by P. K. Lentz
Once the deal was struck, Arixa selected a handful of men and women to board the shuttle and fly to the icy north. Her half-sister was among them.
“I hate the idea of separating from you,” Leimya protested in private prior to the departure.
“You’re not a warrior,” Arixa explained to her gently. “What we’re about to do is far too dangerous for you. Believe me, Tomiris is no happier than you are to be excluded. But the mission I’m sending you on is also vital. Just less dangerous.”
“Mission?” Leimya said in surprise. “I thought you were just sending me away.”
“For now, only Tomiris and Matas know the objective. It’s best that way.”
With a frown, Leimya accepted it. They said their goodbyes and embraced tightly for a while before Leimya boarded the shuttle with the others who were leaving: Matas, the disappointed but dutiful pilot Tomiris, the warrior-turned-preacher Phoris, the Hellenes Memnon and Andromache, and four other warriors of the Dawn. Loaded thus, the shuttle ascended and sped away north, not to be seen again until after Devastation Day.
* * *
With a single day remaining—give or take, since Zhi maintained that the timing of the Jir arrival could not be known with perfect precision—Arixa gathered the Dawn in camp and addressed them all.
“These are trying times,” she said. “I burst with pride that you, my family, my darling Dawn, have come through them without flinching to stand here beside me. Your trust in me has endured through sights that rightly send most men and women running. Soon we shall do something that no humans before us have attempted: we will strike at those who believe themselves our masters. They are called the Jir, and for untold generations, they have visited Earth and laid waste to our cities. The Jir fear that if they do not strike us down, humans might one day become their equals. Yes, they fear us. And they are right to.
“They fear a challenge, but at the same time, they don’t expect one. Time after time, they have visited Earth with impunity, facing no resistance, and smashed whatever humans have managed to build. It is routine for them. They wrongly believe that this visitation, this coming Devastation Day, will unfold as others have in the past. That belief is what makes it possible for us to resist them. They have not sent their greatest warriors armed with the best weapons. The Jir ships, like those which flew you here, are capable of operating with very small crews, and so the enemy’s numbers will not be great.
“They don’t expect a fight, but we will give them one. And not only that. We will do what seems impossible. We will survive, and we will win a victory to echo down the ages and beyond our own sky. It will not be easy, but I know you wouldn’t expect it to be. The battleground and other things about this conflict will be unfamiliar to us, but our objective is the same as ever: slaughter all before us. This enemy has shown Earth no mercy, so we shall show it none. Until I order otherwise, you must kill all Jir you see, no matter whether they stand and fight, flee in terror, or fall to their knees in surrender.
“Follow me, my Dawn, and we shall strike a blow against our oppressor, an enemy which is truly vile, truly evil. We shall strike this blow not only on behalf of Scythia but of every human who has ever lived or will live. We represent a new Dawn for our world! As of this moment, we few are Earth’s champions!”
Triggering the ironglove to flow over her right arm, Arixa raised her war-pick and she screamed at the sky, “Kill!”
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” the Dawn chanted back wildly, on and on, with their own weapons hoisted, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
It was fortunate that no Han within earshot understood Scythian, or their hosts might have worried.
* * *
A day later, while training with her men, Arixa heard a tone in her ear. It was Zhi calling her via comm from the Kephis ship, some equipment inside which allowed her to detect when the Jir ships came near the planet, long before they could be seen by the eye.
“They’re here,” she reported.
Twenty-Three
Hours later, Arixa stood not far from the Han capital Luoyang with Zhi, Ivar, Dak, and ten more of her augmented warriors. The rest of the war band waited back at camp with the cloaked Kephis ship. All watched the currently peaceful sky above a city which looked so different from Roxinaki, a city whose people had no inkling of the terror to come.
At last it came. First, a low hum which slowly began to drown out the birds and rustling breeze. Then the wind picked up, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not. All at once, as if a storm had appeared, the clouds darkened.
