by John Daulton
Her Majesty cocked an eyebrow at that. “Is this true?”
Orli nodded.
“What were you charged with?”
“Being your friend.”
Her Majesty rolled the royal lips inward for a time and looked off after the gryphon rider and the other officer. When she looked back, it seemed the subject had changed. “Do you think a thousand riders is enough to hold off two hundred or so of the steel golems your people ride?”
“I don’t know,” Orli said. “I don’t know what your people are capable of. I’ve only ever seen Altin and Tytamon in a fight. I can say, I don’t think fireballs and lightning are going to help very much. They can ground out the lightning, and they have pretty strong shields. Fire probably won’t do anything to them at all. Swords and arrows will do even less.”
“I’ve seen those machines at work, Your Majesty,” Altin said. “They are very powerful. They have a device that issues shaftless arrows, thousands of them in the span of a few heartbeats.”
The Queen nodded grimly. “They must also have the red-light weapons that Miss Pewter wears. The ones we had to enchant against for Citadel.” She looked down at Orli again and realized the Earth woman wasn’t wearing the blaster at her side; in fact, her fleet uniform had been exchanged for Prosperion attire, if perhaps a bit in the style of a brigand, comprised of black trousers tucked into high riding boots and a cobalt blue blouse, all of which appeared to be brand new. Even her dog tags had been exchanged for a light blue sapphire dangling from a golden chain, which the Queen recognized as the amulet Altin had taken from Madame Kenouvier two days past. She wore no weapon at all. “I see you’ve come unarmed to battle, Miss Pewter.”
“I didn’t know we were having one,” Orli said. “Although I guess I should just assume it now. It seems like that’s all anyone does anymore.”
“You asked if I would honor my promise to make you my subject one day.”
Orli nodded. “I’d like that more than anything.”
“Will you fight for the crown as Sir Altin does? As all these men and women do? Even against your own people?”
“I’m not much of a fighter,” Orli said with a shrug, “but ‘my own people’ tried to kill me yesterday. I won’t shoot my father or any of my close friends, but I will help you every way I can. This is my home now. I’ll fight for it if it comes to that.”
The Queen studied her for a time, peering down from the height of her huge warhorse, which itself seemed to be taking the measure of the slim woman standing there. After a time she began to nod. “Very well. You are now a subject of the crown. Swear your fealty.”
“I swear it,” Orli said, glancing sideways at Altin and suddenly feeling very awkward. Was there something special she was supposed to say, some particular oath? He only nodded at her, his eyes alight with joy.
“Good enough,” said the Queen, putting Orli’s concern to rest. She turned to the royal assassin and ordered him to send someone for Orli’s weapon, the one that the city guard had found during the investigation of Orli’s kidnapping and the murder of Tytamon. “Someone might as well put that thing to proper use.”
Altin flashed Orli the warmest smile and clutched her hand, his face the very picture of happiness at having Orli officially claimed for Prosperion. It really was her home now, even in the eyes of the law.
“Sir Altin,” said the Queen as she motioned for a nearby squire to come and take her horse, “since I have you at hand, take me to the south gate tower, and be quick about it. I must get to the wall and see how it goes with our people and the Earth war machines. We may have to delay our assault on the orc fortress if our patrol can’t handle them.”
A moment later, the War Queen stood in the high tower at the southern gates of Crown City with Altin and Orli at her side. She looked out over the patchwork of small farms that spread like a quilt across the land toward the prairies beyond. From this distance, all she could see was the endless green of them, spreading away like a verdant ocean leading off seemingly forever to the south and west.
“They must be too far off still,” Her Majesty proclaimed. “I need my seer.” She started to turn toward the guardhouse and call for one, but Altin reminded her that he was in fact a Seven.
“Your Majesty, I can oblige.”
“Ah, yes, I nearly forgot. You are a handy fellow to have about, Sir Altin. And you spare me the noise of a crowd.”
Just as Altin was about to begin a spell to search the distant plains for signs of the fleet machines, Orli let out a gasp. “Look,” she said, pointing. “Over there.”
Following the line of her extended arm, they saw immediately what she had seen: a great dark mass had formed like a blot upon the ribbon of green that marked where the prairies began in the distance beyond the farms, a dark band appearing in an instant as if a great army had been lying prone in the grass and now decided to stand up and be seen. In a manner of speaking, one had.
“Tidalwrath’s fits!” Altin exclaimed. “Is that what it appears to be?” He didn’t wait for the answer and immediately sent his magical vision careening out across the farmland toward the spreading darkness upon the plain. When he emerged from the spell, he quickly cast the illusion of what he’d just seen into the air above the battlement, just large enough for Her Majesty to see.
“Those are Captain Andru’s orcs,” declared the Queen. “It seems they have beaten us to the punch.” She closed her eyes, and for several moments, she gave orders telepathically to officers back at the compound. Eventually, she returned her attention to the situation on the wall. “This is an inconvenient surprise,” she said. “Yet another one.”
“But your scout said they were my people in battle suits.” Orli sounded genuinely confused. “And he said there were only two hundred of them. How could his count possibly be that far off?”
