by John Daulton
Barely had he righted himself, however, when the fighter’s missiles struck the ground below. The explosion was tremendous, and hot blasts of air churned upward at them, the heat brought upon a column of smoke and flame and a powerful concussive wind that buffeted the dragon yet again. It hit him so hard it drove him straight up, nearly twenty paces all at once, cramming his riders down upon his backbone as he rose with such violence that their bodies compacted, their spines compressing as they absorbed the force of the sudden rise. Taot managed to bank out of the worst of it, for the fighter’s passing did mark a straight line, but even moving off that path, the air currents the fighter’s pass set in motion, the chaotic random whirl, were too dangerous and impossible to navigate—not to mention what damage might come from inhaling the smoke of chemicals made on distant Earth.
And there was plenty of that. Huge clouds of smoke filled the air in greater and greater volume, choking and foul. Some of it smelled dark and woody, but some of it did not. What wasn’t from burning timber and the possessions of dispossessed or dead citizens came from noxious things the dragon had never smelled before, acrid, artificial and alien. Taot did not need to know what it was he smelled to know it was not healthy for him to breathe. And the smoke that did not come from any of those other things was worse in its own way, for some of it was foul and yellow, odious plumes of dense, greasy smoke that curled all around them, reeking, oily, heavy with the nauseating stench of burning flesh and hair. That smoke was the most disturbing, if not for the dragon, certainly for the humans riding on his back.
In addition to the fighters attacking the rear of the crowding enemy, still other aircraft flew out over the plains. They flew sorties tracing the length of the demon line stretching into the city from beyond its broken walls, the steady stream of it constant as demons came from the blood-soaked fields like a flow of black lava, filling the smoking scar that marked where the main body of the host had trashed and ransacked their way toward the Palace gates. These bombers added their own criss-cross of laser fire, bullets and missiles to be dodged, and farther out, their bombs went off like kegs of captured thunder being opened beyond all those broken farms. Tons of them, tactical nukes going off in breathtaking eruptions that unfurled into the sky, great gray mushrooms of smoke, umbrellas of churning ash sliding up from the ground along neat narrow columns as if some angry god, an artist god, was sculpting cumulous clouds in the very likeness of his wrath. All about them the ground shook and concentric rings of rushing air smashed bodies and dismembered demons totally. At the edges of the blast waves, remnant limbs and hollowed-out carapaces blew like tumbleweeds across the field. It might have been a vision from the lowest depths of hell, though it served the cause of good.
All of this went on in the skies above and around Crown City, and though Altin had little familiarity with the combat capabilities of planet Earth, he knew within moments after having teleported the three of them into the sky above Prosperion that continued flight in the battle zone would be deadly for them all. The aircraft shot and bombed endlessly, pruning and carving away at the enemy, streaking in and out so fast that Altin could not keep track of them. Even Taot, veteran of the skies that he was, could not keep track. By the time even that great hunter heard them coming, they were already long gone. There would be no way to dodge them if they stayed. The lasers, though visible, moved far too fast, and the spitfire bullets could not be seen at all. Only the hiss of bullets cutting through the air announcing those projectiles had passed, and it was only luck that preserved them when the third fighter in less than a minute came whipping by. It didn’t take human or dragon very long to realize that they needed someplace safe to land.
Unfortunately, in an ironic sort of way, the Palace walls were fully defended, jammed tight with men and women who stood shoulder-to-shoulder hurling spells and projectiles all around, flinging them down with fury upon the constant wash of the ravenous enemy, the shouts and epithets of their last hopes following each new weapon, each new spell they threw, a chorus of desperation rising into the air to mingle with all that smoke.
The long, banking turn that took them out of the path of the latest fighter brought them soaring toward a part of the city where the fighting had already passed by, enabling them to drop low enough to avoid collisions and crossfire, and yet not requiring that they fly above the thickest mobs of the enemy. They flew in toward where the temples were. As they approached, they could see why everyone was at the Palace now: the temples were, all but one, completely destroyed. Bashed in as if a temple-hating giant had come along and kicked in all the pumpkins in a patch. Most were entirely unrecognizable, reduced to rubble, and even the Temple of Anvilwrath was little more than a heap of ruined stone. The ten square city blocks upon which it sat, rising once in tiered majesty, were now transformed to a ruined, marginally geometric mound of broken stairs that led up to a jumble of felled marble stumps. And stumps were all that remained of the mighty columns that Altin had once thought an impregnable barrier. The priests might as well have relied on a few stalks of wheat to keep them safe. The temple wasn’t even contested anymore, the bastion of its divine strength no more, no longer defended, no longer even sought after as the demons had all moved on to the Palace and the final victory. The orcs hadn’t even bothered looting it.
Only the Temple of Mercy remained standing, somehow preserved in its place across the great temple square, occupying its own modest rise, gleaming white still, staring out at the ruin of Anvilwrath, and the city, alone now and seeming somehow sadly justified.
“What do we do?” Orli asked, leaning forward to speak in Altin’s ear, her voice high over the wind and her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, if awkwardly due to the bulky spacesuits that they wore. “We can’t stay up here.”
