by Jody Wallace
She braced herself as Will drove through the gates. Traveling toward shades instead of away from them seemed foolhardy, but war was foolhardy. Three more Jeeps followed, filled with some of her best people. Floodlights and headlights alike trained on the encroaching black barrier, lending the entities an almost nauseating swirl, like an oil slick on waves.
The Jeeps bounced across the dirty, half-melted snow and cleared ground in the area surrounding Chanute, which had been razed to prevent attackers from finding easy camouflage. The shades’ eager hiss filled the air, drowning out other sounds.
Tendrils of overeager shades reached toward the incoming sentients. Laser rifles, more powerful than bands, scorched the initial fingers, and the horde recoiled, shivering as if stung.
“That’s close enough,” Adam said through their arrays. “My skin is itchy. I’m ready.”
Without asking permission, he jumped out of the Jeep, grabbed her around the neck, and kissed her. Nobody said a word.
“Kiss for luck before you…don’t die.” Now she was quoting Lassiter.
He smiled. “I can work with that.”
She touched his cold cheek and studied his face. Was this the last time she’d see him alive? This decision wasn’t easy—sending him in. She had to have faith that he had this ability for a reason, that it could be used against the entities instead of against humanity. She had to trust that he could mold it into what their planet needed.
“Come back to me. That’s an order.”
He nodded before heading out. His yellow slicker gleamed in the headlights. They were a fifth of a mile from the shades, on level ground, and could see everything.
Those in the spearhead with sensor arrays trained their attention on the skies, guarding against inbound daemons. The laser rifles blasted apart creepers of shades, holding the horde back. If Adam couldn’t slow the entities, they’d need to be careful they didn’t get cut off. This section of the convergence, the one closest to their people, had to die first.
Adam reached the wavering line of shades in short order. All the lights, everything they had, focused on him.
It was as if the entire camp was holding its breath. He halted, every line of his body cast in sharp relief. The daemons’ cries faded into the background.
He backed up. The shades, in such a sizeable mass, didn’t advance quickly, yet they seemed hesitant to approach him. But then their edges swelled, encasing him in a fat semicircle of black.
Over a private band on the array, she thought she heard him tell her that he loved her…and then he waded in.
Every instinct in her body begged him to shy away from the evil. Some cynical part of her expected him to go down. But he didn’t. He remained head and shoulders above the shades, miraculously unharmed.
“I am receiving your data, Adam,” Ship’s toneless voice echoed through everyone’s array. “You are a miracle. Your efforts will not be in vain.”
He’d already shed his winter gloves. When he plunged his arms into the shades, Claire flinched.
Instantly, his head fell back, and he uttered something like a howl.
“Get him out of there!” She fired at the shades to one side of him, careful not to flame near his body. If they could forge a path, they could drive to him and—
“Hold on, hold on.” Will snatched her arm before she could hurl herself out of the Jeep. “He’s still standing.”
“Are you sure we should advance, ma’am?” their gunner asked. “He looks…I think he’s doing it. The entities around him are getting sucked in.”
That was when the first daemon dive-bombed Adam.
Laser beams slammed into it from two different directions, blasting it back, sideways, and down.
When it disappeared beneath the shades, it didn’t emerge.
Odd—current Shipborn theory taught that daemons weren’t eaten by the shades since they had no souls or essence, similar to most of the animals on Terra. While Terran wildlife didn’t appreciate the entities, the shades had no effect on them. Maybe the daemon was too wounded to rise, and maybe this was more evidence that the daemons had evolved, or devolved, into carnivores…with souls.
Claire’s array warned of an incoming daemon, and she scanned the sky, relying as much on her enhanced eyesight as the sensors. The stars blotted out far too close to her, and she fired.
The beam lit up the daemon, and it clawed at its chest. She maintained the beam, gritting her teeth against the pain in her blistered forearm. Another shooter—Will—joined her.
