by Chad Huskins
“When we approached from the sky, we saw you were utterly surrounded,” he hollered over the booming engines of war all around them. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion!”
“Who are you?”
“I am Brother Penitent Morkovikson, commander of the Elite Penitent, and by the grace of the Three Goddesses, blessed be their names, I atone for my sins through service to those better than myself! Upon my most wretched and unworthy soul, I am yours to command!”
LORD ISHIMOTO WAS forced to maneuver slightly ahead of Shatterstar, speeding up and temporarily breaking its geosynchronous orbit, for there was a squadron of Ascendancy starfighters that had just been detected coming in from Rah’zen and Honagher. Shatterstar had been damaged in fighting and was suffering some internal pressure loss, so it was up to Lord Ishimoto to meet these new enemies head on.
“Do all torpedo teams answer ready, XO?” Donovan asked.
“They do, sir. All tubes but one is locked and loaded.”
“Why the one?”
“Because this is our last batch of torpedoes, sir.”
Donovan nodded. In all the fuss, he had let their artillery count slip past his noticed. He had been answering messages from the War Council and their sister ships, as well as dealing with the death tolls and damage tallies coming in from across the system, and coordinating with the Brotherhood captains.
“Conn, radar,” Bingham called from the PPI room. “Got an update on those newcomers. Their drive trails flashed hot a second ago, but then they activated some kind of sensor shroud.”
“Sensor room, confirm,” Donovan said.
“Sensor room confrms, sir,” DeStren answered. “Checking the last ladar returns from those ships…yeah, looks like they were on a retreating vector from us, just before they went dark.”
“Why retreating?”
“Can’t say, skipper.”
“I think I can shed a little light on that mystery, skipper,” said a female voice, almost laughing. It was coming from Comms One. “Check your message display, sir. I just sent it to you.” Donovan waved his hands in the air to bring it up. Even as he read it, he couldn’t believe it.
“Vaultimyr,” he whispered. It came out in a quivering sigh of the most immense relief. “They made it. They’re here.”
Even as he looked at his tac screen, he could see the blips indicating the arrival of five separate starships. Spacetime distortions, ladar returns, and MeV and bremsstrahlung emissions all confirmed it. Then came the transponder codes. It all checked out. It was almost impossible to believe they had gotten here this fast. Donovan had assumed at best it would take one to three hours, and that was with no enemy resistance. It was as astonishing as the mystery of how the Brotherhood had gotten to Phanes so fast in the first place.
But none of that mattered right then. All that mattered was that Vaultimyr had arrived with more than enough reinforcements, and the enemy had seen that and retreated.
“Conn, Comms One. Vaultimyr tightbeamed a message, saying the Brotherhood ships have plenty of troops ready to drop on Widden’s surface, and that their ships are prepared to deal with the Ascendancy ships parked at the poles. Do you want them to go ahead with—?”
“Yes,” Donovan said. “Dear god, yes.”
WITH THE AID of the contrite brothers, Lyokh and his people were able to hold the line. But he wasn’t sure if even that could last, for the reanimated corpses kept coming. It took heavy artillery to blast them into a state from which they could not return, and they were running out of such artillery.
The Brotherhood had brought numbers, and more guns, but not much else. Their drop ships had only one belly cannon, and it didn’t do much more than harass the ground troops.
The rain had diminished to a drizzle, the clouds had parted slightly to reveal one of the suns—Lyokh didn’t know which one—and blood-red Rah’zen still looming over the world. Tinzer beams slashed the air in all directions. Crisscrossing beams burned some of Lyokh’s people alive as he watched, helplessly engaged in his own battles.
When he had a moment between kills, he shouted, “Artemis! Move up the center of the street! Ravager Nine, give Thrallyin some support! Devastator Actual, send me whatever hulks you got left! We’re ploughing ahead!”
He had made up his mind. The Dexannonhold was less than a klick away, and he had determined that they would achieve it.
