Warden's Vengeance

by Tony James Slater

  For Kreon, the battle was a remarkably different experience.

  Sera had taken the first wave.

  After banishing their daughter to the safety of her chambers — a decision he had been only too happy to support — she had planted herself in front of them and unleashed.

  Sera’s career in the Wardens had spanned decades. She’d seen combat on a hundred worlds that Kreon knew of, and like most marriages, theirs had plenty of secrets.

  She’d worked her way into the First Circle shortly after he had, with less than half the time served.

  Because she was absolutely fucking lethal.

  Fingerlike protrusions extended from her shoulder-pads, each one a self-targeting flechette launcher. For several seconds, every Transgressor that headed in their direction simply exploded. It was like watching popcorn in a microwave — something he felt sure Tris could relate to.

  But ammunition for such devices was finite, and he knew from experience that special munitions ran out at the worst times.

  So did Sera. She was ready, with twin pulse rifles in place to take up the slack. Her armour did the heavy lifting, allowing her to aim and fire one of the heavy weapons in each hand. The effect was carnage, mowing down everything in her path. She barely moved as she fired, the withering hail of high-energy blasting scores of Transgressors into bloody ruin.

  Still the mindless creatures charged forwards, heedless of their deaths. It was just this tactic that overwhelmed defenders, as no human could comprehend them continuing to fight in the face of such losses. When ammunition ran out, people were forced to fight with knives. And so the Transgressors made their conquests — the shock troops that never tired, the war of attrition against a limitless foe.

  Fighting them was a place for logic and numbers, not passion and heroics.

  Sera’s pulse rifles fired until they were torn from her grasp.

  At which point she screamed.

  The sonic weapon was something entirely new to Kreon.

  She’d used it once before, to flatten a whole roomful of guards during his show-trial before the Lemurian Magistrate.

  Back there, it had knocked every man off his feet — and left Kreon with a ringing headache.

  This time she focussed it in a much narrower beam. Standing behind her, he heard almost nothing — but the effect on the enemy was unprecedented. A tidal wave of sound poured outwards, in a crescent shape from Sera. He could tell the shape of the weapon’s path, because everything hit by it simply disintegrated. Blood poured from the Transgressors’ eye sockets as they crumpled to the ground, their bodies pulverised by the sonic shock.

  It was terrifying, in its own way.

  Either she’d discovered this weapon recently, in which case it had just been lying around somewhere, and he’d missed it — or she’d had it all along, and never mentioned it to him during forty-odd years of marriage.

  Regardless. With the weapon expended, he strode forward to stand alongside her. He was under no illusions; he was vastly inferior in skill at arms. He doubted even Kyra would be a match for her, and prayed to Sydon it would never come to that. But he was no shirker, and Tris stepped up beside him, his father’s glaive in his hands.

  That boy would do well one day. He had a feeling.

  They just had to survive their current engagement.

  He activated his grav-staff, pulling off his gauntlet to do so. He was momentarily grateful there was atmosphere — this battle would be suicide without at least some of his advantages. Kreon relied on a variety of alien technology in battle — most notably the Aegis, a Kharash gem that used the wearer’s own metabolic energy to produce a potent forcefield. Sadly that would do nothing to help him here, where close combat was the order of business. He was fortunate indeed that it was not the only piece of exotic weaponry he employed.

  As the mass of twisted and deformed bodies surged towards their position, he exchanged a last glance with Tristan. “Fight hard,” he said, the helmet filtering out what little emotion he put into his voice, “and fight well.”

  He’d never been much good at motivational speaking.

  They did fight hard, and they did fight well.

  Sera gave up on ranged weaponry and drew her glittering sword. The first swipe of that ridiculous blade cut three of their opponents in half. She wielded it in both hands, but as fast as a normal sword; it was some time before any enemies made it past her to attack Kreon.

