The scout saluted again when he saw me. “On their way, sir.”
The tunnel shook, dust falling in little rivulets from the ceiling panels overhead.
Boom. Then again, boom.
The colossi were moving, massive feet striking the roof overhead like the slow beat of a drum. “We have to move,” I told the scout.
“This way.”
* * *
In reading accounts or taking in holographs of the battle, you will have a very different perspective than I. Military historians and the amateur enthusiasts who fancy themselves tacticians look at battles in terms of blocks and arrows. Chess pieces, of a sort. In reviewing the situation on Berenike, they will see the line of colossi arrayed on the tarmac above, the line of Cielcin opposite it. They will note the aircraft on both sides and squint at the tangled warrens of the starport and tram tunnels beneath the surface. They will cluck about the errors Hauptmann made, and Bartosz, and Lorian. They will criticize me, saying I should have remained in the command center.
They are brave, sitting in their chairs centuries removed from the horrors of war, in ages that will never know the Cielcin because of me. But such worthies have one advantage over me, indeed over the lowest pig-boy-turned-soldier under me: they can see it all. The battle in space, the city, the Storm Wall, the tarmac torn between two mighty hosts, even my tunnels. They can see it all with the eyes of a god—albeit one blinkered and foolish as all men are. With all the time academic comfort can afford, they can see the labyrinth unrolled before their eyes and see clear the path to its center while we pieces in the labyrinth are blind. I do not know the Battle of Berenike as they do. I know only the labyrinth, the strange other world of war that I have spoken of time and time again.
Unwashed faces turned toward us as we entered the starport. The breached terminal was still ahead, and even in the gloom I could see the whites of these refugees’ eyes. I felt their silence; the scared, hopeful way they watched me. Waiting for a sign.
Bassander Lin came running forward, his helmet removed, face flushed. Behind, men crouched behind hard field projectors and around columns near the heavy doors from the starport atrium to the terminal halls.
“You’re just in time!” he said. “They’re inside!”
“Where?”
Lin ignored the question. “You have to get these people out of here!” he said, indicating the refugees pressed against either wall of the atrium and massed on the too-few benches. Some sat on bags, others on the floor. Bassander’s men stood by them with stunners drawn, as though they were criminals and not the lowborn desperate for their lives.
“Is everyone out of the terminal?” I asked, pushing past Pallino.
The captain shook his head. “Everyone we could. There was no time.”
Valka swore violently in Panthai. Familiar visions of the Cielcin piling stunned humans onto sledges blossomed in my mind, and Lorian’s dire pronouncement echoed in my ears. “We are going to lose people now.” It had struck me as a funny thing to say at the time. We had already lost people fighting in the streets, had lost an entire fleet and orbital defense platform. We had been losing people for days. He’d meant civilians, but the word choice stuck with me. What were soldiers then, if not people?
“Valka?” I put a hand on her arm.
Despite the mask covering her face, I felt the flash in those golden eyes. “No. Pick someone else.”
“But . . .”
“No, Hadrian. I’m not going.”
Chewing my tongue a moment, I turned to Pallino. “Where’s Oro?”
“I’ll do it!” It took me a moment to recognize the voice. Turning, I saw the unmarked legionnaire press forward. Only then did I recognize her. “I can do it, lord,” she said.
I glanced at Pallino. The chiliarch cocked his head, though whether in dismissal or approval was anybody’s guess. I did not ask for clarification, but turned to the legionnaire. Cowardice or bravery? I didn’t know that, either, and chose to assume bravery. “Very good, Renna.”
“Protect the people, you said,” Renna said. She had survived the battle in the city and had stuck with me through it all. I could hardly contain my surprise.
“I did.”
The roof shook above us again, and I clapped the soldier on the shoulder. “Go then! Quickly!”
Renna turned, and to my almost astonishment shouted orders to the other legionnaires in her unit. “We need to get these people out of here. Let’s move!”
