I’d felled the beast with a single blow.
An almighty cheer went up from the defenders, and I almost laughed aloud. Something in the state of alert focus that the coming threat had placed on me jogged my mind to the right attitude, and the vision shifted into place.
Emboldened by my little miracle, the men fought with vigor renewed . . . or might have done, were it not that elation turned to dread the moment after, for even as the ruin of my enemy smote the earth, the sky turned all to fire and thickened with smoke and light.
An armada descended. Dozens of siege towers and shuttles and lighter craft quitting the battle above screamed out of space with a vengeance. Too many, far more than had appeared in our scans of the first attack group. Their second fleet had arrived. And behind? Behind the gray skies were made white with the flash of annihilation to shame the very sun.
Annihilation.
For a moment, neither man nor Cielcin moved, and all was still in Deira but the flames.
Then the chilling alien cry rose up again, and a voice deep as the waters of Vorgossos spoke from below in the tongue of men. “Your fleet is gone.”
Peering down from the battlements, I saw the thirty-foot monstrosity standing there, its bulbous head and glowing metal eyes sweeping along the line of the battlement, and knew that deep voice was its own.
Not to be persuaded by the enemy, I radioed the command center. “Report.”
It was not Aristedes who answered me, but the grim voice of Leonid Bartosz. “They came out of nowhere. The Cielcin got a . . . got one of their ships inside Ondu Station defenses. Blew their own reactor.”
Cold iron seized my heart. “And the fleet?”
“Reeling. Mostly destroyed.”
“Hauptmann clustered them too close,” Lorian said. “Set off a chain annihilation.”
“The Tamerlane?” I could hardly manage the words. Corvo, Durand, Crim, Ilex, Elara, Okoyo, and all the rest . . . they could not be gone. I had an inkling then of how Aranata Otiolo must have felt standing in the garden while its whole world burned. “Is there word from Corvo?”
The intus answered, “If there is, comms won’t get through until the radiation dissipates.”
No word, then. I held my breath in the strange stillness of the wall, eyes pressed momentarily shut as I tried and failed to master myself. The horror was too much. Was that a tear on my face? I clenched my jaw, and as Aranata had sworn vengeance, I swore I would tear every remaining ship from the sky with my bare hands if I had to.
The sky!
The Cielcin fleet had quit the field and cleared it for their suicidal attack on our own, and their arrival on Berenike carved black channels of smoking cloud across the heavens. Blue-white flared the sparks of retro-rockets slowing their descent, and the noise of them put the thunder to shame. Our Sparrowhawks rose in answer, and the flash of their guns and of the javelins on the wall below turned many a vessel into a fine mist and rain of shrapnel in the upper airs. Lightning flashed from the encroaching storm clouds, and far along the wall I saw two more of the demons of Arae make the ramparts and fall among my men.
I am not certain if a hell awaits the unjust hereafter, but I know there are hells in this life.
“Velenammaa totajun!” came a bass rumble from the realms below. “Take them! Take them all!”
Looking out, I saw the giant had left the shadow of the arch. Like the smaller chimeras, it moved ape-like across the plaza below, moving on hands and knees with a noise like mighty hammers pounding.
“Paqqaa omandiun ija ba-totajun!”
“Message from Corvo!” Lorian said. “She’s alive!”
Relief blossomed in me even as I watched that hideous giant reach the foot of the wall. “Patch her through!” I almost shouted, fear and fury warring with relief to find the Norman captain still alive.
Her voice floated in a moment after, pressed flat and oddly hollow in my ears. “Hadrian . . .” No rank, no Marlowe.
“What the hell happened?”
Fire rained on the giant below as once more the Sparrowhawks wheeled. A massive siege tower smashed the ramparts a mile south of our position and almost instantly scahari screamed from its holds. The tower exploded a moment after, destroyed by the Javelin emplacement it had landed within a thousand feet of.
