Apocalypse

by J. Robert King

  Bo Levar plunged toward the brilliantly glowing crevice where the bomb lay, undetonated. With characteristic finesse, he rolled over in midair and let the severed claw impact the ground. Bo Levar grunted and rolled. He gathered his feet and levered the claw off his clothes. It landed amid nearby wires. Its onetime victim caught a foothold and bounded free. He was lashed a half dozen times by the energies arcing wire to wire but counted these jolts as nothing to what Commodore Guff endured within.

  Through the jagged slash in the panel, Bo Levar glimpsed the old fellow, transfixed on a bolt of lightning. He glowed. His hands were spread, and his body seemed a lantern wick.

  Bo Levar hurled himself through the open passage. There was no ground beneath his feet, only a network of girders over darkness. As agile as a cat, Bo Levar leaped brace to brace, heading straight for Commodore Guff. He struck him without halting, and felt for a moment the agonizing ecstasy of the current as it sped through him.

  The two planeswalkers hurtled on, smoldering like a meteor. They crashed onto a wide support and clung there, as much because of latent energy as from actual design.

  Panting, Bo Levar turned his comrade over, grasped that ludicrous monocle, and ripped it open. Out gushed a cloud of steam, revealing a thoroughly manic face. Hair stood in stiff bristles, and the man’s eyes rolled in bliss.

  “Commodore. Are you all right?”

  The fellow shuddered, coughed once, and said, “Let me have another go.”

  Grimly, Bo Levar nodded his head. “I thought as much.” He stood up, hoisted Commodore Guff over one shoulder, and marched toward the bomb.

  “Just one more go,” the man fairly sobbed.

  “Yes,” answered Bo Levar. “Just one more, and we go.” He reached the bomb, grasped the critical wire, jammed it into the opposite bushing, and spontaneously planeswalked with his passenger.

  All around, the air went to pieces.

  CHAPTER 13

  Weatherlight Reborn

  Weatherlight flew above Urborg. She was a thing from another world. Yes, her hull was still magnigoth wood from Yavimaya. Yes, her fittings were still Thran metal from Shiv. But Weatherlight’s new configuration was undreamed of on Dominaria, not even by Urza Planeswalker.

  Only, perhaps, the silver golem Karn had foreseen this fresh glory. He was seeing a great many things these days, in Dominaria and beyond. His flesh shone mirror bright, counterpart to the gleaming armor of the ship. No longer did he crouch in grimy darkness in the engine room. Weatherlight did not need his mind, for she had her own mind. Now, Karn stood on Weatherlight’s amidships deck.

  She hadn’t forgotten him. In her transformation, Weatherlight had moved the single remaining amidships gun toward the centerline, so that Karn could man it. Once there, the weapon had undergone mitosis, splitting into two identical guns, side-by-side. Both were meant for the silver golem to man. He stood now with one hand clutched in either fire control. The triggers, even, had mutated to fit his large fingers. Sighting arrays crooked inward to allow him a chameleon’s split-eyed view of the skies around. The whole embrasure towered above amidships, giving him clear fire in two hundred seventy degrees of arc.

  Weatherlight did not need Karn anymore, nor did he need her, but in a way they were more powerfully connected than before. Once they had been parts of a single organism. Now, they were twins born in the same oracular moment.

  He was seeing a great many things, as was Weatherlight. The ship’s lanterns had transformed into optic devices. They could beam light in chunks of the spectrum, even beyond ultraviolet and infrared. Soon, those lights would scan the chain of islands seeking a man and a goblin. If Gerrard and Squee remained in Urborg, the all-seeing eyes of Weatherlight would find them.

  Weatherlight rose higher into the skies. Her engines hummed eagerly, not straining. The heights were her rightful home. She rose into them with silent ease, an air bubble escaping deep seas. The world plunged away. A white cloud descended on the ship. It broke around Weatherlight and whirled through her intakes. She seemed a veiled bride.

  Karn nodded gravely. Everything felt right. Never before had the ship been so powerful, never so quiet. The guns in his hands were no longer overdesigned Phyrexian monstrosities, but sleek weapons that would shed air as easily as they hurled fire. Ahead, on the forecastle, two other such guns pivoted, one manned by Tahngarth and the other by Orim. She had put away her healing implements for the tools of war. What transformations! Even Sisay was a new creature. She stood at the helm with a new ferocity in her eyes—determination to see this ship to her destiny.

