by Dana Fredsti
“We made quite a journey to find you,” Cam said proudly. “Worthy of a song.”
Another woman in some kind of toga stepped forward. She was striking, with Mediterranean features and aristocratic bearing. Nellie broke away from the embrace to draw the woman into their group.
“These are more of our companions,” she said in Greek. “Amber, Cam, this is the famous Hypatia of Alexandria! Isn’t it amazing?”
Hypatia gave an elegant little nod in greeting. “You and all your company are most welcome here.”
Amber felt a bit tongue-tied, but responded with a simple, heartfelt “Thank you,” and then quickly translated the lady’s salutation for Kha-Hotep, Leila, Ibn Fadlan, and DeMetta, introducing the newcomers before turning back to Nellie.
“I was so afraid we’d never see you again,” Amber said, squeezing her tight. “The ship told us where you were, more or less, but then our rover broke, and… anyway, we can tell you all that later. What’s going on here?”
“The city is under attack from the Germans,” Nellie explained. “From Blake’s war.”
“Holy shit, Nazis? Where did you park the Vanuatu? We need to get out here!”
Nellie’s face darkened. “Amber…” she started.
“What’s wrong? Is it Blake?” Oh god, is Blake…
“No, Blake’s fine,” Nellie reassured her. “At least for now. He’s outside the walls with the soldiers. Harcourt’s somewhere around here.” She shook her head. “He’s fine, too, the crafty old good-for-nothing. It’s… it’s the ship.”
“Where is it?”
Nellie stared silently for a long moment. “It’s difficult even to say it. I’m afraid it’s just… gone.”
“Gone! Did Mehta steal it?”
“No, Mehta’s thrown in with the Germans. The Vanuatu… It’s been destroyed.”
Amber grabbed Cam’s arm. Her worst fear—the one she had been keeping at bay—came rushing back. Suddenly the earth was spinning too fast, and her heart felt like a stone thumping around in a washing machine.
We’re screwed, she thought frantically. The world is screwed.
She slumped to the ground, gutted, and Cam held her arm. She could sense the distress in his mind, even as he tried to stay brave for her sake. DeMetta had been trying to remain inconspicuous, but then he came forward and crouched down beside the pair.
“Listen to me, both of you. Don’t give up. We’re not finished here, even if we can’t see how we’ll get through it just yet.” He focused on Amber. “Do you remember what I said about the PreCogs? Somehow they knew it was crucial to bring us together.”
Amber nodded, trying to breathe through the panic.
“Alright then,” he said. “So no giving up yet.” He peered at her, and added, “Agreed?”
“Yeah… okay.” One of the hard knots of despair in her chest unkinked itself. Maybe he was right. Maybe there was still a chance. The two helped her to her feet as Professor Harcourt emerged from in between the trucks, carrying an armful of different guns, weapons, and ammunition belts, toting them all like some kind of lanky Victorian Rambo.
“What the devil?” he said, spotting them. “The colonial girl and her barbarian. Capital!” He came over at once. “Look at all the dashing new recruits.” His gaze fell upon DeMetta, whose makeshift cowl was slipping. The Victorian’s mouth opened in horror. “You!”
Nellie gasped.
Amber started to intervene, but DeMetta held up a hand and sighed. She telepathically eavesdropped as he calmed their fears, explaining matters as simply as he could. When he was finished, both Nellie and Harcourt seemed reassured, though Harcourt still looked confused.
Hypatia and Nellie wasted no time getting back to the coordination of the defense efforts—directing porters with timbers to the Serapeum, wagons filled with amphorae of oil to the Jewish quarter, and the Broucheion and Aspendia districts.
A shifty-looking desert monk leading a laden donkey approached Hypatia. They spoke quietly for a moment before he presented her with a tightly lidded basket and some small round pottery jars. Nodding in approval, Hypatia handed basket and jars to Kha-Hotep and Cam.
“What are these?” Cam asked.
“Secret weapons,” Nellie answered. “They are coming with us to the royal quarter. Careful with them, now.”
DeMetta jerked his head toward the parked trucks.