Beside him, Brother Penitent Morkovikson fired an archaic rifle over the side of the downed and dead warhulk. One of the three brothers that had rescued Lyokh lay dead on the ground, half his head missing, while the others returned fire with the calm fervor Lyokh had only ever seen on the most devout zealots on Timon. As the warhulks and wyrm moved up, Ares and Fierce Wing moved up behind them. Lyokh led with his field sword in hand, with Morkovikson and his contrite brothers right behind. Ravager Nine’s railgun spat at the oncoming hordes as it half crawled, half trundled towards them.
Two of the reanimated mechanicae rushed him. Lyokh cut off the first one’s head, but the second one…the second one dropped to the ground before it even reached him. Like a marionette with its strings cut, it collapsed bonelessly at his feet, and a second later, Lyokh heard a voice say, “I think I isolated the signal, doyen!”
“Ziir?”
“Yes, sir. It was really weird, coming from transmitters all around us—I think it was being routed through all the grasshopper drones, and boosted from there. I don’t know the exact origin, but I had the idea to patch into the piezoelectric oscillators of our Novas, and locked on to its frequency to send out a wide-burst scrambling signal. It’s probably going to make communications worse between us, we won’t have much available bandwidth, and we won’t be able to have radio chatter unless we’re within a few feet of each other, but I think it’s working.”
Lyokh looked around the crowd of his brothers and sisters in arms, and could not find Ziir in the throng of those fighting. “Good job, Ziir. Keep it up. If we have to, we’ll just use deaf-and-blind protocols to communicate.” That would entail lots of hand signals, and sending soldiers with messages all the way to the back, just like in the days before even telephones were invented, but it was a small price to pay to make sure the dead stayed dead.
“You got it, doyen,” Ziir said, his voice already coming through scrambled. “I think we can…we’ll have to…can suffice for now.”
Beside him, Brother Penitent Morkovikson said, “Looks to me like it’s had an effect already.”
Lyokh looked where he was pointing.
Bodies were dropping everywhere. Mechanicae corpses that were missing their heads or were otherwise traumatized spasmed once, twice, and then dropped to the ground. Lyokh spotted a force led by Paupau, who miraculously had not died when the statue collapsed near him, and he was now pushing ahead, screaming inarticulate rage.
The enemy finally started to break. At last! Here was a sign of progress. They broke and fell back, over the rubble of collapsed buildings and the mounds of their own dead, down the street, back towards the Dexannonhold.
“Hoy up!” Lyokh cried. He held up his hands, and began basic signaling to indicate his intent. “Comms are scrambled! We have to keep it that way to keep these monsters dead! If anybody finds Ziir, stick close to him! Protect him! He’s the one doing the jamming! Don’t let them get to him! We’re passing signals by hand and by mouth-to-ear from here on out! Pass the message down the lines!”
Lyokh turned to Morkovikson.
“Can you send one of your brothers all the way to the back to shout this news?”
Morkovikson nodded curtly. “We serve any way we can.” He looked at one of his men and jerked a thumb northward. The contrite brother bowed low to Morkovikson and darted away.
“What about medics?” asked Lyokh, looking at the flashing red screen in his periphery that indicated the number of dead and wounded. “Do you have any med bots that can assist our people?”
“We don’t work with many bots,” Morkovikson said. “Takes away wo
rk from a man, makes him lazy. But we do have trained doctors among us.” He looked over at the last contrite brother. “Brother Xum, if you would please, go and find Dakarj, tell him to gather Rodovast and the other Hippocratic Brothers, and to assist Captain Lyokh’s medics in any way they need.”
After the contrite brother had rushed away, Lyokh looked at Morkovikson and said, “I never told you my name.”
Morkovikson pointed at the medal that was, impossibly, still hanging from Lyokh’s armor after all he had been through. “The Imperator’s Medal of Valor. I recognized it. I remembered the stories of you that have been passed around on the pubnet.”
