by Mark Hodder
The scene was deafening and chaotic, the air filled with pounding detonations and blinding flares. Splinters and branches whirled past. For a moment, I was paralysed from the shock of it, then a hand grabbed my arm, bringing me to my senses, and I saw that Gallokomas was at my side.
“They are concentrating their fire on the trees to either side of the river!” he shouted.
I squinted through the roiling vapour and saw that this was indeed the case. “They must be attempting to widen its path through the forest, Gallokomas! It’ll give them a route in. Order our cannoneers to focus on the machines closest to the river’s mouth. Disable them and they’ll block the rest!”
He sent out a mental command and a large number of Zull rapidly gathered directly above the leading Divergent machines. Hovering in pairs, they aimed their cannons. For a few seconds nothing happened, as frequencies were adjusted. Then my ears popped and some of the war vehicles spluttered, jerked, and shuddered to a standstill.
The response was immediate and devastating. The other machines turned their weapons on the Zull, sending bolt after bolt crackling up into the flock—and where we’d restricted ourselves to disabling the enemy, the Divergent showed no such constraint. To my horror, I saw hundreds of Zull killed in the blink of an eye, their charred bodies raining down.
Gallokomas slapped his hands to his head and screamed as the slaughter sent telepathic shock waves through him. I held him by the shoulders, steadied him, and hollered, “For pity’s sake, order them to keep moving!”
He recovered and nodded. Moments later, all the Zull were flying again, dodging through the haze-filled air, and far fewer of them were being hit.
“But we cannot aim our cannons properly!” Gallokomas observed.
“We shall have to do the best we can.”
A final line of war machines exited the water. The Divergent forces were four vehicles deep and crowding toward the river.
I noticed hatches opening in the sides of the disabled contraptions. Mi’aata clambered from them and made for the trees.
Hitting my harness’s control, I sped forward, swooped down, drew my pistol, and fired at the creatures. A mass of Zull pistoleers followed me. The Mi’aata, armed with pikestaffs, turned them upon us and sent shafts of lightning into our midst. More Zull fell.
I hovered for a second and wiped sawdust, sand, and sweat from my eyes. The war machines had started to batter the forest again, and foliage and powdered wood flew around us as they pushed forward. The vehicles were completely careless of the Divergent who were “on foot” and crushed many of them beneath their massive wheels. It occurred to me that Yissil Froon, wherever he was, possessed only small control over his forces—sufficient, perhaps, to drive them forward, but not enough to keep them properly organised.
I picked my next target, plummeted, slowed, touched the ground with my toes, aimed my pistol, fired an invisible beam of focused sound at a Mi’aata, and saw it slump and drop its weapon. Springing upward, I narrowly avoided an energy discharge, which sputtered past so close that it scorched the calf of my right leg.
A war machine rattled and died just beneath me, hit by a sound cannon, its crystal power source disabled. The hatch in its side swung downward. Tentacles emerged and gripped the sides of the opening. I dropped, landed, crouched, aimed, and sent the three crew toppling backward into the cabin.
The smouldering carcass of a Zull thudded into the sand a few feet from me, twitched, and lay still. I paced away from it and was swallowed by the swirling and ever-thickening cloud. Nebulous forms shadowed through it. Light flared and guttered. Booms reverberated, shook the ground, rattled my teeth.
Dimly, I became aware that someone was bellowing my name.
“Mr. Fleischer! Mr. Fleischer! I say, old thing! Harrumph!”
Colonel Spearjab and Artellokas descended.
“What is it, Colonel?”
“The pistols are having the desired effect, what! The Divergent hit by ’em are dropping their weapons and becoming thoroughly addled. Addled, I say! Old Yissil Froon can’t control the blighters at all.”
“They are filled with need,” Artellokas shouted over the din of battle. “They want only to enter the forest to pupate.”
“That’s the last place they should go!” I exclaimed. “They’ll be shot to pieces by their own forces!”
