Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘Oh gross!’ cried Jack.

  Toby just shuddered with deep revulsion. Dave’s own body shuddered too, partly with revulsion, but partly with revelation and the strength of redemptive healing.

  ‘Yeah, let’s not tell Mom about that, okay?’ he grunted as something hot and powerful coursed through him. He reached for the broken skull of the Sliveen again, but caught himself at the last moment. Or perhaps he just caught the expression of shock and disgust on the faces of his children.

  Either way, he stayed his hand. He did not need to eat again. The hunger was gone, even as his body burned with the heat of healing, the pangs which had crippled and threatened to end him dissipated as thoroughly as morning mist on a summer’s day.

  That was when he knew they were doomed.

  *

  Threshy knew what was wrong. Those fucking meathead SEALs. Igor the giant fag, and Allen the corn-fed cunt. His Threshrendum had taken out Hooper’s warp drive, but the SEALs and the Russian woman had put out such a withering volume of fire that the first wave of Hunn dominants had been cut down, or tripped up by the fallen, burning bodies of their nest mates. And now Gaddis was putting out his own personal artillery barrage with that jeep-mounted grenade launcher.

  Cowering behind a granite outcropping, cringing at every bomb burst, Threshy prayed that Gaddis wouldn’t raise the muzzle of the launcher and drop a few rounds right on top of him. If the SEAL knew he and Guyuk were out here, he’d target them in a heartbeat.

  The lord commander gave every impression of having lost his mind in the maelstrom of fire and high explosive. Until Compt’n ur Threshrend realised Guyuk hadn’t cracked up. He was laughing. Roaring with laughter.

  Maybe he had cracked up.

  ‘They fight well for cattle,’ the lord commander bellowed as long yellow and red streams of tracer fire snapped over his head. ‘They slaughter us like vermin, Superiorae. The scrolls will resound with tales of this night.’

  ‘You fucking looney,’ muttered Threshy. Or maybe it was Compton. Or maybe Trevor Candly. The empath daemon was so messed up with fear and shock he might even have reverted to thresh version 1.0.

  The stupid old fuck was actually enjoying this. He was blowing his wad as the cattle blew the shit out of his thrall. Threshy dared not even raise an eyestalk for fear of having it shot off his head, but he didn’t need to. He could see perfectly well what was happening through the eyestalks of the veteran Threshrendum Majorae who observed the battle from all the points of the compass, and stopped Hooper from orbing – from warping – out here and killing them all. Threshy dug himself deeper into the damp sandy soil, watching the slaughter from six different vantage points, as though through the eyes of an insect.

  The first wave of Hunn dominants who had led the charge had been broken by savage automatic weapons fire and expertly placed volleys of grenades. It seemed that both SEALs and the Russian were equipped with underslung twenty- or even thirty-millimetre launchers, and the popping shunk-shunk-shunk of their fat, high explosive rounds leaving the barrels preceded another storm of detonations amongst the Hunn, who still hadn’t learned not to bunch up under fire.

  Not like the Grymm, he thought sourly.

  Through the eyes of the Threshrendum he could see them fanning out, dispersing, sacrificing the power of the massed charge, but blunting the impact of the fiery hammer blows landing amongst the thrall.

  He had seen one Sliveen scout make it through the intersecting fields of fire and even gain entry to the upper floor of the cottage, but there had been no falling away in the murderous barrage of armour-piercing and tracer fire. The scout was probably toast.

  Guyuk’s laughter was threatening to drive him mad, before the gunfire wiped him out, and Threshy started to cast around looking for one of the portals maintained by the Masters of the Ways. It never hurt to have an exit plan.

  *

  ‘Come with me,’ Dave said. ‘Quickly, and keep low. Try not to show your heads above the window sills.’

  Toby and Jack did as they were told. They closed up behind Dave and followed him down the stairs. He paused, just the briefest of moments, at the top step, where he could see through a window looking out over the driveway that Igor was crouched in the back of the Growler. The thumping and thudding detonations were explained by the weapon he fired. The grenade launcher.

  The giant SEAL laid down a sweeping arc of fire and destruction in front of the cottage, holding back the charge of the Dread Company. Zach stood beside him, raking the killing zone with the heavy machine gun. Between them, and Karen and Pat picking off flankers, they had broken the first assault.

