A whispered order came down the line from the Tacticon, over in the next trench: “Hold fire until the command is given.”
U’Sumi watched the advance grow distinct in the increasing light. As dawn broke behind him, he saw rows of infantry accompanied the Elyo—more infantry than what held the Balimar Straits Line. A first rosy glint of sun lit up the turrets of the nearest enemy machines. The cannon mounts looked more like bug heads now than before. The bulges on either side of their barrels sparkled with millions of hexagonal facets, like compound eyes.
From the front of each vehicle wriggled ten black tentacle-like feelers—tasting, testing, and prodding serpent tongues. Armored sides wagged with spiny light cannons that had wasp-stinger lives of their own.
A life of their own.
They lived, they thought, they moved, and survived off the very life-giving essence of men. From a young age, U’Sumi learned the basic principle of blood sacrifice: that blood carried the life of all flesh. Here were machines, or an army of un-human creatures inside machines, that fed on the very life force of men.
U’Sumi’s arms went limp, his heart and muscles, weak. Paralysis overcame his motions, as he slid down into the trench with his eyes closed. Those squirming tentacles would find him and draw him into some mouth-like opening, where a lancing siphon would puncture his body like a boil and slowly suck away his blood. Already he felt the life draining from him.
He muttered softly, below the noise, “No! I can’t let this happen! E’Yahavah, please, I beg you! Give me power to overcome the Elyo, as you gave my father to defeat gryndel!”
Nevertheless, his prayer turned to ash in his mouth. The gryndel was one; the Elyo were many.
U’Sumi managed to bring himself back up to the lip of the dugout. He glanced down the trench on either side of him. At the far end, nearest the crawlway to the Tacticon’s command post, crouched his father. A’Nu-Ahki tracked the advancing infantry with a thunder-pike held to his shoulder in aiming position. On the other side, Iyapeti, who had proven too poor a sharpshooter for one of the coveted ranged weapons, waited with a spear pointed upward for the melee. He looked ridiculous, and the terror in his brown eyes said that he knew it.
U’Sumi turned again to the advancing enemy columns. The lead infantry were now at a range of about three hundred cubits. He lifted his own thunder-pike, and pulled out the retractable handle that transformed it from a pike into a ranged weapon. The tiny aiming reticle popped out to make a cross-hair alignment with the pike’s razor sharp dorsal blade tip. Everything seemed to slow down as he picked out the nearest enemy infantryman and tracked him in—the first man U’Sumi would ever kill.
The enemy moved closer and closer, two-hundred cubits, one-hundred and fifty, one-hundred. U’Sumi could see his target’s eyes beneath a bronze helmet with the figure of a long-necked sea-leviathan carved out over the forehead. The boy had reddish-brown skin and black curly hair, just as U’Sumi did. Did a mother wait anxiously at home on Aztlan’s distant subcontinent for him who only U’Sumi knew would never return?
The Tacticon’s voice barked over the mechanical roar of the approaching machinery; “Ranged weapons free!”
U’Sumi’s finger caressed the recessed button on his pike’s staff. The young soldier whose mother waited in vain fell over dead. U’Sumi never even heard the echoing crack. The recoil shocked him back to a normal sense of time, as he chambered another round through the staff’s breech load. Then he repeated the process and another infantryman fell. He went through the motions, mechanically doing as trained. Most targets fell, some did not, but soon all thoughts of distant mothers and wives ceased.
The first wave of infantry reached the base of the rise, on top of which skirted U’Sumi’s trench. He had time to chamber and empty one last round into a soldier who was just about to leap into the ditch, before he had to snap the catch that reconverted his weapon back into a pike.
“Melee arms front!” yelled his father, almost as an afterthought.
Infantry poured over the sides. Half leaped over the slit to reach the real line a hundred cubits to the rear. The other half engaged A’Nu-Ahki’s men in what was nothing more than a mop-up operation from the start. Only then did the chattering of belt-driven chain cannons and Avarnon-Set’s artillery engines open up on the approaching Elyo.