Lyokh almost asked What stories?, but there was no time. The group was already pushing forward, and he had a force to lead. As he jogged ahead, Meiks appeared at his side and gave Brother Penitent Morkovikson an appraising look, then shrugged like he was saying this wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen all day. Lyokh shouted out orders, using hand signals to back up his words, lest he was misunderstood: “Assault teams to the fore, tactical teams to our flanks! Ancillary groups move to the middle, take what you can from the dead and keep moving!”
Overhead, two wyrms curled in the air, swimming through the skies, looking for dangers on the rooftops. Thrallyin was still on the ground with them, expanding its armored wings outward to create wide shields for the platoons behind.
Lyokh turned to Meiks.
“Run up ahead and talk to Artemis, make sure he knows we’re being jammed, and why. Let him know we’re communicating by signals and by mouth-to-ear.”
“Copy that, doyen,” he said, and ran off.
“You’ve done well down here,” Morkovikson said. “Especially considering you were just supposed to be on patrol duty, as I understand.”
“Don’t I look like I’m patrolling?” Lyokh said, waving his hand to move a group up to cover their flanks.
Morkovikson threw his head back in a laugh that shocked not only Lyokh, but the others around him. “That’s good. Humor. Alystivoria teaches us to remember it in such times.”
“Is that your commander?”
Again, Morkovikson laughed. “She is the Second Goddess of Mercy, blessed is she. And she and her sisters are looking down on us now, Captain Lyokh.”
“You mean in orbit?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Does she have a Pacifier?”
“She has undying forgiveness.”
“How many rounds does it fire?”
The Brother Penitent howled with laughter as they made their way up the street.
Lyokh ignored the man for most of the journey. He didn’t have time to get to know anyone well, especially since he was probably going to die as easily as all the others.
Heeten. Eulekk. Lucerne.
He kept directing his men forward, sending hand-signal queries to the others bringing up the rear, and monitoring windows on all sides. Once, he spied a mechanicae appear in one of them, then saw its head snap back as a bullet tore through it, and then the distant report of a rifle. He couldn’t be sure if it was Takirovanen, but he was pretty confident it was.
Finally, they had crossed through the enemy’s abandoned defenses. A few grasshoppers had been overturned and used as walls, and a few turrets, depleted of their ammo, had been left behind. Rainwater beaded off of everything. The world had gone silent as the tomb. Ziir’s scrambler was still keeping the dead dead, and their bodies were partially sunken in puddles of turbid water.
All the destruction had ruptured underground pipelines, and fountains of water poured onto the streets. A gas main had also exploded, throwing flames against the walls of one pyramid. They passed a drop pod, one of those that had been launched from orbit and brought the mechanicae planetside. Lyokh did a brief search inside it, saw all sorts of weird hooks and plugs that looked like recharge modules for the mechanicae themselves. He spotted a woman and her two sons pinned beneath it, crushed as it had landed.
They moved on.
The trail of death and destruction led right up to the gates of the Dexannonhold, where the very last of the Ascendancy’s fortifications were. There were walls made out of dense alloys, with wavering, pinkish-purplish auras of artillery-grade plasma shields surrounding them.
Shots came from the enemy. Testing shots, tinzerfire cutting into the hulls atop the Ravagers. But as soon as the lasers were fired, the firers revealed their positions, and were summarily dealt with, either by snipers, Mantises, or warhulks. A few standard projectiles were fired next, small- and large-caliber rounds panging off the warhulks, who returned fire immediately.
All the while, Lyokh and Morkovikson remained behind cover, directing their own troops to different support positions. They held their ground until shooting died down to a low murmur, just a few potshots here and there.
“What do we do now, Captain?” asked Abethik, sidling up beside him.
Lyokh looked straight up. It strained his neck to see the top of the Dexannonhold, which disappeared through slow-moving clouds. Pillars of smoke came roiling out of its windows, banners burned crisp were rippling in the wind, and small tiles of compristeel and rock fell away every so often. The palace and its great tower had been hammered, but it had held. Down the street, Lyokh saw the Ritenkattan, which was a statue in the likeness of one of Priestess Zane’s relatives. And, at the Ritenkattan’s feet, there were some of the deformed corpses Lyokh had seen on Artemis’s footage. Bodies stretched in inhuman shapes, like putty. He zoomed his visor in, and saw the puddles of blood and organs they had vomited and shat out of themselves collecting flies.
