An instant later—only a couple of seconds after the sentries to either side of Arjan Dev were struck by a high-discharge energy lance blast—the sounds became shouts of alarm and screams of shock. Shock and pain. The smells of the forest and the earth were utterly overwhelmed by smoke from projectile weapons and fires, ozone from energy blasts, and blood. Death—death en masse—had smells all its own that only veteran soldiers knew, and it was those smells that now suffused the camp, heralding the onslaught to come.
Arjan Dev moved instinctively. He was moving before he fully understood what was happening. He threw himself backward from the raised earthwork and rolled, even as sizzling energy blasts struck the ground around him or whizzed past. There was little immediate cover nearby; only a scant few of the tall, slender, tropical trees remained standing in the entire camp. A great deal of the forest that filled and surrounded III Legion’s landing zone had been ripped up, burned, or chopped down. At last stumbling past a parked hovertank, he scrambled behind it and accessed the Aether link, intending to sound the alarm. He needn’t have bothered; the attack itself had raised plenty of alarm, and the local Aether was filled with urgent reports, orders, and exclamations.
In a flash, everything on Eingrad-6 had changed. General Agrippa, having led the assault force down from orbit and having taken command of them personally, had been preparing for a major assault that he had planned to launch with the following dawn.
He would not get that chance.
Arjan Dev sat crouched behind the hovertank for three seconds—seconds that seemed both as brief as the blink of an eye and as long as an eternity. Gathering his wits and his courage, reminding himself that he was a lieutenant in III Legion, with all that such a distinction carried with it, he stood and drew his blast pistol. Then he leaned around the tank and peered into the smoke and dust, in the direction of the attack.
What he saw surprised him, to say the least.
“We are under attack,” came a voice over the Aether link, overriding the other signals. It was General Agrippa himself. “All legionaries stand ready to repel enemy advance.”
“This is very unlike the Riyahadi,” came the voice he quickly recognized as Major Kursk.
“Yes,” Agrippa agreed. “Does anyone have any intelligence as to what they’re trying to do—or why? Sentries—have you seen anything that—”
Arjan Dev interrupted his general. He felt under the circumstances it was warranted. “It’s not the Riyahadi, General,” he reported.
“What?” A pause. “Lieutenant Dev? What are you talking about?”
“I can see the attackers now, sir,” Arjan Dev replied, leaning out from behind the tank again and pulling his head back again just before three devastating blasts narrowly missed him. “It’s the Rao.”
“The Rao?” The shock in Agrippa’s voice was obvious and pronounced. It was clear that he didn’t entirely believe Dev’s report. “Why would aliens be helping the Riyahadi attack us?”
The blasts grew more intense, and now were coming from more than one direction. The Rao soldiers—humanoid in general, but somewhat shorter than the average human, and pale blue in skin color, on those rare occasions when they were seen outside of their high-tech orange body-armor—were flanking his position. He couldn’t stay there much longer. In mere moments they would have him surrounded. But—what could he do? Where could he—?
He looked at the big hunk of metal behind which he had been hiding. He blinked his eyes, registering exactly what it was, then smiled. A second later, he was scrambling up the side of it and back down through the open turret.
The inside of the hovertank was dark, but just enough light from the planet’s moons was shining down into the interior that he could make out the controls. He moved his hands over the ignition and main power boards, kicking the big machine to life. Lights in a rainbow of colors lit up on the consoles all around him. Reaching up, he grasped the hatch lid and pulled it closed. Simultaneously, the tank reached nominal power output and rose smoothly into the air, living up to its name by hovering approximately three feet off the ground.
Shots rang off the vehicle’s armored hide. This didn’t worry Arjan Dev terribly much; though he himself was not a tanker and had never trained extensively in one, he knew the basics. The armor of a III Legion hovertank was thick and very strong, made from a single force-grown crystal of hyper-dense molecular structure, lined with a mixture of light, strong metal alloys and exotic ceramics. The weaponsmiths of the Kings of Oblivion had developed this particular formula themselves and had never shared the full details of the process with even their counterparts in the other legions. The tankers who manned the vehicles, likewise, trained long and hard, in the most rigorous of environments and simulations. As a result, Agrippa’s tank corps had achieved a reputation unmatched in the realm of armored cavalry. The soldiers of III Legion took great pride in this. Even those who, like Dev, were not assigned to tank duty.
Arjan Dev manipulated the controls of the tank deftly, spinning the big machine around. His first thought was to use it to retreat back to the main camp from the front line—the spot where, as a sentry infantryman, he had been posted to keep an eye on the Riyahadi. But then he hesitated, looking around him. He was sitting inside a hovertank. Someone in III Legion had parked it there for some inscrutable reason, but there was no sense in turning down a gift like that now.
Dev spun the tank back around, presenting its most heavily-armored section of hull to the advancing Rao aliens in their orange armor. They were charging on foot, already climbing over the raised earth embankment Dev had spent the earlier portion of the evening sitting behind. Their energy lances and power rifles were spitting blindingly bright blobs and streaks of superheated gas and barely-contained pulses of energy, along with solid projectiles and slugs. Their assault was impressive indeed—as long as their opponents consisted of mere sentries with sidearms.