Slow dust fell on all assembled, and I turned from Renna as she set about herding the survivors back toward the tramway. Gunshots sounded down a side corridor, and the words “Snakes! Snakes!” sounded in my ear. “Snakes in the access tunnels!”
Snakes meant nahute. Whirling, I brushed past Bassander for the side door whence the noise had come. Nahute meant the Pale themselves could not be far behind.
Pallino roared in my ear, voice amplified by the general band and by the speakers in his breastplate. “Don’t let one of them in!”
“Can we seal off the tunnels?” Valka asked.
I did not hear Bassander Lin’s answer, for distant thunder roared from the direction I guessed the fleet of alien landing craft stood on the tarmac above. Our lighter wing had come around again, Sparrowhawks or Falcon-IIs striking at the grounded ships and the net of serpentine drones that defended them.
Up above, the colossi marched forward, and the tramp of their mighty feet was like the mountains moving. Great piles of steel two and three hundred feet high marched on legs mighty as the trunks of trees. Guns blazed, and above their fire Lorian Aristedes sat cold and saturnine in his command chair like Kharn Sagara on his throne, tapping his cane against the edge of the console. The Cielcin were moving as we moved beneath them, spilling forward like an oily tide loosed from a sluice gate. They reached the wreckage of their ram and spilled underground like ants swarming.
“You have company,” Lorian said.
By then I’d reached the side door and saw the faint smoke rising from the wreckage of a dozen nahute lying blasted on the floor. Sword in hand, I pressed forward, my men about me.
We’d come to it at last: the desperate hour.
The fortress breached, our people besieged.
There are endings, Reader, and there in the dark of the ruined starport there were many endings. Pale faces shone in the dark at the end of that hall, lit by the ruddy light, their swords like fingers of bone, silver serpents writhing in their fists.
I raised my sword in answer, in salute.
They threw their nahute and charged in. Plasma fire and the high-pitched chime of energy lances sounded about me, and some of the Cielcin fell, but their fellows paid no heed. They are not men, and thought little of climbing over their brethren and broodmates to get at us. One leaped at me, sword drawn back to strike. I thrust out with my blade, point catching the leaping xenobite below the ribs and rising, opening it to the shoulder through one of its two hearts.
Its bulk fell against me, and I shoved it aside, staggering a moment against the wall. Awareness filled me of the closeness of those walls in the maintenance tunnel, of the low height of the ceiling and the plumbing that ran along it. So narrow a space, so narrow the eye of that needle through which my survival—and the survival of human life on Berenike—must thread.
The high whine of energy lances sounded and two more of the xenobites fell. Shoving myself from the wall, I slashed at one of the nahute as it sped by, cutting it to ribbons. I moved forward, taking the impact of another serpentine drone on my shield. Coming at us straight down a hall, the Pale were at a disadvantage, for these at least wore no shields, and I pressed through to the far end, where to my astonishment I found the hallway empty. There was the other side of the gate Bassander’s men were working to fortify with shield projectors and armed men. The Cielcin had not yet assailed it. The dozen dead in the hall behind were onl
y the vanguard. Scouts.
I relayed this to Bassander and said, “We have to seal the breach, same as the tunnels in the city.”
“We need explosives!” Valka put in.
“I’ll send a team,” the Mandari captain said. He did not argue or shout orders at me. This new Bassander was strange.
“Good,” I said, “and close that maintenance hall behind us, but be ready to open it if we need to come back.”
Bassander’s team was three decades of legionnaires headed by a first-grade decurion with the double horizontal stripe on the left cheek of his faceplate above an upside-down triangle that marked him as explosives certified. His entire decade carried the same triangle marker on the left sides of their helms and hard packs on their backs. Units like theirs had mined the access ways from the Valles Merguli into the tunnels beneath the Storm Wall.
“It’s not far,” said the decurion, indicating the overhead signs that marked the way to the various starport terminals. “This way.”