  But Dave knew there would be more.

  Dave knew everything the Sliveen knew.

  As he hurried down the stairs – ‘Careful on these bottom steps, boys, I think I broke them’ – he knew the forces arrayed against them were too great. He knew the Horde could absorb all of the firepower currently holding them at bay. Absorb it, survive it, and wait it out. Dawn was still too far away. They would wait until the calflings had exhausted their magicks and then they would simply overrun them. Hundreds of Hunn and Grymm and Sliveen pouring in through the doors and windows, hacking and slashing, stabbing and biting and tearing until they were done. And there was nothing Dave or Karen could do in return. Six ancient and powerful Threshrendum ringed the cottage, ensuring the champions could not warp, all of them answering to Compt’n ur Threshrend who sat safely some distance away, enjoying the spectacle in the company of Lord Guyuk ur Grymm.

  ‘Karen,’ Dave called out over the cacophony of battle.

  She turned away from her firing post and as soon as she saw him she knew.

  ‘Oh gross! You didn’t! You ate its brains?’

  ‘He totally did!’ Jack cried out. ‘And that’s what I said.’

  ‘It was awesome but,’ Toby said from where he crouched hidden behind Dave’s legs. ‘Dad went UFC on that Bigfoot.’

  ‘Sounds more like your Dad went KFC on him,’ said Annie as she scrabbled across the floor, never raising her head above knee level. ‘Toby, Jack, to me,’ she said in a high voice. ‘I’m going to get them out the back on Dad’s boat.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ both Dave and O’Halloran said at once. Pat had taken up position near the window where Igor had been standing before he’d run out to the Growler. Immediately after speaking he lifted his shotgun in a smooth, unhurried motion, and fired off a round with a dull roar.

  ‘You won’t get ten yards,’ Dave said. ‘Archers will cut you down.’

  But he had a thought.

  ‘Haul them down into the root cellar. It’s better than up here.’

  As if to emphasise the point a flurry of iron bolts poured in through the window, provoking an answering hail of fire from Karen.

  ‘Go. Go on now,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll hold them off up here.’ Knowing he was lying to them as he said it.

  Well, it wasn’t like that was the first time.

  He shielded the boys with his own body, ushering them into the kitchen which ran off the lounge. Annie crawled through after them. The root cellar was an old damp dugout carved from the granite of the rocky headland. Pat used to tell stories about bootleggers having used it, and Annie’s old man had indeed kept a few crates of booze down there. The kitchen windows looked out on the waters of greater Penobscot Bay and for a second Dave considered whether Annie might be right and they could escape over water. But he dismissed the idea for the same reason he’d rejected it before. A Sliveen archer could put a war shaft through them hundreds of yards out into the bay. At its leisure.

  They were much less exposed to arrakh fire in here. Dave hauled up the heavy trapdoor, and he was about to jump down into the dark hole and check it out for them when Karen called to him.

  ‘Hooper. Better get out here now.’

  ‘Get in,’ he said to Annie, no time to argue.

  The boys, who were forever sneaking into the cellar to play, needed no invitation. Annie hesitated.
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  ‘Is it going to be all right, Dave? Are we going to get through this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Just get down out of sight and stay there. Don’t come out until I come to get you. No matter what you hear.’

  ‘Hooper. Hurry the fuck up.’

  ‘Coming,’ he yelled back at Karen. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Everything will be fine.’

  Annie looked back out the door toward the lounge room, where things were obviously not fine.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, turning her eyes on his. ‘I don’t blame you for this. You came back for them.’

  ‘And for you,’ he said. It seemed the right thing to say.

  ‘Now I know you’re lying.’

  She followed their boys down into the cellar and he closed the trapdoor behind them, wishing he had time to find them some candles or a torch.

  ‘HOOPER!’

  ‘Coming. Fuck. This is just like being home.’

  He ran back through to the lounge. Something was missing. The big guns had stopped firing.

  They were about to be overrun.

  33

  ‘Now, Superiorae! Up, up and into the fight. We will hack them down.’

