by A. R. Knight
“How do they land?” Celice manages to say as we watch another dozen dive into her home.
“Oh, they have magnetic boots,” T’Oli says. “They’ll drop a landing pad or two, and then it’s like jumping into a soft bed. They’ll bounce off and be ready to go. Quiet efficient, really.”
“Quiet, T’Oli,” I say. “Celice, where’s the army? I thought you said Avril had assembled a massive force?”
“They came behind,” Viera points at the hole. “I bet they didn’t want to deal with pushing through Avril’s army, so they created their own back door.”
I’m about to ask another question - namely, what now - when Vee flashes past us. The Oratus makes his own path through the fleeing populace simply by showing up; nobody wants to stay in his way.
“What are you doing?” I call after him.
“Hunting!” is the hiss I get in reply, and then he’s gone.
“Can’t keep an Oratus from his purpose,” T’Oli says. “Literally, you can’t. It’s programmed into their DNA.”
“I don’t know what that means, but we have to help him,” Celice says, then looks at me. “You said you’re the Charre Empress? Plenty of these people are yours too. I hope you find a way to save them.”
Then Celice and her men, pulling at their pistols, push forward after Vee.
“Going into that’s only going to get us killed,” Viera says.
“So will staying here, just more slowly.” I look at the hole again.
The shuttles seem to be coming in, going low enough to drop their complement of Flaum, and then zooming back up and out of the hole.
“If we get on top of that building there,” I say, pointing at what looks like a bricked tower looming over the lake. “We might be able to get on one of those shuttles.”
“On? How?” Viera says. “You want to jump on them?”
“I have an idea,” I glance down at T’Oli. “You ready?”
“Always, Kaishi. An Ooblot never lacks for energy.”
We run towards the city too, then. Or rather, walk fast. My ribs still hurt plenty if I try anything faster than a jog, but the crush of people heading against us means it’s slow going anyway.
I just hope we make it in time.
A red flash bursts the ground in front of me as I skid to a stop, my heels sliding on the cobblestoned street leading into the city. That bolt is followed by others, tracing a line across the path and stitching up the side of the building to my right. At first the shots only melt stone, but then one strikes something more and the inside breaks open in fire and black smoke.
“C’mon, Kaishi, out of the open,” Viera says, pulling me to the side, underneath the awning of what looks to be a bakery.
“We have to get there.” I point out ahead, not quite to the center of the city, but to the tall, arched building that’s high enough. “That’s not going to happen by hiding.”
“There’s a middle ground between getting yourself vaporized and getting where you need to go,” Viera replies.
We edge forward to the last bit of the faded green awning. There are three more buildings - the middle one mostly a melted ruin - before we hit the next cross street. Smoke burns up and out, clouding the area and making my lungs itch, but I take a deep breath anyway and make a break for it.
“Go!” I say, as if I have a clue when the Flaum are going to shoot next. “Use the smoke as cover!”
Viera and I hug the walls, moving behind the belching fountains of black smoke. T’Oli’s wrapped himself around me, providing armor and some small support to my ribs. Every time I pass beneath a burning window, heat washes over my hair and ash blows into my face, but I keep going. Stopping means death.
In front of us, a man dives out of another building, holding what looks like books in his arms. He takes a wild look at us, starts to move in our direction, and then vanishes in another flash of red. Nothing’s left of him save a few burning pages floating to the ground.
I can’t stop though. Have to keep moving. Horror at one death means I’ll fail at stopping thousands more.
We hit the cross street as a pair of Flaum round the corner in front of us, one covering down the street, one turning our way. Wearing Nasiya’s Sevora badge on their armor, their brown-black fur puffs out. They’re moving with miners raised, but with an easy pace. It’s a slaughter, and they know it.
So Viera gets the first shot off. Takes the lead Flaum between the eyes, sending its partner swiveling towards us.
Too slow.
