Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “They’re really giving it to them.” One of the medium gunners announced peering down his scope as he jogged. “It’s chaos over there.”

  The thought of his brother under fire made Moses see red. “Pick up the pace!” He shouted and the whole squad began to push forwards, followed by the rest of the line.

  “We ought to have the gunners trail a little ways yer honor.” Staycoffe said. “They’re no shock troops, no swords, nothing for up close. Wouldn’t want them first to the line.”

  It sounded like a decent idea until Moses thought of the knights taking fire from the enemy before getting hit by the knights. “No.” He said. “Guns stay level with the swords. I want them weakening the enemy before the knights are amongst them.”

  “Guns won’t weaken nothing.” Staycoffe muttered. “Those buggers are shielded.”

  “Guns with the swords till we meet them.” Moses said. He could already see the automata pouring away from the fight with the enemy, chased by long beams of blue plasma. He was beginning to be able to make out individuals when they waved glowing swords, or where lines of plasma drew the eye to a single outline. Very suddenly, Moses went blind. Around him men screamed. “What is this!” Moses shouted. His eyes were filled by a brilliant white light.

  “Look down.” The AI advised.

  Moses did as he was instructed and saw, paradoxically, his shadow, a circle of grass and ferns, changing with each step to… charred remains, pools of glass that cooled and snapped as his boots crunched over them.

  “I can’t see!” Someone screamed nearby. “My eyes!’

  “Look down!” Moses shouted. “Everyone look down! You can see the ground. Keep going in a straight line! Keep going!” To the AI he muttered “What’s happening?”

  “It seems to be some kind of laser fire.” Argo replied. “From the breadth of the effect I would guess that it is coming from one of the invader’s spaceships at an intensity powerful enough to melt flesh. It is currently being filtered into standard daylight by the shield though it does prevent us from seeing beyond the confines of its field.”

  Moses looked up and saw his flags, still in the protective bubble that surrounded him. “Is it putting any drain on the shield?” He asked.

  “The shield cannot be drained, but our battery remains steady. The laser appears to be a blinding tactic intended to incapacitate us momentarily while the enemy-” The light cut off and Moses could see again. Around him the squad had once more fallen to pieces and he had to yell at them to get them back in formation. Ahead of him the enemy line was now visible as a distinct group of individual soldiers approaching slowly.

  “Get ready!” Moses shouted. “Get ready!”

  At the front of the line Kyra screamed, accompanied by the men who shouted with her. Behind them, the pipes howled their war music.

  “The laser light appeared to oscillate at a predictable rate.” The AI said.

  “So what?” Moses said. His hands were sweating under the armor, and he could feel droplets trickling down his nose and around his eyes.

  “It may have been a data stream, audio or text, based on the length. If so it was highly encrypted.”

  “I thought we were sealed against electrical signals?”

  “This was different, there was no chance of electronic override or hacking. It was a data stream,I am sure of it.”

  “Well what did it say?” Moses could see the enemy now, very closely. They advanced like a relentless wave, their armor black where his own was silver, their helms every variety of shapes and sizes, accompanied by huge automata as tall as a man’s shoulder, with six legs and a wide bored cannon jutting from its center, like huge military porqine or catoblepas. The machines jogged along beside the men. If his brother had wasted these soldiers, Moses couldn’t tell. They advanced without a gap visible in their line. “Remember your training!” Moses shouted to the squad. “No fear!”

  “No fear!” His men shouted back, but there was fear, fear beneath the rage and the anger and the boiling blood, and fear in some of the voices that shouted. Some of them would die today.

  Argo reminded him that the message was encrypted but Moses wasn’t listening. They were seconds from impact. As soon as they came within a hundred yards of the enemy the six legged enemy machines scuttled forward and plasma lanced into Moses’ line. Solid spears of brilliant blue white light, waterfalls condensed into a rippling line that curdled as they slammed into their shields with a roar like the roar of a thousand bonfires.