  The Lieutenants Grymm who had prevented Lord Guyuk from charging pointlessly into the teeth of the human fire now flanked him, ready to charge alongside their commander. The entire thrall, what survived of it, was moving as one.

  The terrible fires of the human warriors had sputtered, and although they had not died away completely they no longer cut through the ranks of the Dread Company like the hot breath of dar Drakon. Individual Hunn and Grymm still fell to aimed fire, but their loss only meant greater glory for those who remained.

  ‘Have at them, Threshrend,’ roared Guyuk. ‘We have exhausted their magicks, broken their defences and now we shall crush them under our dead if the need of it be so.’

  He plucked the tiny daemon from where it hid behind the cover of a rocky spur, and thrust it into the charge, not judging the little creature for its cowardice, for he too had wisely sheltered from the worst of the firestorm. Instead, Lord Guyuk ur Grymm felt sincerely grateful to the mutant empath, the daemonum and the host of calfling souls it had consumed.

  Its plan seemed to be working.

  They had the Dave trapped and at their mercy.

  He roared with good-natured laughter at that. The mercy of the Horde. Compt’n ur Threshrend squeaked something like a protest but Guyuk was having none of it.

  ‘Stiffen those eyestalks, Threshrend! Summon up the ichor. Set your fang tracks a-blur and stretch wide your jaws to feast upon DAR IENAMIC.’

  ‘Dar ienamic!’ roared the Lieutenants Grymm, and within moments Guyuk’s entire thrall had taken up the chant to honour the foe it was about to devour.

  ‘Yeah yeah, the fucking enemas,’ cried Compt’n ur Threshrend. ‘We all love the fucking enemas.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Lord Guyuk shouted over the din and crash and mad shrieking tumult of war and murder.

  He started at a run through the thin forest, toward the little barracks house where the Dave and his thrall were entrapped. It was pricked and feathered with the shafts of arrakh-mi and arrakh-du. The path forward was beset with the fallen bodies of Grymm warriors and Hunn dominants, some of them burning fiercely with the eldritch flames that consumed those touched by Drakon fire. But Guyuk knew there was no magick to this. Just the human magick of ‘science’ which had fashioned the tiniest of the calflings’ arrakh munitions and locked within them the secret of fire. Even now, a long sinuous line of yellow calfling fire licked out of a port in the stone redoubt and took the head off one of his own Lieutenants Grymm, spraying hot steaming skull meats over the lord commander’s face.

  ‘It is good,’ he roared at the Threshrend he half-carried, half-dragged along beside him. ‘It is meat for the Horde, Threshrend.’

  *

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Karen shouted at Dave.

  She tossed something through the air and he caught it without thinking.

  Lucille.

  The return of the strength and spirit he’d felt upon choking down the brains of his slain ienamic redoubled as the hardwood shaft slapped into his palm. Lucille’s battle song swelled with the power of a massed choir in Dave’s head. He felt her strength, her will, her killing soul flow in to him. And he saw that it was still useless.

  They were all going to die.

  The night moved toward them.

  A dark, unbroken line of Horde warriors charged across the short distance between the cleared forest and Pat O’Halloran’s perfectly maintained front lawn. Or at least it had been perfectly maintained until Zach had parked a jeep on it and he and Igor had raked the free-fire zone with bullets and bombs. It was the dark hour before dawn. Not the gloaming pre-dawn in which the promise of sun is present in the creeping grey light where shadows take on form. No. It was the darkest of hours and monsters moved through it.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Karen warned him, sensing his instinctual reaction to warp out there and start swinging. ‘Threshers.’

  Having exhausted the big, jeep-mounted guns, the SEALs had retreated inside again. Zach stood in cover by the same window he’d first guarded. He fired two short bursts from his machine gun, and threw a hand grenade out into the night. It exploded a few seconds later. Igor fired blind, poking the muzzle of his machine gun out of the window while remaining in cover, squeezing the trigger once, twice, three times. He cursed, swapped out the magazine and turned back to the fight, loosing a strangled scream into the chaos when two arrakh-mi, shot from an extreme angle, punched into his shoulder and thigh. The big man went down, his gun dropping to the floor amongst dozens of spent shell casings.

