Blaze of Embers

by Cam Baity

  “All personnel, leave your stations and proceed in an orderly fashion to the exit. I repeat, proceed to the exit.”

  Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but it took a few stunned moments for the hundreds of officers and workers present, Margaret included, to process the order. Several people on the main floor stood up and hesitantly strode toward the soldiers. She followed their lead, her head in a cloud and her legs numb and shaky.

  No, the ground—it was actually rumbling.

  There was an electronic zap. The lights and screens dimmed for a moment. A glitch. But the Cube didn’t have glitches. Margaret saw concern lining the faces around her.

  “All personnel—” the soldier with the Amplifone repeated. He was interrupted by a shrill alarm. Red emergency lights scattered throughout the Cube flashed.

  This was an evacuation.

  Military training kicked in. Everyone present left whatever they were in the middle of and filed out of the main floor. Soldiers were storming throughout the warehouse, checking every door and hallway for stragglers. Margaret passed through the massive steel door she had entered through a few days ago, her excitement now replaced with a growing unease. Something must have gone terribly wrong, something unforeseen.

  Were they under attack? Would the Quorum dare target Foundry Central?

  Both the personnel of the Meridian Army and the Foundry’s Military Division hurried through the featureless foyer, where more soldiers waited. The wailing alarm and flashing red lights spurred them toward an exit that had been propped open, letting in the warm summer air and revealing the peachy light of dusk.

  Disoriented, everyone emerged from the Cube to see Foundry Central jammed with heavy-duty military vehicles and platoons of soldiers in formation. Margaret’s chest felt tight, and anxious energy coursed through her limbs. Sleek black-and-bronze Auto-mobiles purred past—no doubt the leadership of the Foundry being safely spirited away. Every building was being emptied, with lines of employees streaming toward the bridge where construction was underway to repair the Crest of Dawn.

  Rumbling continued beneath their feet as they made their way through Foundry Central. It felt like the tremors of an earthquake. Margaret questioned the wisdom of marching all these people onto a bridge if there was any chance that—

  “Go! Go! Go!” a soldier barked.

  Everyone broke into a run. Something was happening. Orders were coming into the soldiers’ Com-Paks. Tanks were rolling out, their high-caliber guns buzzing into position. She heard the howl of jets cutting through the air.

  Buildings around them shook. People screamed.

  Order was failing, Margaret could feel it. Most of the employees out here were just civilians, so they had no instincts to fall back on, other than to escape.

  What was that smell? Was it…roses?

  CRASH.

  Panic spread like a plague. Everyone ran for their lives. Soldiers readied their weapons and charged off…into battle? Explosions somewhere within Foundry Central.

  How was it possible?

  Terrified people shoved their way through the crowd. A woman stumbled and fell. Margaret reined in her fear and let her training take over. She elbowed her way forward to clear a path and helped the woman up before she got trampled. Instead of offering thanks, the woman gasped. The color drained from her face as she looked up.

  Margaret followed her eyes.

  Clouds were rising, billowing up from within Foundry Central, forming into majestic shapes, which would have been beautiful if they weren’t gathering so unnaturally. Harsh light within them glowed bright against the dusky sky. There was something else in the clouds, two aircrafts maybe, circular and shifting, somehow…changing. No, they were liquid, blazing like molten gold. Staring.

  The white storm kept rising. Another shape formed inside the cumulus mass, a broad swirling column like a tornado. Fiery clouds emerged and expanded.

  Fingers. Outstretched. The hand in the sky came crashing down.

  And Margaret’s world fell apart.

  The service vault sweltered, trembled, and boomed as if Phoebe and the others were headed to the bowels of Hell. They parked the Rangecart and journeyed the last stretch on foot. Pipes were busted, the lights were flickering, but the steel hatch at the end of the vault was intact. There was no question in Phoebe’s mind what was underway beyond the door that led into Foundry Central. She tried to brace herself.

  Goodwin cracked open the hatch, and the others crammed in around him. Phoebe’s first instinct was to shut the door, walk away, and never look back.

