by John Daulton
“Shit,” muttered the colonel when he saw it. He knew there would be some kind of magic in that glow, and it was likely not going to be good for his men. Into the com he said, “Take down the animals. One burst. Do it now.”
The motors of a hundred mech arms sounded, the armored limbs rising across the line as one, and then came the white flash of Gatling fire erupting from each of them. A spray of fifty-caliber bullets spewed forth, a burst of barely a second and no more, the rush of lead projectiles invisible but for a slight darkening in the air, like the barest shadow had passed across the land. The bullets bit into horseflesh terribly, cutting the powerful heaving chests of the charging creatures into ribbons of slinging hide and bright red meat. Limbs were gone, knees vaporized, and the riders flung into the air.
The burst of gunfire was over as quickly as it began, and the riders lay in various states of disrepair upon the ground. Some lay still, necks broken, while others thrashed about in agony, gripping legs that had been struck by gunfire or bones that had broken and pushed through the skin when they fell. Cries of pain filled the air.
Colonel Pewter shook his head ruefully as he ordered his men to continue onward, toward the city again.
The young officer and his two companions rode fearlessly back through the line of mechanized Marines and rejoined the rest of the cavalry, though from the way the less elaborately armored rider gesticulated, it appeared the next course of action was a matter of debate. Colonel Pewter hoped the young, feathered fool wouldn’t do anything as stupid as that again.
“Step over the fallen,” Colonel Pewter ordered as they got to the swath of wounded men and decimated animals.
Twenty-eight fireballs, some as big as freight trucks, suddenly streaked across the field as the Marines passed through and clear of the carnage. Someone said, “Oh, shit,” over the com. The fireballs had formed in unison, appearing out of thin air in front of the next line of horses, and came on like rockets now. One of them came straight toward the colonel’s unit, so fast there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t help but squint as the nearly blinding glare struck his plasma shield. The fire wrapped around the shield for a moment, like a ship entering an atmosphere. The flames didn’t make it inside, but the heat coming through the gap in the partially open canopy was intense. But that was essentially it. The force of the blow was considerable, causing him to stagger back several steps, just as it did the others whose suits got struck to greater or lesser degrees, but that was the full extent of the damage. And even that could be adjusted for.
“Gravity boost to nine,” he ordered. “And lean into those when they come.”
“Should we open fire again, Colonel?”
“Not yet, Sanchez. Just keep walking. Maybe they’ll figure it out in time.”
Lightning played upon the suits next, huge bright arcs of it, sheet after sheet, the energy climbing up out of the ground and streaking down from the sky. The smell of ozone was everywhere.
“Fuck, I’m shorted,” called a Marine on the left flank. “I can’t believe this shit.” Colonel Pewter could hear the sounds of the Marine pounding on his com panel.
“Take it back to base,” the colonel said. “Everyone else, keep moving.”
More lightning came, and more fireballs, another unit shorted out before they’d covered half the distance to the waiting line of cavalry.
“Colonel?” this time it was the Major’s voice.
“Keep moving.”
A shaft of ice, thick as the torso of the Prosperions’ largest horse and easily five times as long as any of the beasts, formed at one end of the Prosperion line, and it shot out like one of the mineral shafts the Hostiles fought with, a massive battering ram hurtling across the intervening space with incredible velocity. It struck one of the mech units square on and stove it in as if it were an aluminum can.
“Oh, my God,” cried a woman’s voice. “They got Ashcroft. Did you see that shit?”
Another bolt of ice, again the size of a steel girder, shot out and crushed another Marine. Then two more came. Four after that, and suddenly the attack was on.
Having no choice but to order return fire, Colonel Pewter called for a full-out response. The Marines as one set into high gear.
They ran in long ground-devouring strides, covering the distance at a speed that nearly matched the horses, the cavalrymen having launched into a charge of their own. The two sides closed together rapidly. The fifty-cals spun and sung as the bullets flew. But still the horsemen came. Electricity sparked from the tips of their lances, flickers of it like captive lightning reaching blue fingers across space at them. None of them went down.
“What the fuck?” Corporal Chang said. “We’re not even hitting them.”
“I don’t like this,” said Major Kincaid.
Twenty-eight ice beams streaked over the heads of the riders and crushed in another bunch of battle suits.
“Goddamn,” cried Sanchez, watching the Marine to his right get pulverized. “Our shields aren’t doing shit.”
“They were never meant to fend off freight trains,” someone remarked.
Still the cavalry came.
It occurred to Colonel Pewter that something was odd. He kept charging, and yet, as he watched through his canopy, it seemed that they should have closed with the horsemen by now. He squinted into their onrushing line, watching them, the riders bent over the necks of the animals, their mouths moving, their lances level and lit up with magic. But he saw as he stared at them that they moved in a dreamlike way. He could see it if he focused hard enough on them. It was as if they were moving and yet, somehow, the distance was growing as they charged, very subtly, as if the ground were stretching, just enough to make it so they didn’t quite cross the field. An effect like in a dream.
“Are you guys seeing this?” the major asked, as if reading his mind. “They’re not really coming. Or something.”