The daemon dodged. Since it was half on fire, they tracked it easily, as did others, and they all pummeled it. Lasers from all directions exploded it to bits.
“Don’t let the daemons fall into the shades if you can help it,” she recommended across everyone’s array. If the daemons had developed some kind of soul essence, why feed the shades with it?
Alternating between the daemons and shades occupied them for a solid ten minutes. She couldn’t tell if Adam was making a dent in the horde, but her band was keeping him safe. Her stomach alternately knotted and unknotted with each monster her people killed.
Cries and shouts from the walls, as well as frenetic reports through the array, indicated they weren’t faring well with some of the best shooters protecting Adam. She sent a Jeep back. She could be equal to two shooters for him. Or three. She picked up a laser pistol in her left hand and started double-timing whatever entities she saw. Will followed her lead.
Perhaps they should incorporate ambidexterity in their training regime.
The scent of scorched daemons and vaporized shades eventually had everyone coughing and gagging. Ship chimed in every so often with updates on how many shades and daemons it approximated they had killed.
“You are beginning to reduce the horde,” Ship told her. “Please be advised there is a large bulge in the right flank threatening the city walls near the garage.”
“Dix, can you send anyone to the roof of the garage?” Claire called through the array. “Ship says we have an influx there.”
“Can’t. Shades reached the livestock fields in the back of the encampment.” Dixie sounded frightened, uncertain, and she was at the weapons cache, not in the thick of things. “I’m not sure how long we can keep them from pancaking us.”
“If all else fails, get to a floodlight tower. Easier to hold them off from on high.” Claire studied Adam, deep in the shades. His yellow slicker glowed against the oily black sea that circled him. Because the horde was larger than the one at the farm, she couldn’t tell whether he was draining it. “I know we can do this, if Adam can just—ah, shit.”
Out of the darkness from the north, a daemon swooped across the horde. It careened over Adam and released a large piece of metal on his head.
Adam, in the throes of whatever he was enduring, managed to dodge, but his broken concentration sent the horde surging toward Claire and her soldiers like a wave breaking on the shore. They redirected their fire from the skies to the shades to avoid being overtaken. Lasers blazed along the shades’ front wall like flamethrowers.
That gave the daemons easier access to Adam. Another dove for him. Before it could drop its debris, their gunner shot the metal out of its hands.
Finally, Adam righted himself and plunged his arms back into the shade pool. The horde’s forward flow…halted.
“What’s going on?” Dixie asked. “Update me, Claire.”
“It’s okay. False alarm. Adam’s definitely making an impact,” Claire reassured her. If he could stop the slimy progress of this branch of the convergence, he was sucking down shades at a fast rate. “He’s doing it, Dix. It’s working. Once he finishes here, we’ll move him to the back half of Chanute.”
“Did you see that?” Will’s voice cut through the hiss of shades and buzz of laser weapons. “Those fucking daemons tried to drop a roof on Adam.”
“I did,” she said grimly. She relayed the new tactic to Ship, transferring the recording from her sensor array, though Ship probably
had access to others. “Evolving.”
She ordered the guards on the spotlights to broaden their scope, encompassing the sky around Adam more than Adam himself. They couldn’t let the daemons bludgeon him with wreckage, but they couldn’t get any closer to him. Not with all those shades in the way.
Unfortunately, the daemons clued into their strategy, and Claire heard screams from the walls.
One of the floodlights chunked out. Dixie reported, “Daemons got floodlight D. Maybe the men there, too.”
“Get someone up there to fix it, now,” she told Dixie, though it was unnecessary. Dix might be scared, but she knew what to do.
Moments later, the giant revolving spotlight hurtled out of the darkness toward Claire’s Jeep. It crashed against the side, rocking the vehicle and spraying glass splinters all over everyone. The gunner swiveled the rifle and razed the air, slicing the daemon that had delivered it through the wing.
It screamed at him and flapped unsteadily into the night.
“Did you see that?” Will yelled again, dumfounded.
