“I noticed,” Aristedes said dryly when I pointed this out.
“Can we stop them?” I asked.
“Not unless you want to detonate an atomic in the upper atmosphere.”
I did not, as it happened.
“Then we’ll have to shoot them,” I said.
Lorian made no reply.
There must have been half a hundred siege towers looming over the city by that point, each surrounded by an undulating cloud of nahute drones.
“We should close the gate,” Valka said, words barely audible over the siren. “If those drones get into the hypogeum, ’twill mean bloodshed.”
“There are inner doors sealed,” I objected. “And we may need that gate open to retreat through if the time comes.”
A body fell from the terrace above and smacked wetly on the stones.
A Cielcin body. I recognized the organic design of the armor, the rubbery material recalling the shapes of the bone and fascia beneath, the pale hair braided and tied with strips of black cloth. Ichor black as ink pooled beneath it where it lay, and I did not doubt that it was dead. Its mask was turned toward me, a thing of pale ceramic, white as its broken sword and whiter than the silver-chalk complexion of its exposed lower jaw, thin lips and translucent teeth wet and black. The mask accentuated the rise and curl of horns, made the xenobite’s face somehow more pointed and angular.
And between the eyes like slits in burnished black was the symbol of a Pale hand. Clawed. Six-fingered. Grasping.
Shielded and with Pallino cursing after me, I took a few halting steps forward, sword unkindled in my hands. Its was the first body I’d seen in all that violence—though it would not be the last.
“Dorayaica . . .” I said, letting the creature’s limp head fall.
One of my guards fired his plasma burner: a tight, double burst. Two nahute struck the ground not five paces from where I knelt. Their smoldering wreckage twitched spasmodically on the paving stones and went dead. I half-expected to see a dozen more of the evil things descending from the crowd, but there was for the moment no sign.
“Yukajjimn! Uiddaa! Uiddaa!”
Though I had known the xenobites had come, to hear their words so plain beneath the light of day was a quiet horror, for creatures of the night such as they have no place in the sun. And yet there they were, rendered more horrifying by the daylight than any concealing darkness might have done. There must have been two dozen of them, garbed in the same organic-looking armor, black rubber and ceramic beneath short capes blacker still and decorated with swirling patterns of the Udaritanu, the circular writing that aped the marks of the Quiet’s monuments, a kind of blasphemous appropriation. Pale white were their horned masks and white the true horns of their crests that rose like diabolic crowns from their brows.
All this I processed in the space of an instant, for a moment thereafter the flash of two dozen nahute filled the air between us. Plasma fire answered. I kindled my sword and stepped forward, sensing Pallino and one of the others—Renna, perhaps?—close behind. I slashed one of the nahute neatly in half and closed on the enemy . . . and stopped, remembering the force at my back, hidden from the Cielcin by the angle of the street and the tunnel mouth. I smiled, plasma and xenobite weapons flashing about me, and drew back a step.
The Cielcin came on, and beneath the masks they wore to shield their eyes I saw the bare-toothed snarl that was a smile for their kind. My helm’s impassive human face offered them no reply, no indication of the trap they had walked into. Thus concealed, I allowed myself a satisfied grimace, teeth clenched and ready.
“On my mark, turn and run,” I said.
“Eh?” Pallino sounded scandalized.
“Just past the opening to the tunnel,” I said, flinching as one of the nahute battered against my shield.
Understanding filled the chiliarch’s loud Ooh and the comm channel—muffled by our suits and unheard by the Cielcin—shook with the rough sound of the old soldier’s laughter. “Well, why not?” He relayed an order to his men in the tunnel. “Ready.”
“Now!”
I turned and—spurring Valka ahead of me—pressed back along the high street, past the round arch of the tunnel and the iron-barred gates that had kept the citizens out of the hypogeum in peacetime. Hooting and screeching, the Cielcin followed, and the shadows of their pale swords chased us along the stone. Passing the gate, we turned, and I sliced another of the nahute out of the sky. Its pieces bounced away. One went over the railing to the terraces below. The five guardsmen who’d left the tunnel with me to investigate the corpse turned and fired past them, but their shots went wide. One round struck the beast I felt certain was their commander, distinguished by its nearly eight-foot height and ceramic brooch that held its cape in place: fashioned in the shape of a skeletal white hand.
The commander leered as the plasma round washed off it. I saw the brief glimmer of a shield curtain and turned back myself to face the creature.
That was when our men opened fire.
Plasma fire and MAG rounds tore from the mouth of the tunnel and turned the unshielded scahari to mounds of meat and smoking armor. But the commander was not alone in being shielded. Five stood alongside it, laughing and defiant. They saw our numbers in the hall and knew they must die, but would die in glory and battle and take as many of us as they could back to hell with them.
“Svassa!” I said. Surrender!
The commander looked at me, teeth bared. Long ago, on Emesh, the Ichakta Uvanari had surrendered to us because its will was broken. It was surrounded, its people injured, its ship lost beyond recall. Its had not been a combat expedition, but an exploratory one. They had not thought to find humanity on Tamnikano—on Emesh. The Battle of Emesh had been no proper battle, and the Cielcin we’d faced there were no true soldiers.