In the corner of his eye, U’Sumi thought he saw about five or six Wyvernas race down from the highlands to outflank the column of mechanized enemy units. It was a short-lived attempt. He took a quick moment to hack open an attacking foot soldier, and then noticed that the advancing Elyo had reduced all the Wyvernas to smoking hulks.
Another soldier dropped in and fell to U’Sumi’s pike. A wild energy overtook his limbs and eyes, as a sense of invincibility overwhelmed him. He existed somehow at another time rate that ran faster than the rest of creation. The motions of everything else slowed to the pace of cold honey, while U’Sumi somehow retained the ability to move freely at normal speed. One enemy infantryman after another fell to his berserker dance, as a power beyond his own carried him into a dark ecstasy of blood, steel, and fire.
He swung the bladed underside of his pike’s tip, hewing through the legs of those that tried to leap over his trench to engage the main line. Three more enemy soldiers dropped down to subdue him. One after the other fell beneath his weapon. All around him, in slow motion agony, men fought and died, until the floor of his trench became muddy with sticky-jam blood.
His father engaged two thunder-pikers; one of whom raised his weapon to fire at A’Nu-Ahki’s head. U’Sumi ran him through, seized his already chambered pike, and used it to blow the head from his father’s other assailant. Then another two infantrymen dropped into the trench and A’Nu-Ahki had to take one while U’Sumi engaged the other. It was only then that he noticed that his father and he were the only men of their regiment still moving in the trench. Iyapeti lay with a gaping hole in his shoulder, silent, bleeding profusely, with his chest still.
U’Sumi quickly dispatched his assailant, but when he turned to help his father, he found him also fallen, with his enemy ready to deal him a deathblow with a thunder-pike. U’Sumi screamed, and ran the man through where he stood. But his father no longer moved.
He was alone.
Blood and bodies lay everywhere in a vast berry-stained stew made out of people. The enemy chain cannons approached—he could hear them spitting death into his grandfather’s trenches with mechanical ease.
Then he saw the first Elyo approach his trench.
The monster machine rose over the gentle hill like the dawning of a black sun, feelers writhing in front as mocking rays. As if locked in a trance, U’Sumi watched it head directly for him. Then a voice shouted inside his head. He broke himself free of the spell and dove to the blood-mud floor of the trench against the wall, right beneath the Elyo’s tentacles.
The hulking shadow reared up then fell across the slit. In a split second that seemed to last a whole minute, U’Sumi noticed a rectangular hole in its underside; perhaps some kind of maintenance hatch that had been ripped away when the machine had run over a large rock. The Elyo paused, its treads straddling the trench; spinning dirt in a stuck moment before it could pull itself back into motion on the other side.
U’Sumi used that moment without thinking. He leaped up into the hole, accidentally dropping his thunder-pike when it caught on the steel aperture. After a split second of fumbling for the weapon, he gave it up to pull himself up to a safe crouch on some sort of metal chassis, just as the mechanized colossus resumed speed on the other side of the ditch.
The ride grew rough over uneven ground, while the air sweltered from whatever fiery engine drove the thing. U’Sumi rested as he clutched his strut, to let his eyes adjust to the shadow. Diffuse light filtered in from compartments both above and in front of him, although armor separated the two from his little niche. The light came through tiny windows of thick glass. These apparently gave view from the interior to a pump just forward o
f U’Sumi’s cramped body. The place reeked of piney glakka tree oil—the engine, treads, or both likely used the machine lubricant in huge quantities.
Then he noticed the hatch lever behind the pump, all painted the same dark color. He reached around and tried the latch. It turned slowly until the metal door swung open with a bang against the pump, which nearly knocked him to a crushing death beneath the treads.
Had U’Sumi not been a “scrawny ‘tween”—as his elders liked to call him—he would have been unable to squeeze around the massive oil pump and thrust his legs through the narrow hatch. As it was, he had to remove his sword belt to push it through ahead of him.
A loud metallic clink from above startled him. U’Sumi pushed his body into the new crawlspace feet-first, on his back. He peered up through a tangle of metal grating, pipes, and wires. An inhumanly long gray arm with a hand like some monstrous tree frog’s carried a conical projectile above. It slipped the missile into a gigantic version of the breech load on U’Sumi’s lost pike. Another frog hand opened and shut the slot. Thunder shook the already quaking confines when the vehicle’s main weapon fired.
