“Compton?” Dave asked dumbly. “He can do that?”
Heath waved a hand despairingly at the street as if that answered the question.
“But I thought you were in charge here.”
Heath cracked off another double shot, knocking over an unleashed Fangr that was dashing to and fro like a rabid dog.
“I’ve never been in charge of anything but a couple of men on the ground, Dave. I don’t make the big calls.”
“And that fucking moron does?” Dave exclaimed.
“No,” said Heath, “but he’s got the number of the morons who do.”
The gunships opened up again a couple of hundred yards away, lighting up the vacant lot through which the Horde had emerged into the world.
Three of them were working the kill zone now. Miniguns, rockets, and door gunners were churning up the field.
Heath listened to something over his headset again, acknowledged the transmission, and climbed slowly and painfully to his feet.
No. To his one good foot, Hooper thought.
“Chief, round up your squad and Ostermann’s if you can. The hostiles have mostly broken and run for it. Back to the … the … what did they even come through, Dave? How did they get here?”
“No idea,” he said without emotion. “Neither do they. But I guess there’s some sort of portal thing in that lot. And under the Longreach. And on the highway up to Area 51. And who the fuck knows where else now?”
Heath and Allen both stared at him.
“Chief,” the officer finally said, “priority one right now is protecting the civilians. Sweep and clear the AO. Establish a perimeter with NOPD, then sweep and clear again. Casevac will need protecting when they roll in. There’s sure to be stragglers here and there. And find me Ostermann. He’s gonna have to run this. I need to get on the line and let the bosses know we’re at war.”
Dave tried to stand up, but the world tilted on its axis and tipped him off into darkness.
Thresh did not think.
Thresh did not look back.
Thresh ran like a hunted urmin cub.
Thresh ran through fire and steel, past nest mates who did not know what to do. It sent out quickthinkings for them to follow, but their minds were shocked and unmoored by the fire of the men’s captive metal Drakons.
It found the entrance to the UnderRealms and picked up the tempo, matching the speed of a Sliveen scout headed in the same direction. Thresh took some solace from that. The scout bore many scars and inked markings of skirmishes and battles below. None could doubt its proven courage, yet it outpaced thresh on the race to escape this accursed realm.
The Sliveen’s head exploded just as it raced past.
Quick panicked glances dagger- and shieldwise finally revealed black-clad human warriors wielding magic staffs. They sent dark enchantments in thresh’s direction, condensed bolts of searing sunlight that crashed like thunder as they whipped past thresh, impossibly faster than the swiftest arrowhead. Bodies and pieces of bodies were blown through the air every time they touched the thrall.
Puffs of dirt and stone erupted around thresh as it redoubled its gallop for the portal, churning up the filthy maelstrom of mud and ichor that had turned the small field where they entered this realm into a quagmire.
Thresh stumbled, and a young Hunn warrior changed course to offer help, only to be blown apart a few feet away. Gore splashed over thresh just before another explosion covered it in soil. This whole world was an insane mandala of explosive violence in which the lives of individual nestlings and even grand storied BattleMasters were meaningless.
A cloud of smoke puffed from the ruined buildings on thresh’s shield flank as a single Fangr disintegrated in a ball of flame.
Thresh could hear its own voice wailing wild thinkings inside its head, shaken and terrified and somewhat disgusted with itself as it recalled the words of Her Majesty.
“This shall not stand. We shall not be mocked thus. Not by the likes of men.”
A Hunn zigzagging in front of thresh lost his head to a long ropy ribbon of bolt fire licking out from the dark, foreboding tangle of the human village. It was so close to the portal now. But even there the path was not clear as a solid crush of broken, terrified thrallmates attempted to climb over one another to get away from the dire magicks of mankind.
Torn and blasted bodies of clan warriors and human fighters lay entwined together in death. Almost promiscuously, until one could see that the nest lovers had bitten one another’s throats out, torn their bellies, raked one another to offal.
Thresh slowed as it approached, not sure how to proceed. It could not scramble over the frenzied press of bodies at the portal mouth. It could not even crawl under them. But neither could it stand and wait while sun bolts and Drakon fire rained down.
It could only …
Some human wizard riding atop a metal Drakon solved the puzzle by throwing down one of the hissing, shrieking war bolts that exploded like small fire mountains, utterly destroying the crush of Hunn and Fangr at the portal mouth.
Seeing its chance, perhaps the only one it would get, thresh raced forward, ignoring the smoking remains of the slain and the cries of its thrallmates.
Once within, thresh raced down into the passages, past the straggling survivors of the once proud Vengeance. It waited for a few moments for others to come through after it. There surely had to be more. But reaching out for the thoughts of those still on the surface, thresh found only silence.
No more were coming, Thresh realized.
Not a one of them.
Turning its back on the Above, Thresh began the journey back to Her Majesty to tell of the Dave, of his inexplicable familiarity with the lore of the Horde and his betrayal of that lore.
There could be only one answer to this, thresh knew.
War.