  That destiny barreled toward them with inescapable velocity.

  As the cloud fell away, a circle of black shapes took form—Phyrexian cruisers, plague engines, ram ships, dagger boats. They filled the horizon through the four compass points. Not since the opening days of the war had such an armada gathered. The Rathi overlay had made landing craft redundant—until now. Weatherlight drew them. Her power signature radiated across the globe and through the world. Every Phyrexian ship that remained on Dominaria converged on Urborg to rip her down.

  Sisay’s voice came over the speaking tubes. “Well, Karn, what do you think?”

  “We have a destiny,” rumbled the silver golem cryptically.

  “Do we flee to save the ship for that destiny,” Sisay replied, “or do we fight to find that destiny?”

  There came a long silence. “Weatherlight has not found Gerrard or Squee. Until she does, she wants to fight. So do I.”

  Tahngarth’s bellowing laugh came through the tubes. “I never thought I would hear you say that, but I am glad of it.”

  Orim spoke up from her side of the forecastle. “I never thought I’d hear myself saying this either, but I want to fight too.”

  “Good,” replied Sisay. “Then we’re agreed.” She gazed out at the new lines of her ship—the cleaving ram at her front, the sinuous balustrades, the lethal guns. “Any suggestions about tactics?”

  “Take us to them,” Karn said simply. “We’ll take care of the rest.”

  Nothing more needed to be said.

  There was no violent lurch, no tremendous thrum of engines overeager to hurl the ship across the skies. Weatherlight was too powerful for that, too intelligent. With quiet grace, she gathered speed. The last remnants of cloud ripped to tumbling rags around her. She darted forward.

  Tahngarth in the starboard traces and Orim at port swung about behind their guns. Momentum guided them naturally into position and drew their cannons to a bead on the ship dead ahead. Meanwhile, Karn at amidships stared through diverging optics, eyeing the cruisers to either side of the ship. At the tail, manning the weapon that had become unarguably Squee’s, stood a young ensign, white knuckled and intent. He struggled to keep the crosshairs on the vessels aft. Weatherlight so outpaced them that they repeatedly vanished.

  Tahngarth spoke for all the gunners. “When do we open fire? What’s the range of these new cannonades?”

  Sisay’s response was wry. “I suggest a test. Select a target and see how close you get.”

  “Aye,” replied Tahngarth eagerly. He lined up one ram ship through the sites. His fingers tightened on the fire controls.

  The cannon spoke. It did not roar. It did not blast. It spoke, and the violent certainty of that utterance was death. A column of white-hot energy rolled from the end of the cannon. It cleft the sky like a flashing razor. So straight was the line it cut that it seemed the heavens would split in two.

  Watching through the magnifying sight, Tahngarth saw the impact.

  The beam crashed into the ram ship and blasted a hole into the thick metal at its front. Steel blossomed outward in broad petals. The energy not expended in that blast spattered out over the rest of the ship. It tore through the fuselage, segmented the superstructure, and struck a power core. An orange ball of fire awoke within. The ship blasted apart, sending out a corona of heat energy. The effect swept wide arms out to embrace two other ships nearby and ignite them as well
. Spewing fire and streaming smoke, they edged lower and began a quickening plunge toward the volcanoes below.

  “I guess range at thirty miles,” Tahngarth said gladly.

  Orim shrugged. “Might as well shoot.” She might not have been as sanguine about the process as the minotaur, though with a will, she muscled the gun into line with her target and let loose a quick volley. Four short blasts came from the gun. The gleaming energy soared straight toward its target—a lumbering plague engine.

  It seemed a black carbuncle in the sky. Through the sight, Orim could see the corrupting spores roll from the monstrous machine. Those were the same sort of spores that had slain hundreds of thousands in Benalia, and tens of thousands in Llanowar, and had killed the singular Hanna. Orim paid back the contagion in kind.