“Clearly those are not your people, and that’s an army, at least ten divisions, out there. So either the orcs have fooled us with an illusion of your battle machines, or the Earthmen are trying to fool us with some sort of trickery of their own. And if not one of those, then we are now being attacked by two enemies together, and clearly collaborating.” She looked to Orli and raised her eyebrows. “I don’t suppose you know anything about either of those last two?”
“No, Your Majesty, I don’t. As far as I know, nobody from the fleet has ever had contact with the orcs. And we don’t have the ability to make holograms that big, so it’s not fake. Or, if it is, it’s not something the fleet did.”
“Then either the orcs are casting an illusion of your machines, or I have two enemies who happened to attack at the exact same moment by pure coincidence, which I find difficult to accept.”
Orli nodded, staring back out at the enormous stretch of the orc army which spread like a shadow over the land. “The royal assassin has my gun,” Orli mused, “is there any chance he has my com badge as well? Maybe I can pick up something over the air. If there is an attack from my people, there will be ships up there.” She pointed at the sky to make her case.
“I’m afraid not, Miss Pewter. Your weapon is the only thing we found. The search for Black Sander continues, but I fear he won’t be brought to me in time to be of use for this.”
Orli shook her head again. “Then there is nothing I can do to help figure it out.”
“Wait,” said Altin. “What about one of your seeing mirrors? The small frames you carry about. Can you find out in one of those?” He shaped its size with his hands as he spoke.
Orli frowned for a moment before realizing what he meant. “A tablet? Yes, if I had one, I could, as long as I knew the access codes for it.”
“I’ll be right back. Don’t move.” Altin vanished, without the least utterance, but he was back in less than a minute, his reappearance announced by a loud rush of air.
“You have a remarkable way of casting these days, Sir Altin,” said the Queen. “I’m sure I’ve never seen a teleporter work like that before.”
Altin evaded He
r Majesty’s point, handing Orli the tablet instead. “Here, see if you can find something.”
Both Altin and the Queen leaned in to see what images Orli called up on the small screen. She pressed a portion of its edge, then began touching symbols and small images shining there. “Well, at least I can get in,” she said. “Where did you get this? It’s one of ours. From the Aspect, I mean.”
“It belongs to Doctor Singh,” he said. “He gave it to me when Citadel appeared above planet Earth. I never got time to give it back.”
Orli went through several screens and discovered that all her passwords still worked, the one upside of the fleet’s having intended to fast-track her straight into the grave. Several long minutes passed as she worked through image after image on the screen.
Altin looked up to see that the first lines of the cavalry had just appeared in the fields a measure beyond the wall, two thousand horsemen suddenly popping into place, indicating that the teleporters back at the parade grounds were already carrying out the new orders from the Queen.
“That’s weird,” Orli said frowning down into the tablet. “I show several ships in orbit, all with identifiers too low to be starships.”
“What does that mean?” asked the Queen.
“Well, for one thing, it means your scout was probably right about there being mechs on the ground. It wasn’t a holographic trick.”
“Mechs?”
“Marines. Warriors in heavy infantry machines, mechanized battle armor. The ones Altin was talking about. You saw them when you came for me and Thadi—Lord Thoroughgood.” She blanched as she said it but pushed the feelings of anger and humiliation aside.
The Queen nodded grimly and motioned for Orli to keep working with the tablet. “Quickly then. Can you find out what they intend?”
“I’m trying,” Orli said. “But the Aspect isn’t here, there’s no signal. I can only do so much without its computer to go through. I get open channels and public access, but I’m not coded into any of these smaller ships.”
“Do what you can with it,” said the Queen. “Sir Altin, I think perhaps it is time you take me back to the staging grounds, given our change of plans. Be quick now.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Oh, shit!” Orli exclaimed.
“What is it?”
Orli tapped up the volume control on the tablet and turned it so both of them could hear. “Listen.”
“Why are they stopping?” came a voice through the tablet speaker. The screen was blank, Orli had only audio, and that crackling.
“Fuck if I know,” someone said in reply.
“Six hundred yards west, Colonel,” said a woman’s voice.
“I see it, Major. That’s a lot of heat signatures.”
“They got their reinforcements fast. Bastards led us into a trap.”
“What the hell are those things?” someone else asked. “Those ain’t horses.” He sounded agitated, teetering on the brink of fear.
“Holy shit,” said the first voice. “They’re some kind of aliens.”
“The horse guys are coming back too. What should we do, Colonel?”
There was a long pause before the reply came, calm and analytical. “Those men are in retreat.”
“What?”
“The cavalry. They are retreating. Look how they ride.”
Silence followed, then a chorus of profanity, many voices, some that made it through the translation spell on Altin’s amulet, and some that didn’t, indicating many of those being overheard on the tablet did not have enchanted com links like the one Orli and most of the visiting fleet officers to Prosperion had been provided with.
Then came the call from the commanding officer, the colonel, for the mechs to retreat as well.
The Queen and her Galactic Mage looked up from the tablet to Orli, Altin asking what both thought. “What in the nine hells is going on?”
“That’s my father,” Orli said, looking grim as she flipped the tablet back toward herself and began stabbing her fingers at it again. “But I can’t get video, so I have no clue what’s going on.”
