by P. K. Lentz
Finally Zhi announced via comm, “We are above the cruiser.”
“It’s nearly time,” Arixa told her warriors. “Be ready.
Another ten seconds passed. A startling crash rocked the hull of the skyboat.
This was to plan.
The hatch at the rear of the hold slid slowly open. Wind whistled into the cavernous chamber. When the door fully opened, the view revealed was one of blue sky and dense, huge masses of clouds. Underneath it spread a wide, irregular expanse of polished metal.
Zhi’s foolish ‘notion’ had become real: she had landed the stolen vessel on the top surface of the god-ship.
While Arixa and the others watched through the square opening, a blob of shimmering air settled with a faint clang onto the metal surface a hundred yards away. Upon its rough impact, the Kephis ship flickered into visibility, dull gray against shining silver.
The door on its side opened, and its Scythian pilot Vaspa leaped down onto the metal surface. He slipped and fell, and when he rose he visibly battled high winds. Hunched over, hair whipping, fighting howling gusts, he made his way cautiously to the skyboat.
Arixa pulled him in with her own hand before comming Zhi: “Clear.”
Zhi returned, “Detonation in 8... 7... 6... 5...”
The engine of the Kephis vessel—that part which provided its motive force—had been rigged by Zhi to do something she called overload. And she had adjusted the shielding around said engine to direct the force of the blast downward.
“Look away!” Arixa ordered her war band. According to Zhi, the coming flash could damage the eyes.
Zhi finished her countdown.
An instant later, bluish light flooded the skyboat’s open hold. Accompanying it was a boom louder than summer thunder.
When the echo faded, Arixa dared to turn her eyes toward the opening.
The Kephis vessel was gone, and where it had been, a blackened, smoldering hole marred the surface of the Jirmaken god-ship.
The deck under Arixa lurched again as Zhi lifted off, flew a few hundred feet over the metal surface and set the vessel down nearer to the hole, close enough that the winds carried an eye-watering stench of burning.
“Our hour has come, my Dawn!” Arixa screamed. She hoisted her war-pick in a right hand sheathed in alien metal. “Attack!”
She was among the first to clamber over the blasted surface, buffeted by high winds, and climb down, down, over giant shards of thick, twisted metal into the dark rend.
Twenty-Five
The three-hundred-plus warriors of the Dawn spilled down through at least four levels worth of twisted, blasted metal before arriving at a flat deck on which they could stand.
The interior of the god-ship was dim, lit only by a pale glow emanating from strips that lined the corridors. Zhi had explained that Jir eyes, like those of some Earth animals, were suited to lower light. It put humans at a disadvantage, but it should be no worse than fighting at twilight, which the Dawn had done plenty of times.
Unlike the shiny snowbound base of Fizzbik, the surfaces here were matte and far less uniform. Many surfaces were grated, with shadows and various parts of machines lurking on the other side.
Zhi was among the last to descend through the breach and into the crowded corridor. She carried two weapons which had belonged to the now-dead Jir skyboat crew. These arms were different from the vazers except in the most general sense of having the overall shape of a blunt stick. These were slightly bulkier and dull green in color, rather than black. They were also better shaped for human hands, given the details of Jir anatomy relative to the insectoid Kephis.
“This is the main weapon the Jirmaken will use against you,” Zhi had instructed Arixa back in the skyboat. “It fires projectiles which can penetrate your armor. For safety in confined spaces, they have a limited range, beyond which the projectiles vaporize. Other than that, aim and fire them as you would a vazer.”
Arixa gave these ‘slug-throwers’ to two Scythians who had trained with vazers but weren’t among the few equipped with them.
“Remember, when we kill Jir, take their guns!” Arixa reminded her war band. “If you have not had vazer training, try to pass it to one who has. Barring that, point it at the enemy and do your best! Now, let us move, my Dawn! Let us kill!”
Their plan called for the Dawn to separate initially into thirds and then into smaller divisions as needed. Since they had no map of the cruiser, nor did Zhi know its layout, splitting up the Dawn would let them hunt more effectively for the so-called bridge from which the god-ship was controlled.
