by Chad Huskins
“Wait, hold on, you’re not thinking of—”
“Paupau, if Meiks takes my place, you take up his. Ziir, keep trying to contact the War Council. Affirm.”
“Got it,” said Paupau. Adding, “Paupau!”
“Copy that, doyen,” said Ziir.
“Captain Josep, do you copy?”
“I copy, doyen.”
“If this goes sideways, you’re in charge of all ground forces. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
“Lyokh,” said Meiks, calling him by his name for the first time in a long while. “Don’t do this, brother. There’s no parleying with these guys, you’ve seen what they’ve done. They don’t want peace talks—”
“Your opinion is duly noted and I’m sure the record will reflect that. Do as you’re told. All forward units, form a phalanx to hold this line. Any Nova ships listening, give us overwatch.”
Lyokh watched proudly as his people, despite being exhausted and mourning their lost brothers and sisters, rushed quickly towards the center of the street, ballistic shields up. Taking advantage of whatever cover they could, they formed a wide rectangle of heavy infantry, fanning out from the Ravager and the warhulks.
“Warhulks, watch the streets as I make my approach. ’Vanen, keep your crosshairs on this guy’s forehead. Ziir, maneuver the EyeSpy to scan the rooftops.” With the wave of his hand, Lyokh brought two Mantises down the street, their railgun-heads scanning all windows.
With that done, he took one more deep breath for courage, then stepped out from behind cover. A Fell rifle he’d taken from a dead soldier was slung at his side, and he carried his field sword in his right hand. He moved slowly around Ravager One, then around Minix’s warhulks and into the open street. Lyokh glanced at Minix through his rain-spattered window. Minix’s focus was dead set on his sensors, hands poised over the mech’s controls. Lyokh looked at the lone mechanicae warrior standing thirty steps from him. The warrior had not budged, he was as silent as the demonic statues on either side of the road, which had somehow not been damaged.
Puddles splashed beneath his feet, inches deep. The corpse of a mechanicae lay on the ground, its mouth agape like all the others and gathering rainwater. Lyokh stepped over it, and, unless he was mistaken, he thought he saw its eyes tracking him. An illusion, surely.
When Lyokh was within twenty paces of the warrior, he saw the rain make fluttering motions in midair. Some kind of disturbance. He looked up, and saw a Nova roaring overhead, but it soon disappeared over the top of a pyramid down the street. Novas were conducting patrols directly above the enemy’s head, and so far the mechanicae didn’t seem to have noticed. The warrior in front of him certainly didn’t seem concerned.
Fifteen steps away now.
Lyokh stepped around the corpse of what appeared to be one of Vastill’s city guards, his torso and below incinerated, his chest punctured by some round weapon. Lyokh knew what made that kind of wound.
Ten steps away.
The rain lightened up a little, going from a torrential downpour to a lazy shower. Lyokh looked into the face of the warrior. He saw no change of expression, only the permanent scream. He sensed no anima within the creature, and felt no kinship with it. Intellectually, Lyokh understood that he and this man were blood-related, both their histories traced all the way back to Earth Cradle. They probably had touches of each other’s DNA in their blood, being descended from the same batch of explorers who left the Cradle, who were in turn descended from the two or three thousand survivors of the Toba Event on Ancient Earth, when a supervolcano had wiped out most of humanity, when their whole species had only been made up of primitive nomads.
They had so much in common, Lyokh and this warrior, and yet he felt only insurmountable hatred when looking upon its hideous face, and detected nothing but enmity from it, as well.
It. Not he. It.
Eight steps.
Lyokh glanced all around, checking the windows. He gripped his hilt tight.
Heeten.
At five steps, Lyokh came to a halt. He looked up at the creature, who stood a good foot taller than he did. The reason Lyokh had remained at such a distance was because of those arms. Long, enormous, and with pulsating, fibrous connections. The armor itself looked to be rippling with muscles, and Lyokh noticed that the gorget merged seamlessly with the warrior’s neck, as though suit and man were one. There were pulsating veins along the limbs, most likely pumping the blue and purple liquids that coursed through their bodies.
Lyokh looked into its dead oculators, and into that wide, permanent scream.
