by Aeryn Leigh
All too easy. From the stairwell entrance to his left, Merrion heard the echoed roar of an Australian.
Chapter Ninety
THE MISSING BATTALION
ABOVE THEM, the sounds and screams and explosions of the Republic army fighting for their very lives rolled down the spiral staircase and washed over them, and Laurie ground his teeth.
The commando team lay prone upon the stacked pyramid of tables, the penitent squad behind the barricade below, and Laurie fiddled with the catch of his MP 40.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The fear coiled tight around his stomach, as he waited, as they all waited, for whatever was about to happen.
This was how it was like back in the trenches waiting for the flare to shoot overhead, the signal to go over the top. Instead of hours or days of deafening artillery barrages softening up the enemy before another big push, just the sounds of men killing men echoed down. The muffled thump, thump, thump of Merrion firing the mortar prototype they'd found in Building Seven, the screams of those impaled and those about to be impaled, and the sound of his teeth grinding.
The seconds dragged on, then minutes. Then in front of them, down the back out through the mess hallway corridors leading to where the prison pit lay, now the screams and terror of mortal men. He looked at Griffin and Mick, then at Beowulf, who held one finger up to ward off talking, assuming any of them would talk as the sounds ahead intensified in volume.
Was it the hundreds and hundreds of the First still trapped dying? Gunfire, long streams of gunfire not even remotely in short, controlled bursts. The sound of submachine guns being held down until the entire clip emptied. Laurie realised he'd been holding his breath and forced himself to exhale. A faint passage of air, a breeze across their faces, fourteen feet in the air.
Griffin pulled the arming mechanism back on the Browning. Heartbeats. Then the Inquisition battalion hidden for so long ran pell-mell into the mess hall, their heads twisted this way and that trying to see behind them, and so it was they ran toward Laurie's team. A full Inquisition battalion of under one thousand men ran without heed or care straight for the barricade.
Laurie tipped his head at Griffin and the M2 Browning split the cavern mess with the roar of full metal jackets and Betty carved a huge butchers swath right through the battalion and yet still they ran. Twelve rounds a second spat out of the heavy machine gun then, over thirteen heartbeats later, ran dry and as the commando squad with Laurie yelling put up their own withering wall of lead from a dozen MP 40's. The damaged battalion smashed into the barricade, and as any holes or gaps in the structure became filled with the dying stuck remnants of human flesh it created an even easier ramp for those behind and soon the rushing wave reached the top of the barricade. Laurie found himself screaming along with Beowulf to let them pass and calling for bladed weapons only. Even the penitents moved out of the way as the bloodied Inquisition men sprinted around the pyramid of tables and reached the wide staircase heading to the cathedral. Axes, daggers, and swords slashed out at those running past, and as if in a stampede gone mad, the sizeable remains of the Inquisition battalion ran up the steps two at a time.
"After them," screamed Laurie, shuffling backward off the edge of the table and hurrying down to the floor, pointing at the penitent squad as he did so. The battalion would be running hard right into the rear of the First and Last but still over six hundred strong.
The assault team gave chase.
Laurie bellowed as hard as he could.
MERRION BARELY HAD time to reform the rear lines of battle before the running Inquisition marines stormed up the stairs and flowed in a straight line for the exit on the far end of the cathedral paying no attention to the casualties inflicted upon them as they passed. Merrion looked around for the general or Major Brutowsky but couldn't see them just as Beowulf, then Griffin, reached the top of the stairs and came to a dead stop in front of Merrion. Moments later Laurie joined them, panting heavily. The ball of dread in Merrion’s stomach now blossomed into full outright panic.
What on earth could make Inquisition Marines break and run?
General Versetti stood amazed as the missing battalion ran straight into the advancing army and sowed seeds of discord all up and down the battle line as soldiers cried in terror the words "Daemons, Daemons!"
In that moment, the roar of battle faded away as Inquisition commanders tried to regain control.