Ivar would lead one third, and his was first to detach from the main body. Arixa pointed him down a dark corridor and told him, “Good hunting, Norther.”
“See you in fucking Valhalla,” he laughed and charged off at the head of his contingent.
Among Ivar’s third was Vaspa, who in addition to having been imprinted with piloting skills had received a comm implant like Arixa’s and could help keep the separate groups in contact with one another.
The remainder of the war band Arixa ushered past her, being sure that the vanguard consisted of fighters who were augmented and vazer-armed. With a roar, the two hundred remaining warriors launched down a corridor about wide enough for six humans to stand abreast. Though they ran, their boots made little noise on the stable and quite solid metal floor. Not that their movement was quiet: the rattle of armor echoed loudly in the enclosed space.
This would not at all resemble fighting on the steppe, but the world had changed and so must they.
After several hundred yards, a mere fraction of the expanse of the city-sized god-ship, the corridor opened into a wide area. Arriving first, Arixa and the lead fighters came upon a handful of Jir that appeared to have just arrived from another direction.
Arixa couldn’t read their gray, hideous faces, but judging by the way they scrambled and collided with one another, it seemed they were thoroughly surprised and unprepared for what met them.
Careful that none of her comrades were in the way, Arixa aimed her vazer low and kept the trigger depressed while moving it in a small arc that encompassed several of the enemy. Others around her did the same, and all six or so of the Jir fell heavily with extensive blue-black wounds opening on the lower halves of their gray uniforms. Some fell while fleeing. Others didn’t even have a chance to turn.
As the Dawn flooded the chamber, a fallen alien raised his gun but failed to fire it before Dak’s sagaris split his head.
Arixa had ordered that prisoners be taken, but Dak could be forgiven, having possibly saved Scythian lives.
Of the six Jir, one was dead of vazer fire and one by ax, but four still crawled or writhed with severe wounds to the legs.
Two of the survivors were armed, or they were until Dawn warriors yanked the weapons from their gray, three fingered hands, adding them to the Dawn’s arsenal.
Arixa grabbed the nearest wounded Jir by the front of its uniform and dragged it half-upright.
“Which way to the bridge!” she demanded in Nexus-G.
The creature muttered some indecipherable sounds.
“Where!” Arixa screamed.
The Jir looked up at her and snarled. Arixa slammed her war-pick down between the two black, glossy eyes and the thing slumped down dead.
She went to the next wounded Jir, which was pinned to the deck by her warriors, and repeated her question.
“You...will... die,” that captive groaned back before Arixa happily ended its life.
The next looked away and refused to speak. Rather than killing it, Arixa tried a different course, driving her war-pick slowly into its black eye. Dark blood poured out. The captive shrieked until someone jammed an ax butt into its vile mouth.
“The other eye is next,” Arixa promised before repeating her inquiry.
When the alien only groaned, she set the point of her war-pick beside its remaining eye.
Its muffled shrieks became louder. It struggled in vain with the wa
rriors gripping its arms.
“Release that arm,” Arixa ordered, realizing the purpose of the Jir’s struggle. It had been trying to raise its hand to point.
Freed to do so, it indicated one of the chamber’s three irises.
“Ask that one,” Arixa yelled to the members of the Dawn detaining the fourth and final survivor, who was far enough away in the crowded chamber that it could not likely have seen its comrade’s actions, only heard its screams.
Under torture, the final Jir captive swiftly gave the same answer.
“Kill it?” its captors asked Arixa.
“No, use them as shields. But take no more direction from them. They could receive instructions by comm to lead us into a trap.”
With the wounded prisoners dragged along on dead legs, all two hundred of the Dawn present flowed down the indicated corridor, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The confined spaces of the god-ship were far from ideal for fighting in such large groups as this. The Dawn needed to split its numbers further, and quickly.
Two more Jir appeared and were vazered down, their weapons seized and bodies hoisted as shields. At the next junction, Arixa ordered a split, sending half of the two hundred one way under an augmented senior warrior called Olkavas while she took the rest in the other direction. Olkavas’s group included the Dawn’s third pilot, who could report progress via comm.