“Did you want something?” Perhaps that wasn’t the most intelligent thing he could have said at a first meeting, but they had been killing each other for days now and he no longer cared for subtlety. They were direct in their intent to kill, so let us be direct in our dialogue.
When the warrior spoke, its lips did not move. A staticky sound was emitted from its open throat. It took Lyokh a moment to realize he wasn’t listening to a voice at all, but a recording.
“Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’dreddi,” it said.
The words appeared phonetically written as subtitles at the bottom of Lyokh’s visor. The recording went on at length, repeating a similar pattern, echoing down the street.
“Dre’desta’dre’dre’dennan’anda’dredest’dreth’dreye’dre.”
The STACsuit’s computer had all sorts of tactical data packages he had been deployed with, should he need them, including old recordings of the many languages the people of the Machinist Ascendancy were known to speak, and an interpreter program to try and account for any nuance or slang that might have developed in the decades since the Republic had encountered them. A screen on the far left side of his visor showed the interpreter program’s results: NOT FOUND – INCOMPATIBLE.
“I don’t understand. Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
The recording stopped abruptly.
“Doyen!” It was Tsuyoshi in his ear. “We’ve got movement at the rear. We—”
He broke off as the distant sound of gunfire echoed across the rubble-strewn streets.
“What’s going on, Tsuyoshi? Report.” He never took his eyes off the warrior in front of him, who remained stoic. “Devastator Actual, report.”
More gunfire.
“Doyen, the dead aren’t dead!” That was Meiks. Shouting. In a panic.
“Say again, Meiks.”
“The dead…they ain’t dead—”
Now gunfire erupted from everywhere behind him. All over.
Lyokh had just enough time to recall the image of the one mechanicae corpse ten paces back, the one that had seemed to be tracking him with its eyes…
Suddenly, a HUD ghost appeared on his visor—
—and he spun around, activating his sword’s plasmetic edge, and faced the reanimated corpse. Two others had risen from the ground and joined it, parts of their bodies missing but still maneuvering, using what limbs they had left. But for Takirovanen’s well-timed shot, the first one would have punctured his chest with its wrist piston. The bullet tore through its head, pitching it forward. It splashed hard into a puddle at his feet, but was still squirming, still groping at the air, still trying to live and kill.
Lyokh hacked the other two down no problem. A HUD ghost told him the lone warrior behind him was approaching fast. He spun around, and shuffle-stepped backwards, just in time to avoid having his head punched off by the warrior’s wrist pistons.
Missiles streaked overhead.
Warhulks rushed forward.
The Mantises and Ravagers roared to life, pummeling the buildings all around them.
The mechanicae corpses that had been used to erect ramparts now heaved as one giant organism, a massive centipede that came apart in sections and crawled or rolled down the hills. Lyokh saw corpses consisting of only the chest up crawling by their hands. Severed arms moved of their own accord. It was a nightmare ripped from a madman’s fever dream.
Lyokh could hardly pay heed to the rest of the battle, for his opponent was far more gifted at melee combat than others had been. The poles on his wrists extended and retracted, extended and retracted, again and again, punching at the air with such force that Lyokh saw the rain exploding with each motion. He side-stepped an attack, parried another with his sword, and managed to impale one of the warrior’s gauntlets so that the pole remained extended—no more pistoning. He dialed up his STACsuit and teep-kicked the creature in its chest so hard it flew back into four of its resurrected friends, but it soon returned to battle.
The wyrms deployed. Thrallyin landed on the street behind Lyokh and bit and stomped the resurrected dead. Lyokh saw so many die, and yet so many kept fighting. Just as the STACsuit could keep soldiers fighting past their death, he imagined there was some dead-man’s protocol programmed into whatever inner workings the Ascendancy now bred into their people. Surely they were all brain dead, for some of them were missing their brains altogether, but their bodies were animated by computer-brains, the spinal meshes on their backs, and whatever supporting network was hidden beneath their flesh.