  Once that happened though, they were all on their own. Tris backed towards him as the Transgressors washed up against them like a tide, infinite and inexorable. Kreon smashed skulls left and right, his staff lending the mass of a meteorite to every blow. Each impact drove the monsters back, meeting their charge with a force they couldn’t repel.

  Then he heard Tris grunt with exertion, and realised that alone of all of them, the boy was unaided. No augmentation fortified his muscles; his only advantage was the hours of training Kyra had put into him, and the impossibly-sharp blade on the end of that staff. Beyond that, he was just a boy from Earth — barely out of his teenage years, with a man’s strength and wisdom yet to temper him.

  “Back!” he yelled, above the screams of rage and madness. Tris was handling himself incredibly well, but his strength was not limitless. Kreon had noticed that the boy’s ability to multi-task was also somewhat lacking. If the monsters got behind him…

  “Back!” he called again, and was rewarded with a scathing glance from Sera. Nevertheless, she retreated in step, until the cavern wall was right behind them. It limited their movement somewhat, and reduced their avenues of escape to zero. But what choice was there? Tris was his only chance to stem a much larger crisis — the Black Ships were still out there, sucking entire worlds dry on a schedule only they understood. He desperately needed Tris alive, to send through the Portal on Arixia…

  Or did he?

  With what they’d now deduced between them — was Tris necessary at all?

  It was hardly the time for a philosophical debate. He lashed out with his staff, crumpling another Transgressor and impeding the one behind it. Fighting them took a calm and rational disposition — an ability to curb the natural desire to panic in the face of almost certain death.

  That was one of Kreon’s other advantages. Not that he couldn’t die; most of his internal organs were dead already, but that wouldn’t make being torn limb from limb any less unpleasant.

  But he was prepared to die. He had been for centuries.

  That was his real advantage.

  But was Tristan?

  His internal debate was interrupted by a blinding flash.

  Even the horde of monsters paused to look up — as three Siszar nestships screeched into view! He’d never heard the sound of their engines in atmosphere before. It was an unearthly wail, like the souls of the damned straining to escape their torment.

  The flash had been a weapon of some kind, causing a fireball at the far end of the Atrium, but as far as he knew the Siszar used similar laser technology to humans. They couldn’t fire their main guns in here without frying everyone present. He experienced a pang of sudden fear, wondering if that seemed like an acceptable strategy to them. What was a handful of humans, more or less? Their species was at war with mankind, after all.

  But then valve-like hatches popped open on all three vessels, and their occupants squirmed out.

  They made the drop to the ground effortlessly, leaving their ships hovering above them.

  Each of the new arrivals was a gigantic Siszar male. Rather than land behind Kreon’s team, to throw their considerable weight behind the defence, each one of them chose a different portion of the battlefield. They hit the ground with a trio of thuds, announcing their presence with a bestial sound that welled up from all three simultaneously.

  A battle cry…

  And the Transgressors were happy to respond.

  * * *

  Kyra looked on in disbelief as the aliens dropped from the sky.

  Their huge forms rip
pled with aggression… a welcome assist, for sure.

  But were they planning on taking out the entire horde on their own?

  Maybe they were.

  With a roar that shook the trees, the Siszar attacked.

  The largest male, fully ten feet across, threw himself onto the Transgressors like a blanket. Kyra winced, knowing he must have been punctured by a dozen different blades, but the alien seemed not to care. He reared up, two of his limbs beneath him, two others hurling broken bodies through the air. The heavy tentacles came down again, slamming into the melee around him with bone-crushing force. His friends were similarly engaged, flinging Transgressors left and right in great armfuls. Every blow of those powerful limbs left two or more enemies crushed; the speed at which the mangled corpses piled up around them was breath-taking.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  A scream of pain pierced Kyra’s mind, so loud she almost dropped her swords. She tightened her grip instead, chopping away at the enemies who’d gotten close enough. She didn’t need to watch the big Siszar male die; she felt it, shared his agony as the rabid humans dragged him down and swarmed all over him. Blades stabbed in, claws tearing through his hide, carving chunks off him on all sides.