Each of the three groups, led by Arixa, Ivar, and Olkavas, were to split up further as circumstances warranted. An organized Jir response to the attack did not appear yet to exist, but soon enough it would. Better that the Dawn be spread throughout the ship by then, making it impossible for the Jir to halt the incursion with a single pitched battle.
To Arixa’s eye, it seemed that a group of any more than twenty was at a disadvantage in these close quarters. Any higher numbers were wasted, unable to fight. She commed the observation to the two pilots accompanying Ivar and Olkavas.
“We’re making progress,” reported Vaspa, Ivar’s pilot. “Killed at least eight and taken three prisoners. One gave us direction. We’ve lost two of ours.”
At the next turn, a burst of sharp noises sounded in Arixa’s ear: the impact of slugs from the Jir weapons on a metal wall of the corridor.
Not all of the flying slugs struck metal. Blue blood burst from the head of one of the hostages, and one of the Dawn was struck in the chest. The man cried out and sank against comrades who already were returning fire with vazers and captured enemy weapons.
Arixa joined them, and the enemy fled into cover. The Dawn raced after them even as Arixa shouted the order for another split. Loose sub-groups of twelve to thirty had always existed within the Dawn, and Arixa called upon that organization now in causing the war band to flow in two separate directions.
Arixa’s half pursued the fleeing Jir, sighting them again as they poked from cover to fire shots that felled a Dawner just behind Arixa. Hot blood from his pierced head spattered the back of Arixa’s neck.
Another of the tiny but deadly slugs ignited a spark on Arixa’s ironglove, but she felt no pain and it didn’t pierce her. She returned fire, but the resistors vanished once more.
Around the next bend, the waiting Jir unleashed another barrage. Arixa covered her face and chest with her metal-shod arm and escaped injury, but two others around her were struck. One was augmented, and she soldiered on in spite of a hole in her shoulder. The other was not so lucky. He groaned and stumbled, either alive or dead. Arixa couldn’t look back. Others behind would attend to the wounded, if they could.
It had been decided that those who could not press on in this attack would have to be left behind, or else carried as far as a place of concealment, if one could be found. There the fallen would wait to be discovered by friend or foe, with weapon in hand so that if it were the latter, they might kill before dying.
Perhaps forty or fifty was a better force size, Arixa reconsidered. Given the rate of casualties thus far, twenty might be too quickly become zero.
For now, it was the Jir defenders’ turn to fall. The onrushing Scythians rounded the bend before the withdrawing aliens could reach cover following their last ambush. They tumbled to the floor with their backs covered in blue-black wounds. Seconds later, the Dawn trampled the bodies and stripped their weapons.
Ahead of the band, the corridor widened significantly before ending abruptly in a huge metal wall that Arixa rather hoped was a door. She called a halt.
“Vazer it?” she asked Zhi.
“This was an officer,” Zhi said of one of the trampled Jir corpses whose uniform bore white etching on one shoulder.
During the planning of this assault, Zhi had explained what use officers would be.
“Cut his arm off,” Arixa ordered.
The nearest ax-wielding Scythian happily granted her request and carried the hacked, dripping limb along the corridor wall toward the dead-end. Zhi betrayed her disgust at the gory necessity by averting her face as the limb passed her.
“Be ready,” Arixa ordered her band with vazer leveled.
The wall obligingly parted for the officer’s dismembered limb.
Muted cracks sounded and Jir slugs soared through the opening. Surging forward through the door anyway, the Dawn returned fire. A few Dawners hit the ground bleeding. Arixa herself felt dull pressure in her left leg and glanced down to see blood, but she pushed on.
The metal chamber into which they charged was wide and vast, its ceiling as tall as the pines on the edges of the Bleak Sea. They might have fought on horseback with bows in here, had they brought either along. The chamber was as dimly lit as the rest of the god-ship, its beams and grates and distant walls awash in yellowish glow.