These were.
Still leering, the commander peeled its nahute from its belt and hurled it at me.
I sliced the weapon from the air and closed the space between us in five long strides, sword rising in a diagonal cut. The commander must not have known highmatter, for it raised its sword to parry. My blade clove through the xenobite’s zircon sword and through rubber and armor and flesh. Black blood spattered the stone at my feet as the creature fell in twain. Pallino and Valka and the soldier Renna all moved forward to stand with me against the others.
The Battle for Berenike had begun at last.
CHAPTER 76
THE GIANT
“FALL BACK!” ONE CENTURION cried.
I watched from the rail as one unit pulled back across one of the arching bridges that spanned the river a thousand feet below. The Cielcin followed on, nahute swarming about them like a plague of locusts, tearing at the defenders.
The bridge exploded an instant after. Chunks of mortar and white stone flew in every direction. Red flame, black smoke, the tangled shrapnel of bodies torn asunder. In the middle distance, one of the Cielcin siege towers erupted in a cloud of fire that tore the crumbling walls about it apart and set the trees on the terrace to burning.
Sparrowhawks screamed above, circling over the city, tangling with the black darts of Cielcin fliers that had come down with the towers. If I stood by the rail and looked up along the terraced wall of the Valles, I could see the square ramparts that lined the edge of the valley and the winged shapes of Irchtani wheeling overhead, their zitraa flashing in the sun. Beyond them, the sky glowed red and violent white as weapons fire discharged in the void about Ondu Station.
The sirens wailed above it all, a ceaseless, flat droning in the ears. The noise gave the tableau a sense of unreality as I watched, a part of and yet apart from the violence. Gunshots sounded on the level above us, and I heard the thump and rattle of armored feet. Briefly I caught a glimpse of white armor and red tabards on the terrace above, the cough and shout of plasma fire as the men fired over their shoulders. A school of nahute s
wam on the airs after them, writhing, churning, hungry for flesh. There must have been three dozen of them.
“Here!” I cried, waving my hands. “Here!”
One of the soldiers spied me as they rounded the bend beyond—and to my horror I saw that they were all peltasts. Unshielded. There were seven of them, the remnants of some larger unit. Where their decurions were I could not guess. Spying me, they changed plan and half-threw themselves down the steps, the evil drones grinding at their heels.
“Lord Marlowe!” one cried.
“Back!” I shouted, pushing the man past me. “Valka!”
The last in line of the peltasts stumbled on the uneven flagstone steps that led to the thoroughfare and staggered a moment against the rail. It was one moment too long. Three of the nahute overtook him, snarling heads catching on the rubberized polymers of his suit underlayment, tearing as they burrowed. The man’s screams were piercing even with the sirens’ blast. Blood sheeted over white ceramic.
He was dead before I got to him.
The nahute emerged a moment later, wet and dripping. I destroyed them before they could fully emerge and shake off the blood and torn flesh. Half a dozen more locked onto me and charged, rebounded as they struck my shield curtain. It would take their primitive machine brains a moment to work out the shield’s weakness, but in that space of time they were within the reach of my sword. Highmatter shone blue about me, and the serpent machines fell in pieces.
But there were too many. Behind me, my guard opened fire, and I heard screaming as one of the alien drones found its way through the man’s defenses. Try as I might to attract the worst of them, the nahute kept coming. I felt the teeth of one grind against one armored thigh, piercing my shield by accident. One hand flailed reflexively and snapped the thing away, but it was too late. The diamond-bit teeth had caught on my armor and began to turn. I flipped my sword round and slashed at it, hewing the metallic snake just behind its jaw. Grasping what remained, I tugged it loose and cast its ruin upon the stones at my feet.
There were always more. The air about churned and buzzed with the thrum of their primitive repulsors, so loud and so close that even the wailing siren was dimmed.
And then they stopped, and full dozens fell lifeless to the street about me.
Turning, I saw Valka standing with hand outstretched and head cocked to one side. She gave me a satisfied little nod and tapped her temple. I could not see her face through the featureless red of the visor, but I knew her tight smile was firmly in place.
“What would you do without me?” she asked.
Something huge and dark fell on her from above. Man-shaped and more than man-high, white hands grasping. Valka yelled as the thing crushed her beneath it. A moment later, a half dozen more of the scahari warriors fell from the street above. Another of my guardsmen fell with a scimitar in his throat. I didn’t hesitate, but threw myself toward Valka’s attacker and opened it from hips to shoulder blade with a rising flicker of my moonlight blade.
Valka seized my hand and I helped her to her feet.
“You were saying?”
Pallino fired a round from his lance that felled another of the attackers, and Renna and another soldier did for another. Valka drew her sidearm, the antique plasma repeater, and unloaded three rounds in the back of a third. The remaining Cielcin tried to flee, to break off and regroup—but it was too late. Another decade of troops poured forth from the shadow of the tunnel mouth and claimed them.
In the eerie stillness that followed, some of the others picked over the bodies, relieving them of knives and scimitars and other artifacts worth saving.
“Where do you come from?” Pallino asked the survivors.