Other less loud, but more frequent, clinks and bangs issued from closer down—less than a couple cubits over U’Sumi’s head—the secondary cannons that lined either side of the rolling mini-fortress. These fired from the narrow metal platform grate under which ran U’Sumi’s U-shaped crawl-way. The open ends of the “U” fed into the forward cabin on either side of the carriage. Bundles of pale, pinkish-gray cables ran along the mezzanine grate, with two that reached up to the pivot brace and breech load of the small cannon just over his head.
One of the cables moved.
It did more than that; it twisted upward like a striking snake. The others slid and curled with it, all along the gun ports.
The nearest tentacle snaked into a storage rack opposite the gun and coiled itself around a projectile, while its partner tentacle opened the cannon’s breech with a suction-cupped end.
Lack of space trapped U’Sumi’s head in a cage full of thrashing vipers. He tried to scream but his diaphragm froze. All around him, the loathsome grayish-pink worms writhed and shot at various objects, each controlling some mechanical aspect of the Elyo’s outer shell and weaponry.
Farther above, inside the turret, the pair of oddly bent arms continued to load and fire the main cannon. U’Sumi had no way to see where these members all converged, or even if he shared the vehicle with several different monstrosities.
He whispered, “E’Yahavah, help me!”
He closed his eyes so as not to focus on the pink snakes. For a long time he lay frozen, afraid to move and afraid not to. Then it came to him that inactivity paved the road to debilitation. He muttered, “I must reconnoiter, as Pahpo would have called it.”
He slid forward on his back and confirmed that each secondary cannon on the right side had two tentacles apiece to operate it. These formed separate ganglions along the mezzanine rather than branching out from a main conduit. More fleshy tendrils twined together in the front than at the rear of the vehicle, which told him that whatever creature or creatures controlled them did so from the forward cabin.
He poked his head through a small break in the machinery and quickfire conduits into the main turret space to get a better view. The froggy arms seemed so oddly bent because they also attached to a set of shoulders forward of the cannon turret. They worked as a man that used his hands behind his back. Yet they seemed to have no need to feel around for anything—they executed movements swiftly, as if guided by sight.
Then U’Sumi noticed two screens of hexagonal facets on either side of the interior turret dome. They resembled the facet bulges he had seen on the Elyo cannon mounts from the outside. He saw the underside of those facets now—each connected to a wire, all of which were bundled into cables on either side, like the arms and tentacles, which went likewise into the forward section. The inside facet screens also had similar connections that joined the cable bundles of their exterior counterparts.
U’Sumi guessed that the facet screens worked like the compound eyes of a dragonfly, which he had studied under crude magnifying lenses at Nestrigati’s academy. Perhaps they somehow modeled the system after the giant bug’s eye, which had excellent visiospatial acuity for rapidly tracking other flying insects. U’Sumi quickly drew his head back down into the tangled shielding of his crawl space, out of their “sight”—assuming his interpretation was correct.
Now came what Lumekki’s training had called tactical planning; how would he go about disabling the Elyo? Did the forward compartment contain some internal self-defense mechanism? If so, rushing in to attack the “heart” might not prove the best tactic. That also presupposed a single being—the differences between the arms and tentacles suggested that he faced diverse creatures. If he simply began to hack appendages one at a time, the creature, or creatures, would still have all their remaining members to counter-attack. The thought of constriction to death in a tangle of those giant sticky worms made him drop the second option.
A third alternative came to mind; what if he could chop the wire bundles from the interior compound eyes with his sword? If he moved fast enough, maybe he could hack the bunch just above his head and make it across to the other bundle before the tentacles and arms could react. What if I’m wrong about the facets, though? What if their resemblance to dragonfly eyes is coincidental and has nothing to do with seeing, and what if the Elyo’s reflexes are faster than I expect? There was only one way to find out.
With a silent prayer, U’Sumi pulled himself from his hiding place and swung his sword at the interior facet screen wires above his head. His heart melted when he found the space too cramped and his swing power insufficient to sever more than a few leads. A rustle all around him signaled an awakened army of sinewy worms.