EPILOGUE
She emerged through the mud and silt, past the breach in the barrier holding the UnderRealms apart from the Above. With powerful strokes she pushed and shoved and wriggled through rock and stone, holding her breath until she punched through into water. With emerald eyes open she saw the faintest hint of starlight above, filling her with a fervent hope that after ages of privation, she might have found her way back.
With the same powerful strokes she beat the water into a flurry, swimming up to the surface past startled fish and other creatures too small to feed on. She emerged in the steady current of a river and took a deep breath. Scents both wondrous and sublime tickled her memories of when she and her kind had soared above the mountains, above plains and forests. Memories of creatures from this realm came to her. The calflings and their feedstock.
From time to time in the past, they had been scarce and she had known hunger. Yet now her nostrils flared. It was as though they smelled the whole world. The air itself was a banquet of possibilities. She hammered at water and air, expanding her gas bladders, clawing her way up with puffs and snorts of fire jetting from her snout.
She broke the surface. Catching a thermal, the ancient Drakon lifted herself into the sky, giddy with the thrill of flight after so long in slumber beneath the crushing rock and the unmovable capstone. She climbed higher and higher, reveling in the freedom of unrestrained flight for the first time in unknowable ages. A few powerful beats of her stiff, aching wings and she was powering through the clouds, swooping and twirling, basking in the joy of her hatchling time, when she had first learned to fly. Clouds and stars above rolled with her in a tumbling twirl.
She paused in her reveries.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
For nighttime it was far too bright, she realized. Where was the heavy cloak of darkness that covered her approach to the fields and tiny homesteads of the prey?
There were strange sounds in the air. The growling of metal on metal and the mating call of untold numbers of creatures rang in her ears. An oily, nasty odor overlaid the sweet delicate scent of what lay beneath her wings.
Gliding i
n the direction of the coast, dar Drakon realized that the land beneath her was awash in light far more powerful than mere candles and burning torches. It was as though the land itself were burning. What wizardry was this?
Surveying the area with sharp emerald eyes, the dragon saw a brightly lit clearing of stonework.
Strange, but perhaps there would be answers, she decided.
She spied a creature she had never seen before. Some winged beast of magnificent ivory, silver, and blue glided across the masonry work, attended to by smaller gray hatchlings.
Their wings did not flap. They did not seem to exert themselves in the slightest as they glided along.
A roar of unearthly power reached her ears.
A challenge! This strange Drakon must be the dominant of this region.
She had never abjured a challenge, not across the eons, and what tales would be told if she could best the new, strange creature.
She slipped into a power dive and launched herself at the creature’s nest from out of the clouds, narrowing her wings and letting out as much of her gas as she dared. Soaring over treetops and fields, she could feel her speed increasing as the great white creature howled and began to climb into the air, attended by her hatchlings.
Stupid, dar Drakon thought, waiting for the blue-headed thing to turn her gaze toward the challenger. Such contempt and surety was unknown among even the most hardened of her kind. She would teach this creature a hard lesson about impudence.
Shiggurath Ur Drakon clicked her jaws together twice to ignite her remaining gas reserves and let the creature feel the heat of her counterchallenge. Squirting a tight stream of fire through the night, she caught one of the hatchlings. The tiny thing’s own gas bladders exploded, singeing her scaly hide so badly that it alarmed her. Bits of bone pierced her wings, but she kept on until she caught the creature’s head in her claws. She had timed her attack perfectly and sat astride the creature, as Gulyok Ur Drakon had mounted her to plant his seed in her belly so long ago.
The triumph was marred by Shiggurath’s complete incomprehension about what to do next, however. Her claws dug into and punctured the skin of this beast, but it did not yield as flesh might. She raked at the exposed neck, just behind the animal’s bulbous head. But the head never moved, and she gained no purchase on the vulnerable meat. It was passing strange. Indeed, the only thing to which she might compare the experience was a vague recollection of biting down on an armored calfling in the far distant past.
The creature’s attendant nestlings, unsurprisingly, were deeply disturbed by the attack and swooped around her, coming so close that the roar of their gas bladders all but deafened Shiggurath. They did not mount her as she mounted their mother, however, and tiring of trying to unravel the mystery, she opened her jaws wide and bit through the armored hide of this odd, stiff Drakon.
Wind erupted from within the beast, carrying with it the dimly remembered scent of calfling meat. Cooking calfling meat.
Flames licked the wings of the Drakon foe and ran down its spine.
Shiggurath tore free a large strip of the creature’s hide and tossed it back at one of the hatchlings that was flying behind her, possibly hoping to creep up and mount the old, wily Drakon when she was not paying it due heed.
But Shiggurath did not get to be an old and wily Drakon by falling for that sort of Fangr guano. The massive chunk of stiffened hide slammed into the pursuing nestling. To her surprise it exploded, as though all of its bladders had ruptured at once.
Decapitated and burning, the mother’s death scream was short-lived as it plummeted back into the masonry work.
Shiggurath flipped in midair, landing on the masonry work with a cracking thud.
At the last possible instant before impact she had seen something.