  When she and Micah had stumbled upon the train yard beneath Foundry Central, they had barely been able to comprehend it. Now that staggering example of industry and innovation was a dead hole in the earth hundreds of yards across. Makina had vaporized a path through floor after floor and erupted into the evening sky. Dozens of submerged stories were exposed like the layers of a desiccated cake. Fragments of ravaged technology dotting the crater were shiny bits of beach glass on a shore of soot. Manufacturing assembly lines, fleets of vehicles, and chains of enormous Cargoliner locomotives lay tangled in a titanic knot.

  A stone’s throw above the service vault door lay the mouth of the tunnel, blown out like the bell of a trumpet from the force of Makina’s entry. Phoebe could see mehkans scampering out of the tunnel and clambering toward the surface. They climbed up angled slabs of the fallen floors, now toppled into ragged ramps, and ascended scorched catwalks, stairwells, and cables to join their creator’s rage.

  It was a moonless night, yet everything was cast in Makina’s spectral glow. She towered above them, framed by the lip of the crater, vengeance taken blazing form.

  Chaos was underway in Foundry Central. Bright streaks of tracer bullets flew at the Great Engineer from all directions. Missiles cut slashes across the sky before bursting, a barrage of futile explosions within Her clouded body. Buildings crumbled beneath Her wrath, and the ground shook as She shattered steel, cement, and bedrock. Makina lashed out at Her attackers with swirling arms of storm and flame.

  “This is really happening, isn’t it?” Micah whispered.

  Phoebe looked at him. He was pale, his eyes dark and heavy with the painful realization that was sinking its teeth into her as well.

  People were dying up there. Human beings. Maybe even people they knew.

  This was war.

  And war was death.

  Then the Great Engineer’s light intensified. Fire swept from Her body as She expanded in a massive conflagration. The air rippled in rolling shockwaves. Aircraft burst and fell from the sky in pieces. She cast Her flames out into the sea and sent up billowing clouds of brackish steam that mingled horribly with Her floral perfume.

  The salty scent of the ocean ignited Phoebe’s dread of the deep. Combined with the sickly sweet aroma of Makina, it was enough to make Phoebe cringe with nausea.

  The old fears mixed with the new.

  The battle was over. Was there anything left up there?

  A stifling silence hung over everything. Makina loomed, utterly still, tornado arms idle at Her sides. The onslaught against Her had ceased. No one moved. The only sounds they heard were the scuffling steps of mehkans making their way to the surface, Mr. Pynch’s ticking nozzle, and Fritz’s sporadic twitches.

  “We gotta get up there,” Micah whispered. “We gotta help.”

  Goodwin dismissed him. “That monster just decimated the most advanced military in the world. You cannot stop it.”

  “No, but you can,” Phoebe said.

  All eyes turned to her.

  “Orei told us that Makina wants the leaders of the Foundry. If you go to Her, She will leave our world in peace.”

  Goodwin considered her words.

  “Our only hope is to give Makina what She wants.” Phoebe breathed deep. “You.”

  The Chairman’s icy eyes narrowed, as if he were considering her words. Then he tightened his mouth, limped out from the service vault, and began to climb painful
ly down the wreckage.

  “Hey!” Micah hissed. “Where you think you’re goin’?”

  Goodwin ignored him, gingerly trying to maneuver his splinted leg as he clambered down. Mr. Pynch rolled up his sleeves and began to inflate.

  “When Master Micah dictatorates, you listen!” the balvoor said.

  “Help me down,” Goodwin ordered, and immediately Fritz was at the Chairman’s side, aiding his descent.

  “Bad Fritz!” Micah scolded. Fritz sank back a bit like a disobedient dog.

  “Methinks you be traversing in the oppositary direction,” Mr. Pynch noted. “Your destination awaits you up there.”

  Goodwin glanced up to make sure they were well out of sight of the mehkans emerging from the tunnel, then limped out at the base of the crater.

  “Hey!” Micah growled as he and the others followed. “We’re talkin’ to you. If you don’t start playin’ ball, we’re just gonna tie you up and drag you up there ourselves. Don’t think we won’t!”

  Still Goodwin ignored him. He hobbled, grunting with each step, scanning the sprawling arena of wreckage as if he were looking for something.

