He was braver than I ever was. Braver . . . or more foolish. Or perhaps they are the same thing.
Beside me, Valka swore in Panthai. I glanced at her. I thought we’d been separated in the fighting. “Are you all right?”
She only nodded.
“Stay by me,” I said, and put a hand on her arm.
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
Breathing a bit ragged, I replied, “Lin’s coming.”
I could practically feel her eyes widening. “But the people . . .”
“He sent them back down the tramway. He’s going to mine the tunnel entrance.”
“ ’Twon’t hold them back for long,” she said. “They should never have been out here.”
“There’s not enough room in the bunkers,” I said. “There’s still not enough room.” The tram tunnels were the last resort, the last refuge for the thousands that would fit nowhere else.
The pressure of her unseen eyes vanished, and she turned her head away. “What about us?”
“Over the top,” I said, and pointed with my sword at the slant of the giant’s leg where it descended into the chamber.
Valka looked at me. “You’re mad.”
“We can’t stay here.”
“We can lead them deeper into the tunnels,” she said.
That gave me pause. “Do you think we can get up under their fleet?”
She thought about this for an instant. “Maybe we can get close.”
“Lorian!” I changed comms channels again. When the intus’s voice came in over the comm, I asked him the question again.
“That’s out past the edge of the starport,” he said, and my heart sank, visions of the earth opening to swallow that forest of dark towers crumbling in my mind’s eye. “But . . .”
“But what?” I glanced sharply at Valka.
Aristedes’s reply came haltingly as he studied the relevant schematics. “There’s a tunnel. Tramway maybe. Looks like it runs out to those perimeter towers.” I knew the ones he meant, the little mushroom-like structures that stood at intervals along the uttermost edge of the starport landing field where the port authority had its stations.
“Good enough,” I said.
“I can mark it for you,” Lorian said, meaning on the suit’s display.
“Do it,” I said.
Valka cut in. “Sapping one tunnel won’t destroy the whole landing fleet.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She was silent.
“Lorian,” I asked, “are there still rockets in any of the blast pits?”
CHAPTER 82
THE DEPTHS BELOW
ON THE FIELD ABOVE, the battle raged. The colossi—hemmed in by the sinkhole that had swallowed one of their number—retreated and took up a defensive position nearer the Storm Wall itself. They could not risk losing another of the goliath machines. I imagined Lorian grinding his teeth at his display, cursing himself for a fool. It was easy to picture the fellow as a kind of impatient spider, ordering the colossi back to within the protective cordon of the wall and its guns.
The Cielcin, I later learned, had not followed them, finding the Storm Wall’s shields and guns—with their overlapping fields of fire—wholly impenetrable to attack on an open field. Even the nahute kept their distance, or followed their masters down the twin breaches in the tarmac to the terminal halls below.
The black fortress of Dharan-Tun hung above all, the corona of the blackened sun white around its edge. I saw it again before ducking into a side passage after Valka, though at our great distance I little guessed at the dark towers and channels that ran across its surface. The forests of steam-work pipes and oceans of frozen air, the grub farms near the surface where slaves—human and Pale alike—toiled beneath the whip. Nor could I guess at the number of those slaves, nor the torments they endured. And yet they all were there, hidden in the shadow of that eclipse. And there too watched and waited the owner of that White Hand, surveying its triumph.
Syriani Dorayaica.
Valka’s shouting brought me back to myself, and I followed her and Bassander Lin into the side passage. The Mandari captain had come forward with nigh on a thousand men—leaving the collapsed tramways behind them. It was cruel sealing so many people in such cramped quarters. Cruel and desperate, but desperation was not so bad as desertion, as leaving them to die.
We could not hope to win the battle in the fight in the terminal—there were too many. But Bassander’s men had turned the tide for the moment, along with the grenadiers on the flank of the colossus above.
