by Jack Conner
“You must be joking,” said the Empress-Regent. She raised her thin eyebrows in General Stresgil’s direction, asking him a silent question, but he only frowned, seeming to concur with Layanna.
Up ahead soldiers were trying to clear the path, but Avery knew that even if they did the convoy would only get stuck again.
“It’s the only way, Mother,” Jered said. He sat between her and Ani. The two youths held hands, but not, Avery decided, out of any romantic or semi-romantic sentiment, but fear.
“I agree,” Janx said. “We’ve gotta leg it from here.”
“I hope you have one big umbrella,” Hildra told him.
“Our hoods will have to do,” sighed Issia. All wore the typical Ysstral outdoor outfits, hooded and treated with wax. “However, I suggest that I call in an airship to ferry us to the Tomb. I had wanted to avoid the aerial conflict, but we should not be making our way afoot through this chaos.”
Agreeing, they emerged into the rain as people streamed around the stopped cars and up the street. The pops of assault rifles and the whumph of bombs sounded shockingly close, and Avery put an arm protectively around Ani as the Empress-Regent ordered General Stresgil to summon a zeppelin. Soldiers, leaving the confines of their transports and jeeps, gathered around her, guns ready. Many propped their weapons on their vehicles and took cover behind them, aiming in the direction of the violence. The screams and bombs drew closer ... as did odd, high-pitched wails. Avery felt something hard in the pit of his stomach. He recognized those sounds.
Uthua, who had emerged from the transport where various soldiers had been keeping a close watch on him, went rigid.
“The airship’s on the way, Your Highness,” General Stresgil said, handing a radio handset back to a junior officer. “It should arrive within minutes.”
“We don't have minutes,” Uthua said.
“We can hold whatever comes,” General Stresgil said. “We can …”
His words trailed off as his soldiers began firing at something coming up a cross-street. With the darkness and rain Avery only received a vague impression, something large and strange, moving with an odd rhythm to the sound of clicks and clacks. Lightning erupted from the shape, illuminating a terrible crustacean in the blue glow, twenty or more feet high, not counting its antennae, and a hundred long. Rain glistened on slabs of carapace, on segmented limbs and waving stalks. Great misshapen pincers snapped at a fleeing woman, cutting her in half. A bolt of energy fried two men wheeling about to make a stand. The creature scuttled forward with alarming speed, a tide of panicked citizens surging ahead of it. Other gargantuan shapes moved behind it, coming forward.
“Gods below,” Janx said. “Look at those bastards.”
“We were too slow,” Avery heard himself say. “Uthua was right. We never should have wasted time in the War Room.”
The soldiers fired their assault rifles, but the thick carapaces of the decapods shrugged off the rounds. The tanks’ turrets swung about, adjusting their aim for the lobsters. One fired—Ani cried out at the noise—and the lead creature shuddered, was flung back a few paces. Ichor leaked from the wound. Then, amazingly, it stepped forward again.
“Damn,” General Stresgil said. His voice sounded hollow.
A second tank fired, punching into the creature from the other direction. The atomic lobster reeled sideways, but still stood, though it appeared to be trying to gather its strength to resume the march.
By then the creatures behind it had reached its position, and without pause they moved around their wounded compatriot. The third and final tank fired, hitting the new lead decapod and causing it to shudder. It shook off the blow. Another lobster flanked it, with more behind. The creatures were so big that only two could maneuver down the broad avenue abreast. Before the first tank could reload, the creatures shambled out into the street the convoy was parked along. Claws clacking, they descend on the line of soldiers and their makeshift barricades.
The troops fired and flung grenades, but the creatures kept coming. Lightning emitted from a lobster’s carapace speared one soldier, causing him to burst into flames. Then another. Pincers snapped up men and women, tearing them to pieces. Blood and viscera flew through the air, dripping off the creatures’ claws, which were then cleansed by the burning rain.
The first tank, reloaded, managed to swivel its turret toward a target. It fired, striking the lobster with such force that bits of the creature’s flesh and armor pattered down around Avery. The decapod sagged to the ground, a great hole in its side. After that the lobsters were too close to use the tanks against, and in seconds they clambered onto the tanks themselves.
“Back!” General Stresgil cried, ushering the Empress-Regent away from the line of combat. “Back, Your—”
His voice cut off as a great decapod, the first one Avery had seen, leaking from both sides, loomed over Stresgil. The general ripped out his sidearm and fired into the thing’s black eyes. The lobster opened its mouth ... and screamed. It was an awful, soul-piercing sound. As the wave of noise hit Stresgil, who stood directly before the behemoth, his flesh bubbled and ran, and in moments he had melted like a stick of butter set on end, but in the blink of an eye, from his head to his feet, leaving only a puddle of steaming flesh behind.
“No!” Issia said, horror stamped upon her face. “General!”
She started to move toward the puddle, to do what Avery didn’t know, but the lobster rotated in her direction and she froze. Jered tugged her arm, drawing her away.
Suddenly, Ani shrieked. It wasn’t a cry of fear or sadness at what had happened to Stresgil, Avery could tell; it was the shocked cry of someone being attacked.