“Who’s motorcycle is that?” he asked Harcourt.
“Blake stole it from the Germans, so I suppose it’s his now.”
DeMetta walked over and mounted up, starting the engine. He nodded to Amber, patting the sidecar.
“Hop in.”
“You and me?” Amber said, surprised. “Where are we going in that?”
“We’re slipping out the city gates. It’s a long shot, but I think I can end all this if I can just get close enough to Mehta. Only I’ll need your help.”
“Get close?” Amber stared. “Are you out of your mind?”
“We’re going to save the world, remember?” he replied. “First we need to win this battle.”
12
Singh stared down in alarm. MacIntyre looked as though he was about to take a swipe at Blake’s head.
“Wha’ did ye jist say, ye bampot Sassenach?”
“I said, we can’t win this battle.” The commando kept his voice cool. His intention all along had been to draw the enemy in—and that part had worked brilliantly, but the most crucial component hadn’t gone according to plan. He got to his feet. “Listen to me, all of you. I’m going to tell you what I’ve already told the snipers. Don’t any of you fool yourself that we’re going to win this. That’s no longer our objective.”
“Well, wha’s th’ feckin’ point then?” MacIntyre growled.
“There are two lines of tanks up there, nine Panzers in each. We just killed two of them. If we’re lucky, maybe, maybe, we could knock out all seven of the rest from behind. I’d say our chances aren’t half bad. And maybe the Alexandrian cavalry and the French can take out the other nine behind us, with one good surprise attack. Christ knows a single charge is all they’re going to get.
“Our archers sure as hell made pincushions of their bloody infantry, and thanks to the snipers, those Jerry flamethrowers went up like fireworks.” He allowed himself a wry grin, and a few of the men chuckled in response.
“But there’s been a change of plan,” he continued. “We need to find Rommel’s mobile HQ, and it’s not up there. That means this is just the advance wave, and he’s calling the shots from behind, so more tanks are coming. What do you think that says about our chances?” Blake let the sobering thought sink in for a moment before continuing. “Right. The likelihood is that we can’t win this battle, or keep the city.”
“A wee late to be telling us noo,” MacIntyre said glumly.
“Stow it, soldier,” Blake snapped. “Now listen carefully. When the Jerries’ real force arrives, we can take out János Mehta—and that is our prime objective. We have to kill János. Everything else is secondary.”
“Kill tha’ bastard who crossed ye? So tha’s wha’ this’s all aboot? How is tha’ supposed to save any of us?”
“Damn it, man,” Blake snapped, “we’re not here to save Alexandria, or even ourselves—we’re here to save the whole goddamned world. Mehta makes Hitler look like a bloody piker. He’s insane, and he’s able to sink his claws into your brain… sink them in and squeeze until you’re his bloody slave.” As he spoke, Blake drilled his finger against the Scot’s forehead.
“Worst of all, he can’t or won’t believe that the planet is literally falling to pieces. So our only chance is to kill Mehta, and try to reason with Rommel. Nellie and Hypatia need to surrender to Rommel as soon as his mobile HQ enters Alex. That’ll get them in close. If they can’t find a way to all work together to stop what’s happening, it’s over—for you, for me, the Alexandrians and the Germans, every last person on Earth.”
“So we’re aw doomed, then? A bloody suicide mission, is it?” M
acIntyre’s voice cracked. The other soldiers muttered among themselves. Blake said nothing for a moment, meeting the eyes of every man in the tomb.
“I expect we’ll probably die here,” he said. “But you all could have died in that German pit back there, or at El Alamein—and you most certainly will be dead if the whole world goes to pieces, which could be very soon.”
That got the men’s full attention.
“Mehta’s our target, and my money says he’s riding alongside Rommel, pulling the strings. Rommel’s not one to stay behind in some HQ tent miles behind the front. He’s a maestro, and he wants to conduct the whole symphony up close and on the go. He won’t be running around blind, buttoned up in a Panzer. The Afrika Korps mobile command is a captured Brit Dorchester AEC. It carries his full communications center, along with the radio crew and equipment. A great lumbering toaster of a lorry, so we won’t miss it. Our job is to stay under wraps until it appears—and then fight like hell to take out that bastard Mehta.