The empty hall echoed to the sounds of our feet, one of the hundreds of similar tunnels the dock workers and starport custodial staff used in maintaining the complex. We hurried on, three men abreast, following the map Lorian had given us.
We had not far to go.
Fifty men had followed us into the tunnel, led by Bassander, Valka, and myself. Pallino had stayed behind with Oro and Doran to command the force in the terminal proper. A silver thread projected on the hall by my suit’s entoptics led the way, around blind corners and down narrower passages toward the place Lorian had marked for us.
Somewhere up ahead was a cargo ship, the Kupari, whose fuel cells—along with a single remote-detonated plasma grenade—would be precisely the thing we needed. It was not the closest ship to the terminal, not by half . . . but it was the closest to the lonely tramway that ran through the undeveloped portion of the landing field toward the port authority watchtowers. The inner bulkhead was open as we approached, and the outer hatch opened on a wheel-lock.
The wind rushed in, whistling over the titanium and the ceramic outer shell. Beyond, white tiles greeted us, dust-streaked and burned black. The Kupari stood above us, a silver finger burned black itself in places, surface ionized and corroded. It looked in every way like one of the rockets of utmost antiquity, red-finned and ice-cauled where the fuel cells were kept cold, their contents held under extraordinary pressure. The cells themselves formed a girdle near the base of the lifter, near the aftermarket repulsor nacelles her owner had welded on to offset some of the payload. She had dozens of them, each about eight feet long and about a cubit in diameter.
“How many do we need?” Lin asked. The cells contained a chemical accelerant that assisted with the primary drive—a primitive, hydrogen-oxygen burning rocket. The Kupari was no interstellar craft, was little more than a surface-to-space freighter, one that would park itself in the hold of some large ship and ride along to its next stop. It was as elementary as rocketry got, riding explosives to the stars.
It was exactly what we needed.
“Four or five should do,” Lorian answered when I repeated the question.
One of the soldiers chipped in, “There should be a float pallet around the bay somewhere, sirs . . .”
“Can we carry them?” Valka asked.
“If we put four or six men on each,” Bassander said, “but that doesn’t leave much for defense if it comes to fighting.”
Pushing past him, I shouted orders at three of the men who’d followed us into the pit, eyes wandering among the gantries and fuel arms attached to the fuselage of the glorified missile in whose shadow we stood. I could not see the sun or the great vessel that blocked it, but so deep in the well of that pit I could see the stars, bright and clear and pure through the lazy coils of cloud.
Turning back to Bassander Lin and to Valka, I said, “Then we had best hope it does not come to fighting.” The thought of a stray shot or sword blow flooding the cramped quarters with chemical accelerant was not a happy one. “Quickly now!” But I had found what I was looking for, and moved toward it. A spout ran along the inside of the pit, shielded from the main shaft behind the inner curve of the artificial crater. The ladder ran up it for more than fifty feet to where the nose cone and upper sections of the Kupari rose above the landing field. It was not a short climb,
but we had a moment. Ignoring the chastisement of Valka and my guards at my back, I mounted the first rungs. I knew I could not stand on the surface without risking the attention of the Pale, but I could peer out at the world above.
I reached the top and raised my eyes above the lip of the crater, bracing myself against the far side of the shaft where a carved foothold waited, trying not to think about the fall beneath me. There was the black sun high in the sky above, and there the dark forest of siege towers at one margin of my world. I could not see the blasted nuclear plant so near the ground, nor spy the perimeter towers behind that thicket of evil spires. But I saw the Cielcin plain enough, massing in the shadows of their ships. I hoped I was far off enough not to be a target for the nahute that moved like shoals of fish in the air above them.
Turning my head to look through fields of smoke and smoldering fires, I beheld the burning wreckage of the downed colossus. The fallen colossus—four-legged and with a body like a saucer—lay shattered and burning. Its weight hadn’t broken the vaults of the terminals below. Its fall had. Looking past it to the wall, I could just make out the other platforms standing at attention. Bipeds, tripods, quadrupeds—and the hexapods largest of all. Our iron guardians. I knew plenty of strategoi and logothetes in the Defense Ministry who argued the massive war machines were impractical. Foolhardy. Expensive and impossible to maintain. But one could not deny: they were breathtaking.