A man. She was sure.
Inside the belly of this beast. It made no sense to her at all.
She rolled back onto her hind claws and examined herself. All around the air was filled with strange howls and screams. Chariots rushed out in livery of yellow and red toward the slain creature, torchlights blinking and flickering in their mad dash across the stonework field. Shiggurath searched for a shank of meat or perhaps a wing that might have come from the collision, sniffed for the scent of rich blood.
The hide it found, jagged and sharp, was charred with flame. She picked it up, examined it, and tossed it aside.
Just armor. No meat at all, at least nothing worthy of the name.
High overhead the creature’s remaining hatchlings screamed. She could see them fleeing through the clouds, off into the stars. Maybe they would go find her a worthy foe with some meat to its bones instead of the thin, curved armor shell that now lay burning in the wreckage. Confused and not a little frustrated, dar Drakon returned to tending her wounds, plucking bits of metal armor from her hide, gently plying the sting of her own fire to cauterize flesh and stop the bleeding.
Across the field, a line of chariots charged toward her.
The Hunn can’t be here, she thought. Nor the Djinn or Morphum. She found the break in the capstone first.
The chariots came on nonetheless, bouncing over grass and mud, gaining purchase on the stonework before plunging into the grass again. And then another shock. Men drove these beastless chariots, she saw now. Her stomach growled.
Dar Drakon leaped back into the air, mindless of her wounds and hurts. She was not afeared of the little men, of course, but she preferred to come at them from above with fire. Climbing through the billowing smoke of her slain foe, she thrust her wings up and down again and again, building power, clawing up into the clouds, away from the lights of the strange stone field. Strange thoughts piled up in her mind, demanding her attention. Each memory was a gem, and a fastidious Drakon would sort them all into neat, orderly little piles, with the emeralds in one place, rubies in the next, silver ingots on the third level of the lair, while the gold, the sweet, soft, luxurious gold, always went to the bottom of the trove.
The creature she had slain was no animal of flesh and blood as she knew it. It seemed entirely crafted from metal and fabric and powered by magicks. She turned in midflight to find the two surviving hatchlings roaring up from behind, spitting fire at her. Her surprised offense soon turned to shock and even fear as a thousand burning stones tore through her wings, prompting her to loose her own fire too soon in a roar of pain. Balling up to evade the hatchlings, she dived through the clouds, looking to gain an advantage. An old master at the game of cloud cover, she was confident that the young hatchlings would grow bored and give up.
Such thoughts were proved for a falsehood when a large iron spike flared through the clouds. Her temper in check, she took a deep breath and blew her own fury back at the spike.
That should …
Dar Drakon fell through the night sky.
She fell down through the clouds, chased by a glowing hail of red-orange lightning.
She felt the cool air slip over her grievously wounded body, the cauldron within extinguished. Idly, without feeling as though it had anything to do with her, Shiggurath watched her own severed wing falling alongside of her. Her belly ripped asunder, she could feel the black bile of her insides running out.
She was numb from snout to tail spikes. It was as though the hot rocks the nestlings had spit at her had severed her from all her feelings. Or maybe she was just stunned by the blow of the flying iron spike.
It had exploded right next to her.
Shiggurath had not expected that at all.
She felt lightheaded and, when she thought about it as she fell, a little melancholy. Songs would be sung of this day when dar Drakonen returned to the Above. Her name should be in those songs, but as she fell, such hopes dwindled with her slowing heartsbeat.
The hatchlings were near her now, circling in her death spiral. She caught sight of one of them.
Such power for creatures so small.
She chuckled darkly as the river below raced up to meet her.
Slain by
such a tiny thing, she thought. Who would have thought it possible?
For SF Murphy,
who is forever dragging me out of the fire
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Who to thank first? Doctor Who, I think. It drove me nuts as a kid that guns seemed to have no effect at all on monsters. Like, why did Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT even bother? The Dave Hooper series is an attempt, in part, to rectify that.
I’d also like to thank the producers of Reign of Fire, who annoyed me greatly with movie posters promising all sorts of dragon vs. helicopter gunship awesomeness. And failed to deliver.
Less flippantly, I have to thank my ur-Champion publishers Tricia Narwani, Cate Paterson, Haylee Nash, and the incomparable Alex Lloyd, who all took up sword and shield with me on this long, strange quest.
To my wizardly agent, Russ ur Galen dar SGG, I offer tribute from the highest blood pot.
And for my armsman, SF Murphy, acknowledgment of his skill with blades and fire staff. His gurikh is second to none.
Finally, for my nestlings, Jane, Anna, and Thomas … You are my Realm.
BY JOHN BIRMINGHAM
Published by Del Rey Books
Without Warning
After America
Angels of Vengeance
THE AXIS OF TIME TRILOGY
Weapons of Choice
Designated Targets
Final Impact
JOHN BIRMINGHAM is the author of Emergence, Angels of Vengeance, After America, Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice, and other novels, as well as Leviathan, which won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts, and the novella Stalin’s Hammer: Rome. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other magazines. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.
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