A storm had appeared, but not of a kind that any living human had seen before.
The hum became a rumble which vibrated the very bones of the earth. The gray clouds parted, and from them emerged the behemoth of Arixa’s vision. Oblong in shape and smooth in parts, irregular in others, the god-ship dwarfed the rugged hills and the gilt city underneath. There was no way even the bravest of humans could look upon this object and not feel an utter, sinking despair which stole the breath and rooted feet to the ground.
Such a force could not be resisted. It was futile to try.
Surely, the Dawn was to die this day...
Arixa struggled to draw a breath, gaining fresh understanding of how Leimya had felt all her life.
“We must move, my Dawn...” she said in a choked whisper. She managed to put one foot in front of the other, breaking into a run toward the city. Her twelve chosen warriors and Zhi, to their extreme credit, followed her.
A few faint screams pierced the omnipresent hum of the god-ship, but Luoyang was mostly still and quiet. Most of the Han stood paralyzed, staring at the thing which had blotted out their sky. Arixa and her handful of warriors, meanwhile, ran at maximum speed toward the imperiled, oblivious city.
They had reached Luoyang’s outskirts, passing mystified, frozen Han, when the small specks emerged from the god-ship. None of the Han yet knew what the specks were, but Arixa did: Jir skyboats descending to ensnare unsuspecting men and women and carry them away. When they got low enough, the craft would spray the yellow substance which solidified around its victims by the dozen, turning crowds into helpless lumps ready for transport.
It had been terrifying to watch this happen to the humans in Arixa’s vision. Today she aimed not only to watch but to make herself and her warriors its victims.
“The substance has a sedative effect on the humans it traps,” Zhi had explained. “But it won’t work on the augmented.”
They reached the city just as the ships flew low enough over the elegant Han buildings to take on the boxy shape familiar to Arixa from her vision. They swooped and began to spray.
The Han’s screams and flight began in earnest. Running against the heavy flow of city-folk fleeing danger, the twelve augmented Dawners and Zhi actively sought the danger out.
“There!” Arixa cried, sighting a skyboat which appeared to be turning to start a pass over a nearby crowd of Han.
The party ran toward it, joining the densest part of the crowd. Clutched tightly in Arixa’s right hand, as if her life depended on it, which it did, was a small tool from the Kephis ship. It was a knife, of sorts, but it cut with heat rather than a blade. About half of the twelve fighters with her had such tools in hand and ready. They had to carry them in hand, for once ensnared, they would not be able to move.
The skyboat turned. Arixa looked directly at its front as it sped towards them.
This was it. Their moment. The beginning.
The vessel passed overhead, and from it fell a liquid that rained over the crowd, pelting Arixa’s head and armor in large yellow droplets. Heartbeats later, Arixa could no longer move or see the people around her, for the air itself had become translucent yellow and solid. Her breath caught in instinctive alarm, and she struggled, but as the seconds passed, she steadied herself and found she could breathe almost normally through the material, which was porous and slightly yielding. The sense of constriction was almost panic-inducing for one who could barely stand to be inside a wa
lled room for her love of open spaces.
Immediately, Arixa triggered the instrument in her hand. Time was of the essence. The Jir skyboat had not yet returned to haul its prey on board, but once it did, there was no telling how quickly it might return to the god-ship. Everything to come hinged on the ability of the twelve trapped warriors and Zhi to free themselves before that happened.
In less than a minute, Arixa had hollowed enough space around her hand to pivot her wrist and aim the tool back at her forearm and begin clearing the substance from around it. Of course, she could see none of this and no doubt would have seared her arm if not for the alien metal shell of the ironglove. The others had wrapped their own right arms with leather strips for protection, except for Zhi, whose star-folk garment apparently provided protection enough.
The smell was terrible as the substance melted away into a much smaller volume of warm, thick liquid. Within minutes, Arixa was able to pull her right arm in against her body and begin clearing more space. She found Dak a few inches from her and was able to communicate with him. He reported making similar progress, while on his other side Ivar worked to free an adjacent rider who lacked a cutting tool.