What did this?
No sooner had he thought this than the doors to the Dexannonhold began to open. The doors were twenty feet tall and made of shimmering compristeel, and they moaned like a whale’s song of mourning as the Priestess’s Order Guard came stepping out. The mechanicae stopped shooting, and Lyokh ordered his people to do the same.
“Cease fire!” he screamed, and signaled with his hands. It took two minutes for the orders to pass down to everyone in his fighting force.
The mechanicae now turned their weapons to face the alien Order Guard. Large, gaunt, thin, and serpentine, the uk’tek were a bizarre-looking people, some with four arms, some with six, and all of them carrying polearms that snapped with electricity at each ends.
Three things happened at once. First, the mechanicae started firing at them. Second, Lyokh felt a nausea pass through him, and he could tell by the looks in the visors of others around him that they felt it, too. And third, he saw bodies pulled into the air. Mostly mechanicae, but some of his own people had their bodies lifted off the ground, as well, like an invisible hand had raised them.
Some of the mechanicae fired. Even as they were lifted into the sky, they fired into the gaping doorway.
What’s happening? Lyokh thought.
“What…is happening?” said the Brother Penitent beside him, his voice tinged with awe.
As Lyokh watched, the bodies jerked and twitched in the air. And as they did, a woman stepped out of the doorway of the Dexannonhold. She was dressed ornately, with multicolored robes and jewels, and wearing a black mask with a horrible visage painted onto it.
The High Priestess.
She looked beleaguered. Weakened. Like something had taken an immense toll on her.
The mechanicae that had been taken up into the air in some kind of rapture began to flail. Their bodies did the strangest things. No two fates were the same, some died by having their chests explode, while others sprouted new limbs from their spines that reached around and choked them, or opened their mouths to vomit out blue viscous fluids, or had their arms and legs stretched and reformed to misshapen claws. Lyokh saw one mechanicae’s head swell to the size of a warhulk’s chassis, bubbling and boiling like hot water over a stove, before finally exploding and releasing noxious fumes.
Lyokh had seen a lot in his years as a soldier. He had seen much more in the sepulcher in Kennit, and even more horrors when
confronted with the husk of the Queen of Mothers. Never had he seen anything like this. What he was witnessing…It looks like magic. Sorcery.
Some of the mechanicae on the ground started running.
Is this what they ran from days ago?
If so, it meant that they knew fear, or at the very least they understood when they were woefully outclassed.
A demon’s voice fouled the air. It was a woman’s shriek, amplified by unknown means. Lyokh knew it was Priestess Zane’s words, coming through her mask, or else a microphone inside of it broadcasting. “Defilers, meet defilement! Mahl has shown us! He has shown…”
Bodies continued to be peeled apart like onions, and as they did, the High Priestess’s Order Guard launched themselves at the Ascendancy troops that had managed to stay grounded. They tore into the mechanicae with such speed it humbled Lyokh. He did not remain dazed for long, though. Snapping out of it, he shouted, “Give them some support!”
His words and his hand signals traveled down the street, and his people began lending their firepower. The mechanicae received their last punishment. Trapped here, between the Republican Armed Forces, the Brotherhood, and the horrors coming from the Dexannonhold, between the ground forces and the wyrms curling through the skies, between one wall of death and another, the Machinist Ascendancy’s hold over the city was finally, fatally, broken.
: SDFA Voice of Reason
“The Phanes System is won,” the Chief Steward said. “We will translate into normal space at the edges of the system in two hours. Captain Fee asks that you confine yourselves to your quarters at that time, for there is still some small flashfire battles occurring as the Machinist Ascendancy retreats.”