Altin meant to land near the Temple of Mercy, but as they approached, they saw that two smaller demons were eating bodies in the streets nearby. He pointed. “We can’t land there.”
She shook her head when she saw them. “Not yet, but maybe we can take them out.”
It was his turn to shake his head. “There’s no point. Nowhere is going to be safe. Not without your people coming down in those battle suits to clear the streets, one by one. What’s taking them so long, anyway? Are they here? Surely it’s been enough time. We can land near them if we can find the staging area.”
“I can’t ask them again,” Orli said, even as her hand reflexively reached for the com controls on her spacesuit’s sleeve. Her hand looked small as it hovered over the control panel, her delicate fingers seeming too fine for buttons designed for gloved fingers three times as thick. “They are too busy to keep checking in every three minutes.”
“Well, how long has it been since Peppercorn went back to Earth with Citadel?”
“It’s been twelve minutes since I asked,” she said. “Ensign Nguyen said they should be coming right away. Fly over that way, toward the river and we can see.”
Another fighter shot by, not unlike the one Altin had teleported deep below Fort Minot. He wondered if perhaps the pilot might be the same man, though he knew it couldn’t be. He hoped that man was still alive. He hoped everyone would still be alive. At least, everyone that was left.
Taot carried them out over the city’s northern wall as directed by the magician’s thoughts, soaring low enough to be out of the direct flight path of most of the fleet fighters—at least they hoped—but high enough to be out of reach of leaping demons, for there were still a few in the bloodstained fields, devouring what remained of the dead and eating the choice morsels of wandering livestock. There wouldn’t be much cleanup for the victors, whichever side that was. Not much to bury, if the winning side saw value in such things.
They flew along the south bank of the Sansun River, looking for signs of the incoming Marines, projecting with their imaginations what they hoped to see, though neither knew how the men would arrive. Or where. They swept upstream for two full measures, but nothing, no sign of fleet landing craft. No gleami
ng march of incoming Marines. They swung back again. Where could they possibly be?
They flew out over the ruins of Little Earth, but there were no fleet ships there. Orli cursed, and Altin sighed, and they flew back toward the river again. That’s when Orli shouted, pointing and leaning out over Taot’s wing.
“There,” she cried, her outstretched arm directing Altin’s eye to a place about a measure and a half back toward Crown, a place where a fleet transport ship had just landed in a fallow field. Except it hadn’t landed there, at least not precisely. It had simply appeared. “They’re here! They’re finally here!”
They flew toward it, and as they did two more transports arrived, lined up neatly next to the first. By the time the dragon was flying directly over them, there were four more.
Taot swung back around, and they watched, soaring in a circle above the field, as the line of transports grew longer, left and right, and the cargo doors were flung open from each in turn. Out poured the gleaming battle machines of mechanized Marines, fifty to a ship, pouring out like mercury, shimmering even beneath the clouded sky.
“Thank the gods,” Altin gasped as he watched the Marines running out and forming up into fire teams and then into platoons. A second row of fleet ships started forming behind the first, another twenty of them side by side. More came. They appeared in different places across the plain. Some in fields, some on the great avenue that led into the city gates.
They came and came and came, and for a time Altin could not believe so many warriors existed on Earth. But still they came, and continued to come, even when the first wave of them moved off, running together in a shining wave of pounding metal feet. They ran in perfect formation and came quickly to a wide place where demons had broken through the northern wall. The demons devouring the dead near the break turned at the sound of the Earth people’s approach, saw them coming and howled with delight. Something new to kill, new humans in metal shells to crack open and eat like mussels and clams. They leapt up from their grisly meals and ran at the newcomers, roaring with deadly glee.
Not one demon got close. The combined spray of that many bullets ripped them to shreds so quickly that all Altin could see from his place upon his dragon was a black dust around the demons for a moment and then the lot of them burst into flames, their bodies blasted into goopy shapeless heaps and the dark armor, broken like so many dropped ceramic tiles, burning with low flames that were blue around the edges and yellow where they danced like tongues probing for the sky.
The Marines pounded into the city without even stopping, charging through the carnage they’d just made, splitting up by platoons, by fire teams, working in formations, all the while missiles firing, spraying demon guts everywhere. The sound of the collected Gatling guns seemed to rattle off the very clouds, and soon the black scar that a solid third of Crown City had become filled with the quicksilver flood of all those battle-suited warriors from Earth, the movement of the incoming like an injection of liquid silver flowing toward the city’s disease-ridden heart.
Another wave of Marines came in from the south end of the city, and the blasts of their missile fire and the horizontal lines of their lasers filled the scene with distant light. Altin and Orli could not help but fly toward the line of the encounter like insects to a new flame. They soared above and watched as the wave of technological brutality crashed upon the back of the demonic horde in an armored tidal wave.