Laughing now, Arjan Dev swung the main turret around and lined both the heavy cannon and the smaller anti-personnel weapon up in the direction of the enemy. He fired.
The main cannon blasted first. A huge, shimmering cylinder of raw energy lashed out, smashing into the center of the Rao advance. It vaporized the half-dozen alien soldiers it struck directly, then hit the earthworks mere inches from where Dev himself had been crouching before. The embankment exploded, further shredding the Rao line.
Before the alien attackers could recover, Dev’s smaller automatic gun that was positioned just to the right of the main cannon began to spit sizzling death. It carved into the stunned and reeling Rao on either side of the ragged hole in the embankment, slicing them down one by one. Scarcely ten seconds after Arjan Dev had climbed into the tank, he’d taken out half of the attacking force at his position.
“What’s happening there?” demanded Agrippa over the Aether link. “I’m seeing firing from our side of the line.”
Dev keyed the link. “This is Lt. Dev, General. I have commandeered a hovertank and am attempting to blunt the Rao advance.”
A pause, then, “Good man, Dev. Excellent work. We are on our way now.”
The link closed. Dev shrugged to himself and continued to fire, sweeping the turret around forty-five degrees to carve into the right flank of the assault force. The Rao looked surprised now—or as surprised as aliens in armor and helmets that totally covered their bodies and faces could look. Their well-organized ranks were shattered, and individuals scrambled here and there, not unlike what Dev had done some moments earlier. Watching them from inside the tank as he fired, he relished how the shoe was now on the other foot.
Feeling increasingly confident, he stood from the driver’s seat, moved one step to his right, and reached for the driving controls, moving the big vehicle forward slowly. It wasn’t easy to do that and work the weapons controls at the same time, but he moved incrementally, taking every opportunity to break up any concentration of enemy troops as he went. It looked to him as if the Rao were falling back now. The thought that h
e might have single-handedly won this battle before anyone else from his side had even arrived began to bounce around in his brain, and he grinned.
The hovertank moved over the earthworks, angling upward as it went, then back down the other side. It bounced momentarily as it reacquainted itself with gravity and proper orientation. Stopping again, Dev returned to the gunner’s seat and peered out the main site. He gasped.
Instead of the backs of a few dozen retreating Rao, he found himself face-to-armored face with a veritable ocean of Rao troops. From just ahead of him practically to the horizon, all he could see was pale orange armor. They looked like ants that had been stirred up from their hill.
“We’re here, Dev,” came the booming voice of Agrippa over the link. “Coming up just behind your position.”
Arjan Dev opened and closed his mouth soundlessly for a second, in shock.
“We’ll finish off the stragglers,” Agrippa was continuing. “I’d like a few prisoners to interrogate.”
“General,” Dev all but shouted over the link. “Stay back! There are too many!”
Silence for a moment. Then, “What’s that, Lieutenant?”
Arjan Dev spun the turret around so that it was facing towards the approaching troops of III Legion, so that he could get a look at them. They were already there, though, rushing past his tank on either side. At the head of the force ran General Agrippa himself. The big man leapt to the top of a still-intact section of earthworks, raising his quad-rifle high in one hand and his gladius in the other. “Advance, men!” he boomed. He looked to Dev like a god among men, tall and majestic and powerful.
A barrage of energy blasts came at him from beyond, and at least two of them glanced off his white armor. He tumbled off the rise and fell heavily to the ground.
As attendants rushed to Agrippa’s aid, Arjan Dev keyed the Aether link again. “There are thousands of them,” he cried over the mental communications network. “It’s an entire army!”
The legionaries hesitated in their advance, looking to the fallen Agrippa, uncertain.
Agrippa pulled his massive, armored form back up onto his feet. “The Lieutenant is right,” he sent. “Pull back! We must regroup and prepare a more effective force.” A pause as various subordinates acknowledged the order. Then, “You too, Dev. Bring that tank back to the main camp with you. We’ll need it.”
“Understood, General,” Dev replied.
“I’ve already called in a little help,” Agrippa added.
As energy blasts in increasing force and number continued to ring off the hull, Arjan Dev hauled the tank around and accelerated back toward the base. At that moment the Aether link crackled to life again on a private channel. Eyes widening at what he saw in his virtual vision, he keyed it. “Yes, General?”
“That was good work back there, Dev,” the big man told him. “You may have saved a good portion of our army—not to mention me.”
Dev smiled. “My pleasure, General.” He hesitated a moment. “But—”
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Are we retreating, sir? I thought we never did that. Never.”
“Retreating?” The incredulity in Agrippa’s voice was powerful and heartening. “Don’t be silly, Lieutenant. Take a look at about two o’clock, and up—toward the sky.”
Steering the hovertank deftly—he was better at it than he’d expected he’d be—Dev snuck a quick look through the viewscope in the direction the general had indicated. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. It appeared as if about a dozen men were floating in the air, slowly descending. But that couldn’t be right; they were too far away. The shape of what he was seeing fought with the sense of distance and scale within his mind for a couple of seconds before suddenly it all snapped into place. In spite of himself, he gasped.
