by Ross Winkler
Phae found her targets, and two quick bursts dispatched them. "Clear!" she said, then moved back to the hall.
They worked their way down, leap-frogging over each other to the last door. The enemy learned and were better prepared each time for the Maharathas' attacks. A desperate sword thrust nearly punctured Corwin's side, and rifle rounds had critically damaged Phae's shoulder armor. Chahal had taken shrapnel from a grenade, and Kai had been knocked off his feet from the same.
Now here it was, the last room — and it was Phae's turn to break down the door. As she rushed forward, Corwin dyzued a change in the Sahktriya of the hallway. Everything became jagged, energized, like death had caught up to them, scythe flashing in the complex's smoldering ruins.
Corwin reached out his hand to stop her, but he moved in slow motion. Phae was perpetually just out of reach.
She put her shoulder down, bellowing. The door gave, first bending in the middle, then the hinges sheared. She rushed past the threshold.
Time resumed its normal pace.
A ball of plasma plumed outward, the blue-white ball of energized particles framing Phae for a moment, then engulfing her. The concussion blew Corwin backward to carom off the doorway behind.
Sirens screamed in Corwin's mind as his suit's computer highlighted sections of armor that had lost integrity. He had no hearing for their warning cry, no sight for their meaningless details.
On the ground before him lay a blackened suit of armor, recognizable only by its vague, Human-like silhouette. It popped and hissed as it cooled, each crackle reverberating in Corwin's mind like the rending of earth during an earthquake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A hidden hatch opened, spilling off years of dirt and leaves. From the opening, thirteen armor-clad Choxen emerged, their weapons at the ready, their senses and bodies alert.
The Choxen base smoldered in the distance, and gunfire echoed through the green forest like the chirping of nighttime crickets. A stiff wind blew cold from the north, carrying away the smells of smoke and burned flesh that reached out from the base to suffocate the living.
They each carried with them a full wilderness survival kit with food, ammunition, and all the other things they would need for an extended stay away from civilization as they awaited contact from the Siloth.
This was an inevitable fate, Kavin realized as It turned Its back on Its once great Principality. It was leaving now, physically, but Its mind had been absent for several years as It searched for the relic. But the sacrifice hadn't been in vain.
Its hand fell unconsciously to Its waist, where a small pack held the relic and the com. All was not lost, this but a minor setback in the greater battle for domination and subjugation.
With a dismissing sniff, Kavin lunged ahead, running at near full speed to put as much distance between Itself and the dying base as It could. Its guards fell in behind.
Corwin awoke at a combat medic station. As he stirred, two attending soldiers in Power Armor jumped forward and took his arms, holding him down. Corwin fought; the two blank-faced soldiers looked like any others in the place.
"Corwin," Kai's voice rumbled down. "Corwin, it's us. Relax."
"Where's Phae?" He said, struggling, searching.
"She's dead," Kai said, voice deep, hollow.
"Wha…?" Corwin breathed. Rage ripped through his frail emotions, searing, burning out his insides until he, too, was nothing but a blackened husk. He struggled, flailing arms and legs, bending the table in his attempt to do something, anything.
"Where is she?" Corwin cried. "Where is that wickt Guard General? I'll kill her! She wanted this to happen!" He fought harder, veins popping, armor actuators straining to fulfill Corwin's manic demands.
"Corwin. Calm down. Corwin. It — it's war. It's just what happens." Those words from Chahal's lips surprised everyone, even her. "There's nothing you could have done."
"No. No, there was." Corwin shook, tears slipping between the impact foam and his face, mixing with his sweat. His surge of energy faded, and his Voidmates relaxed their grips. Corwin's eyes moved, looked, but did not see. He heard their words of condolence but could not comprehend.
Over and again in his mind he repeated, This is my fault. If I had had better aim, if I had been stronger … it's my fault that Phae died. Mine. I killed her.
He felt that wall slip in between himself and the raw emotion that had upset his mind; felt the anger and remorse and guilt fade away. The wall was a solid thing now, stolid and kilometers thick; an impregnable barrier that held his hurt at bay.