  Men screamed in fear, and some tried to hurl themselves sideways, to hide behind the other knights as the beams swept over them. One man tried to return fire with a light gun and a beam of plasma turned his armor black as it spilled through the weapon’s gap to lick at the silver metal. His shield burst and the plasma turned the armor to slag before the mechanized porqine pivoted their guns to a new target while a half intact suit of armor stood where a man once stood and smoked from the cracks and holes burnt away. Moses could see bits of roasted flesh peeking out in places. It made his stomach turn.

  “Return fire!” Moses screamed to silence his belly. He didn’t have to. The heavies had already sprinted forward, shoving past the terrified knights to level their guns at the automata, every gun picking a robot at random to return the stream of plasma fire the line was receiving. Moses saw Maxwell near the front fighting with a gun that would not fire cursing as he wrestled with the controls. Another shield fell in a burst of static electricity and another statue gouted red flame for a moment amongst the blue before the turrets turned their guns, each smoking statue had been a knight, none of his squad yet, but it wouldn’t be long before one was targeted. “First squad!” He shouted. “Get in there! Charge them! Cut them down before they get you!”

  Marloque gave an ululating whoop as they all screamed and sprinted forward towards the enemy automata, the enemy line at a hundred yards and closing. “Light gunners go with them!” Staycoffe barked. “Get a move on!” His rifle cracked. There was a second roar as the first squad’s light gunners sprinted after the knights, none of them reaching the thirty five mile per hour limit on the armor, but plunging ahead none the less. All along the line rifles cracked while plasma drew brilliant lines between the charging armies. Plasma washed over one of Moses’ knights, he thought it was Ainsworth, and he tripped and tumbled in the burning grass while the beam moved on. Other soldiers splashed through the beams in their headlong charge as though they were little more than streams of harmless water rather than cohesive beams of superheated gas.

  A hundred yards turned to seventy five, then to fifty. Another man’s shield popped to the automated fire and this time he collapsed and was cemented to the ground, another lost his legs to the gouts of fire and he fell screaming as the guns swiveled away anyways, leaving him defenseless on the ground. Moses couldn’t decide how far he needed to push forward. Close enough to command, but far enough away to keep his squad from falling apart.

  The light squires’ kinetic weapons clattered like staccato laughter as they reached the fifty yard mark. A machine gun roar of constant noise as the knights tore ahead. Swords leveled and they turned into a bristling wall of spikes and fifty yards turned to thirty five. Moses saw other flags, sergeants, amongst those soldiers charging the enemy. One of them waved a sword over his head. Moses was deciding to run a little closer when the earth erupted around the front line.

  One moment there was a line of running men, the next it was replaced by pillars of flying earth and debris that rose sixty feet into the air, tossing the shielded knights aside as though they were chaff. Moses didn’t even have time to shout a warning. The next thing he knew the earth beneath his feet rose and engulfed him and all he saw was sky and black clouds of dust, then sky again and clods of dirt and still burning chunks of song grass while the ground threw itself away from his feet. A moment later the noise hit him, like a wall, a great crash and boom of thunder and thump of earth being sundered by something too big for Moses to guess what it c
ould be.

  Gravity took him again and he was falling, spinning, seeing sky and smoke, and air, then a second gout of thrown earth rammed into him and tossed him spinning once again. He saw another knight tossed towards him and they collided, shields ricocheting off of one another as they were tossed about in the carnage of dirt and debris. He slammed into the ground and skidded through falling rubble before something huge rammed into the dirt beside and he was airborne again. He looked for others amidst the smoke, but saw only the flapping red pennant of his own flags following him in his absurd flight.

  “We are being bombarded by kinetic shot.” Argo informed Moses in an even voice as he spun through the air. Moses began to laugh. The laughter bubbled up, uncontrollable as he bounced, from one explosion to the next, deafened by the thunder of the “kinetic shot”, each blast of debris stopped cold by the shield while a blast of superheated air whistled past him and made his flags snap. He laughed as he was thrown up into the air, laughed as he spun and tumbled towards the ground, laughed as he saw others tumbling with him, metallic motes in a storm of black and brown. It was all absurd. Ridiculous. They couldn’t touch him, even with this earth shattering display, he was invincible.