“Quite so!” Spearjab agreed. “But they are of my own kind—What! What!—and I retain a little of the old mental attachment to ’em. Mr. Artellokas here thinks he can—can—humph!—what did you call it, old chap?”
The Zull scientist raised a hand and tapped his own head with his forefinger. His accompanying words were lost in a cacophonous sequence of blasts.
I shouted, “What?”
“I said I can amplify Colonel Spearjab’s thoughts, Mr. Fleischer. Together, we might attract the Discontinued away from the conflict and toward the southern edge of the forest. It is safer there.”
I ducked as a thick branch bounced past and splinters rained onto us. Pressing my inner wrist, I called, “Clarissa Stark!”
“Aiden! What’s happening? It’s pandemonium!”
“No time to explain. Where’s the mouth of the rupture?”
“It’s drifting in a northeastwardly direction about a mile and a half inland—moving quite slowly at the moment.”
“And the forest nearest your position—is it quiet?”
“Yes. The chaos is farther north along the beach.”
I turned back to my two friends. “Do it. Artellokas, issue an order to the flock. Tell the pistoleers not to shoot at any unarmed Mi’aata.”
Whatever acknowledgement I received was lost in a terrific explosion and another shower of fragmented wood. By the time my eyes had recovered from the flash, my friends had departed.
Clarissa’s voice pierced the ringing in my ears.
“Aiden! Aiden!”
“Yes, Clarissa?”
“Listen! Yissil Froon is still expecting Iriputiz to return through the rupture. That’s not going to happen, which means our enemy will have difficulty pinpointing its position. When he realises his plan has gone awry, what will he do?”
I cursed under my breath. “He’ll probably spread his army out among the trees until one of them is sucked into the thing, then the rest will make a rush to that position.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought, too. And the wider the war machines spread, the more Zull pupae will be destroyed.”
“All right. Thank you.”
I peered through the eddying murk. I wanted to speak with Gallokomas. Where had he got to?
As if by magic, having sensed my need, he dropped to my side. “You have orders, Fleischer Thing?”
“Yes! Follow me!”
We flew straight up until we were above the dirty and expanding cloud, then hovered and surveyed the battlefield.
I pointed at the indistinct war machines. “All the Divergent vehicles are on the beach now. It means we can get behind them. Their weapons are at the front, and unless the whole machine turns around, they can’t shoot backward. Order the cannoneers to the waterline. From there, they must work hard to disable every vehicle. We have to prevent further destruction of the forest and protect the pupae. The armed Mi’aata will try to escape among the trees. Have our pistoleers follow and stop every one of them!”
Gallokomas gave a satisfied nod. “Yes! Good! But what of that—?” He pointed inland to where the atmospheric disturbance was fast filling the valley.
“Clarissa will tell you exactly where in the storm the mouth of the rupture is located. You must avoid it but, at the same time, prevent any Divergent Mi’aata from reaching it.”
“I understand.”
We parted. I joined the pistoleers as they first congregated, then swept forward en masse over the machines that clogged the river. Beams of electrical energy sliced into us. Zull fell before we passed the greatest danger and plunged into the forest. There, on foot, we engaged with the advancing Divergent.
/>
A sort of guerrilla warfare now ensued and the combat took on a phantasmagorical quality. We were ahead of the blast zone but debris continually drifted from it to mingle with the steam and dust, making the atmosphere, in the hellish twilight, a sickly rust colour, and the nearby explosions and thunder, muffled by the dense air, were reduced to an almost unvarying rumble which, along with the shaking ground, gave the impression of a never-ending earthquake. Intermittently, a branch or clod of earth would come ricocheting through the tree trunks, while stuff constantly rained down on us from the canopy overhead. Through this maelstrom, from bole to bole, we stalked our prey.