His eyes came back into focus, eyebrows knotting into their familiar places, lips curling downward to where they were comfortable.
Corwin sat up, brushing away Kai's helping hands. "Give me my weapons." His voice was as cold and impassable as his wall.
"Corwin … Corwin? Our objectives are complete. The remainder of the battle is in the hands of the Abtinthae now. We don't need to fight any more."
"You two can stay back, but I'm not finished. I will make them all pay." He stood, unsteady on his feet for a moment. Taking the weapons from Kai's hands, Corwin stumbled away without hearing their protests.
Corwin arrived at the rear of the advancing army. Body parts — friend and foe alike — covered the floor in a carpet of twitching limbs, torsos, and blinking dead eyes. It was horrendous, or would have been if it could have affected Corwin through his emotional barrier. As it was, the sights and sounds couldn't penetrate farther than his helmet. He was walled off, present though not fully a part of the battle.
And from the looks of things, he'd never be a part of it. The halls narrowed as they approached the ramp that led downward, choking the IGA army so only a small fraction could fight at one time. The rows of allied soldiers stretched out until they were lost in the twists and turns of the hallways, the smoke and debris of battle.
Despite the bottleneck, the allied force advanced at a steady pace, though it wasn't without cost. A never-ending flow of Abtinthae medics ferried injured and dying warriors to the rear, where they cauterized wounds or completed the removal of a limb that a Grunt had started. The Abtinthae were lucky in that respect: an amputated or severed limb would regrow without aid within a weak. Not all IGA species were so endowed, and while the Abtinthae bore the brunt of the battle, others still found a way to fight — and to die.
Those that could be saved were, and the others … some attempt was made to pull them off the front lines to die in peace rather than under alien feet. One of the Ismael went down, and it took a team of Abtinthae medics to haul him out. He didn't make it, dying on a cold plasteel floor, towing chains still looped across chest and arms.
Rows of the wounded lay shoulder-to-shoulder along the ground, the dead stacked like cordwood along the walls. The smell was atrocious to those who had scent faculties; the fecal smell of ruptured bowels; the metallic tang of blood; the sick-sweet scent of Abtinthae thoracic juices that ran along the ground in rivulets and dripped from the walls and ceiling.
Corwin pushed his way into the throng of soldiers. They moved readily enough, with only a grunt or chitter of protest. The formation compacted towards the front, the Abtinthae warrior drones pressing thorax to thorax to create an unbreakable, deadly line of slashing claws. Smoke and dust drifted in the air and obscured the lights; it fell like dirty snowflakes on the soldiers that waited for their chance to kill and die.
Corwin couldn't advance any farther — the drones were so compressed that he couldn't push through. He gathered himself, harnessing and channeling his Sahktriya. He projected Fear.
The drone's faceted eyes sparkled, and their heads rolled away in terror. The Abtinthae leapt atop one another in their haste to get out of Corwin's way, flung aside as if by an invisible hand.
Corwin was close to the front line now. Rockets flared between each side, erupting in gouts of flame that consumed lives. The armies writhed, forward and back, side to side, entwining, moving with and against each other like battling sn
akes.
Pulling three grenades from his chest, Corwin thumbed their triggers and tossed them over the thin line of allied soldiers. He followed them two heartbeats later, triggering his jump jets to launch himself up and over the embattled soldiers. He was dimly aware of the other two Maharatha that followed in the same way.
The enemy had arranged themselves like the Abtinthae drones, Grunts pressed shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back to create a wall of snarling death. The grenades fell amongst them. They didn't notice the puny things that bounced along the floor but didn't cause pain, even as the grenades detonated, gouts of plasma licking up to immolate flesh and armored carapace, to boil innards and bake brains. The beasts didn't flinch.
Those Grunts the grenades didn't kill, Corwin did.