The yellow shell around them shook with a jarring impact and began to rise. Still largely immobile, Arixa and the others found themselves at no risk of losing balance or falling in spite of the sharp movement which, if reality followed Arixa’s vision, indicated the transfer of their spongy prison-loaf into the hold of the Jir skyboat.
They had to hurry. If they failed at this, the human rebellion against the Jir was over before it began.
Working methodically, Arixa and the others established contact between eight of the twelve captured Dawn. Perhaps most crucially to their subsequent plans, they found Zhi.
That was enough to begin their escape. Arixa and who were in possession of the tools now commenced tunneling upward. They worked for long minutes until dark holes were visible above. When that was done, they traded their cutters for vazers, axes and war-picks and began climbing out.
The space above the yellow mass of trapped humans was dimly lit by small red lights arranged in even lines on a ceiling that was far out of reach. The space resembled a long, dark hall. No Jir seemed to be present.
As nine freed warriors squeezed out to stand on the spongy surface, Zhi found her bearings and declared softly, “That way.”
While the nine worked at climbing or sliding down the side of the loaf to the metal floor below, a tenth warrior burst out through the side further along. He was shortly followed by three more—the last of their party.
All had made it. Now to find the ship’s crew, which Zhi felt sure would number four or fewer. Ready with eight vazers plus Zhi’s personal sidearm and an assortment of iron blades, the small force moved cautiously in the direction Zhi had chosen.
They arrived at an iris similar to the ones in Zhi’s base. This one didn’t open automatically at their approach. The Jir were not quite that careless.
With vazer in her left hand and war-pick in the right, the manner in which the Dawn had trained to arm themselves, Arixa extended the pick and tapped twice, loudly, on the iris.
Dividing themselves between the left and right of the door, they waited.
After a minute, the iris opened. A being stepped onto the threshold.
Arixa recognized its form instantly as a gray-skinned, hunch-backed, large-headed, black-eyed Jir, a perfect match for the image Zhi had shown them.
Arixa didn’t pause to take in the loathsome sight. She swung her war-pick at its vile head.
With a cracking sound and feel that Arixa found comfortingly familiar, the spike of her pick penetrated the thing’s skull just as it would any human’s.
The Jir’s throaty shriek was not like any man’s or woman’s. It was a horrid sound, and loud, but Arixa did not act quickly to silence it. Pushing the dying Jir back through the open iris using the haft of the weapon still embedded in its face, she glared with rage into huge black eyes and gladly let the thing scream.
After a few steps, she jerked the handle, freeing the war-pick’s spike in a splash of dark blue gore, for the Jir evidently bled blue. The still-shrieking victim sank to the deck of a smaller, unoccupied chamber that lay beyond the iris. The Dawn warriors flowed in behind Arixa.
The scream had gone on long enough, she decided. The vazer might have silenced it most quickly, but instead, with fire in her eyes, Arixa swung her war-pick hard a second time into the enemy’s face.
It was fitting that the first Jir to fall in her war should die in this way, by means of cold, sharp iron.
Crouching to get closer, she struck the fallen Jir again and again, butchering the gray flesh and black eyes, pulverizing the bulbous skull. Each blow produced a warm, satisfying eruption of dark blue matter.
When Arixa finally relented and stood, blood-spattered, Ivar chuckled. “Remember I told you about berserkers?”
The Jir’s death screech had been pleasant to Arixa, but that was not why she had let it linger. Her hope was that the sound would attract other Jir on board, who might then enter this chamber as unprepared for what met them as their crewmate been.
A second iris stood opposite the one they’d entered through. The Dawn and Zhi formed up at it for an ambush and waited.
Within a minute, the door irised. Zhi and others with vazers immediately fired them. The lone armed Jir who appeared slumped instantly before the barrage, his gray clothing smoking as blue-black vazer wounds blossomed all over his torso.