We crossed the hall without resistance, moving up a short flight of steps toward a curving hall that led to another tram platform. The earth groaned once more beneath the tramp of the colossi overhead and the impetus of that evil moon. We splashed forward into thin puddles where a burst water main spilled across the floor, ruining carpets and carrying refuse from the thousands that had been cramped into this space mere minutes before.
“Up ahead!” Pallino pointed with his bayonet.
I’d seen them, too.
There were people ahead, running toward us, carrying packs or children or nothing but themselves. Men and women who had been on the wrong side of the main gate when Bassander closed it. I ordered my men against one wall, letting the crowds swarm past. There were still hundreds of them. Thousands. Too many.
“Get behind us!” I called out, voice boosted by the speakers in my suit. “Back toward the Storm Wall.” I hoped that they would make it, and pressed past. In the distance, I heard a man yell, then shriek. It was no sound a human throat ought to make, high and piercing, like a pig skewered on the hunt. The sound died almost as quickly as it had begun.
Shoving a big man out of my way, I skirted the throng, shouting for them to hurry back all the while. I was glad of my helmet and the suit’s air cyclers, for surely the air of that close space was hot with the fetid damp of breathing, stuffy and claustrophobic.
“Out of the way!” I cried.
Pallino joined me. “Everyone to the right! Move! Move!” He lowered his truncheon toward the oncomers, and the sight of the muzzle and the white spike of the bayonet gave them pause. They crushed right, making a channel through which we could pass. Following Pallino and a trias of hoplites, I surged forward.
More screams rose to greet us, desperate and frenzied and punctuated by cruel, cold laughter. Beneath it all, the buzzing sound of the drones feeding echoed up the hall. Here the stragglers scrambled on, hurrying past us in their desperation to be away. I prayed the Cielcin did not find a way around the retreating throng, lest we were sending them to their deaths. The tiles in the chamber beyond the hall were smeared with blood, walls spattered where the drones had drilled their way through unprotected civilians. I stepped over the husk of a woman, fighting the temptation to duck as two nahute hissed overhead. Pallino had told me long ago that proper Sollan officers don’t duck.
In the open, a shot will find you crouching as easily as standing, he’d said. Plus the men don’t like it. That had always stuck with me. The men don’t like it.
Another of the drones pinged off my shield as I hurried forward.
The Cielcin emerged from the dimness, white masks and horns seeming to float above bodies black in the gloom. I remember little of the chamber, the emergency lighting full and red against the shuttered stalls and service counters, the tiles slick beneath my feet. Shots flew past me, striking drones and warriors alike. Here and there, stolen shields flashed in answer. Writing now, I can hardly believe them the same species that surrendered to me on Emesh. The difference between a beaten Cielcin like Uvanari and this horde of the Pale King was like night and day.
“Forward!” I cried, and raised my sword to parry a blow from one of the Pale. The sword broke on mine, blade clattering to the floor. I turned, and struck the head off the demon, shoving its body to the ground. The terminal could not be far, for the force of the enemy ahead was beyond counting. They must have climbed down through the shattered roof.
The roof.
The whole chamber rang like a bell, and I had visions of a metal foot large as an armored tank striking the tarmac and the metal reinforcements beneath it. On the field above, Lorian’s artillery had engaged the enemy. Colossi and lighter wings alike charged forward against the siege towers and ground troops marching beneath the banner of the white hand. There was a door ahead, low and wide enough that ten men might walk abreast. Through it I saw the hulking white shapes I’d feared. The chimeras had come. The Demons of Arae. A dozen at least, with untold hundreds of scahari warriors about them, screamers hot for blood.
“At least that giant isn’t here,” Pallino said, voice flat.
“Yet,” I said darkly, and glanced at Valka. “Can you do something about those hybrids?”
I could almost hear her savage grin. “Give me a moment.”