He dropped his Sahktriya downward, grounding out to make himself heavier. He became a falling boulder, a thousand augmented kilograms of crushing weight that collapsed a Grunt's armored torso into itself. As he landed, Corwin used that same downward force to propel his sword and split another Grunt in half from horned head through armored groin.
Fury boiled inside despite the wall, and Corwin used it, lashing out with all the hatred and anger that he had repressed, gave it voice with his own, a raw and jagged scream that echoed inside his cavernous helmet. The Grunts around him shrieked as their animal brains registered a predator more terrifying than themselves. They shied away, this thing they couldn't comprehend, and Corwin cut them down with great sweeps of his sword.
Bodies and viscera flew. There was no room for maneuvering or finesse. Enemies assaulted from every direction, and Corwin killed them all, each swing of his sword fueled by white-hot fury that grew with every strike.
Corwin was not without injury, but the hurts of his body were so far away it was as though they belonged to someone else. As he kicked and shoved and bashed and stabbed, the last of the Grunts and Choxen died.
A cargo door blocked his path now, its two halves drawn closed and locked. Stepping to it, Corwin tried to pry it open. It was a futile gesture — he knew that in a very small corner of his mind, but he couldn't help himself. In anger and frustration, Corwin hammered at the door with the butt-end of his sword.
He stepped away, panting. As the fury that had burned in his veins began to cool, his own hurts started to make themselves known. His hip had been jarred; a foot smashed; one side of his neck armor had been torn away from its housing. Beyond the physical pain, the emotional ache boiled, a knife cutting, slicing, twisting.
He had to keep moving. "Someone open this wickting door!" he snarled into the general com.
From the mess of aliens milling uselessly behind, Chahal appeared. She waited down near where the door would retract into the wall, and she didn't greet Corwin with words, just a simple bend of the torso.
Guilt made Corwin shudder. He approached the Exilist. "You shouldn't be here," Corwin said. She couldn't be. If she were here, in the thick of the fighting, then she'd die too — like Phae, like his family, like his dreams.
"Are you ordering me off the front lines?" Chahal asked.
"Yes. I order you—"
"Too bad. We're in this together."
Kai appeared on Corwin's right, a mountain of armor sliding into place without a sound.
"Kai—" Corwin started to say.
"Shut it, sir. I want a piece of them too."
Corwin couldn't begrudge their presence — he longed for it, and that made the guilt all the worse: his emotions, his weakness, had again put these two in danger.
Hidden gears ground to life. The Abtinthae warrior drones surged forward, eager in their mindless way to slay and be slain. The door split down the middle, the gap widening until first one of the warrior drones, then three, then twenty could push their way forward.
They all died. The enemy concentrated their fire at the opening, and drone after drone ran forward, fearless unto death.
There was a tipping point, still long before the gap had reached the three Maharatha, where the Abtinthae made headway. They poured into the room, slashing and killing, pushing the enemy back to create a small beachhead.
The door edged near. The Maharatha could dyzu the battle, dyzu the Grunts' hungry, predatory Sahktriya reaching forward, a hot wind eager to rend limbs, spill guts, and devour what remained. The three Humans tipped their swords forward so whatever lay in wait on the other side of that door would meet instant death — and maybe ensure their survival for just a few moments longer.
Then the door was past them, and they charged forward to meet the snarling enemy. Corwin drove his sword through the first Grunt to cross his path. Ducking, he twisted as he pulled his sword free and drove the tip up and through the next Grunt's armored torso. Kai fell in to Corwin's right, each guarding the other's side as they pressed forward into the morass of death.
This was the grow chamber, the one room that every Choxen base contained, and the single most strategic place. A warren of corridors and interlinked catwalks ten floors high awaited the IGA troops. On both sides of each walkway, Grunt growing chambers hummed, fully active as they grew the alien soldiers from a tiny clump of starter cells into a fully functioning killing machine in less than two hours.