  Dave leaped to him, covering the fallen commando with his own body as he swept up the gun and stood in the ruin of the window frame firing into the mass of accelerating Hunn and Grymm berserkers.

  ‘Hunn. Hunn. Hunn ur HORDE.’

  The gun bucked in his hand, surprising him. He’d half expected to have to fuck around with the safety, which he doubted he could find in time.

  ‘Hunn ur HORDE. Hunn ur HORDE.’

  The mad horror of the monster charge slowed down, but only in his mind, the way everything slows in extreme moments. It wasn’t magic, just human neurology. There was magic, however, in the way he was able to size up the shots he took. The lines, angles and calculations of timing and effect he had first experienced in New Orleans were available to him again, like a pull-down menu of enchanted options. He squeezed the trigger and the gun roared. Two armour-piercing rounds and one tracer bullet left the muzzle, travelling straight and true across the fifty yards to the leading dominant, taking the Hunn at the base of his throat and climbing up the fright mask of his face. The monster’s head exploded like a fat piece of jungle fruit dropped from a great height and he went down, lifeless arms and legs tripping two more Hunn behind him. Dave killed them with three round bursts, right into the cabbage. The gun, Dave understood, was set to fire three bullets for every trigger pull, and he wished he knew enough about the weapon to quickly set it to single shot. He was certain he could make every shot he took.

  But there was no time.

  Igor disappeared from beneath him, crying out as Zach dragged him away from the exposed position by the window.

  ‘Get him in the cellar with the others,’ Dave yelled as he cut down a Sliveen scout that had cocked a long arm to launch a clutch of throwing stars at him. Multi-tasking like a boss. ‘We can retreat there. Hold them off.’

  ‘HUNN UR HORDE.’

  The chant seemed to grow in volume as more and more of the beasts emerged at a run from the trees, undeterred by the pathetic blatting of O’Halloran’s Ruger; the dry cough of Karen’s submachine gun clicking on an empty magazine.

  ‘Do it,’ she cried at Zach as he struggled to haul Igor out of harm’s way.

  Dave snorted with laughter at that.

  Maybe they’d be out of harm’s way in
Tasmania.

  ‘Hooper is right. We can hold them at the choke points,’ she shouted, and she sounded mad for it.

  ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Dave said as she drew the long killing steel of Ushi to yasashi to. ‘But hot. Crazy hot.’

  ‘No. I am not crazy,’ she said, and her voice was different. It was her voice, in his head, not his ears. She spoke into him as Ekaterina Varatchevsky, a loyal daughter of the Rodina. ‘I am Russian,’ she cast into his mind, holding her katana so that it glinted in the moonlight. ‘And this is my fate. Ushi to yasashi to. Sorrowful and unbearable.’

  ‘Hunn. Hunn. Hunn ur HORDE.’

  ‘Help Zach with Igor,’ Dave yelled at O’Halloran. The Navy SEAL had dragged his comrade all the way into the kitchen, a thick blood trail marking his passage. But he was going to have trouble getting him down the ladder into the root cellar. The old seadog slung his shotgun over one shoulder and hurried to lift the trapdoor as Zach manoeuvred the wounded man over the lip and down into the dark. A monstrous face appeared at the kitchen window, then disappeared in a gaudy green and yellow splash as Dave swung the submachine gun around and snapped off a tight burst, threading a bright, neon ribbon of tracers over Zach and Pat as they bent to the task of lowering Igor down.

  The machine gun was empty. It might have had a grenade he could have fired off, but there was no time to check and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to work the underslung launcher anyway. He tossed the weapon aside and took up Lucille as Igor slipped out of sight and Zach unseated his fighting knife. He too was out of ammo.

  Dave heard him reciting the Lord’s Prayer as the first of the daemon killers hit the front porch at a run.

  ‘. . . thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven . . .’

  O’Halloran’s Ruger barked fire and thunder and seemed the loudest noise Dave had heard in the confined space all night. A swarm of super-heated wasps flew past his face and punched into the chest, throat and face of the first dominant to reach the house. The Hunn collapsed in a crashing train wreck of armour plate and flopping, flying limbs. The corpse slammed into the window frame, blocking it just a little with its bulk.