  Then he saw one of the others struck by a kinetic round. The round itself was invisible, but one moment the man was tumbling through a cloud of dirt and the next he was a shimmering streak, and then there was no sign of him anymore. Moses didn’t want to think what it would be like to hit the dirt at that kind of speed. The shields kept them safe, but did they keep them that safe? A hit that hard...He didn’t want to know.

  A final blast found him as he fell, and this time hurled him sideways. He didn’t see what hit him, or rather, what he hit, but he hit it hard. So hard he felt his skull ram into the back of the helmet, his arms and legs compress themselves against whatever he’d struck. His blood rushed backwards with his momentum and the world suddenly seemed to pull away into shadow as he was knocked cold.

  Chapter 19: Moses // The Slaughter of Bresia

  Sound came first. No longer the roar and thump of bombardment, but the screams of battle cries, the sigh of plasma fire, the crackle of lightning as it was ripped from shields at sword point and the staccato laughter of guns. It all seemed very distant. Quiet even. “Moses.” A voice said. “You have to get up.” It was all wrong. It didn’t sound anything like his mother.

  When vision came Moses saw, as though in a dream, a man on a high ridge above him. There was something wrong with his chest plate, it had been carved, or burnt, in long lines to form a dozen different patterns, so many that his armor looked almost black rather than the dull silver of Moses’ own armor. He seemed to be snarling in a way that wasn’t natural. Another man was flung from the cliff, his helmet blackened and melted from plasma fire along one side. He was a Marain knight and Moses recognized the floral pattern tattooed on his chest before he slammed into the dirt at the bottom of the cliff sending up a small puff of dust. He did not get up again.

  “Moses. You have to get up.”

  No, no. He was tired. It couldn’t be morning yet, could it? He’d marched all night, or… or… someone had. But not him, he was too tired, and woozy, and… he knew that man, in the dirt with only half his head. He knew him.

  Others fought all around the body. They were small duels, for now, a few black snarling knights swinging fluorescent swords at Marain knights still staggering up from the places they’d fallen. The one that had thrown the dead man jumped from the cliff face, and landed on the small hill of loose soil that ran up to the wall. He jogged towards Moses, sword in hand and Moses heard, from somewhere in the back of memory “It’s a homeworld plant. They call it a rose.”

  “Moses, if you do not get up I will have to get up for you.”

  That wasn’t right, how could Mom get up for him?

  Two very large eyes were scorched above the barrel of the snarling man’s turret. They glared at Moses as it peppered his shield with red cation bolts. The man reached him and raised his sword. No, it wasn’t right. The man in the dreams, he didn’t have those faces carved all over him. He was only, black.

  There was an explosion near Moses head and a cloud of smoke appeared between them as the man staggered back from some blow. A second explosion followed pushing him further back. Moses felt his hand begin to move. “I’m getting up now.” Argo said.

  Moses groaned, and stumbled as he attempted to help the AI rise. “You must deploy your sword.” Argo said.

  “No.” Moses told him. The snarling man’s sword skated across the back of Moses’ shield and Moses registered the bite it took from his battery reserve. He stumbled away. “Get me out of here.”

  “You cannot abandon the line.”

  “Just give me some space!”

  “I am taking motor control.”

  Moses felt his legs bend under him, and he was jumped. His legs stiffened at the feeling of losing control of his own limbs but he forced them to relax, felt the blood shift as the AI moved him, jumping now, one boulder to the next up the low incline that had knocked him cold, then running, through the dirt, leaving the black armored man behind. Moses head began to steady as his heart picked up and blood began to flow again.

  “There.” he said. “Give me control again.”

  The AI let off and Moses almost tripped as he tried to carry on the sprint through the loose soil. In front of him another black armored soldier covered in tattoo faces savaged a shielded man with his sword, drawing off lightning while more of the black armored men closed in behind. Moses rammed into the many faced soldier from behind, swinging the belly of his shield like a hammer to bully him away from the Marain knight. The man stumbled as he fell and Moses drew a pistol in one quick motion, leveling it at the quickly sealing gap in the man’s shield where his sword hand was exposed. Both he and the turret fired. The invader’s hand disappeared in a haze of fire and smoke. He screamed as his sword dropped and Moses turned away, the enemy already forgotten as Moses surveyed the battlefield.

