little space so they would not jostle him.

  Then … they waited.

  CHAPTER

  60

  Cade heard them first. That clicking sound, rattling down the tunnel like macabre maracas. Then the darkening of the tunnel mouth as figures crisscrossed in front of it.

  Time ticked by, and with each second Cade rejoiced. There was a chance … a slim one, that they would not need to kill every ant to win. That the time would run out before the battle was over.

  He didn’t know what would happen then. If they would be immediately transported to Earth. If Abaddon would make a little speech before sending them on their way.

  By Cade’s estimation, he had to make a decision before the timer ran out, in case of immediate teleportation. And it was a decision; He didn’t have to go through with Song’s plan.

  In the back of Cade’s mind, he knew he could take the coward’s way out. Go home. See his family again. Let some other poor souls pick up his mantle. Let humanity dance to Abaddon’s tune until they could dance no more. Perhaps they would dance forever.

  He tried to tell himself it wasn’t selfish. That he would save his friends. That he owed them it. And then Cade stopped agonizing. Because the ants were coming again.

  The tunnel seemed to shrink suddenly. And Cade saw the true horror of what they faced: The ants weren’t just charging along the tunnel’s bottom. They were on the walls, the roof. Crawling toward him in a great flood, blotting out the light beyond.

  00:25:14

  00:25:13

  00:25:12

  Quintus nudged Cade with his foot.

  “Now,” he hissed.

  “We need to wait,” Cade whispered. “Make every shot count.”

  Men whispered prayers around him, and the tunnel echoed the frantic chittering of the beasts approaching. As the swarm neared, each torch winked out, one by one, knocked to the ground by the mass of insectile monstrosities.

  “Wait for it,” Cade whispered.

  The noise grew thunderous, rattling around Cade’s mind. He picked the nearest torch, some fifty feet away. Waited for it to blot out. And fired the gun.

  A crash of gunfire erupted, strobing the dark tunnel with light. Dust and ichor plumed as black smoke belched from the gun throbbing in Cade’s hand, half obscuring his view.

  Ants fell from ceilings and walls, trampled underfoot by the fearless horde. Insect bodies were hurled back, tangling and tripping the legs of those behind.

  Yet still they came, for the winnowing of the swarm still left frontrunners, ants that had miraculously survived the hail of bullets. They crashed into the shield wall on either side of Cade. Men roared, both in fear and fury, as hand-to-hand combat began. Cade’s only solace was that within the cone of accuracy directly in front of his gun, not a single ant survived.

  Soon enough, there was a pile of insectile corpses choking the tunnel. But the ants swarmed over and around the mound as if it were no more than a feature of the landscape. They came on, and all the while the bullets spattered random death through the masses.

  Then, just like that, the gun fell silent. Cade released the button and yanked the empty belt through the bottom of the gun. As he fumbled for the next belt, an ant dropped from the ceiling and slammed into Quintus’s shield.

  Cade tried. He really did. But the gun was heavy and his hands were slick with s
weat. The space was too cramped and dark to see the gun teeter, and it fell from the tripod, landing on the ground with a clang. A death knell.

  Ants poured forward, the hail of gunfire no longer cutting down their numbers, and Cade could see them slashing their great claws into the front line’s shields with abandon, splinters flying.

  They were like machines. Methodical, precise, and untiring. And seemingly ignorant of the swords that severed limbs and punctured their carapaces. Each fought until it fell, and another took its place.

  Cade gripped the gun, slotting the belt into place with frantic fingers as he tried to lift it back to the tripod. Another blow from the front knocked Quintus back once more. The tripod fell, and Cade screamed above the furor, using his hand to pull Quintus away.

  “Retreat!” he bellowed. “Retreat!”

  To their credit, the Romans did not break. They stepped backward as one, grunting in unison. Once. Twice. Thrice.

  Thuds sounded from above as more ants dropped onto their formation. One fell on the shield above Cade’s head, knocking the heavy wood into his head and pressing him into the ground.

  Dazed, Cade could only push on, gripping Quintus and the gun with all the desperate strength he could muster as they slow marched out of the tunnel.

  The wall held, even as men cursed and pincers broke through shields and sliced away fingers, scissoring through metal and flesh.

  Behind, a rattle of sling stones gave blessed, brief relief, and the ants standing upon the roof of their testudo were knocked down, sliding along the edges or through to the floor below.

  Step. Step. Step. Cade realized now that his blade lay forgotten, for he dragged the gun with one hand and held Quintus’s shoulder and thumb-hooked loops of ammunition in the other.

  Light, dim from the setting sun, was blessed, letting Cade know they had exited the tunnel. But suddenly the men stopped. Cade took a moment to turn, only to see his formation pressed against a low wall of river boulders, with their reinforcements crouched behind the wall, flailing slings as they hurled rocks above their allies’ heads.