A high-pitched wail began to blare intermittently, surely an alarm.
The danger of which it warned, the invading Dawn, spread out across the metal plain. Those with vazers or captured slug-throwers discharged them nonstop at the dark figures of Jir around the edges of the room. All sought cover behind machines of unknown function.
Arixa witnessed at least three of her fighters fall, but Jirmaken were falling, too. Arixa gunned down four herself, working her way around the vast chamber’s perimeter before finding herself in a place of concealment not ten feet from an enemy firing at her comrades. Creeping up, Arixa covered about half of the distance before the Jir took notice of her and turned his weapon. Arixa swung her war-pick, swatting the slug-thrower from its hand before reversing the stroke and driving the pick into the its knee. Falling, it shrieked, alerting another Jir whom Arixa spotted in time to melt its nightmarish, ebon-eyed head with her vazer.
Meanwhile, the alien underneath Arixa tried to crawl away on its wounded leg. Arixa stepped on its back, flattening it against the floor before digging her war-pick into his hip and using it as a lever to flip the alien over.
Setting her knee firmly on its chest, she looked down into its shiny eyes, which she sensed, in spite of being unable to read the ugly Jir faces, were full of fear.
“Which way to the bridge?” she demanded in Nexus-G, fully aware that the creature might lie.
It tried to shove Arixa off. She twisted her pick out of the wound and slammed it down into the thing’s shoulder, which bore the white markings of an officer. It shrieked.
Elsewhere in the vast room, the battle continued to rage.
“Where!?” she screamed.
“That way!”
It pointed upward at a door which could only be reached by means of a skeletal metal ramp affixed to the expansive wall.
“You’re lying!” She buried the pick in its left arm, piercing the elbow.
“No, no!” it shrieked. “Truly!”
Around Arixa, the sounds of alien shrieks and the dull crack of their weapons began to diminish. Scythians shouted back and forth, coordinating their actions in finishing off the last resistors and collecting their guns.
“You’re coming with us, maggot!”
Arixa dragged the bleeding Jir officer upright. Around th
em, the Dawn counted its dead.
Six. They took what time they could spare to arrange the bodies and whisper prayers before heading up the ramp, which had a solid wall on one side and a short railing on the other. Arixa dragged the Jir officer behind her for a time before handing it off to Dak.
As Arixa hoped, the doors at the top of the ramp began to glide open in response to the presence of an officer on the platform outside it.
A rapid burst of cracks sounded, much louder and deeper than the normal sound of Jirmaken guns. Pain in Arixa’s abdomen pushed her back from the opening doors—over the railing. Her dropped vazer clattered on the platform, and she grabbed the rail just in time to prevent a plunge to the floor far below. Dangling from the metal bar, projectiles sailing past her, she got a view down the dimly lit corridor beyond the open door.
This was much wider than the corridors in which they’d fought until now. Twenty yards down it the Jir had set up what looked like two larger versions of their hand-held slug-throwers mounted on tripods. Not only were these blasting away, but ten or more Jirmaken soldiers were also shooting from behind some barriers of metal plating. Unlike the ones they had seen thus far, these Jir were armored and wore helmets with opaque face-shields.
Unable to stop in time, the Scythians who had been directly behind Arixa poured into the line of fire and were peppered with projectiles. One woman flew back and tumbled thirty feet to thud on the floor below, the same fate which Arixa had narrowly avoided. Two augmented fighters absorbed hits with groans, their backs pressed to the rail from which Arixa dangled as they began returning fire with captured Jir weapons.
While using her war-pick as a hook to hoist herself up between the feet of her beset warriors, Arixa was hit again. The shot pierced her bronze scale on the right side where by good fortune the flesh underneath was protected by the ironglove.
She scrambled back onto the platform and recovered her vazer. Just as she was about to scream an order to fall back, a deep bellow filled the cavernous chamber. It was a sound which all who had ever heard it knew as Dak’s war-cry. Holding the broken Jir officer aloft in front of him as a shield, the giant rushed forward, vazer leveled and discharging its deadly, invisible beams.