“Their second fleet just . . . appeared. Must have come out of warp on the far side of the planet, else we’d have seen them sooner. Surveillance grid’s in shambles.” I could hear the strain in her voice, the numbing shock ebbing as awareness of loss drained in. “Their first fleet scattered, made an opening. They sacrificed a frigate, flew it clean through Hauptmann’s cordon and slowed up inside the station’s shields.”
I swore. Ondu Station had contained huge reserves of antihydrogen for refueling warp drives, and the resulting annihilation had cascaded, bypassing shield after shield in its unholy fury until no ship left was left within range. Mere chance had saved Corvo and the Tamerlane.
“We got lucky, but I’d wager there aren’t more than a dozen of us left up here,” she said. “What should we do?”
“How long until the rest of the fleet returns?” I asked.
“Three days,” Lorian answered. “Any closer and the Cielcin might have detected them, realized they weren’t really gone.”
Three days. “We can’t hold for three days,” I said. We would not hold out three hours. “Especially not with that second fleet.”
“They hit us from both ends,” Corvo said. “Tore the defense fleet apart. They must have . . . a thousand ships? Fifteen hundred?”
“Is there any sign of the worldship?”
“No, nothing.”
I clenched my jaw. If there had been it might have been possible to launch a bombing run on it with all available ships, force the Cielcin to panic, but unlike Ulurani and Aranata and all the other princes I had known, this Dorayaica had held its worldship in abeyance, safe from harm.
A luxury it could afford with a fleet of its size.
The Cielcin had boxed us in nicely. We were trapped on Berenike with their army at the gates and no relief coming for days. Plenty of time for the giant and its forces to crack the Storm Wall like an egg and suck the life from its heart. When the rest of the Cielcin fleet arrived—if more were indeed coming, as I feared—we would all be neatly counted and packed aboard their siege towers for return to the alien Dark. And worse . . . whatever else happened, the Cielcin had already achieved what I guessed was their aim.
Titus Hauptmann was dead.
The stodgy old officer had held the front for more than a century, and if the attack on Marinus was a trap set to catch the old hunter it had succeeded. Perhaps our single greatest asset in the Veil and Expanse was lost. But there had been no way to know how fast this fleet of Dorayaica’s was. It was an incredible thing, a dozen times larger than any fleet of the Pale heretofore encountered by man.
Recalling my vision of strange kingdoms and empires stretched across the farther stars, the immeasurable scope of them all . . . I shivered and swore, “Black planet . . .”
Present necessity brought me back from those distant shoals. Bartosz’s voice sliced through my black mood. “Marlowe, pull your men back into the tunnels.”
A hollow formed in the pit of my stomach. “Abandon the city?”
“The city is lost,” he said, sounding light-years away. “Abandon the wall!”
“We can’t, sir,” I said. “Not without abandoning the Javelins to the enemy!”
The line was dead.
“Aristedes?” I said. “Marlowe to Aristedes.”
“Still here.”
“What happened?”
Lorian paused a moment, and I imagined him peering over the lip of his console in the command center. I could almost feel the slow track of his watchful eyes as he said, “The legate quit the field, sir.”
“What do you mean he quit the field?” I clambered back into the command post, brushing past Valka and Pallino on the stair. “Where did he go?”
“He just . . . left, lord,” Lorian said, uncharacteristically formal.
I swore. “You’re in command there, then.”
The wall rocked beneath me, and I lurched against an open crate of energy lances. A huge iron hand wrapped fingers around the merlon nearest me, crushing stone beneath its weight, and a moment later a single massive red eye peered over the ramparts.
Pallino shot it.
Shield flicker fading, the giant pulled itself higher until its whole head loomed before me. The face was large as a passenger shuttle, like a huge moon rising above the wall. I could see the aperture in one massive eye tighten and focus.
“You.” Its voice was like the sea in storm. “Tuka okun-se belu wo.”
I am proud to say I did not falter, but locked eyes with the creature some fifty feet away.
Valka and Pallino stayed behind me. No one fired their weapon—no one seemed to move. Surprising even myself, I took a step forward. “Marossa okun-kih!” I said. Name yourself.