The demons at the rear of the invading host, those most recently through the gate who had rushed in only to discover they had to fight their way in just to get to fight, stopped when they heard the Marines at their backs. They stopped climbing up the backs of their fellows, stopped killing their companions and eating them out of frustrated rage, and turned and roared their jubilant war noise. Now they had an enemy to kill and rend, just as their comrades thought they’d had at the north wall. And so their teeth were blasted in. Their mandibles blown off. Their horns and antlers and assorted spines, all brutalized. Bullets by the thousands pounded into eye sockets and down throats. Jointed limbs were burst apart like old trees in the wind of Earth’s ferocity. The demons staggered and stumbled, tilted and toppled, tangled amongst themselves, bounced off and gored one another. They floundered and foundered, and great collisions of stilted monstrosities were viciously carved apart. They fell together like so many toothpick piers and pillars made of rotten hay, tinder-tender things blown away by the veritable monsoon of bullets and ballistic missile blasts.
The dying creatures blew strands of their yellow pus blood into the air, sometimes so high Taot had to tilt and bank to avoid being splashed with that fetid spray. It flew up at them everywhere, great fountains of it as if from a field of geysers shooting ochre gore. Both Altin and Orli shouted with what felt like righteous ecstasy. The carnage was sublime.
And still more and more Marines poured into the city, and by the thousands they blasted their way into the blackness, the phalanxes of their unity cutting through the demonic mass like a great plasma torch of war. They cut and cut, spreading the wedge of their brutality like wildfire, steadily pushing and driving toward the Palace gates, filling the streets with rivers of flowing demon ichor.
The starships above continued to strafe the Palace walls. The air was heavy with the humidity of all the burning flesh, the acridity of molten demon armor and thousands upon thousands of burning orcs. The bombers and fighters continued to mow down the new demons as they came through the gate that was somewhere out in the prairie, keeping them pruned back.
The shouts of the Prosperions rose higher and higher as the onslaught of the Marines became apparent to them. They saw the orc shamans turning and trying to fight, but they had no time to summon even a small bit of magic then. Such was the number and the ferocity of the suited Marines that most of the enraged orcish magicians had barely uttered a sound before bits of flying lead broke through their faces and pushed bits of brain out through the backs of their heads. A few set ice walls in place, hoping to hold the Earth people at bay, but the lasers from the starships melted most of them instantly away. What clumps of ice remained were turned to vapor by those upon the ground, by the lasers lancing from mech chests and by the fireballs the Queen’s mages cast from their places on the battlements.
And so it went. The influx of the Earthmen had finally come. An enemy without magic set upon the magic-resistant demons and the magic-wielding army of the orcs like the very soul of irony. While the formation and initial push of the Earth forces seemed to take forever to get set and under control, the purging of the city went fairly fast once it was underway. In less than an hour after the last ship was teleported from Earth to Prosperion, the demons were nearly all gone, down to the last few thousand and all but a handful of orcs, a last stand of them formed up near the gate where the Queen had gone down, the last little patch of pitched battle for the Prosperions, in a place too narrow, too delicate to attack with brute force and bombing runs. But even there in that place beneath the gates, it was obvious how it had to end.
Chapter 50
God roared his outrage as the red lights began streaking down from the sky again. He raised his great long arm up in a gesture of fury, and his curses for the new god filled the air with such violence lightning crackled from the clouds and it began to rain for a while. The rain fell into the holes that the new god’s red lights burned and made them hiss and steam even louder than before. But eventually God’s curses gave way and the sound no longer shook the rain from the heavens.
But still Gromf wondered at what he had seen. He’d thought God had vanquished the new god, but now the new god’s children were once more sending their red lights, their spears of straight lightning, of fire made from blood and cast from somewhere far away.
This made Gromf uneasy, and it took his concentration away from the fight. He only lost his thoughts for a second, barely a blink, but when God stopped roaring, when the rain ceased, he glanced back to see what had happened to make it so.
That is when the
elf stepped into him from nowhere, appeared in the absence of Gromf’s defensive fire, showed itself in the timing of its own device. It slipped the long tooth of its dagger between Gromf’s ribs. He felt it like heat sliding into his lung. He turned from looking upon God to look into the elf’s eyes, green like pine needles and just as emotionless. The elf was a war creature, like Warlord. It was a thing of death. There was no shame in dying on its blade, though there was remorse, regret for the things that Gromf would not see.
Gromf looked away from the elf then, content to die if it was God’s will that it be so. He had fought with the creature for a long time, enough to let Warlord strike down the golden queen. He’d seen her fall. She could not survive such a wound, not in this place where her cowardly healers had run off, not in the middle of this glorious war. She would bleed out and die right there at the gate of her great fortress, slain by the greatest of the orcs. He’d seen that much. He could be content, even if God saw fit to let him die now too. His blood would mix with the golden queen’s and feed the weeds that would one day grow in this place, sown at the moment of humanity’s downfall.
He just wished God hadn’t made the clouds cry. Even as the elf withdrew his long knife and let Gromf fall to the ground, Gromf watched the towering figure of God, his great and glorious reach pressed heavenward, and Gromf felt some bit of fear. He supposed it would not matter now that he was dead; his fear was for the greatness of God and Warlord.