A group of man-shaped Imperial Colossus walkers were settling to the ground. The heavily armed and armored machines had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head, but beyond that all resemblance to a human being ended—not least of which because each of them was some two hundred meters tall. They were engines of pure, unadulterated destruction, and the general had just committed a dozen of them to this battle.
“Retreating?” Agrippa repeated over the link, laughing. “Son, I’m simply reloading.”
4
The huge double-doors of the throne room swung open with a crash, instantly dissipating the previously oppressive, almost palpable gloom that had filled the chamber.
Caught by surprise, ceremonially armed and crimson-robed Sand Kings guards reacted with a start, moving away from their usual positions along the walls and hurrying forward, their ornamented but effective golden energy rifles at the ready.
On his throne, the planetary governor, Rameses, jerked awake from the latest of his recent string of nightmares and sat up straight. Scowling at the interruption, he peered through the dimly lit space and attempted to understand exactly what he was seeing.
Through the now-open doorway glided a figure all in black. A peaked hood covered its head and obscured its face in shadow. A few paces behind came a quartet of muscular, bronze-skinned men, all partially clad in black metal armor of some unrecognizable sort, each holding up one corner of a rectangular palanquin.
The Sand Kings guards hurried to interpose themselves between the intruders and their ruler. Scarcely had they moved into place, however, before the man in black gestured at them with his right hand and they began to fall back, making way.
“What is this?” demanded Rameses, now fully awake and seeing his troops moving aside for this newcomer. He smoothed the wrinkles in his luxurious purple and red robes, the woven gold trim gleaming in the dim candlelight. His voice cracked but was still strong. “Who are you?”
The figure in black ignored him for the moment. Instead it gestured to its right in silent command and the four bearers instantly obeyed, carrying their burden to the area indicated. The figure gestured and spoke a soft word, inaudible to Rameses only a short distance away. The four slaves instantly knelt in one smooth movement, lowering the rectangular platform to the cold marble floor. As it touched down, Rameses could at last fully see what was carried upon it: a small cube of dark red, roughly six inches to the side, and a broad but shallow bowl or basin of gold, slightly more than two meters wide.
Rameses’ eyes darted from the objects to the silent figure and back again. “What is the meaning of this?” he called down, but the force of his words had already faded somewhat. His eyes were now locked onto the two objects that had been revealed. Standing, never taking his eyes off them, he hurried down the steps of the dais which held his throne.
“Gifts,” the dark figure stated, breaking its silence at last. The voice was low and gravelly. Spindly fingers drew back the hood. “Gifts from my master.”
With seemingly great effort, Rameses tore his eyes away from the two objects and glanced quickly at the man whose head was now revealed. He looked at him just long enough to get a general impression—very pale, very slender, angular face, short and spiky hair—and then turned back to the palanquin. “Who are you, then—and who is your master?” he asked. He felt somehow he should know the answer to the second question, but no name came to his mind as he considered it. “You are in my throne room, on my world,” he said. “You will answer!”
“I am called Zahir,” replied the man in black.
Still distracted, Rameses nodded at this. “Zahir. A good name. A godly name.” He glanced very briefly at the man again. “It was carried by one of the Seventy-Five, the lost gods. The gods who died the final death.”
“No,” the figure in black stated.
Rameses blinked at this unexpected response. He frowned. “No? No what? The name Zahir is well-known as having belonged to one of the dead gods.”
“No,” the figure repeated.
Rameses’s anger grew. It was enough now to drag his attention away from the two shiny objects on the palanquin. “No? What do you mean by ‘no?’” he demanded. �
��Do you dispute the fact that the name you bear was also borne by a god?”
“Certainly not,” the figure in black replied. He looked up at Rameses and his mouth split into a smile both humorless and disturbing. “I merely dispute the claim that I am dead.”
Rameses stared back at him for a long moment, then blinked, shook his head, and laughed sharply. “Ah. I see what you are saying now. Very clever—very funny.”
The man in black simply stared back at him, his gaze flat and almost lifeless. “You know my master, do you not?”
Rameses’ smile faded. For a moment he said nothing. Then he looked away, saw his soldiers standing idly by with glassy eyes and vacant expressions, and nodded. “Yes,” he said, as an image swirled into and back out of his consciousness. “Yes, I believe I do.”
Zahir chuckled softly. “And, knowing his identity, you would yet believe anything impossible?”
Rameses stood up to his full height, turning his back on the palanquin with great reluctance. He loomed nearly a foot taller than Zahir. “So I am supposed to believe that you are a god?”
“What you believe of me is immaterial,” the dark man replied. “What matters is that you understand I am here in the place of my master, and that I have been sent to advise you. You will follow my instructions as you would his, and you will follow them implicitly.”
“Instructions?” Rameses bellowed. “I am the ruler of this entire world—and soon of much more besides. You would have me follow?” He practically spat the word. “I follow no one!”
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 31