The dead mechanicae continued to rise. Every time they fell, they spasmed, jerked, tried to rise again. Every time they were blown in half, the two halves moved autonomously, trying to define some new locomotion by which to advance towards their enemies. Hordes of the reanimated dead threw themselves against the heavy infantry, who fought to maintain their phalanx formation as they advanced with shields up.
Lyokh nearly tripped over the crawling ones, and utilized the Forty-Seven Steps to keep himself defensive as he waded through them, scything them with his crackling blade like he was reaping a harvest. His STACsuit kept track of some of them when he turned his back, alarms blaring whenever one was approaching from behind. Treating the warrior in front of him like a sparring partner, Lyokh once again retreated into a state of no-mind. He emptied himself, accepted death as inevitable, and left himself open to the skills he had ingrained into himself through training.
He parried one of the warrior’s poles, ducked the next one. The plasmetic aura of his blade appeared distorted and fuzzy as it slashed the rain. When he met his enemy’s pistoning pole, Lyokh slid his blade down the gauntlet, over the wrist, up to the elbow, and stabbed into the joint before ripping his blade out, taking out chunks of meat and wires. That arm became useless, and now the warrior swung one-handed. Lyokh ducked, then lunge-stepped forward, thrusting his blade into the warrior’s chest nearly to the quillons, then withdrew his blade and shuffled backwards. His enemy’s next swing smashed into his left vambrace, crushing it, ruining the Sigil of the Republic emblazoned there.
The Novas swept overhead on a strafing run, which helped mulch some of the bastards into such tiny sizes that not even their dead-man’s protocol could find a way to get them moving again.
The debris rained down on Lyokh and his opponent as their weapons met, again and again. Finally, Lyokh found his opening, side-stepping to let the warrior thrust hard, overextending himself. As the warrior went stumbling past him, Lyokh spun around and brought his blade down on its skull. The warrior dropped to its knees, but it’s body was already spasming, fighting clumsily back to its feet.
Something suddenly occurred to Lyokh. An idea. He lost it a second later. His mind was too occupied by the next opponent that rushed him, but after he cleaved the thing into three pieces, the thought came back to him. He lost it again when the Novas did another strike, and one of them took a missile to its starboardside wing, and crashed into the next street over.
Lyokh tried to remember what he had just been thinking. It was important. What was it…?
He slashed at the next enemy, slew another one, scythed one in half.
Then, he had it.
All these things had reanimated at the same time. At the exact same time.
A signal. Some kind of signal activated all the dead-man’s protocols at once.
“Ziir!” he called, even as his blade slashed the air in front of him and slew three more enemies. “Tell me you’re alive, Ziir!”
“I’m here, doyen! Go ahead!”
“There’s a signal! There’s got to be a signal telling them to reanimate! It happened all at once! Find that signal! Jam it!” He was shot in the arm. The round did not penetrate, but it hit with enough force that it spun him to the ground. An Aravastar warhulk stepped in front of him a second later, protecting him from the follow-up barrage that would have surely killed him. The warhulk sawed several mechanicae in half with its gatling guns. “Jam it, Ziir! Find it and jam it! Jam it! Jam it!”
With several tactical chops of his hand, Lyokh sent waypoints to his people to join him in the fray, and to take up advanced positions to keep the ground he was holding. He shouted for Ravagers Six and Nine to come to the front. “I don’t care what you run over, or how many buildings you have to knock down to get here! Do it!”
The Aravastar in front of him provided cover while he transitioned from his sword to his rifle. He fired from behind its legs, while the warhulk’s pilot incinerated a dozen of the enemy with its particle-beam cannon.
A hundred tinzer rifles returned fire, green beams sizzling the air all around.
Behind him, Lyokh heard a loud explosion. He turned and saw Ravagers Six and Nine, coming from one street over, driving straight through the lobbies of two office buildings like gods of war incarnate, and they came crashing onto the street to join him. The Ravagers were crawling with reanimated mechanicae, while crushing five or six beneath their treads. The Ravagers used their insectile legs wherever necessary, sometimes defensively, knocking down the hordes that tried to overrun them. “Direct all fire forward! Break their wall! Hose them!”
“The wall!” someone screamed. Sounded like Meiks.
Others took up the call. “THE WALL!”