The Zull could sense their enemy, but I possessed no such ability and was again and again taken by surprise as Mi’aata suddenly lurched out of the pall, raised their pikestaffs, and sent a jagged line of light whipping in my direction. Repeatedly, I dodged, ducked, dived, rolled, and raised my pistol only to have it seemingly fail in my hand. There was no report from the thing, no recoil, no sensation that it had discharged, nothing to tell me the confounded device had worked at all until I saw my target limply drop its weapon.
Always, the Divergent I hit shuffled off southward, while the Zull pistoleers and I, by contrast, gradually retreated toward the East, deeper into the trees, as the war machines continued to tear into the forest.
And now a further hazard endangered us:
“Aiden Fleischer!”
“Yes, Clarissa?”
“The storm has enveloped the whole valley now.”
I looked up. With the ongoing barrage, I’d failed to notice there was fierce lightning overhead, too.
“The rupture is sliding toward the centre of the forest,” she said. “If it continues on its present course, it will reach your position. Damnation! Just when you need me most, I’m going to lose track of it. I can hardly see, my eyes are watering so.”
A Mi’aata rounded a tree trunk, pointed its pikestaff at me, and fired. I twisted but was knocked off my feet as the discharge ripped through the skin of my flight sac. Crashing down amid the roots of a Ptoollan tree, I fumbled for my pistol, threw myself to one side as the creature took another shot, then raised my weapon and pulled the trigger. My assailant rocked backward, the pikestaff slipped from its tentacles, and moments later the creature began to dazedly move away.
“Are you all right, Aiden?” came Clarissa’s urgent voice.
“Yes. Hold out for as long as you can, but don’t risk your eyes.”
“All right. Stay safe.”
I climbed from among the roots, pulled the shredded membrane away from my harness, cursed my ill-luck, and suddenly became conscious of a strange keening coming from behind me. This, in turn, made me aware that the reverberating thunder from the direction of the beach had lessened in intensity—the cannoneers must be winning out against the war machines. Turning, I stepped around the tree and discovered the source of the mournful noise—a large cocoon. Could the thing inside the leathery shell sense the bedlam occurring around it? Apparently so.
Feathery leaves cascaded from above, and, among them, Gallokomas. A nasty-looking burn furrowed his chest.
“You’re injured!”
“Zull have died, Thing,” he said. “I am merely hurt. We are fighting for the survival of our species, and through our sacrifices, we are beginning to overcome the Divergent. Many of their vehicles have been disabled.”
“Can you carry me, Gallokomas? I want to assess our progress, but my flight apparatus has been destroyed.”
He stepped forward, gripped me beneath the arms, and hauled me up through the canopy and into the sky over the forest. We flew low beneath the storm, skimming the treetops.
“It is dangerous here,” Gallokomas said. “If we are not killed by the storm we might be shot by the remaining war machines. We must hurry past them to the sea, then we can ascend.”
That we were in the line of fire was illustrated an instant later when a coruscating beam seared through the air to the right of us and came sizzling in our direction. Gallokomas pitched downward then swooped up, arced around the deadly beam, and sped out over the sand.
I looked to the right and the left. What of the Zull flock I could see through the haze appeared thinner, with half of it now hidden among the trees and the rest distributed along the beach. I was dismayed by the many bodies littering the ground. Our casualties were high.
By equal measure, the war machines, which had threatened so much, were more than two-thirds disabled, and the progress of those that still functioned was blocked by those that didn’t. The mouth of the river—the easiest route into the forest—was completely jammed by incapacitated hulks.
“We should order the—” I began, but was cut off by one deafening report after another as spears of light pulsed past us and smashed into the forest, instantly reducing hundreds of trees to dust. Gallokomas rocketed upward, turned, and let out a cry of shock at what we saw floating motionless about two hundred feet over the sea.