Chahal stumbled from a Grunt's lucky blow. Corwin cut the Grunt down, but in doing so he left himself open. He paid with a claw to the side, his armor tearing away in flakes as the claws dug through and gashed soft skin underneath. With a cry of pain, he lurched, turning and pushing hard on the creature's face with his rifle barrel, firing at the same time. Even at close range, the bullets ricocheted off its armored head, but it stumbled and gave Corwin the time to hack off its head.
Every move hurt now, even with painkillers. Whatever, he thought, a small price to pay to ensure Chahal will walk out of here.
One of the grow tanks opened and disgorged its contents onto the grated floor. A Grunt stumbled forth, newborn but deadly despite its infancy, and fully enraged by the smell and taste of battle in the air. Corwin chopped through both the intervening door and Grunt behind it.
The enemy fought for every inch in this win-or-die struggle, and the ground told the story of that fight. Bodies piled up, tripping soldiers on both sides of the battle; gore dripped down through the grated cat walks; electrics sparked and popped, casting a flickering dissonance into the already chaotic mess that was the grow room.
Six hours after the assault began, the last of the enemy died. The allies, weary, shaken, cried out in victory — all except for the three Earthling Humans.
They had nothing to celebrate, for this was not their fight, yet they had paid with one of their own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A small personnel transport pulled up to the first of two checkpoints. It was of obvious IGA design — that the Inquest agent could see by its sharp angles and the alien glyphs stenciled on the sides. He stepped forward as the vehicle's darkened windows retracted. Behind them were grim faces: a woman in the back with sweat-clumped mats of curly hair and a bear of a man in the passenger's seat. The driver, a dark-skinned man with sunken eyes that despite his young age had the frown lines of a man at least a century old, held out a holographic projector. It flashed into life displaying the Maharatha symbol.
As the guard stepped forward to take the projector and scan it, a malodorous stink wafted from the open windows: sweat, fear, sorrow, death, and somewhere, lingering, was the smell of charred meat. This was Death's own carriage — and it was driven by a Quisling-turned-Maharatha.
The guard waved them onward, shuddering as they passed. He pulled out his com and radioed ahead. Whatever these people were, they weren't to be wickt with.
Outpost G57 was dead. Its inhabitants had been thrust out into the tenements and makeshift prison by the Inquest Investigators to form an untidy ring of fear and suspicion around the once thriving settlement. Everyone was too busy to celebrate the return of the Maharatha — the only Earthling victors of a battle that had opened up the entire sector to safe settlement.
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Just inside the city's gate, Corwin stopped the carrier. He had taken a hover litter from one of the many medical stations inside the now conquered Choxen base, and it had required only a deep-throated growl from Kai to make the attending Ordeiky medics back away. They had retrieved Phae's body from where they'd left her after the explosion — they'd had to just leave her there … they'd had to — and ferried her charred husk up and out of the base.
They changed from their armor and, after searching for just a few minutes among the jumbled troop carriers that had transported the Abtinthae soldiers to the base, they had found one that fit their needs.
Then they'd stolen it.
With a gentle pull, the litter came free, and Kai and Chahal maneuvered it clear of the carrier. Corwin pressed the return key and shut the door. The vehicle would drive itself back the way they'd come, and with luck no one would know that it was missing — not that Corwin cared at all right now. He'd burn them all down if he needed to.
They walked in silence through a muted city to the recycling center. Wearing only their second skins, the vacant streets and the eerie silence made the slap of their bare feet on plasteel seem loud.
The machine sounds of the city's recycling center — humming fans, whirring gears, sliding, scraping conveyor belts, and the roar of the incinerator where they were destined — grew louder as they approached. Kai and Chahal hesitated. Corwin pushed past them, tugging the litter after him.
The drone of machinery was comforting, a dull, continuous throb that echoed Corwin's broken heart so that he could, almost, ignore its ache.
Tall bins stood on either side of a conveyor belt that ran the length of the building, their chutes empty and crusted with refuse. The belt itself wasn't in any better shape, but such was the fate of those that gave their lives to the Republic.
They walked Phae up near where the belt terminated into the incinerator, so close that its heat caused sweat to bead on their foreheads and necks.