“What?” That was Sanchez.
“They’re not coming. Look.”
Twenty-eight more tree-trunk-sized beams of ice bashed in what remained of an entire platoon and a few more to boot.
“Faster, damn it,” ordered the colonel. “Get in close. They aren’t missing with those things.”
That’s when he hit a wall, literally. He slammed into it and came to an immediate halt. They all did. The impact jarred him, stunning him for several seconds. It took as long for the spots in his vision to clear as it did for his control panel to come back up.
“It’s a goddamn iceberg,” Sanchez said, coming to quicker than the rest.
Colonel Pewter took a second to confirm it and saw that, at least in principle, Sanchez wasn’t far off. A huge wall of ice now stood before them, stretching away to the left and right and bending back at a gradual angle, making it impossible to see if there was an end to it nearby. It rose up high into the air as well, perhaps two hundred feet. “Major, see if you can go around. Everyone else, burn it down. Ice melts.”
Flamethrowers erupted like the breath of so many steel dragons, licking out from the extended arms of the remaining mechs, melting the ice in waves.
“Readings still showing it twenty-feet thick, Colonel,” said Corporal Chang. “It’s staying constant. They’re refreshing it from the back side.”
Colonel Pewter saw the readings on his own console. He called back to Little Earth. “I need air support. Do we have any of those fighters up yet?”
“We’re getting close, sir. Ten minutes,” came the reply.
“We don’t have ten minutes.”
“Colonel, they’re waiting for us around the end of the barrier,” reported Major Kincaid.
Colonel Pewter bit back the profanity that leapt nearly to his lips. His instincts couldn’t believe he was being held off by a bunch of men on animals, despite what he knew of magic intellectually. He’d fought alongside Altin once, so he had an idea of what the magicians were capable of, but somehow he hadn’t expected this.
He looked up. That wall was very high.
He could shift down his suit’s gravity settings and jump, but mechs didn’t do well as aircraft, and he didn’t want to risk that kind of vulnerability. So he started climbing, jamming the powerful vices that served the unit for hands into the ice and pulling himself up, one yard at a time. Seeing him do it, several other Marines started climbing as well. The colonel wasn’t sure what to expect, and he had no ships or satellites in orbit to send him a visual of what was on the other side. At least not yet. He didn’t want to order the rest to climb with him. Those that had were enough. “If you’re not already climbing, stay down,” he said.
When he reached the top, he debated peering over the far edge but quickly put that idea aside. They’d be waiting for that, and he’d take one of those massive ice beams straight to the face.
One by one, the Marines who’d climbed after him joined him. Soon there were twenty-four mechs atop the wall.
“You want the rest of us up there yet, Colonel?” asked an eager young Marine from the ground below. It was clear he felt like he was missing something.
“No. They’ll probably just cancel the damn thing and we’ll all fall. We’re going to see if we can’t disrupt this thing. You be ready to come in when it goes down.” Without the proper gravity settings, that would be fatal, and the colonel knew what he was doing was going to be dangerous as it was. Better to do it on his own terms.
He turned to the men with him and nodded through the canopy at them. “Let’s do this. On my mark, let’s jump down and take them out, make them drop this thing. Set your landing for sixty yards out from the wall. Maybe we’ll get behind them.”
“Roger that.” Private Sanchez wore a come-get-it grin as he set his suit’s gravity for the leap.
“Flash grenades now, concussion right after. On three, two, one, go.”
The grenades shot out in rapid succession, then they all jumped, hydraulic force sending them flying out over the edge of the wall and, as hoped, out over the lines of horsemen and down to the ground beyond them.
Despite the gravity adjustments, the force of the landing sunk the suits several feet deep in mud, and it was the work of a few seconds to get free. In that time, the magicians had turned to see what had happened. They were still too late. Colonel Pewter and his men did not need to move to unleash the Gatling guns. Once again the white flare of fire blew out from the spinning carousel, and in the span of seven seconds a huge section of the Prosperion line lay dead. All of them, mages, knights and animals. Where they had been, what they had been, was now a swamp of mutilated flesh, soggy fabric and rent metal. In patches, leather burned from the heat of the onslaught.
Colonel Pewter leapt from the indents of his landing and made to finish the rest of them, but he saw that they were now in full retreat, the two halves of what remained of their force peeling off on either side and riding for all their worth back toward the capital.
The colonel nodded as he watched them run. “I think their Queen will talk to us now,” he said. “But just to be sure, let’s wait for the other companies. I suspect our hopes for dialogue alone have passed.”
“Which companies, sir?” asked the Major. “How long do you want to wait, since we’ve got them on the run?”
“All of them, Major. If ten thousand mechs aren’t enough to convince her to call off the assault on Earth, we’re probably still going to need them to tear that city down. I have a feeling busting into that place isn’t going to be as easy as we’d hoped. Not by a long shot.”