I’m already running, and I push off with my right foot to the left, then rebound off the building wall as the Flaum tries to track me. I tackle the smaller creature and drive it to the ground as T’Oli flows up my right hand, shifts into a sharp point that lets me finish the job.
By the time I stand up, Viera’s already holding the first Flaum’s miner, playing with its triggers. She nods to the other one.
“Let’s make the fight a little more fair,” she says.
I can only agree.
We slip through more broken alleys, past burning markets and crumbling buildings. There aren’t, thankfully, many bodies - Avril must have started evacuating the city before the raid began. The Sevora, though, don’t seem to care; the Flaum expend plenty of energy zapping anything and everything.
The Sevora want to destroy us. Not conquer, not take over, but obliterate.
So when we reach the tall building, I’m coated in soot, my lungs burn from breathing in so much smoke, but I’ve still got the Flaum miner in my hands, and it’s still ready to fire. Viera’s right at my back, and I wonder if my breathing sounds as bad as hers. Or maybe that’s just the continuing ripple of explosions, scattered cries, and the whine of shuttle engines.
Our target rises up in front of us, and I think it must be some sort of government building, or a temple like the Vaos, only tall and square until sharpening to a flat spire at the top. The front of it - the parts not blackened by laser-fire, anyway - is a mesh of intercut designs. Gemstones are interspersed in the pattern, coming together at the nexus of various grooves.
“I’d call it beautiful if this was any other time,” I say to Viera as we crouch in the shadow of a half-shattered wall.
“The Siamante,” Viera says. “Where Lunare commerce begins and ends.”
“You confine your trade to one building?”
“The major deals.” Viera nods at the building. “Any party wanting to get themselves established here has to make their case in this building, in front of the government and other big Lunare players.”
“They used to, anyway,” I reply.
“I was in there once,” Viera whispers. “For a Solare tribe that wanted to supply jade.”
We shouldn’t be talking about this now. We should be rushing across the road, into the Siamante and finding our way up, a way to take one of these shuttles and stop this madness. And yet, right here in this ruined city, I want to hear more.
“Did they?” I ask. “Did we help the Lunare?”
“Yes,” Viera says. “We approved the deal. Gave that tribe plenty of black-glass for their weapons and their ceremonies. Not that it helped them - the Charre wiped them out not too long after.”
“We’re always the targets.” I stand. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I glance up, look for a shuttle and see none. There’s no Flaum on this street - they’re pushing out from the city center now, establishing their front. Then, I have no doubt, all of these buildings will burn.
But the Sevora push means we can run over the cobblestones to the wide stone doors, pull on the rings bolted to the tall gray portal and open our way in. Once Viera slips through I pull the door shut behind us, sealing us into the Siamante.
The sounds rumble through the wide room, a space with rows of padded benches on either side of a central rectangle dominated by a pair of desks. At the far end, set against the back wall, is a single throne-like chair with a thick shelf in front of it. I can picture a hundred squabbling Lunare in here
, shouting at each other over the price of sapphires or who has the right to mine a particular mountain.
What I don’t have to picture are the three Flaum above, wandering through one of the overlooks. They’re hunting, at least going by their searching eyes, by the occasional human shouts shortly followed by a bright red blast.
At the sound of the shutting door, those Flaum turn and see their new prey.
“Split!” Viera yells and I jump towards the right side.
A pair of walls on either side of the door hold stairwells leading up, and Viera goes to the one opposite me. The steps are short, marbled stone scuffed with long years of boots to which mine add their prints. Above me, the grooved patterns - absent any gems - continue their meanders on the ceiling.
“Did you mean to leave Viera with the Flaum?” T’Oli asks me as I jaunt up the stairs.
“Leave her?” I huff. “This is strategy.”
“A rather convenient one.”
I get to the second floor and ignore the continuing steps, choosing to crouch and make my way into the long rows of hard benches. Across the way, I see dust and rock flying as Viera engages in some drawing fire with the Flaum. Their whole trio is set up around the stairwell, taking potshots at my friend.