Scythians flooded over the corpse and through the opening. On the other side, a bulbous gray head swung round in surprise just in time to be split in half by Ivar’s ax.
Arixa and the rest fanned out and searched the small chamber, which Arixa now recognized from experience as a control center, but found no sign of more crew.
The ship was theirs.
Ivar hauled the dead alien pilot from its seat, clearing the place for Zhi, who assumed the spot and began interacting with the lines of lit symbols.
Arixa brought her war-pick down six or eight times into the dead Jir’s already broken head, not from an excess of caution but rather an excess of spite.
“They can die,” she said with satisfaction. “And I greatly enjoy killing them.”
Twenty-Four
A wide display in front of Zhi showed the Han city passing underneath them, its streets and squares filled with the fleeing, terrified crowds. Arixa saw and felt the motion of the skyboat as it gently turned and flew low over the buildings on the way to its new destination, the Dawn’s campsite.
“I don’t think the Jir cruiser has noticed yet,” Zhi reported.
“Good,” Arixa answered.
Here in the pilot’s chamber and the small room beyond, Dawners had gathered around the three alien corpses, staring at and examining them in fascination.
“Come,” Arixa told them. She passed through the first and second irises to return to the large space which contained the captured humans. At present, the only yellow mass on the hold’s expansive deck was the one from which the Dawn had escaped.
There was easily sufficient space in the hold for the three hundred men and women which it shortly would contain.
“Hold on tight. We’re landing,” Zhi said over Arixa’s comm.
Arixa conveyed the warning to the others, who clung tightly to the edges of the yellow loaf from which jutted a human limb here and there. The ship rocked and thumped slightly, then became still. A square hatch the same height and width as the hold cracked and widened at the ship’s rear, flooding the dim space with daylight.
On Arixa’s command of “Push!” the twelve augmented fighters heaved and shoved on the yellow mass, inching it toward the exit.
On the ground outside the hatch waited the rest of the Dawn. A great many of them now flooded inside the skyboat and lent their shoulders, speeding the effort to remove the mass of unconscious, ensnared Han.
Soon the huge yellow lump was deposited out
side on the ground, where it would be up to their countrymen to find and free them. The remainder of the Dawn, three hundred men and women, swarmed the hold of the captured ship.
Outside, across the Scythian camp, the shimmering lines of the cloaked Kephis ship could barely be seen. Occupying its pilot’s chamber was a man named Vaspa, one of those whom Arixa had chosen along with Tomiris to be imprinted as pilots.
The Kephis ship played a role in their plans this day. Gods willing, Vaspa’s skills were up to the task.
When all had boarded, Arixa informed Zhi by comm, the hatch slid shut and the floor shifted slightly as the hijacked skyboat took flight again. For tense minutes, the Dawn stood silently in darkness while, invisibly to them, the craft ascended toward the god-ship.
Cruiser, Zhi had called it.
“What we are about to see and do is unlike anything that has come before,” Arixa addressed her war band one last time. Her voice resounded in the cavernous space. “I know you will not balk. You will not falter or fail. You will do me proud as you have always done. We killed three of the monsters already. They died easily enough. We shall kill many more. This day will be ours, my Dawn.”
“The cruiser is hailing,” Zhi reported by comm. “I can’t respond without giving us away. Hold on.”
Arixa felt a sudden acceleration. The skyboat tilted, sending warriors stumbling into one another.
“Get low!” Arixa ordered, sinking to her knees. The war band did so, and thus was better prepared to ride out the dramatic pitching of the deck which followed.
One of the ways in which this day could end in failure was with the fiery destruction of this stolen ship and all within it by the god-ship’s defenses. Unfairly or no, Arixa had opted not to inform the Dawn of that risk.
It was hardly the smallest secret about this day that she currently withheld from them.
A tense minute passed. Stomachs lurched and bodies rolled. No fiery death came.