Chapter 24
Altin led Orli by the hand as they crossed the busy parade ground upon which the Queen’s army was forming. They had to dodge the charge of horsemen loping across the field toward the formations of cavalry gathering, and they had to stop and step back to avoid being trampled by sprinting units of infantry making their way to the teleportation platforms, the rattle of their weapons and armor announcing their approach, but only as they were already very near given the general din of the preparations everywhere. Tens of thousands of men and women had already formed into companies, whole regiments, each assembled on the broad tile-work squares around which transmuters and teleporters stood. The transmuters would call up walls of dark solidity, formed from the material of the platform itself, and from it build a box around the warriors, closing them in and making them ready for the teleporters, who would then send those troops by the thousands straight to the orc fortifications that Captain Andru and his team of scouts had found. When it came to moving troops, the War Queen’s army had no equivalent.
“Total commitment,” is what the Lord Chamberlain had told Altin when he and Orli had arrived at the Palace. “She’s going to send it all in at once and catch them by surprise.”
From the looks of the frenzy in the staging grounds, when she said “total” she meant total. He thought it was pretty risky to commit like that, but he’d also heard that there were over a hundred thousand orcs. It was probably best if the fight didn’t take place here, so he understood the Queen’s gamble on that front.
As he approached Her Majesty, who was astride a monstrous warhorse of nearly nineteen hands, he could see in the illusion hanging in the air before her that similar scenes were taking place in the garrisons across Kurr, reserve units gathering from all reaches of the kingdom, and all to be committed to a single swift and decisive fight. As he scanned the images that shifted in sequence across the illusion, he could not help but wonder if, even with all that going on around the continent, she could come up with a force as large as a hundred thousand strong.
“That’s enough,” she snapped at the illusionist who’d conjured the report for her. “Make sure General Cavendore is ready at Calico Castle, and tell him to send word if Sir Altin ever reappears.”
“Sir Altin has reappeared, Your Majesty,” said Altin, having come within hearing range.
She turned in her saddle, the leather creaking beneath the weight of her golden plate armor, and regarded him with a level gaze. “I am not accustomed to having my subjects simply exit my presence without so much as a ‘by your leave,’ Sir Altin,” she said, referring to his hasty departure upon learning of the Hostiles in orbit above planet Earth. “I will not tolerate such things, is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I was thoughtless, my mind only on extracting Orli from certain death.”
“Then it seems that you have done so.” She glanced to Orli and then back to Altin. “I’ll be frank: I no longer have any idea where that woman stands in the scheme of things.”
“She stands upon my heart, its conqueror, My Queen. But if you worry for where her loyalties lie, I assure you, she is a creature of Prosperion now.” He turned to Orli and, by the go-ahead motion of his head, prompted her to speak.
“Your Majesty, you once promised that I would be your subject one day. You promised all the flowers I could pick. I hope that you will still grant me that, if not today, then eventually.”
Altin nodded and smiled approvingly. He knew Orli’s heart was not filled with that kind of servility, but he also knew where her loyalties were. Orli was doing what needed to be done, saying what needed to be said. Demanding the Queen apologize or demanding that she trust her, neither would be a winning strategy.
“We shall see about that. Right now, I have larger knots in my bowstring.” Her face turned stark then. “Sir Altin, what is the condition on planet Earth?”
“I didn’t stay long enough to find out, Majesty, but based on what I saw from orbit, they are horribly outnumbered. I don’t know how they will defeat the Hostile forces without our aid.”
“Yes, she got the jump on them, to be sure. But there’s little for it just now.”
“They’re not Blue Fire’s armies, Your Majesty,” Orli interjected then. “She spoke to me while I was on planet Earth.”
“My dear, while I confess that you are something of an enigma to me, one thing I know for certain is that your judgment on that subject has been compromised beyond measure.”
“It’s not com
promised at all. I spoke to her. She said it’s another being just like her, another living world, a male. Like her mate was. It’s not Blue Fire.”
“I believe that might be right,” Altin said. “I went to Blue Fire and confronted her directly. She insists it is not her behind the attacks on Earth. At first I didn’t believe, and if I’m being honest, I still am only partly convinced, but I think Blue Fire may be telling the truth. It really doesn’t seem like she’s making it up.” He couldn’t tell Her Majesty that Blue Fire had helped him save Orli, and that this was his evidence for trusting her—that and Orli’s impassioned pleas on Blue Fire’s behalf, a case made earlier this morning as they were getting her some clothing and preparing to come and see the Queen.
“You are a good man, Sir Altin, but love blinds you. You need only look above the skies of Earth to have all the proof you need.”
“That’s not quite true,” came a voice off to Altin’s right. They all turned to see High Priestess Maul approaching along with her assistant, the priestess Altin recognized as Klovis. The two came dressed for war, each in rust-colored robes, the Maul wearing an iron cuirass over hers. She carried a long-handled war hammer with familiar ease, while the young priestess beside her used her spear casually, as if it were a walking stick. “I believe Sir Altin is correct.”
“Let me guess,” said the Queen. “You’ve had a drift in the hkalamate pool, and in the grip of that black gas, Blue Fire has promised you, in the same way she has Sir Altin and Miss Pewter, that she’s really not as bad as she seems.”