The mightiest of these stood easily three hundred feet high, dwarfing the men and smaller tanks that clustered about its legs. Red lights glinted in the narrow slit about its equator from which its drivers watched, weapons at the ready. The Cielcin had given up trying to engage those mighty war machines, seemed clustered instead about the spots where the tarmac had been breached about the smoldering wreckage of the colossus and the alien ram.
The Cielcin had set up a line of cannons along the right flank of their army. Bristling, spiny things of the same darkly organic design as their armor, ribbed and corded as muscle tissue. As I watched, they fired, thunder slapping the air. One of our Falcons fell, transformed into a tumbling ball of flame. And above that, upon the uttermost crown of the Storm Wall, barely noticeable against the blackness, I saw the winged shapes of our Irchtani beating the air.
Something nearer at hand caught my eye. The glint of light on white metal, on ceramic, on bone. And there it was, huge and hideous and very much alive. The vayadan-general Bahudde emerged from the midst of its army. Even at this distance, it looked the worse for wear: armor dinted, the linkages of one arm exposed, the light of one red eye put out. But the creature’s brain and coiled spine were yet intact, safe in some jar in its chest. I bared my teeth involuntarily.
The beast strode out past the foremost ranks of its men, arms raised. Above it, the clouds parted in fire as another siege tower—this one larger than the rest—smashed down from the heavens. Its engines blazed to slow its descent, filling the air with the noise of fire. Our lighters were nowhere to be seen—had the xenobites’ cannons done for them? And what was in the massive dropship?
“Hadrian!”
I must have lingered longer than I thought, and slid quickly back down the ladder, ducking back into the scorched landing pit.
“See anything?” Valka asked.
“That giant’s still alive.”
“Fuck me!” One of the men swore. “The one from the city?” Bassander cleared his throat, but the fellow didn’t seem to get the message. “The one that looks like a fucking baby?”
“Language, soldier,” the captain said, acid in his words.
Facing the vulgar soldier, I said, “The same. They’ve called down another tower—bigger than the rest.”
“Dorayaica?” Bassander asked.
I shrugged. “Could be, but it looked more like a cargo rocket. Like they’ve brought the heavy artillery.”
“Fuck me with a lance!” the soldier swore, turning away.
“Order!” Bassander clipped the fellow with the butt of his lance, hard but not hard enough to do any real harm. “Pull yourselves together. We have work to do.”
There was no float pallet to be found, and in the end, it took a half dozen men apiece to lift and carry the big fuel cells. It was slow going, for the cells were heavy and the halls just wide enough to accommodate the men and their load.
“It’s not far,” Bassander said for what felt like the dozenth time. Somewhere ahead was a tram platform and tunnel that ran directly beneath the enemy army. “With any luck, there’ll be a tram in the platform.”
As he spoke, I had visions of loading the fuel cells aboard a train and sending that unmanned down the tunnel. Lorian Aristedes, you’ve done it again.
The Cielcin it seemed had not penetrated so far back into the complex from the holes torn in the tarmac, or else they’d not found their way into the maintenance passages as yet. If Lorian’s maps were correct, we would remain in access corridors until we hit the concourse, and then it was another five hundred feet or so to the tramway platform. That would be the point of maximum danger.
Tap.
Was it my imagination? Or had I heard something coming behind?
Near the rear of the line, I turned, looking back into emergency-lit gloom. Nothing but red darkness greeted me. Cautious, I slid my sword from its holster, fingers ready on the trigger.
“What is it?” Valka asked.
I shook my head, nodded for her to move on ahead of me.