  It was a gruesome, agonising death. Whereas a human would have succumbed in seconds, the Siszar was so damn tough he lingered on. Long moments passed as he lay there immobile, his hearts pumping ichor into the ground, and still the enemy mauled him.

  By the time his soul was gone, there was almost nothing left of his body.

  Kyra cursed, as the group of Transgressors surrounding him turned towards her. The giant alien had made a big dent in the opposing forces, but was it enough?

  His friends still fought on, though even to Kyra’s untrained eye one of the aliens was flagging. Huge gashes had been torn across what passed for its body; all five limbs had taken heavy damage and were bleeding freely. Two of their tips had been cut off, and a third was still held on only by tendons; the Siszar was using it like a flail, bludgeoning its enemies with a wet thud.

  She daren’t turn her head to look for the third of them; it had vanished in the scrum surrounding Kreon, Tris and Sera.

  Kyra made two quick cuts, decapitating her opponents, and relaxed her stranglehold on the Gift. Filtering through the haze of fury surrounding her, she reached for the others.

  Tris and Kreon were fighting back to back, somehow still alive against the odds. As she looked on Kreon struck out with his grav-staff, knocking three of the monsters back with a single blow. Behind him Tris darted in to impale another, drawing back with perfect poise in time to deflect an attack from the side. His glaive could slice through several opponents at once, and none of the Transgressor’s hideous implanted weaponry could block it.

  Not that blocking was their style.

  Through Kreon’s eyes she saw Sera, swinging that great sword in sweeping arcs. Its blade was thick with blood, but the added strength and protection her armour granted was keeping her in the fight.

  Through Tris, she watched the third Siszar go down.

  For a split second he’d frozen, fascinated by the power of the alien as it smashed through a knot of monstrosities. That had been enough; he was out of step with Kreon, turning to face a different direction, and suddenly his back was unprotected.

  Death came for him then, a fresh group of nightmares with snipping shears and whirling saws.

  He noticed them too late, and was in the wrong position—

  When the Siszar flung itself atop the group, flattening the lot of them.

  It proved fatal however; the powered weaponry on its victims ripped through the Siszar’s flesh, opening it up like a tin can. Internal organs spilled out with an awful stench, and Kyra felt the alien’s life wink out.

  She also felt Tristan’s disbelief at what he’d just witnessed, and prayed the shock wouldn’t immobilise him. Then the sacrifice would be in vain. But he recovered swiftly, backing into a pocket swept clear by Sera.

  Kyra turned her attention back to her own fight, steeling herself as another group rushed her. She lifted her eyes to scan the terrain behind them, already rehearsing the sequence of moves she would use as her body settled into the familiar poise—

  And then she saw it.

  Saw them.

  A second bunch of Transgressors — make that, a second horde.

  Spilling out of a different tunnel mouth, a quarter of the way around the Atrium.

  Already they were closer than the first lot had been when they’d attacked…

  And there had to be thousands of them.

  Abominations flowed from the tunnel in an endless stream, encrusted with gore, arms and legs pumping, their blood-stained weapons flashing as they ran.

  Straight towards her.

  3

  Tris saw the fresh horde pouring from the tunnel mouth, and knew it would be the end of him.

  There were simply too many.

  His strength was flagging, his grip on his dad’s precious glaive was slippery with blood and bile; the ground around him was strewn with bodies, some still twitching or trying to get back up.

  Sooner or later he would trip, or the glaive would slip from his hand. Or his exhausted muscles would falter, letting an enemy in past his guard.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Ella, he thought, suddenly wishing he could speak to her using the Gift. A selfish part of him wished she was down there, fighting by his side, but he squelched that quickly. The thought of her delicate flesh carved into by Transgressor blades was too much. At least this way she’ll live…

  He risked a look back at Kreon. The old Warden had somehow kept his composure, and was wading through opponents like a medieval farmer threshing wheat.