  Micah was getting red in the face, but Phoebe held him back.

  “You told us that you wanted to save Meridian,” she said to the Chairman. “That you wanted to save lives.”

  “Indeed I do, Miss Plumm,” Goodwin muttered.

  “Then do the right thing,” she pleaded. “Come with us and—”

  Goodwin sped up, hobbling through heaps of collapsed floors and ruined tech. He stopped at a giant nexus of tubes that disappeared down through a hole in the ground.

  “You,” Goodwin said, pointing to the Marquis, who glanced around innocently. “Point your light here.” The lumilow did as Goodwin ordered, to Micah’s annoyance.

  “Look,” Micah blustered, “I told you, you ain’t in charge no more!”

  “You said that the mehkans demand that the leaders of the Foundry be brought forth, yes?” Goodwin asked.

  Phoebe nodded. Goodwin pointed to a hole in the ground. In the light of the Marquis’s opticle, they could make out an array of shiny blue electrical conduits that ran down into the darkness.

  “Well, that is exactly what I intend to do.”

  Makina’s vengeance was more fearsome than anything Dollop could have imagined. Even though Her rampage in the human world had ceased, he was still quaking. This was everything he had dreamed would come to pass—with the Covenant’s help, the Great Engineer had risen to punish the Foundry. All his phases of desperation and unanswered prayers had come to fruition.

  Why then did he feel so empty inside?

  Dollop stood at the lip of the black crater from which the Children of Ore had emerged. All around him was ruination, with a thousand mehkans rejoicing at the feet of Makina. She towered victorious over the island of debris and gutted structures. Above was an alien sky choked with smoke, smothering the sad little stars that eerily lacked astral threads to connect them. What a lonely world this must be.

  “The Tender of the Forge has spoken,” declared the Ona, her voice mystically amplified so that all could hear as she descended from the mists of Makina’s form. “And Her word is fire. Her voice is decimation. With this, and with you, She has brought the Foundry to its knees.”

  A cheer erupted from the assembled mehkans.

  “But She has issued unto us a decree,” the Ona continued. “While Our Mother awaits the leaders of the Foundry to come and answer for their sins, She bears witness to the atrocities that surround us, the abominations they have made from our sacred flesh. To purge the evil from this place and send the embers of our mutilated kindred beyond the Shroud, we must honor those who have rusted.”

  The worshippers hung on the Ona’s every word.

  “Scour this place. Reclaim the remains of your brethren from the wicked. Deliver the fallen Children unto Her, so that She may bless their passing and cleanse them in Her loving blaze.” The Ona pressed her hands together in prayer. “So it shall be done.”

  “In Her name,” chanted the mehkans in unison as they set about their task.

  Gohr and volmerid and tiulu, all races once divided, worked in concert, digging through the destruction to excavate machines and technology built from dead mehkans. Vehicles, equipment, furniture—it was all metal, all stolen from Mehk.

  Dollop did his best to focus, but he found it hard to concentrate. Everywhere he turned, he saw mangled corpses of mehkans, corrupted and warped into abominations. The crimes of the Foundry were no secret, of course, but the extent of their evil was beyond anything he had feared. Death was everywhere.

  Vehicles surrounded the island, swarming in the air and slicing across the oddly pungent sea, sweeping the area with powerful searchlights. They kept a safe distance, but Dollop knew it was only a matter of time before they mounted another attack. Only a matter of time before the Great Engineer made them all know Her wrath.

  He wandered through the shattered shell of a building that was being picked over and stripped clean by a team of mehkans. The Foundry’s foul mutations were everywhere, horrible chimeras made from every race, creature, and plant he had ever encountered in Mehk—everything from gohrs and lumilows to liodim and zurdyflies. And on and on and on. They had all been twisted into a mockery of their beautiful, Makina-given forms. It was a revolting phantasmagoria that reminded him of the victims of Kallorax, melted into a ghastly facade for his Citadel.

  White-hot hatred began to burn within Dollop.

  “You okay, Little Lump?” called a chraida who was sifting through wreckage nearby. Dollop realized he had been shaking.