We kept moving, progress slowed by the weight of the canisters. Sounds from the fighting still played over the comm, and Pallino’s voice overrode the din. “You all best hurry up, Had. We won’t hold long here.”
“Get them air support, damn it!” I growled at Lorian, ears pricking for the sound again.
Tap-tap.
Memories of the way Iubalu had hounded us in the bowels of its ship came back to me, and I moved a little faster, butting up against the rear of our column. It took a measure of self-control to slow my pace, to allow space to form again between us. I was certainly not imagining things. Something had found us in the dark. I tried to call on my new vision, but could see only the hall about me and our small caravan playing out around me, refracted across countless variations of the same slow passage.
Tap. Tap-tap.
A low grinding like the noise of chainsaws sputtering to life roared up not twenty paces behind. The number of possible presents—possible hallways—fractured in my new awareness, little infinities spawning larger ones. I saw them in my vision before I saw them with my eyes, before I turned my head. The nahute had been slithering along the ceiling, invisible along the piping and the ductwork there. Five of them leaped at once, and at once I turned, vision bright and clear. Highmatter kindled in my fist, and taking hold of the vision I stepped from one instance of our hallway to the next, to a place in possible time where my blade sliced clean through all five of the metal drones. Some unconscious part of me, I think, had recognized the danger before my waking mind and imported that danger to my vision, clarifying it. The torn devices tumbled in pieces around me, and I stood a moment open-mouthed, shocked that it had worked.
So shocked that the vision broke and I was left standing there amazed when the snakes’ owner leaped from the darkness. The scahari moved like an ape, bounding forward on hands and feet. I had a momentary impression of black claws and glassy teeth before it struck me full in the chest with its horned crest. I hurtled backward with it on top of me, claws sinking into my suit’s environment layer. I felt bruises flower and blood well between the fibers even as the gel layer hardened to protect my flesh.
But for once in all my life, I’d managed to keep my sword. Any ordinary blade would have been useless slapping an armored opponent in the back, but Sir Olorin’s sword was anything but ordinary. Despite the creature’s weight on my chest and arm, I could still bend my wrist, still push the blade effortlessly down into the flesh of t
he creature atop me. Black blood flowed, and the beast sagged against me.
I threw it off and—rolling over—made to scrabble to my feet.
Clawed hands seized me, slashing my white cape. Only on my knees, I fell, sword punching a hole in the concrete floor. A shot rang out, and dead weight collapsed on me once more. Rough hands seized mine and hauled me to my feet, pulling me clear of the enemy.
“Run!” I cried out, waving my hand.
The men carrying the payloads began to trot, moving in time with a chant begun by one of the triasters to keep them from jostling the dangerous accelerant. Bassander took the lead, his own sword—the sword he’d taken from Admiral Whent on Pharos—lighting the way like a beacon.
It wasn’t fast enough.
Tearing my mangled cape from my shoulders, I turned and faced the other Pale who had come. Four of them stood there masked and armored. Their leader had only one eye in its mask. The other side bore the image of the Hand.
“Go on!” I called to the guards behind me. “Protect the others.”
“But!” Valka said, and I sensed her take a step nearer.
“They’ll need you if any of those metal monsters catch up!” I said, and waved her back.
I do not dare write down Valka’s curse.
“Noyn jitat,” I said under my breath, knowing I would not hear the end of it if we escaped Berenike alive.
Having seemingly learned their lesson from the two Pale dead at my feet, the others kept their distance, shrinking from the advance of my moonlight blade. They clustered behind their leader, who I felt certain must be shielded. Step by careful half-step, I pressed forward. They drew back. They had no nahute, no firearms, would not risk their own lives on explosives in so confined a space.
“Tuka . . . devil ne?” their leader asked, struggling with the terminal consonant on the human word devil.
“I am,” I said, standing straighter.
The commander drew back, breath hissing past glass teeth. “Numeu ti-Shiomu, yukajji!” it said. You belong to the Prophet, vermin.
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