  It wouldn’t last.

  It couldn’t — not against what was coming.

  Tris braced himself for the rush, and vowed to die well.

  And ideally, as painlessly as possible.

  Sera had moved forward again, giving herself more room to swing that giant sword. Her face was a study in anger, every line of it taut as she cut down her assailants in twos and threes.

  It almost gave him fresh hope…

  Almost.

  One look back at the approaching horde remedied that.

  From behind him, he heard Kreon curse. Instantly he tensed; had the Warden been injured? Would he go down? If he did, Tris was living the last seconds of his own life right now.

  “What?” Kreon roared — and Tris realised he was shouting into his comm unit.

  Great time for a chat.

  But he kept an ear on the conversation as he reversed his glaive, bashing a Transgressor in the chest before following up with a vertical slice through its brain.

  “ALI wants what?”

  This time Tris heard the unmistakable voice of the Folly’s computer, now picked up by his own comm unit but distorted by bursts of static.

  “The threats in orbit have been largely neutralised. ALI is requesting permission to provide you with assistance.”

  “Permission?” Kreon’s answer was incredulous.

  “Yes. It appears she has taken the lesson I gave her to heart. She is now requiring permission from you before bringing Wayfinder close enough to engage.”

  Tris frowned inside his helmet. There was nothing the ship could do in here anyway, as far as he knew. Not without incinerating the lot of them.

  “Yes, yes,” Kreon was saying, his tone expressing his frustration.

  Tris knew how he felt; they were literally fighting for their lives, and even the slightest distraction could prove deadly for all of them.

  “Very well,” Askarra’s voice came back, electronic and maddeningly calm. “I have authorised ALI to engage. Wayfinder is approaching the planet’s surface…”

  Tris would have rolled his eyes if he’d been able to spare the effort. He thrust forward with his glaive again, taking another enemy through the chest. He hauled back quick, not daring to let the weapon
become lodged, but his victim fell forwards, landing heavily on the shaft. Tris took a half step back to avoid the thing’s outstretched claws, and felt his heel catch on another body.

  For a second he teetered on the brink, sure he would recover his balance—

  Then he fell, landing on his back atop the corpse.

  A Transgressor loomed above him, joined by another as they scented a kill. A pair of gore-slicked blades darted in, one stabbing into his chest armour while he used his staff to deflect the other.

  He drew up into a ball and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the blow that would end his life—

  Nothing happened.

  His heart thudded loudly in the sudden silence.

  He opened his eyes a crack, still shielding his face with his glaive.

  And couldn’t believe what he saw.

  The Transgressors were falling. Every one of them, all across the battlefield. Like puppets with their strings cut, they crumpled to the ground mid-stride. Hundreds — maybe thousands of the things, grotesque amalgamations of meat and metal, they just… dropped.

  He spun to look at Kreon, and saw the same stunned surprise registered on the old Warden’s face.

  Across the way, Kyra stood up from a crouch, suddenly visible behind a mound of dead enemies. She glanced around in puzzlement; Àurea emerged beside her, reaching up to tug an exotic helmet off her head. She tentatively raised her free hand and waved.

  Sera had turned to face them. Her powerful armour was dented and bloody, with great rents torn in it by a variety of weapons. Her anger had faded, replaced by confusion. She looked at Kreon. “Did you do this?”

  Then their comm units crackled in unison. The voice Tris had been expecting — the cool monotone of his mother — was replaced by something chirpier, almost sing-song.

  “ALI reporting, Lord Anakreon! I detected Transgressors in your vicinity, so I have moved Wayfinder into broadcast range and transmitted the kill-code. Is their any additional assistance I can render?”

  Kreon’s jaw fell open. He stared at Sera for a good few seconds, obviously trying to come to grips with what had just happened.