None look my way.
I rest my arms on a bench, line up my aim, and pull the trigger. There’s no kick, no sound other than the slight hiss of the miner’s gas ionizing and launching forth in blazing power. Power that streaks across the chamber and hammers the wall above the Flaum. My surprise attack has the valuable result of showing them in pebbles.
“Good shot,” T’Oli says as I dive away from a few fast returning shots.
“I’ve never fired one this large before!”
“I suggest you try again.”
“Thanks,” I try to think like I’m in the jungle, avoiding enemy hunters.
The key is never being where they think you are, which means either moving, or making them think you’re moving.
“T’Oli, go three benches over. Make some noise.” I nod to my left, my back against the bench.
The Ooblot flows off of me, careens its liquid body and a pair of stalks across the floor until it hits the distance I asked for, and then T’Oli proceeds to bang its body back and forth. The Ooblot sounds like something’s slamming the stone benches with a giant mallet.
But it draws fire. Which lets me turn, put up the miner, and see that there’s still a single Flaum pinning down Viera while the other two, who’ve spaced themselves out, take their shots at my Ooblot friend.
It feels vaguely wrong to blast someone in the back, but I shoot the Flaum anyway, and this time my shot hits the Sevora-controlled creature in its shoulder, causing it to drop its weapon and howl a high-pitched curse. One that’s cut off a half-second later by my second shot, adjusted and lethal.
I duck back behind the bench, which is getting smaller as the other Flaum blows one chunk after another off of it. When I feel the piece covering my back burn away, I throw myself towards T’Oli as the Ooblot heads towards me, expanding itself to act, again, as my only defense.
Then I poke my head up, swing the miner around, and see Viera top the stairwell as the two Flaum center their weapons on me. T’Oli sweeps over my face as I duck back down, as intense heat follows the close-cutting lasers.
“T’Oli?” I say as the Ooblot flops off of me, curdles up on the ground.
“I’ve felt better.” T’Oli’s body, even hardened, is blackened in ways I haven’t seen before. As if the rock-like skin has been melted together. “This, this is going to take a while.”
“Stay down,” I say, crawl a meter away to the next bench and try another pop-up.
Turns out I don’t need to. Turns out Viera’s reduced the Flaum to smoking ruin. Turns out we have a clear path to the top.
After confirming the Flaum are down, we keep climbing and pass a few huddling packs of Lunare who take one look at our miners and shrink away.
I want to tell them to run, but seeing as the Siamante still stands, it’s probably better if they stay hidden here. So that’s what I say; hunker down, hide, and hope for a rescue. Viera tells them to take the miners from the fallen Flaum below and, with a few flicks of her fingers, shows the humans how to fire them.
“That’s how a resistance starts,” Viera says to me when we’re done, when we’re climbing the steps alone.
“A dozen scared traders?”
“A dozen desperate ones,” Viera replies.
“How would you know that?” I ask. “You’ve always been with the Lunare. Part of the strongest nation on Earth.”
“We crush these insurrections all the time.” Viera doesn’t seem the least bit troubled by this. “A town decides they want to govern themselves instead of taking the latest decree. Some mine owner doesn’t want to pay taxes. It’s easy to start a rebellion, hard to make it last.”
“Clarity’s Dawn survived by hiding,” T’Oli interjects. “Staying in the shadows, waiting for the right moment.”
“Patience helps.” Viera makes it to the top landing, where the left and right stairwells meet far above the Siamante’s front door, and nods towards the roof. “That’s our way out. Won’t be much cover out there, so now’s the time to make a plan.”
“There’s not much to plan.” I look at T’Oli. “You can fly one of those shuttles, right?”
“Not in this condition.” T’Oli swivels its eyestalks to look at the hard-charred part of itself. “I need to be flexible enough to get all the levers, the toggles. Can’t do it like this.”
“Which means it’s you,” Viera says to me. “Think you can do it?”