The giant laughed. “You are the one who liberated poor Iubalu? You are so small.” One fist wide as I was tall clenched and crushed the battlement between its fingers, sending up clouds of dust.
“You know me?” I asked, speaking the alien tongue. I wondered at its use of the word liberated. I had killed Iubalu—with Udax and Siran’s help—but then, perhaps death was liberation to the Pale.
“Your image is known.”
“Tuka okun-se belu ba-Iedyr Yemani ne?” I asked.
The giant’s metal eyes narrowed in that smooth white face. It opened its fist, showcasing the giant imitation of a Cielcin hand the MINOS engineers had forged. “One of six,” it said.
“Six,” I said, casting about. “Six, six.” I raised my human hand. “Five now.”
The beast hissed, but made no move against me. “I am Bahudde. Vayadan ba-Shiomu.”
Just as I had thought.
“You must surrender,” the giant said. “You cannot win. Tuka uelacyr ba-vakun-kih celaj’jyr.”
I struggled with the words a moment. The grammar was ungainly, arcane, the pronunciation somehow more stressed and inhuman than I was used to, but I got it in the end.
Your time has ended.
“Our time?” I asked, mind racing of its own accord to the bright thread of narrative time I had seen weaving its way through the tapestry of infinite possibility. The word time, uelacyr, took on a special meaning, sharp and filled with an almost religious power. “That is not for you to decide.” As I spoke, I tapped the emergency beacon on my wrist-terminal, as I had in the alleyways of Meidua so long ago. The signal would carry to the command center in the Storm Wall.
To Lorian Aristedes.
“He will scratch you out,” the vayadan said. “Carve you off the face of every world you have infested. Crack the bones. And suck the marrow dry.” The beast spoke Galstani, its voice projecting from speakers hidden on its back so loud that all could hear. Around us, more and more of the siege craft were landing, black towers rising amidst dust and smoke and the ruins of the valley city below.
“You will try,” I said, and looked past the monster to the specks in the eastern distance over the scrub land beyond the far side of the rift valley.
Bahudde seemed to notice my staring. “Do you look for the sun, yukajji? It is going down. It is setting on your kind.”
The beast was not wrong; the sun had since vanished behind the mighty bulwark of the Storm Wall, and gray shadows hung upon the city, made grayer by the smoke of the almighty burning.
“They say the suns never set on our Empire,” I said, focusing on its hideous smooth face once more. “There is always light somewhere.” I kindled my sword, highmatter flowing like water, blue light flowering in the gloom. Bravely—madly—I rushed forward.
A high and whining squeal escaped the behemoth, and it raised its arms to strike me.
An explosion struck the behemoth full in face, and it reeled back. Its shield had taken the worst of the impact, and it caught the parapet with its other hand, digging huge feet into the stone face.
Lorian had struck just in time. The tall-masted craft sliced the air overhead with a sound like tearing metal as it circled back and fired again. The shock of the blast threw me back, slamming me into a heavy weapons crate.
Hands seized me. Valka’s. Pallino’s.
“We have to go now!” the chiliarch shouted over the din and the ringing in my ears.
He had no cornicen to sound the retreat, and so the task fell to Lorian Aristedes, whose dry, palatine accents calmly ordered every legionnaire left standing in Deira to fall back to the tunnels. With the nearest stair destroyed, we had a half-mile run along the wall-walk above lift lobbies and urban utilities stations.
Shooting as we went, I saw the flash of missiles firing, rapid now and less precise as Lorian burned through the last of our assets before they could fall into the hands of the enemy. Siege towers went up in flames, and whole shoals of the questing nahute died defending others. Cielcin airships burned and plummeted from the sky, and our Sparrowhawks died with them. I passed the broken bodies of men and Irchtani lying on the wall.
Bahudde did not appear, and yet I was certain the lighters had not killed him. Killing Iubalu had taken a measure of doing, and Iubalu was only a little bigger than an ordinary Cielcin.