“Adam, the daemons are stepping up with the debris,” Claire warned, not sure if he could hear. “If they smash all the floodlights, we have to retreat. We gotta have light to keep the daemons off you. We’ll have to hit the towers until dawn.”
He didn’t respond—but far beyond him, near the edge of the flattened area they’d created to surround Chanute, Claire noticed something pale and unexpected.
She quickly confirmed with the array—she could see the snow. White, uncovered snow. An end of the blackness. An end of this section of the horde.
“Is that what I think it is?” She zipped the on-the-scene data to Ship.
“The far edge of this entity patch,” Ship confirmed. “Adam appears to have absorbed approximately fifty-four percent of this incursion.”
“Wonder how much he can hold?” she replied. “What kind of data is he relaying?”
“He is not responding to hails,” Ship said. “He is no longer communicating or voluntarily supplying me with a live feed.”
“That’s not good.” A trio of daemons swooped out of the night sky, straight toward the Jeeps. Everyone directed their weaponry at them, knocking one into the shades and setting one on fire.
The third daemon dodged the blasts and landed on the hood of a Jeep. Quick as a blink, it was over the windshield and slashing at the occupants with its four clawed hands.
“Get over there,” she ordered Will, heart thumping. “Take that fucker out.”
If they lost the rifleman and crew, they may as well head for Chanute. They couldn’t hold off the daemons and shades with two laser rifles and six people.
Will vaulted out of their vehicle and fired at the other with unerring aim—while running. Claire scanned the air around Adam, hoping the triad of daemons wasn’t a prelude to a sneak attack.
“Watch the sky,” she warned the other soldier. “Train your sensor array behind us.”
Claire’s fears were well founded. Another trio of daemons plummeted directly overhead, but her sensors blared in time.
In time for her, anyway.
She jumped and yelled for the gunner to follow, but he stayed where he was, rifle pointed at the sky. The daemons arrowed straight down as if they intended to splatter into the ground headfirst.
She caught one daemon in the back with a blast, tumbling it through the air, while the gunner pegged another with the rifle on the tripod. But the third daemon crashed directly into the Jeep.
It exploded on impact.
Claire gritted her teeth, frustrated the soldier hadn’t done as he was told. Goddammit. There was no way he’d survived that, but that didn’t mean the daemon would be burned alive. She peered through the orange heat, looking for daemons to emerge.
On cue, one strode out of the flames, its peculiar, bow-legged gait menacing. If she could kill it before it reached her, that would be preferable. She blasted the daemon, snarling right back at it.
It kept lumbering forward as it fought the lethal shove of her laser. Her arm began to heat unbearably. Just when she thought she was going to have to switch to the handheld, her beam tunneled through the monster’s torso, and it went down.
However, one of its companions wasn’t badly injured. With a harsh screech, it galloped toward her across the uneven ground, its hind talons kicking up chunks of snow and mud.
When she assaulted it with her band and handheld at the same time, it dodged. That beam sizzled into the night, and the daemon made it halfway to her before she could focus her weapons on it again.
But then her blaster band sputtered.
And went out.
“Shit!” Claire flicked her arm, hard, shaking off the pain. The shake awakened her multipurp band, sending a full-sized sword into her palm.
She fucking hated hand-to-hand. She was a gun person, all the way.
But a daemon was hard to stop with a handheld. She darted forward, meeting it with a sword to the neck.
The blade stuck, nearly jerking her arm out of its socket. The daemon swung at her with two of its four arms. The black claws swished by her head, too close, and severed her array.
Claire shouted in its face. When it screeched back, she jammed her handheld in the monster’s gnashing mouth, wedging it sideways. Acidic saliva sizzled on her glove. She pulled the trigger, hoping she could get clear in time, and set the gun to self-destruct.
The daemon screamed as it tried to dig the weapon out, but its talon cut its face.