It was a flying ship; a thing comprised of two immense cigar-shaped structures, set parallel to one another, both reminiscent of dirigible balloons—such as that flown by Henri Giffard in 1852—with a flat glass-covered platform spanning the distance between them. A big propeller was spinning at the front of the platform and another at its stern. Steam spouted from pipes set along the outer sides of the dirigibles and cannons poked from bulging domes, one atop each structure and one below. It was from the bottom pair that the hugely destructive light rays were shooting, cutting a broad channel through the trees and into the centre of the forest.
“Get above it, Gallokomas!” I yelled. “I want to see through the glass. I’ll wager Yissil Froon is inside that behemoth!”
My friend plummeted down until we were just a few feet above the water then sped out to sea, angling away from the monstrous aero-ship. We went unnoticed as we circled around it and began to gain height.
“Aiden Fleischer!”
“Clarissa! Do you see it?”
“I never thought to! I designed the thing when I was barely sixteen years old. Yissil Froon is aboard—I can sense his presence!”
“What’s its weakness? How do we bring it down?”
“It’s unstable. If the Zull concentrate their attack on just one of the dirigibles, they might succeed in unbalancing the whole thing. Have Gallokomas order them to use the pikestaffs dropped by the Divergent.”
Gallokomas heard this and telepathically issued the command. My friend and I had by now risen above the warship. We eased forward, approaching it cautiously from the back.
“What of the rupture, Clarissa?” I asked.
“I can’t see it. I had to put my goggles on. I’m sorry, Aiden.”
“Don’t be. Stay undercover. We’ll come for you when it’s safe.”
Gallokomas and I circled high over the glass-topped platform. I could see six Mi’aata inside, and, standing at the pointed prow, the unmistakable form of Yissil Froon, still a Yatsill.
An inky cloud of Zull came swirling through the sky toward us—a tiny attack force on its way to assault the gigantic aero-ship. Below us, the turret on top of the leftmost balloon swivelled until its cannon was directed at them.
“Warn them!” I shouted.
Energy suddenly snapped not from the weapon we were looking at but from its opposite number, which, unobserved by us, had turned and pointed in our direction. Blistering heat screamed past, scorching the side of my upper right arm. Gallokomas cried out, and before I could properly grasp what was happening, I was falling. The sky and sea and ship whirled around me. I caught a brief glimpse of my friend tumbling away, whether wounded or dead it was impossible to tell.
I hit glass, crashed through, and thumped onto a hard deck. Sharp fragments clattered and shattered around me. I struggled to retain consciousness, to draw in a clarifying breath, to comprehend what had just happened. I felt my eyes slipping up into my head. No! I couldn’t allow it! Don’t escape from the pain! Cling on to it! Use it to stay alert!
Rolling onto my side, I tried to lever myself up on an arm and failed. Glass crunched beneath me. Blood trickled across my skin. The four click-clacking feet of a Yatsill approached. I tried to speak but could only moan.
A familiar voice: “Aiden Fleischer!”
Long sharp fingers clamped around my neck and my thigh. I was heaved into the air and flung with great force against a flat bulkhead, bouncing off it to smack once again onto the metal floor. I tried to drag myself away from the oncoming footsteps but they caught up with me, chitinous digits dug into my hair, and I was yanked by it up onto my knees. Yissil Froon twisted my head around until I was looking into his ghastly face. His horns curled like those of a ram. His vertical lips gaped and the inner beak clicked in the rat-a-tat manner of Yatsill laughter.
Speaking English, he snarled, “Pitiful creature! You think to oppose me? Impossible!” He dragged me to my feet.
His hard right hand slapped my face, the serrated inner fingers ripping the flesh from my cheek, sending me reeling away and leaving him holding a clump of hair. I collided with a Mi’aata. Its tentacular limbs wound about me and hoisted me around to face Yissil Froon.
The Yatsill froze, then raised an arm and pointed at my chest.
“The crystal! You have the crystal! Where is Sepik?”
I managed a grin, and blood bubbled from my mouth. “He’s splattered at the bottom of Zone Four, you damned maniac, and good riddance to the wretch!”