  The four blasts slammed into the plague ship. The first struck the nose of the vessel and rolled like a crashing wave up its horny brow, dissolving the thing as it went. The second shot sped straight into one of the plague ports, meant to spew virulence upon the land. Now, the port acted like a scoop, shunting the blast inward to rip out the plague banks. White explosions peeked through the disintegrating shell. The third and fourth rounds impacted simultaneously, one to either side of the ship. They hit the lateral engine banks and gutted them. Cleansed of plague and cored like an apple, the black machine plunged. Even the winds tore it apart as it fell. Phyrexians tumbled out like fleas.

  Karn was third to fire—though in truth his twin blasts vaulted away but a split second after the first two. In that split second, Weatherlight had crossed an easy mile, and the ring of foe ships had tightened. Port and starboard, Karn’s cannons whooshed. Energy like bundled lightning coursed out toward two Phyrexian cruisers. The blasts spun as they shot through the air, eager to unload their deadly charges.

  The first struck its target like a kegel ball, ripping through the cruiser’s banks of mana bombards. Shorn conduits sprayed corruption. The ship digested itself. On the opposite side, the other attack vaporized a ship’s lateral stabilizer. It listed hard to port and began spinning around its axis. A giant corkscrew, the ship spun and plunged. It augured into the ground and cut a deep, narrow hole.

  Staring at both scenes of destruction, Karn nodded.

  Four guns fired, six ships obliterated. Weatherlight’s arms were awesome indeed. Directly before her, a wide avenue had been cut, with clear air beyond it.

  Weatherlight banked, swinging away from the vacant space and thundering toward a new line of menace.

  “What are you doing?” Tahngarth barked before he could stop himself.

  “I’m being captain,” came the response over the tubes, “First Mate.”

  “My apologies, Captain,” Tahngarth replied.

  “I’m being captain, and I’m getting in on the fun,” Sisay shot back. “Defensive fire. We’re going to ram.”

  Flack rose suddenly before them. Enemy vessels disappeared behind a wall of black-mana webs and plasma bombs.

  Weatherlight’s forward cannons came to life. They hurled white fire across the heavens. It boiled plasma beams into oblivion. It churned black mana until the mixed charges exploded. The once-impenetrable wall of destruction was suddenly breached, and Weatherlight vaulted through.

  An even more imposing wall loomed beyond: a plague engine. The most massive ships in the Phyrexian fleet, plague engines were called by the common folk “harbingers.” When their scabrous outlines appeared in the distance, they foretold death—manifold and inescapable death. Now, the machine of death itself could not escape.

  Weatherlight sliced like a scalpel through the heavens. The Gaea figurehead bore toward that mass of twisted metal. With Hanna’s all-seeing eyes and defiant chin, she drove on. Like the world-soul herself taking revenge for all the injuries inflicted on her, the Gaea figurehead plowed into the plague engine.

  She cleft through thick metal armament and plunged deeper. She hurled back flowstone as if it were an ocean wave. Weatherlight cut through the plague engine. Fetid cells showed in cross-section. In some, creatures stood at guard, too surprised even to flinch as the great ship tore past them. In others, Phyrexian crews worked great machines, also bisected by the tearing ship. Deeper, in the command core, shouted orders were drowned by the imperatives of failing metal and dying monsters. Unslowing, unrepentant, Weatherlight plunged deeper, a knife seeking the heart.

  She found it. The engine was a huge thing. It straddled the central drive conduits and proliferated in endless matrices of cog and piston. Weatherlight tore through them all. Her keel punctured the engine’s casing and cut a long trench along its top. Raw energy welled up behind her and spilled out through the room, dissolving everything. Weatherlight was too fast to be touched, though. As the core went critical, hurling fire in every direction, Weatherlight already rammed her way along the exhaust lines and out the stern of the craft.

  She emerged in a shower of fragmented metal, which devolved quickly into a storm of energy. Metal melted. Air itself was spent. The harbinger bled smoke from its every manifold. It turned magnificently and began a shuddering plunge.

  Sisay whooped at the helm and stood Weatherlight on end. The ship rose with eager speed, pulling away from the ring of destruction. She had destroyed seven ships now, but hundreds remained. They formed a sluggish iris below, tightening as though in response to some blinding light.

  “This is fun, but there’s got to be a faster way,” Sisay said.

  “Take us along the ring,” Tahngarth replied through the tube. “Strafe them. They’re too close to each other to draw an effective bead, and we’ll have full use of our guns.”

  “They’ll break formation,” Sisay replied.