She dove for the ground and rolled with only seconds to spare. She barely escaped the small, intense explosion. Claire’s body hurtled forward, and something rigid thunked into her back. Debris?
Indeed. The daemon’s head tumbled past her feet.
Well, one more down, and she needed that sword back. It was the only weapon she had left.
“I’m down to a multipurp,” she said over her array before she remembered it, too, was dead.
A soldier from one of the other Jeeps raced up to her. “I saw what happened. Are you hurt?”
She catalogued her aches and pains. Graze to the arm. Daemon saliva burning her hand. She ripped off that glove and shoved her fingers in the snow. “Nothing serious. Give me your array and your handheld.”
He obliged as quickly as possible, because more daemons were coming.
They weren’t going to be able to guard Adam. Sure, he was destroying the horde, but too slowly. They needed to regroup and tackle the shades after they’d handled the daemons, but how could they notify Adam of the switch?
She yanked the dead array out of her head. Blood trickling down her cheek, she inserted the new one. The Shipborn were funny with their hygiene worries—cleaning everything before they inserted it—but Terrans knew there wasn’t always time for that.
“Now we’re blood related,” she joked to the guy, wiping her cheek on the shoulder of her Kevlar. Hell, after tonight, she’d end up with everyone’s blood in her body.
As soon as the implant synced with her endo-organics, she conveyed a message to Adam. “Retreat. Retreat. Adam, retreat to a tower. Retreat. There are too many daemons. Retreat.”
No answer. He remained in the sea of shades, body stiff, hands plunged beneath the black surface.
“Fuck.” They couldn’t lose him. She couldn’t lose him. How much longer could they protect him?
“Shade update,” she demanded from Ship. “What’s his absorption rate?”
“This is not your array,” Ship commented. “Is the original owner of this array alive?”
“He’s fine,” she barked. “Now answer my question.”
A daemon streaked through the air, headed for Adam. She and her partner blazed it, followed by a third beam—Will. He’d carried a wounded soldier to the gates and returned to the battle.
Ship responded. “His absorption rate has slowed. He has ingested 78% of the horde. This horde should be neutralized in roughly twenty minutes.”
Claire kicked the multipurp
sword free of what was left of the detonated daemon, letting the snow cool it enough for her to grab. “For sure?”
“Only if he can continue to absorb at this rate,” Ship amended. “We have no way of knowing at what point he will be full. Cullin hypothesizes there is no top limit, like with entities, but I disagree. Human bodies have physical constraints, unlike shades, and—”
“Don’t bug me with the science right now, Ship. We can’t last twenty more minutes with this many daemons.” And they couldn’t fall back and leave Adam unguarded. She called him through the array, over and over. “Adam, report.”
“The daemons are stopping,” Dix announced, array crackling. One of the men at a floodlight confirmed. “They’re flying away and…uh-oh.”
The daemons herded in the air above the walls, circling each other, before swarming toward the horde all at the same time, a flock of migrating monsters.
“Do you see—?”
“Don’t say it,” Claire warned Will. “Everyone, on the gates, on the ground, do whatever you can to stop that swarm. And somebody bring me a fucking blaster band.”
All the soldiers in the spearhead directed their lasers at the incoming daemons. They didn’t have anywhere near enough firepower. Daemons streamed from different parts of Chanute, daemons with ragged wings, daemons with wounds, daemons in all conditions.
Well, this disproved the Shipborn’s belief that the daemons didn’t really communicate.
“Cullin says this should not be possible,” Ship said.
“Cullin needs to shut the fuck up because he isn’t here to see this.” She aimed carefully for wings, the most easily wounded part on a daemon. Grounded daemons were less of a threat. Her lousy-ass handheld wasn’t powerful enough to waste trying to melt their heads.
The daemons screeched defiance. They winged straight for the center of the horde, where Adam was slowly absorbing the shades.
“Actually,” Ship said, “about Cullin’s location. There has been an incident.”
From above, Claire heard a whining drone that sounded like…