“We don’t have a choice,” I reply. “If we don’t send that message, then we’re all dead anyway.”
The rest of the moves are simple; go out, wait for a shuttle to dip low to drop off the next set of Flaum, and dive on it. Burn our way in and commandeer the craft.
Viera leads the way up onto the roof, and the first thing I notice as she flings open the thin slate door is how much darker, how much thicker the smoke is up here. It’s as if I’m standing in the middle of a fire - Viera and I start coughing right away, and I notice T’Oli press its large eyes shut.
Even in that ashy black, it’s not hard to track the shuttles. Their engines give off a light-blue glow, and the whining sound carries above the scattered screams and crackle-burst of crumbling buildings. Red flashes blink in the distance, muted bursts carrying through the dark like far off lightning. I try not to think about what each flash means, another life snuffed by the Sevora.
“There, beneath the spire.” I wave and realize it’s pointless - I can barely make out my own hand, and the spire’s only visible because it rises over most of the smoke.
We gather at the edge, feet balancing on the stone ledge, and wait.
The Sevora shuttles look like, well, the Sevora themselves. Long ovals, with what looks like a wrap-around windshield over the front. A series of bays open alone the bottom of the shuttle, from which ladder-like tentacles extend, and the Flaum drop from those, magnetic boots flashing as they land.
We watch a pair let off a new squad of twelve and start their journey back up before we decide the next one is the target. So far, the tops of every shuttle look like sealed armor, impassible. Which means the tentacles and their open bays are the only option.
“They pull back slow enough,” Viera says as the last shuttle soars by the Siamante and up into the sky. “If we time it right...”
“If we time it wrong, though, we end up smashing into the ground,” I say. “There’s no recovery.”
“Failure means death? Seems like we’ve been here before.”
“T’Oli?” I glance at the Ooblot, a blob on the floor next to me. “Any advice?”
“Don’t miss.”
“Always inspiring, T’Oli. Always.”
Another shuttle’s approaching whine draws away my sarcasm. Time to track our ride up and out of here. T’Oli hears the cue
too, and it slithers up my back, perching near my shoulders. I notice T’Oli’s not playing the armor dance anymore - apparently getting shot’s robbed T’Oli of its guardian drive.
Guess I’ll have to dodge this time.
The shuttle coasts by us, Flaum standing on their perches, and after they drop off onto the street, the shuttle does a slow rotation.
“Easier than that sewer tunnel on Vimelia,” I say to Viera. “Easier than the trees back home.”
“Just jump, Kaishi!” Viera echoes her own words, pushing off of the ledge as the shuttle picks up towards us.
I’m surprised at how little I hesitate, how quick I press off and fly into the air. How quick I fall towards that rising shuttle and its array of retracting tentacles. Barely a second passes before I hit the smooth metal bar and its cross-section pieces. My knees bang off of one, my hands reach out and snatch.
My left hand slips - the momentum’s too much - and my right wrist flares as my whole weight pulls on it, as my legs dangle off, towards the diminishing city beneath us. Then I feel something cool form around my right hand. T’Oli - swirling around my arm and sealing me to the rung. The Ooblot gives me a chance to pull up my feet, get myself situated even as the tentacle pulls back into the bay.
The small door slams shut behind me, and I’m inside.
Lemon-yellow globes flash to life as all the doors shut, and I see Viera, miner already slung from its strap over her back and in her hands. She raises it towards me as I look at her.
“Viera—” I start when she fires.
The red bolt flashes over my shoulder and I hear a chittering scream, then a thump.
“Nice shot!” T’Oli warbles from my shoulder, where it’s currently reforming itself. “I thought that one would definitely get you both.”
I shake my left shoulder to bring my miner around as I press my back to the shuttle’s outside wall. The only thing behind Viera is the sparse end of the crew bay, which consists of nothing more than hanging handholds. The Flaum don’t get to ride to their assaults in comfort.