At last we made the stairs, and cut our way down. I soon found myself leading from the front, sword tearing.
“The Cielcin are taking up position over the city,” Aristedes said. “Should I order the fleet in?”
I had forgotten about the fleet. I rested a moment in the shadow of a line of townhouses, panting as I waved my column of soldiers past me, following Pallino and Renna toward the arch and the gated tunnel that led to the safety of the old mines.
“How many are left?” I asked.
“Not enough. Thirteen ships.”
But Corvo and the Tamerlane were alive. That was not nothing. “And Bassander Lin?”
“He’s alive,” came Aristedes’s reply.
The soldiers were nearly all past me. I wanted to be in the rearguard, to be the last of our people over that threshold and leave no man behind. Valka had gone on with Pallino, and behind I heard the raw battle cry of the Pale. The sound of nahute buzzing filled the airs, and slowly I started to run, following the loping soldiers as each followed the man in front of him.
We hadn’t far to go.
“Order them away,” I said, answering quickly—though whether it was impulse or inspiration only time could tell.
Time.
“Are you sure, Hadrian?” The commander’s brittle, battlefield demeanor blinked a moment.
“Damn it, Lorian!” I hurried on, keeping pace with the end of our retreating train. “Have them link up with the relief force. I won’t risk the Tamerlane or Lin’s or any of them. They won’t last long against that fleet. We’ll last longer here.”
The good commander replied, “What makes you say that?”
“Because they want to eat us,” I said. “They sacrificed one meal on Marinus. They won’t waste a second.”
I spoke sense, and Lorian knew it. Perhaps the little man resented admitting defeat, perhaps it was frustration with Hauptmann and Bartosz. The former had made a critical error cordoning his ships so tight together. Shields were not proof against matter-antimatter reactions—that was elementary warcraft. How Hauptmann might have overlooked it, there was no telling, but overlooked it he had. And all it had cost him was everything, leaving us to pay his debts. And Bartosz?
I had words for Leonid Bartosz.
A stone arch above the entrance to a backyard exploded onto the street before me, and a white-armored creature appea
red, cousin to the one I’d slain on the wall-walk, flanked by four scahari in white masks blazoned with the sigil of the White Hand in black outline. I slew one of them before even the chimera knew I was upon them, and the rearguard fell on one of the others, relying on the bayonets of their energy lances to kill the shielded foe.
The metal creature swung its huge sword. I ducked and heard a clear pang as the zircon blade caught on an iron lamppost. I was not as fortunate in this encounter as I’d been with the last, and striking the creature’s armored thigh with my sword, I found adamant proof against highmatter. Blood hammered in my ears, thick with adrenaline, and the vision would not come. Eyes stretched wide beneath their mask, I struck again. The zircon blade came whistling, and I parried and cut the blade in two. Plasma fire from my men peppered the creature’s hide, and it snarled and punched one man in the chest with a clawed foot so hard his ceramic armor shattered and he went flying straight back into the storefront behind, dead of blunt trauma.
Seeing my chance, I lunged at the exposed leg joint, blade slipping beneath armor plating to notch the common metal there. The beast whined, and fingers hard as iron and long as snakes seized me by the head. I felt the plates in the armor bending, flexing at the joints. My entoptic vision sparked and fizzed, and I felt that surely at any moment the helmet would crack and that would be the end of Hadrian Marlowe. I hewed at the metal arm with my sword, but to no avail. The beast lifted me bodily from the earth and squeezed tighter. I could hear its machine-aided breathing low and deep and steady.
It released me. I landed on my knees—nearly putting my sword through my bowels in the process—and looking up I beheld a strange sight. The giant chimera wobbled as if drunk and slipped on its injured leg, crashing through the window of a clothier to land on hands and knees. It wheeled about, but its movements were muddy, dumb. And then the most incredible thing of all happened.
The faceplate that concealed black eyes and nose-slits and the seam where flesh was sewn into metal opened like the lid of a great, white eye and bared the face and brain to my blade.
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