“Understand this. The birth and the death of this world began in a physics laboratory in the Antarctic, and to fix it we have to give the others a fighting chance. They have to get to that lab. Nothing else matters. Every last one of us is expendable if we can only give them that.”
The other men were very quiet now. A new commotion arose, and Singh took another look topside. He watched for a long time before finally turning back to the men with a sunken look on his face.
“The trenches have been overrun,” he said quietly. “It’s a slaughter out there.”
* * *
In the first trench, the archers knelt safely out of sight below ground level. Urion, the youngest of them, had three arrows left. He turned to the veteran by his side for a sign of what to do.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. The roar of their enemy’s war engines was only growing louder, and their captain was searching back and forth across the smoke-strewn remains of the shattered necropolis, desperate to get a new sense of their range. All around them the ground started shaking beneath the tread of the machines—still unseen, still coming. Grains of chalky yellow soil began to trickle down from the lips of the trenches.
With the sound of a cracking whip, the top of the captain’s periscope suddenly shattered, sending it flying out of his hands. He let out a startled cry and fell backward. Straightening up again, he peered cautiously over the lip of the trench. Urion and Obelius, along with the rest of their company, watched their commander’s cheeks turn pale. When he faced them again, his ashen, expressionless face looked like the shade of a dead man.
“Toxótes! Sikónomai!” he called out, ordering them to stand, his voice more haunted than commanding. After only the briefest of hesitations, Urion and the others dutifully rose to their feet and notched arrows, their heads just above ground level. They could see nothing but scattered scraps of broken stone and thick curtains of smoke rising off the bonfires.
“Etoimos!” the commander cried out. As one, the archers aimed their bows, this time level with the ground. Urion drew back his bowstring, anchoring his hand against his cheek. The clamor was deafening now, but still he could make out nothing. The youth stood as still as he could, but his anxious gaze tracked back and forth, searching for a target. Obelius’s earlier words ate at him.
“If they see us, we die.”
A solid metal juggernaut burst out of the smoke, smashing through the closest barricade and scattering its flaming timbers to the wind like a handful of kindling. Two more behemoths flanked it on either side, and two more, and two more—a giant spearhead, hurling toward the heart of the city. But first it was coming for them.
“Véli!” the commander howled.
Urion loosed his arrow with the others. The volley raced toward their quarry, but the deadly shafts only shattered against the thick metal plating. In return, the war machines opened fire with their own blazing weapons. All along the line, men screamed and died.
Obelius was struck at once, the impact tearing through his torso and dashing his lifeless body to the ground. Urion raised a hand to his own face—it was wet with the seasoned fighting man’s blood. Dazed, the bow slipped from his grasp and he raised up his hand as if he could stop their charge.
Then the closest war machine roared up and crashed down upon him.
13
Lucius stared at the corpses of armored men and horses, strewn over the triangle of bloodstained earth between the V-shaped line of burning tanks. While he rallied the remaining cataphracts, the squad of Legionnaires and the three Zouaves rode up. They spoke no Greek, nor he French, but no words were needed to express what they all were feeling—the flush of victory, tempered by the dreadful cost of the battle.
Sous-lieutenant D’Alsace, the French Legionnaire’s commanding officer, silently took a quick headcount of the surviving cavalry. One hundred and twenty rode out that morning. In just the few seconds of the German counterattack, the machine guns had killed a full third of their riders.
He turned to Lucius, who stared intently into the smoky haze covering the necropolis. After a few moments the two commanders silently came to the same conclusion. Lucius gave a curt nod to D’Alsace, and reined his horse around to address the rest of his men.
“Back in your lines,” he shouted in Greek. “Same assault as before—we’re going in for twice the glory.” The surviving cataphracts cheered. So did the French, who understood the intent, if not his words. The horsemen quickly wheeled about, urging their steeds into formation. In the midst of their maneuvers, a drawn-out whistling sound rose on the air until all the riders could hear it—then came an explosion.