LAURIE BENT OVER, one hand on his knees, the other holding a dripping sword. The fighting stopped. A massive cheer erupted from the First and Last, and Laurie heard Major Brutowsky give the order to press the attack. At the back of Laurie's mind, the edge of his senses, he heard cicadas. The snake around his stomach constricted into a tight wad of fear as out in front the Inquisition army stopped what they were doing and started screaming, hands and arms pointed upward. Laurie stood back up and craned his head backward and saw the image of his nightmares blossoming outward from the cathedral's mountainous cracks far, far, overhead.
AT THE EDGES of the bay the daemons crawled out of the surf and clambered up wooden jetties and stone piers, up anchor chains, up and over stone fortifications and every man serving their Emperor ran for their very lives uphill toward the sanctuary of their God, and those who couldn’t, died.
IN THE PRISON PIT, what remained of the trapped First and Last fell and were ripped asunder by the relentless waves of monsters crawling out of their very own nightmares, and in death they finally found peace.
THE DAEMONS outside worked their way up the mountain, section by section, impaling, clubbing, or cutting every human that stood in their path as they too made a beeline for the mountain interior to rejoin their brethren. What remained of the Inquisition forces of the stronghold fled through the broken mountain doors as the daemons entered the courtyard.
AS THE UNKNOWN enemy advanced down, along the walls, up on the ceiling, every oil lantern was extinguished as they passed, smothered by long, spiderlike limbs.
The only light filling the cavernous room came from the stairwell down, and that flickered and faded, casting shadows hundreds of feet long, the air smothered with fear, sweat, and moans of the dying and wounded, hysterical screaming from the void.
"To me, to me," yelled General Versetti, as the general tried rallying her troops as the ceiling mural's empty spaces were finally covered in swarming black — monsters.
The fleeing battalion almost made it to the rear exit just as the crush of stronghold personnel slammed into them coming in the opposite direction and clogged the exit. The First and Last formed a defensive diamond ten rows deep, at its core the general and the major.
The assault team and the penitents formed a half-circle around the stairwell, their backs to the wall.
The dim light coming from below faded further, and the Inquisition became no longer visible.
Laurie looked into Beowulf's eyes, round with awe and wonder, then at Mick and the two shared one single moment.
"Been nice knowing you, short arse," said Laurie.
"You too, Old Man."
The black shapes dropped.
Chapter Ninety-One
VALKJUR
ALIEN MUSIC BLASTED through the helmet in a steady almost industrial rhythm. Ella grimaced. A million possibilities, entire Universes of problems and solutions, yet it seemed, finding the gramophone off switch wasn't one of them.
A tiny symbol popped up in the bottom right corner of her vision, pulsating red. She looked at it and once more tried to open it only using her mind, concentrating so hard her breathing stopped. It didn't open. Instead, other alerts popped up in the shape of a pair of lungs blooming orange. Ella forced herself to start breathing and the image faded from view.
Verdammt. She fought the urge to stomp her foot and unleash the frustration of trying to control an interface that accepted input via eye control, sound recognition, and the power of thought. Her rudimentary grasp of Norse language thus far had unlocked the main menu and basic functions — in theory at least, fo
r she hadn’t yet moved the suit at all. Not one damn centimetre.
And this entire time the awareness, the presence of being in the shadow of the great white figure. What was it? Who was it? Did somebody control it like the armour she was in? So many questions and almost no answers.
Ella closed her eyes and for the millionth time tried to awaken from this living nightmare. The anger and rage rose, heating her blood and she started breathing regularly, in rhythm of the music's beat and the thought popped into her mind. She focused, and with her eyes still closed, imagined her left arm swinging out and her right foot lifting and then her left, walking down the steps and into the graveyard and with her eyelids still closed, swung the long warhammer at the nearest target, ducking under the long outstretched bony limbs, and caving its head in with a single blow. Only now did she open her eyes and find the reality matched her imagination. Ella Gruder took control and let her intuition run free.