The whole chamber shook again, and I heard something my brain did not at once understand. A squealing, a heavy metal groan like the creaking of timbers in an antique sailing vessel. How I heard it at all over the noise of the fighting I cannot say, nor explain the sense of dread that flooded me even before my conscious mind realized what was coming.
The ceiling broke, metal arches buckling, bending beneath a weight greater than any their designers had predicted. And then it came crashing down: a foot and metal thigh six times the height of a man, broader than the broadest tree. It crashed into the center of the terminal platform, crushing men and Cielcin alike beneath it. The soldiers drew back, carving a space around the foot of the downed colossus. I had a brief impression of movement, as if the hulking machine were a shark covered in lesser fish or a wolf swarmed by mice. There were black shapes clinging to handholds on the surface, and with a shock I realized the Pale were clinging to it, had climbed the legs to the platforms about the body of the walking machine to fight the gunners and grenadiers on the catwalks there.
The wind rushed in, whistling through fingers of torn metal and broken tarmac, and for an instant both armies stood still. Dust settled. Smoke rose. Above our heads, the black sky peered in, and high in those heavens I beheld the limn of that occulted sun and the dark outline of the worldship peering down at us like the pupil of some immeasurably vast eye. And looking up I knew that we had failed. I’d failed. We might have sealed one breach, but two?
Cielcin warriors leaped from the platforms above, landing cat-like amongst my men. Still more crawled headfirst along the leg of the damaged colossus, moving like crabs toward us, gripping the machine’s carapace with fingers and toes. Even as I watched, a shot tagged one of the beasts between the shoulder blades. It fell thirty feet and struck the terminal floor.
“We’re never going to close the breach now!” Pallino’s voice rang in my ear.
“I know!” I said.
“And we can’t stay here either!”
“I know!” I said more forcefully.
The sound of thunder rolled in the distance, though whether it was true thunder or the sound of the Falcons was anybody’s guess. I cut down a passing nahute, drawing back with two men behind a pillar. The great foot of the colossus was moving, was still drawing power from its reactor, still trying to rise from the pit it had fallen into.
Frantic fingers changed comms channels. “Lin!” I waited for the Mandari captain’s reply before asking, “Are the survivors secure?”
“Not all of them. We’re pushing them back along the tunnels as we speak.”
They’ll never make it, I thought, screwing my eyes shut. “Can you seal the tramway behind them?”
“We were going to hold the gate,” he said.
“Damn the gate!” I said, “I need you here. One of the colossi broke through the roof—we’re pinned down!” One of the chimeras chose that moment to scream, its horrid battle cry scraping at the vaulted ceiling above our heads.
Lin did not answer at once. “But . . .”
“That’s an order, captain!” I did not wait for any argument. I killed the line. When we had parted, the Mandari captain had been my superior. Now I was a Knight Victorian, and even had it not been for Bassander’s odd change in attitude toward me, that change in rank was enough to guarantee his obedience. Bassander was a soldier through and through, an officer of the most classic kind.
Shots rang down from above, and looking I saw a knot of grenadiers crouched on the hip of the colossus above, each secured by tethers of whiskered carbon. One of the chimeras launched itself toward them, not slowing at all as it hauled itself upward. One of the incendiary rounds broke on the creature’s shields, and the men tried to retreat. Iron hands seized the foremost of the fire team and tore one leg off at the hip. Blood issued from the torn stump, and the chimera beat the man in the face with his own thigh before tossing the torn limb aside.
His head followed, followed by another man. There was nothing I could do from my vantage point on the ground. The chimera crawled back and forth over the metal leg, moving from soldier to shrinking soldier. Until one man unclipped himself from his line and half ran, half tumbled from his place on the sloping surface of the machine and threw his arms around the neck of the alien warrior. The surprise weight knocked the chimera clean off the colossus, and man and xenobite fell back toward the terminal floor.
Somewhere in between, the both of them erupted in scarlet flame. The soldier must have detonated one of the charges in his bandoleer, sacrificing himself to take out the enemy.
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