It was as if the sun had dropped upon them. Something impacted with a deafening roar, its inescapable heat blasting apart men and horses alike.
* * *
Further from the center of the blast, both D’Alsace and his steed were slammed to the ground. The pressure felt like an elephant rolling over him.
Thrown from his saddle, the stunned Legionnaire lay on the hard earth, watching in a daze as fire rained down around him along with clods of earth, flesh, and blood. With a curious detachment, he watched a gore-splattered Lucius, moving in dreamlike slowness, shouting and struggling to control his terrified, rearing horse. He was yelling something—
“Aposýromai! Aposýromai!”
—calling for his men to take cover behind the wedge of burning tanks they had just killed. But even as the riders galloped for safety, the chatter of machine-gun fire joined the chorus of the wounded and the dying. More riders and steeds screamed and fell to the earth.
With Herculean effort, D’Alsace turned his head to the southwest. Out in the desert, great dark shapes, wavy and uncertain in the scorching desert heat, came into view. He forced his eyes to focus, trying to count the number of new tanks, but there were too many to see clearly through the haze and the scores of enemy infantrymen running to the fore.
A new wave of German forces was coming.
* * *
With hatches down and the tanks buttoned up, Dietrich and his seven remaining crews were nearly blind as they lumbered through the smoky ruins of the Nekropole, but they were virtually invincible to the small arms fire of the guerrillas. His lead Panzer plowed through another flaming barricade with ease. The interior of the tank suddenly rang with the musical patter of scores of arrows pinging off the armor.
In retaliation, the tankers opened up with their machine guns. At nine hundred rounds per minute, the guns tore apart the entrenched archers in a single burst. The wedge plowed straight ahead without pausing, the tank treads crushing any man caught beneath them. Up ahead, the remaining trenches boiled with droves of fleeing targets. Inside the tanks, the gunners gritted their teeth and made stones of their hearts as they decimated the terrified running men. The tank treads left behind a ghastly killing floor—pulped, red and white shapes mashed into the hard ground, barely recognizable as human beings.
Dietrich kept his jaw clenched and his face a mask as they rolled
out of the cemetery grounds and approached the high city walls. On his order, the wedge pulled to a halt once they came within the thousand-meter mark. To their left lay the sea, scattered groves of olive trees and vineyards along the canal banks to their right. Between them and the gates stood only fields and road.
Peering through the narrow view-slit was an exercise in frustration, but he wouldn’t risk opening the hatch for a better view, even if they appeared to be well out of range of the defenders on the ramparts. The bowmen there could not have failed to see the slaughter of their comrades, nor how ineffectual arrows were against the Panzers. Still, the Alexandrians held their line, seemingly oblivious to their impending doom. The gates remained closed.
So be it.
Dietrich lifted the microphone. “All machine guns. Clear the wall.” The guns snapped to life, sweeping across the line of defenders. At once he saw something was wrong. Over half the Alexandrians still stood in their place. None had ducked for cover.
“Cease fire!” The machine guns fell silent, and after a moment, the tank commander rose to open the hatch. He raised his binoculars. “Ach du Scheiße…” he muttered to himself.
There were no defenders on the wall.
Up and down the city walls, the Alexandrians had lined up stacks of baskets, clay pots, amphorae, or stuffed cloth sacks, each with a staff or pole or stalk of papyrus—anything they could throw together to give the semblance of an archer’s head, shoulders, and bow. There were hundreds of the dummy soldiers.
Despite himself, Dietrich began to laugh. The tankers looked at him as though he had lost his mind. He collected himself and pulled the hatch down again.
“Give me an HE round and knock on that door,” he said, gazing through the view-slit at the city gates.
* * *
The Moon Gate exploded spectacularly in smoke and heat, as if a giant had kicked apart a bonfire. The booming thunder of it sent a wave of panic through the agora.
“We’re breached!” Nellie shouted. “Everyone, go, go! Off the street!” As people dropped their burdens and ran, she shepherded Cam and the others into the closest truck.