Sliding his blade beneath his armpit, U’Sumi grasped the wire bundle with both hands, and yanked it as hard as he could from the panel. Sparks flew, while fleshy coils wrapped around his feet. A groan of something like pain bellowed from somewhere up front. Only one groan—not many—and no orders barked between several creatures.
U’Sumi chopped the groping tentacles, as more flew at him with elastic speed. He leaped over the central console that supported the main cannon’s rotation mechanism, ducking the gray arms as they grabbed at him.
Scrambling to his feet against the opposite bulkhead, he clamped the other interior eye harness and yanked it free. Then, for good measure, he blinded the left exterior facets. He would have gone back for the right outside eye, but fighting through the growing tangle of tentacles seemed too risky. Instead, he hacked at the twined base of the snakes on that side. More groans came from the front. The vehicle swerved, either to dislodge U’Sumi’s footing, or in partial blindness.
He made one last chop at the stumps, covering himself in their foul-smelling ooze. The right-side ganglia had almost fully snaked around the turret motor to get at him. Sword first, he threw himself into the narrow passage left of the massive rotation gear box, over which worked the frog-arms. He meant to confront whatever lurked in the forward section.
The evil-eyed man with bared teeth flashed out at him like a specter in the sparks from broken wires. U’Sumi jumped back, screamed, and turned, only to find a wall of ravening whips behind him. He swung around again to face the ghost-man.
The fellow’s eyes and mouth bulged, as if he had died in abject terror—it only took U’Sumi a split second to realize that he was dead, though not long so—manacled into a coffin-like recess that had somehow worked loose. He had been a person of white complexion, like U’Sumi’s mother and older brother, though his skin had an unnatural pallor. A red tube protruded from the corpse’s side, right through his tunic, as if it had punctured with great force.
The loathsome umbilical moved.
U’Sumi had thought he was immune to any further terrors, having already overcome the viper-cage worms. He was wrong.
The red tube’s muscu
lature writhed its way backward out of the corpse. Once free, it became an elastic missile, firing erratically to make contact with the intruder, and a desperately needed source of food to replace the one lost through the wounds U’Sumi had inflicted. It jabbed randomly in what seemed like blind frustration, whipping through the cramped space with a violence that almost pushed him backward into the straining tentacles. When it flew at his face, U’Sumi dropped his sword to catch the enraged blood-siphon in both hands, just a hair’s breadth from his nose.
He wrestled the thrashing sucker-tube; a hollow, tooth-like barb snapping in and out of its end, as if to burrow into U’Sumi’s face. Then he slid a boot over his sword blade to keep it from becoming a weapon for the coiling snakes at his rear.
The vehicle’s erratic motion bounced U’Sumi about, as he forced the blood-siphon away against its waning strength. Once the thing weakened to the point he could push it away with one hand, he drew his dagger and hacked its end off. Another moan issued from close ahead—weaker, but not yet weak enough. The beheaded sucker retracted into the mechanical gloom.
U’Sumi squatted to retrieve his sword, and followed the writhing tubule with his dagger drawn in his left hand.
Entry to the forward cabin came not from the rear, but through a right-angled bend in the tiny passage. The small companionways extended front, on either side of the command suite, from the open ends of the U-shaped carriage. Dim blue-green interior lights revealed the Thing in control of the Elyo vehicle.
Stench smothered U’Sumi’s nostrils, as he pulled his way into the suite. Then he stopped at what he saw. A gigantic quasi-human head with a horrendously large cranium cradled on malformed double shoulders—each with two sets of arms—flailed about the control center, smeared in its own filth. One shoulder-set hunched forward, the other bowed back, while both met at the same misshapen collarbone.
The backward-bowed shoulders produced the frog-like arms U’Sumi had seen from the turret compartment. The forward pair bore a shorter set of limbs with long, six fingered hands to operate the vehicle controls in front. Out of the head’s eye-sockets grew tightly braided wire harnesses—the controlling end of those compound eyes U’Sumi had severed.
The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Page 9