Between the Ravagers and the warhulks, there was unleashed an unholy fusillade at the hills of collapsed buildings the enemy had used as a wall. The whole world seemed to explode. Mechanicae were flung into the air, coming to pieces, and any parts that were not rendered totally inoperable simply wriggled along the ground, searching for Republican soldiers. One of those limbs slapped Lyokh in the face, and tried to strangle him before he peeled it off and flung it beneath the treads of Ravager Nine.
Lyokh worked with the Aravastar pilot, who took care of the long-range enemies while Lyokh picked off the ones that had managed to close the distance. He made their bodies dance with each burst of his rifle, but even when they fell dead, they staggered back to their feet, or crawled along the ground.
Someone went screaming by him. A large man. It was Paupau, blood drunk and swinging two field swords—his and someone else’s. His armor was being riddled with bullets as he ran headlong into the enemy, bellowing his range.
“Paupau!” Lyokh shouted. “Fall back, you stupid grig! Get back here and hold the phalanx—”
“Come on, you twinkly fairies!” the huge man roared. And, “Paupau!”
A second later, he was lost in a gout of rock and debris as one of the demon statues, hitherto untouched, was blasted apart by Ravager artillery and finally came crashing down.
“Incoming drop ships!” someone shouted in his ear.
Lyokh chanced a glance to the sky, and saw ships that were clearly not Novas swooping in low over the buildings. There were three of them. The Brotherhood? His question was answered when the ships’ bellies opened up, and from each one came long black ropes. Down those ropes came dozens of men, all dressed in robes and patchwork armor, carrying weapons ranging from advanced rifles to the most primitive gunpowder pistols.
Lambs to the slaughter, most likely, Lyokh had time to think, before his rifle was spent and he had to transfer back to his field sword. As soon as the contrite brothers put their boots on the ground, they went screaming into the fray.
It was too confused to tell exactly what was going on, but Lyokh believed they were holding the line. The air wavered with
the heat distortion of weapons discharge. A series of concussive explosions, brought on by some unknown enemy weapon, shook the ground, and sent a wave of dust into Lyokh’s visor. The world went dark. He felt hands—dead hands—groping at his feet. He hacked blindly at them, his suit’s computer trying to supply with him information through echolocation, but there was just too much noise interference now. He made due. He killed anything that wrapped itself around him. Every once in a while, he extended one hand to feel for the warhulk’s leg, to keep track of it.
Then, another explosion ripped the ground in front of him, sending cobbled pavement into him. His suit’s shear-thickening liquids cushioned his fall, hardening until he was basically a statue. But by the time he had climbed back to his feet, he had another problem. Something hit him. Something big. It knocked him to the ground, pinning his lower body. It took several dazed seconds before he realized it was the upper torso of the Aravastar. He tried pushing it off, but couldn’t even budge it. He tried dialing his STACsuit up, but his battery was only at one-quarter power. Not nearly enough of what he needed.
Something crawled onto his chest. With so much dust in the air and rain on his visor, he couldn’t make it out. It smashed his visor, tried to pull off his helmet. Lyokh used jiu-jitsu tactics to control its hands, then found its head and pulled it in close, smothering its movement against his chest. But something else grabbed hold of his neck. A disembodied arm snaked around his throat, tightening.
Lyokh released his hold on the enemy’s head and struggled to fight with the arm. It was a frantic battle, defending against the unseen enemy smashing his helmet and the unseen arm trying to strangle him.
Then, he heard a close-by shot. The enemy smashing his helmet fell away somewhere. Some other hand reached down to pry the arm away from his neck.
The smoke had cleared just enough for him to see the robed figure standing over him. “Hoy up, brothers!” the man shouted through a thick white beard. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. “Help me get this soldier free!” Four other contrite brothers rushed forward, all of them with ten-digit penal colony numbers tattooed on their foreheads. One of them died from a large-caliber round that tore him in half. The rest of them fought to get Lyokh up, while he used all his STACsuit’s remaining strength to help them lift the warhulk. It was just enough for him to slide out from underneath. Once he was out, he took cover with them behind the Aravastar. The bearded man looked at him, and spoke through crooked yellow teeth.