She felt like God. Using the field of corpses, she jumped, danced, ran, and swung the hammer as if practising in a martial arts military training ground. She avoided any contact at all with the dried, desiccated cadavers and as she did so she looked at the graphical representation of her suit and its right arm and a little symbol of jagged teeth. She willed it into being, and the two-foot-long sword covered in little teeth embedded into the suits forearm erupted into life with the barest feeling of vibration. Ella Gruder laughed, as for the first time in millennia, the chainsword powered up and cycling at a Gott knows how high rpm held her right arm out parallel to the ground cut a monster’s torso in two.
She stopped, and reversed the process, shutting down the toothed weapon. All around her, bone dust hung in the air. The music pounded. With a thought, she turned it off. Now she tried that flashing red symbol and it swelled open, occupying the entirety of her vision, then past that as everything else disappeared and she stood in one vast three-dimensional representation of the world. She stood at the epicentre of the sphere. Pulsating out from where she stood were constant waves of blue, just like the energy wave she saw first entering this hall. Radar. Just like radar. But rather than looking down the two-dimensional display, everything was shown and could be rotated this way and that, zoomed in or zoomed out.
Her mind boggled. Such technology could barely be conceived. Ella gazed upon the planet called Elysium. With her heart in her mouth Ella concentrated on the mass of glowing orange dots. She dived toward the surface of the world with such speed Ella experienced vertigo thinking any moment she would smash against the earth and found herself looking upon the section of mountain called the Emperor's Lair.
Inside it swarmed with orange, electronic monsters. The aliens.
Right where her friends were. She had to help them. She closed the tactical map and found the dragonfly dagger hovering directly in front.
"We need to help them," she said in what she thought her best Norse. The dragonfly flitted up and down for a moment then headed back to the centre dais and Ella followed, each of her footsteps a mushroom cloud of dust. When she reached the top of the throne she kept moving, past the chair, to where the dagger hovered at the rear wall underneath the immense leadlight window.
There was nothing but smooth polished stone. An instant later, outlines of large blue rectangles formed. "Open," she commanded.
From out of seemingly solid stone drawer after drawer eased out and Ella took in the plethora of large, ugly weapons sitting in moulded supports. She looked at the dagger. It shrugged. A cascade of information swept across her display as she looked upon each weapon in turn, and Ella could make very little sense of it.
They didn't have time for this. She swept her head left and right, then reached out for the weapon directly in front of her. Her arm stopped midway as the pole on the battle hammer retracted into the body, telescoping upward, and all by itself the suit holstered the hammer onto the side of its left leg and with a single smooth motion continued upward, lifting the five-foot long weapon shaped like a torpedo with a hole-in-one end, hefting it with ease.
"Now what?" she said. "Do I walk there?"
The weapon cases retracted into the stone and the dragonfly pointed its tip at the rear of the throne chair. Ella turned around to see a wide hatch open and heard gears whirring and couldn't help herself sprinting over and grinning like a maniac.
Before her, looking suspiciously like something she had test flown not long ago, yet completely so far advanced it made her past prototype aircraft seem utterly prehistoric, stood a smaller version of Me-163 Komet but with most of the belly fuselage scooped out, and moulded to say fit, comfortably, the back of a suit of power armour.
Her power armour.
Standing vertically upright, stubby short wings extended, drop pods either side. And the trailing edge of the wings resembled metal feathers, cool to the touch, like one giant eagle.
Ella bounced up and down, her footfalls slabs of granite hitting concrete.
"Valkjur," said the suit. "Ready?"
Ella walked slowly backward and into the embrace of the metal wings and heard a satisfying click. In the top left section, the display showed the outline of her suit and the wings, both flashed blue. All good. She walked to the edge of the elevated platform, in front of the God’s feet, facing the tunnel entrance clotted with the dead. The dragonfly docked in her arm.
Ella felt vibrations in the suit as something beneath powered up and juddered as a blue beam shot out over the top of her head and lanced toward the entrance pushing everything in its path aside.