  “Not Little Lump,” snapped another chraida, decorated with tin plumage. It was the same scarred warrior that had nearly prevented Dollop from seeking help in the chraida village. But now the warrior bowed his head in tribute. “Big Lump. Bravest of our tribe.”

  Dollop attempted a smile in return and shuffled away as fast as he could. At this moment, bravery was the last thing he felt. He entered an unexplored room that looked like a storage area. Toppled towers of drawers spilled sheets of flimsy white material, all crowded with what Dollop assumed were Bloodword symbols. He nudged the pages with his foot to see if there was anything worth reclaiming.

  A shuffling noise got his attention. He crept around fallen columns and saw a big metal cabinet lying on its side against a fragmented wall. There was the sound again—it was coming from inside. He ripped open its doors.

  Two grimy humans were hidden there, a man and a woman, eyes wide with terror.

  “Please, please don’t!” the man cried.

  Anger at all he had seen rose within him. Dollop took a breath, ready to alert his brethren. But he didn’t. Couldn’t.

  What was he doing? Who was he becoming?

  The humans looked at him—traumatized, afraid for their lives. Dollop knew the feeling well. How many times had he experienced this same fear when running from the Foundry? This was the terror that had seized him when he escaped Amalgam, the terror he had seen on Phoebe and Micah’s faces when the Ona banished them forever.

  “Big Lump,” the decorated chraida warrior called. “What have you found, brother?”

  Dollop looked at the humans and saw reflections of himself inside their fear.

  “Nothing,” Dollop replied in Rattletrap. “Just more bleeder m-mess.”

  He started to move toward the doorway where mehkans had gathered. They grunted and moved along. Once they were gone, Dollop returned to the humans.

  “Whatever you d-d-do,” he said in Bloodword as he closed up the cabinet, “don’t move. Your sp-spans depend on it.”

  The humans were stunned speechless.

  Dollop gathered up armloads of the discarded symbol sheets and piled them atop their hiding place before leaving the storage room to rejoin the others. He didn’t know what Makina’s infinite and infallible plan had in store for him. But he knew himself.

  And he was not a murderer.

  Des
cending through the obliterated sublevels of Foundry Central proved more difficult than expected, especially when the bright blue conduit they followed kept leading through walls and disappearing beneath tons of wreckage.

  That was where Mr. Pynch and the Marquis came in.

  Deep in the understructure of what used to be an engine room, the balvoor was on his hands and knees, wrinkling his nozzle, cycling through nostril holes as he sniffed at the ground. Meanwhile, the lumie inspected every nook and cranny with his array of tethered lenses, hoping to spy something out of place.

  “That a-way,” Mr. Pynch declared as he sprang to his feet and shuffled toward a large steel roll-up door that had been torn off its track.

  “You gonna explain what’s goin’ on?” Micah asked Goodwin. “Or do we just get to keep on guessing?”

  Mr. Pynch followed a scent into the inky black passage beyond the fallen door. The Marquis intensified the beam of his opticle to reveal a long hallway cluttered with diagnostic equipment and industrial tools tossed every which way. Attached to the hall were darkened repair bays that housed giant broken machines.

  “The Radial IR-17 Industrial Generator is so powerful and so costly to manufacture that the Foundry only produced a limited run,” Goodwin explained. “According to our records, there has never been one installed in Foundry Central.”

  Goodwin spotted a bright blue elbow joint sticking up out of the floor. He bent over and pointed to it. Printed on the side in tiny font was RADIAL IR-17.

  “So…” Micah said, “why’s that here, then?”

  “I wondered the same thing whenever I came across one of these conduits,” Goodwin said, “but I never found a satisfactory answer. It is especially unusual when you consider the fact that Foundry Central runs entirely on electricity provided by turbines in our core power facility.”

  “So why does the Foundry need another generator?” Micah asked.

  “A mystery indeed,” the Chairman went on. “Until yesterday. You might recall our time together at the Hatchery…” Goodwin threw a dark look at Mr. Pynch. “Well, before our rather abrupt…parting of ways, I used a Com-Pak to contact the—”