  “They’re too slow. We’ll get most of them with cannon blasts. You can slice through any others.”

  Sisay’s smile was audible through the tubes. “I’m game.”

  The ship leveled off and dived toward the Phyrexian line. Already, they had begun to break formation. They had thought to surround Weatherlight in a circle of death. Now, the circle had become their own death. Even though some ships sped inward and some rose to engage their mercurial foe, most remained in that long black arc that Weatherlight would erase from the world.

  She dropped like a hammer. Before her went fire from six of her seven cannons. Only her tops gunner couldn’t acquire a target. The belly gunner laid down a white highway beneath the ship. Even the tail gunner stood in his traces, blasting away at ships to stern. But the greatest damage came from Tahngarth, Orim, and Karn. Their weapons blazed so hotly that the barrels were little distinguishable from the brilliant stuff they hurled.

  Tahngarth’s first shot doused the center of a Phyrexian cruiser, eating the ship away. It fell in separate sections, each trailing a severed part as gruesome as a crushed limb. Orim’s blast clutched fistlike around a ram ship’s bridge and wrenched the thing wholly from the superstructure. Thus geeked, the ship listed and tumbled. With his starboard gun, Karn incinerated a squadron of fleet dagger boats that had been rising to attack Weatherlight. They dropped in spinning hunks toward the ground. Karn’s port gun hurled luminous fire into the tail flukes of a cruiser that was turning to attack. The added power propelled the vessel into a neighboring craft. They crunched together, the cruiser digging a deep well in the side of its counterpart.

  The next plague engine was Sisay’s. She steered low, bringing the figurehead and keel in for a lethal slash. Undulled by the first assault, the keen edge of Weatherlight cleft the upper deck of the plague engine. She cut a deep, long laceration among spiny protrusions. She crushed Phyrexians on her way and shattered spore banks. As she passed, Weatherlight sterilized the virulence with her roaring engines. The mortal wound struck, Sisay pulled the ship up away from the bristling carcass. It was little more than that now, deeply gutted and failing in the skies.

  “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!” she shouted through the tubes. “They aren’t even firing back!”

  “They can’t,” came the
rumbled reply from Karn amidships.

  “What do you mean?” Sisay asked.

  Even as he unleashed a pair of blasts from the cannons he held, Karn said, “Look at them. Look at the Phyrexians on deck as we pass.”

  Within the glass-enclosed bridge, Sisay leaned toward the optics arrays that gave her a view from numerous angles around the ship. As Weatherlight hurtled low over a Phyrexian cruiser and laved white fire on her, the beasts that stood on her outer decks and rails made no move to fight. Instead, they stared up in awe.

  “What are they doing?” she wondered aloud.

  “It’s one of Weatherlight’s greatest defenses. Fear. Wonder. Awe. She is a god to anyone who sees her fly, who sees her fight. And what mortal is ready to fight a god?”

  Sisay looked again. It was true. They worshiped the ship. Even as she slew them, they worshiped her.

  “How do you know all this?” Sisay asked reasonably.

  “Weatherlight has told me,” Karn responded. He paused to blast another Phyrexian ship from the skies. “Her scans discovered it. They have discovered one more thing too.”

  “What?” Sisay asked.

  Karn’s voice rumbled with hope. “She’s found Squee. And where Squee is, perhaps we’ll find Gerrard.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Rock Folk

  The coalition forces had dug in. There was no hope of sealing the main entrance to the Stronghold volcano. They had tried everything from frontal assaults to pincer movements to rockslides above the gate to suicide squads with incendiaries. Nothing worked. Though boulders would cascade down atop the passage, the Phyrexians would dig their way out and emerge fighting, as ubiquitous and tireless as ants.

  The coalition forces had dug in.

  Minotaurs and Metathran stood in pike arrays before the lines—a living bulwark allowing more permanent defenses to come into being behind them. Keldons and Kavu meanwhile cut parallel lines of trenches into the angry rock, hollowing out the porous stone between rills of basalt. Steel Leaf and Skyshroud elves established archery nests and defensive bunkers every fifty yards. Behind all this impressive work lay supply lines that stretched down over twenty miles of mountain and swamp to the sparkling sea. Only with this wall of warriors and warrens could the defenders of Dominaria keep the Phyrexians at bay.