Clearing the runway.
Ready.
Ella felt nerves come alight all over her skin as the sensation of gel covering every available surface of her body and a counter appeared in the centre of her vision counting down runes. It reached the end.
She instinctively gulped as the suit toppled forward off the edge of the throne and tried to raise her arms outward to stop the fall, then the attached engine ignited, and Ella catapulted forward with a terrific amount of G-force through the room and into the tunnel, now lit with cascading dashes of blue lights along its walls. Ella felt and watched the speedometer increase as they accelerated faster and faster the entire time maintaining the absolute precision of dead centre in the tunnel. The very same tunnel she had dragged Rob along in the dark but this time traversing its length in a fraction of the time until she reached the final long straight.
Now, oh my Gott, oh my Gott, something like afterburners kicked in and Ella screamed out of the mountain side breaking the sound barrier as she did, the sonic boom clanging off the rocks as she broke Mach 1 sending seabirds from miles around scattering into the air. The suit banked hard to the right and descended to sea level, sea spray falling in arches all around her.
The tactical map popped up with new alerts and Ella could see something like tiny representations of longships pursued by a half-dozen warships 30° to the left just over the horizon. Hellsbaene. There she thought, and the autopilot adjusted the new course and only seconds went past before they came into view. Hellsbaene and her three companions still afloat, including the Oslo, puffs of water erupting all around them as they fled the Inquisition Fifth fleet, before the tail end longboat took a direct hit and blew apart.
In her mind, she selected the heavy weapon and assorted options presented themselves on screen showing different routes of attack. She chose the second. Again, the power suit banked hard like a raptor and came around in a wide, sweeping turn heading straight for the eighteen Inquisition ships lined abreast, staggered in twos. Ella lifted the heavy weapon at the edge of the horizon and her gloved fingers squeezed the trigger. A molten, searing shaft of roiling orange light spat from the torpedo’s end, and almost instantaneously turned the attacking ships pair by pair into infernos of light. As she shot past at a little over Mach 2 she screamed, "Hellsbaene!" and the suit resumed course to the mountain stronghold.
MAGNUS and the others could only blink and look at each other as in a matter of moments, their fate almost assured
, a glorious day to meet Odin, a great rolling wall of thunder came from the east. They witnessed a Valkyrie descend and with the power of Ragnarok immolate the enemy. As it went by, the god snapped the air in two with a single beat of its black feathered wings, rocking the longships with great plumes of water in its wake before vanishing in seconds on its return to Valhalla.
The one thing they could not shake, as the eighteen burning ships slipped beneath the waters, and tiny bits of ash fell like rain, was that the Valkyrie who screamed Hellsbaene sounded a lot like Ella.
Magnus gave praise to the gods, took a swig of mead, and went back to the task of trying to fix the throttle controls, the flagship’s engines non-functional, as they resumed course towards the rendezvous point via old-fashioned wind power, awe in their veins.
Chapter Ninety-Two
MASTERS OF THEIR FATE
THE KILLING BEGAN.
Such a one-sided slaughter had never been seen on the shores of Elysium. Arrows buried deeply into the aliens' carapace yet did nothing to slow them. The rare hit with axes and swords removed the bottom few feet of limbs, and were rewarded with death, as bone swords the length of a man, killed multiple men with a single slash, and the monsters' remaining seven limbs tore apart those lucky enough to land such a blow.
Bursts of light here and there, muzzle flashes from guns, all around in the inkiness, smears of phosphorescent blood from injured monsters, all a light show of death.
Laurie found himself screaming at Versetti for them to retreat to the wide staircase for at least there they might escape the killing ground and present less of a target. Seconds later he heard Brutowsky give the order and the diamond Ninth shuffled backward as the ground underneath formed shallow lakes of red blood upon the polished stone floor. Their boots waded and splashed through the sticky liquid and all around the terrified screams of those in the front and centre of such a horror show.