One man, a triaster, answered, “Up a ways.” The man turned his head from the chiliarch, not seeing him or else afraid to see.
It was not a substantial answer, not an informative one. “Name and rank, out with it!”
The fellow just turned away, glancing back at his fellow dead on the stairs. Pallino slapped him with the butt of his lance. “Eyes up, soldier!”
The man seemed to come back to himself. “Kuhn, sir. Four-Beta two-two. Triaster.”
“Fourth Cohort . . .” Pallino said. “This your first?”
“Sir, no sir.”
“Then stop acting like it,” Pallino’s words came flat. “The hell happened?”
“Demons!” one of the others said. “Giants, sir!”
Giants. Behind my mask I shut my eyes, gathered what scattered pieces of myself I could to ask, “Were they chimeras?”
The men of the Fourth Cohort had not fought aboard Iubalu’s ship, nor had any of them plumbed the depths of the fortress at Arae.
“Chi . . . what?” The legionnaire struggled with the antique word.
“Machines,” I said. “Metal.”
Triaster Kuhn only bobbed his head. I imagined his face green, lips compressed behind the dull white helm.
Giants. The word conjured memories of Iubalu’s looming bulk, its white arms and swords, its fingers like scalpel blades. Bastard creation of Cielcin blood and Extrasolarian praxis, hateful and accursed.
“Giants . . .” I said, and pointing to the tunnel, I said, “Triaster, take your men to the rear. You’re no use to anyone as you are.” I brushed past the fellow, stepping over the bodies of the Cielcin as carefully as I could, white cape gathered in one fist, blade unkindled in the other. “We need to see what’s going on out there,” I said to Pallino. “Send two decades.”
* * *
Pallino chose two of his decurions. With Siran gone, the chiliarch had not appointed a new prime centurion to replace her, and the duty fell to two officers who had been with us since before Aptucca. I watched them go: the glint of red fires on armor the color of bone, the way the decurions’ crests swayed as they ran. Still I felt useless waiting and watching. Weak. I tried to reach for my vision of the endless present, but try as I might to look in those directions no mortal eye was meant to see, I could not find it. I could not focus, and my frustration only further alienated me from the sight.
Cannon fire filled the air from the inner wall above as the wreckage of towers fell like rain. Off in the distance, another of the towers erupted in white flame, and a cheer went up through the comm line.
But it was not to last.
“More ships incoming!” Lorian’s words came like evil prophecy falling from on high, and accompanying them came the roar of entry and the scream of retro-rockets as Cielcin siege towers crashed against the shores of our world.
“Keep firing!” I said, watching another of the towers explode as it slowed in its final descent.
A horrible flash filled the air. Not the red glow of weapons fire like lightning beyond the clouds, but something orange and horribly present, and a dozen things happened at once.
The sirens died, and all the lights of the city of Deira from the highest terrace to the river far below. An instant later the earth groaned and shook as with spasm, and I staggered against the rail. Shouts and cursing filled the common band, mingled with cries of despair. The city was dead. I knew before I asked Lorian what had happened.
“They hit the nuclear generator,” came the intus’s words. “City’s switching to emergency power.”
“Geothermal?” I asked, thinking of the tunnels and the old mines that ran beneath the Storm Wall.
“Yes.”
With the raid sirens gone, there was nothing to deaden the noise of fighting, the screams of men and Cielcin, the crack and roar of fires and of weapons. It was almost quiet, and the sudden clearness of the air lent an eerie sense of stillness to all that passed above and below and about us, as if we were all a part of some frieze carved on a Chantry wall.
“We’re well outside the exclusion zone,” Lorian said. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. The power plant had been built nearly forty miles from the Storm
Wall, far enough to keep the people safe from radiation. “The wind could be a problem.” The blast must have carried radioactive material higher than the level of wall.
“Let’s pray not.”
A horrible sound arose from the depths of that fading city. High and piercing, vibrating clearer and colder than the noise of any human throat. I felt my blood run cold. There was no sound like it in all the human universe, for its makers were far from human. That terrible sound had once issued from deep caverns beneath alien suns where the forefathers of the forefathers of the Cielcin had scrambled in the ceaseless dark. It was the sound of black caverns, of volcanic tubes and grottoes filled with blind things that splashed and paddled in forsaken pools. It was the noise of creatures that spilled blood and sacrificed to nameless things in darkness deeper still.
“Lorian!” I said, voice tense even in my own hearing. “Lorian, open fire!”
The commander did not reply. Not with words. The Javelin missiles rained down the city and broke against the shoals of nahute defending the towers. Another of the siege towers blew apart, blasting shrapnel five hundred feet into the sky.
Snatches of comms chatter clipped over one another on the general comm, bits of shouted intel overlapping as I tried to make sense of the shape of the fighting on my suit’s display.
“Half a dozen towers in the industrial quarter—”
“—lost the whole eighth decade.”
“Man down! Man down!”
“Stick to your target! Remember the simulations!”
“—the size of them!”
“Came in too fast, I—”
And then I heard the fateful words, the words that told me my hours of waiting by the sidelines must end: “They’re climbing the inner wall!”
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