“I thought that voice seemed familiar,” Altin said. “It sounds like they are in trouble.”
“They are in trouble,” said the Queen. “The thousand men I sent to help young Lord Forland have obviously arrived. Earth people have no idea what a proper cavalry charge looks like, and clearly the illusionists with them are doing a proper job of causing panic amongst your father’s men. It seems that now we have them in a rout, making that one less problem I have to deal with for now. Sir Altin, take me to my horse. I have orcs to slay.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Right away.”
Chapter 27
Colonel Pewter ran with all the strength he had. Even with the motorized assist to the legs of the battle suit, and with a half g of gravity being channeled off, it still required a great deal of effort to push this hard. These suits were meant for combat, not for speed.
Checking the rearview video feed, he could see that he and his remaining Marines were pulling away from the Prosperion cavalry, if barely, but the black monstrosity that had appeared before the horsemen and brought their flight toward Crown City to a halt was already in their midst. He could see horses and men flying through the air like leaves in a whirlwind and the huge … alien, whatever it was, tossed them about like toys. From the havoc it wreaked among them, he knew that his initial assumption had been correct. While the horsemen may have been running toward that giant army that had suddenly appeared in the distance, they had not been running toward whatever that giant black thing was.
He radioed little Earth, asking about the air support. “Two fighters in four minutes, Colonel,” was the reply, just as the colonel was suddenly airborne himself. “Four more in sixteen.”
The grass spun down and out of view as the video feed went suddenly haywire, and for a moment he saw, upside down from his vantage, the figures of several hundred Prosperions leaning over the necks of their horses, still hell bent on their getaway. He also saw that a second creature, like the first only with many more legs and a strange bulbous head, had arrived to torment the Prosperions further in their flight.
Then, for a moment, all he saw was sky, the gray mistiness of a cloud-filled expanse monopolizing his vision entirely.
Then he saw something black, a flash of grass again, and then the horses rotated through his view once more as well. He realized he was spinning in the air, flung somehow as the rotation repeated itself twice more like that. And after a half rotation more, he landed on his back, once again staring skyward and hitting the ground so hard it set the mech’s controls to static for a time.
He clambered back to his feet in time to see the incoming blow of one long, pitch-black limb, thick as an oil drum, swinging toward him, the strike sent his way with an accompanying roar from a creature so hideous he had no words for it. Once again he was flung into the air, his battle suit whirling like the blades coming off a windmill. He could hear the shouts of his men nearby as he landed hard, many enduring similar treatment he supposed.
“Four companies in formation here at base, sir, you want me to send them out?” crackled the voice in the speaker near his ear. “The rest are still inbound.”
“How long till we have a starship in orbit?”
“At least nine more hours, sir.”
“Get the suits out of the fortress. Those walls aren’t going to matter against … whatever this is, and we can’t fight in a box. Spread out by company. Get the rest of those goddamn fighters in the air.” It was with some difficulty that he kept the calm in his voice despite the rapidity of his beating heart.
He got back to his feet again and spun to check the status of his men. A few of them were still pounding off toward Little Earth, but most had come back and were fighting over the downed machines of their comrades. The Prosperion cavalry was streaking past as he watched.
The beast that had hit him stood like a mutant spider over the mech unit of Corporal Chan
g. Its massive limbs fell in rapid succession upon the battle armor like giant fingers drumming the cadence of Chang’s demise.
Colonel Pewter could see the blue flicker of Chang’s plasma shield, which was both good and bad. He only had the two tumbling flights he’d just taken to gauge by, but he was sure the power unit wouldn’t hold up for long if Chang had suffered multiple hits like that.
He sent two anti-aircraft missiles at the monster and then opened up his fifty-caliber cannon as he ran in to assist. The missiles blew off four of the creature’s legs and the spray of bullets opened up a huge rent in the black angles of its body, spilling out rivers of pale yellow goo.
He was on the monster in twenty quick strides, the Gatling gun still unloading bullets into the beast at point-blank range. He switched on the jackhammer blade of the mech’s left arm and punched through the hard shell of the monster just as it spun on him.
It tried to throw him off, but he spread the claw hand of that left arm wide, like a grapple stuffed into the beast’s abdomen, and the creature could not shake him loose. He triggered the jackhammer and pulverized the creature’s guts. It was dead in moments, and soon Corporal Chang was back on his feet.
“I thought I was fucked, sir,” admitted the wide-eyed Marine.
“Not this time,” the Colonel said.
They both spun and realized the monster they’d just fought was the third of its kind, for the two that the colonel had seen as he spun through the air the first time were still in action, making a ruin of two mech units in Major Kincaid’s platoon. The colonel didn’t have to say a thing, and both he and the corporal charged in. Four more missiles threaded their exhaust trails over the plain, and one of the monsters erupted like a grenade pie. The second felt the fury of both fifty-caliber cannons and spun toward the two incoming Marines.
The colonel and the corporal had cut it nearly in half by the time the downed Marine was back on her feet and adding her own weapon to the mix. Soon there lay a smoking pile of black plating floating on a swamp of red-and-yellow ooze.