  The Pampas was gone. The place where it had been was replaced by a huge trench of scarred and blasted earth, craters filled with falling debris, a haze of dust still sinking to the ground in the aftermath of the bombardment. To one side, a high cliff face of compacted soil rose over the battlefield, perhaps fifteen feet, twenty or thirty in some places, piled high with hills of loose soil, while behind him, opposite the cliff face, a long slope of cratered loam led back up to the open plains. “What did this do to our shield?” Moses asked in awe.

  “The shield remained intact.” The AI replied. “My power levels were depleted very slightly stabilizing the singularity. The battery lost more power to the enemy sword than it did to the bombardment.”

  Moses holstered his pistol and pulled out his sword, dropping it on the handless knight still writhing in the dirt. He was careful to keep his sword hand at a steep enough angle that the man’s turret couldn’t get him. and after a few moments the shield popped. Argo added two eyes to accompany the snarling mouth burnt onto the man’s chest, bullet holes that oozed red tears, while more of the black knights appeared, swarming over the cliff face and dropping into the trench to engage the silvered men still fighting there. The odds against the Marainese grew steeper as more of the black clad warriors leapt into the fray. Moses grinned despite the odds. It was time to test his training. The snarling knight that had attacked Moses on the ground appeared, sprinting after him, alone. His mistake.

  Moses took the first impact of the man’s charge on his shield, the guns of both combatants roared. Angry eyes above a raging barrel glared at Moses across balls of fire and kinetic shot while their swords shot out to tangle over the shield drawing whips of lightning from each other’s power cells. The Marain knight Moses had saved bulled into the man, and it was two on one.

  The Kamele’s hand exposed itself for just a moment and Moses drove his sword through the gap, severing his arm above the elbow before he buried the blade in the man’s side. The shield disappe
ared and Moses’ companion drove his sword through the snarling helm. The many faced soldier exploded in a red mist of half cooked entrails and bits of shattered armor. A limb flew sideways trailing blood like a comet. The sight should have horrified Moses, but behind the blood storm he could see other Marain knights being slaughtered by the oncoming horde. He had neither time to register the shock of seeing another human being turned to shrapnel, nor to build a plan. He raised his sword and shouted as he and the knight he’d saved rushed forward to help another Marain knight dueling with two of the enemy. “To me!” Moses shouted. “To me! Marain to me!”

  “I’m with you!” The knight beside Moses shouted absurdly. Then everything transformed into madness.

  The first snarling face to attack Moses barrelled into him at full speed, angry gun blazing from his shoulder as shield lances reached for Moses like glowing tentacles. He leapt to meet the charge and they rebounded, but more of the black knights followed close behind. Their swords a bright blur of fluorescent fire as they cut at his shield and the shield of the man behind him.

  An explosion took off the hand of a man attacking him,and Moses had time to note a medium gunner posted up against a rock just behind them, swiveling and firing, swiveling and firing, the turret on his shoulder doing the same in a concert of coordinated death. Another knight plowed into the black soldiers assaulting them, and then there were four swords battering at the press of men with too many faces carved on their armor.

  Moses hacked and jabbed, keeping his sword back unless he saw an opening. He caught a man through the sword hole and saw his forearm disintegrate as the edge of the sword caught him, saw one of the face’s shield burst before the turret of three Marain knights turned the snarling face on his head into red mist.

  More knights joined them, some of them running, others stumbling. He watched one of the men that rallied around him turn into a ghost as a Marain gunner on the top of the ridge put a bullet through his turret at just the right angle. The explosion once the bullet passed through the shield put a dozen holes through his face plate and Moses had time to see them begin to ooze red before the man stumbled and fell. Argo shelled the shelf of dirt just beneath the killer and the gunner collapsed with the cliff face into the mass of bodies below. His grisly work was already done.