Heart pounding, he whirled about, dreading what he would see. He’d been moving Ani backward, his eyes on the advance of the decapods, but something had evidently snuck up behind them. Now Avery watched, at first uncomprehending, then in terror, as Ani was wrenched off the ground by some unseen force. Seeming to hover in mid-air, she screamed so hard that cords stood out on her thin throat.
Avery staggered toward her. Blurry shapes, only vaguely discernible where the rain outlined them, gathered around Ani. One had lifted her into the air, but whether it carried her in an arm or a tentacle or some other limb was impossible to tell.
The mystery party, Avery realized, had arrived.
* * *
They had been following the convoy, Avery supposed, biding their time, waiting for Ani to leave the vehicle and for the others to be distracted. It was possible they had even ordered this attack.
Avery snatched up a stone from the ground and leapt at the nearest hole in the rain. A blur struck his head, dashing him to the ground. He spat blood and climbed to his feet, but another blur flung him back against one of the convoy vehicles. Pain radiated through him as the thing’s venom soaked into his side. Fortunately it seemed designed to wound Collossum, not humans, and he knew he only had a little pain to worry about, nothing lethal. At least not from the poison.
This time when he glanced up he found the decapod that had melted General Stresgil advancing on him, its antennae waving with every step. Its briny, ozone-scented reek filled his nostrils. It would kill him before he could make another attempt to save Ani.
Janx grabbed him up and hurled him away from the creature, firing his revolver at what passed for its face. The creature opened its mouth to shriek. Janx was right before it. The old rogue would be killed, melted just like Stresgil, and there was nothing Avery could do about it.
Before the lobster could unleash its deadly scream, none other than Uthua barreled into Janx, tackling the whaler to the ground, and they both went rolling to a safe distance from the decapod’s mouthparts; the melting scream only worked at point-blank range. Seeing its prey escape the blast radius of its cry, the lobster closed its mouthparts and resumed scuttling forward. Avery couldn’t believe it: Uthua had saved Janx. Unfortunately, he had no time to comment on it or thank the Collossum.
Avery spun back to Ani. While the
lobster had distracted him, the invisible shapes had borne her into an alley.
“Paaapaaa!” she cried, her face white with terror.
Unable to see anything but that pale, scared face, Avery lurched after her. You won’t take my daughter!
“Wait!” Hildra said, grabbing his arm. “We’ll all go together.”
Together they ran toward the alley, away from the convoy line. It was doomed. Lobsters overran it, coming not just up one street but others. A few of the smaller creatures even swarmed up the alleys. There was no point waiting for the Empress-Regent’s airship.
Reloading his revolver, Janx fell back beside Avery and Hildra; she’d taken another assault rifle from a soldier whose head had been caved in by a pincer, her first weapon having gone empty, and she fired the new gun at the creatures till it ran empty, too, then flung it aside and picked up a third.
The Empress-Regent and Jered were also moving away from the line of combat, but a cordon of her troops led them in a different direction. Avery considered calling out to her—he could use her troops in rescuing Ani—but just then a giant crustacean stepped over a stopped tank and breached the line, separating Avery’s group from the monarch. He saw Issia trip over a severed arm, almost fall, then be stabilized by a quick save from Jered.
Uthua and Layanna, the air shimmering around them, backed in tangent toward Avery, both of the Collossum ready to fight the lobsters with their other-selves if they drew too close. Avery wondered who would prevail in such a battle. Could the two Collossum resist the decapods’ shrieks and lightning? It didn’t seem as if either of the pair was eager to find out.
“This way,” Avery said breathlessly, and started up the alley Ani had vanished into. Ani, you’d better be all right. Please be all right. If something had happened to her, he didn’t think he could take it. His heart would fail right then. His only solace was that the mystery party needed her alive, at least for the moment.
A zeppelin soared overhead, trailing smoke, then another. Avery realized these were Ysstral ships, damaged and fleeing combat. Segrul’s air force would not be far behind.
BOOM!
A bomb rocked the night. By the sound of it, an airship had dropped a payload nearby, just a street or two over. Almost instantly Avery could smell the smoke, even over the rain.
Ahead, Ani screamed. Avery picked up his pace, but just then gunfire erupted from up ahead. Unseen figures fired at the group with assault rifles, concealing themselves around the corner of a cross-alley, only their heads and weapons sticking out.
Janx swore and threw himself against a wall. “It’s them!”
Raising his gun, he fired several quick shots, then ducked to reload, though Avery doubted he had many more bullets. Hildra fired her submachine gun, but she only had one clip and it clicked empty after only a few seconds. She tossed it away, then hunkered next to Janx, while Avery pressed his back against the wall near a trashcan, feeling sweat sting his eyes. He didn’t even have a gun.
“Stay back,” Layanna told him, then marched forward to confront their attackers, air rippling around her. Avery obeyed.
After a moment, almost reluctantly, Uthua joined her. Bullets tore at them but couldn’t penetrate their otherdimensional shields. Seeing this, the snipers quit firing. Shapes, human but bristling with waving tentacles, emerged from around the bend, laying down their weapons. There were three of them, and they were all naked, two male, one female.
Finally, Avery thought despite himself. He would get to see just what the mystery party could do, and perhaps even figure out what they were. He only prayed Layanna and Uthua were a match for them.
In unison, the shapes of the mystery party seemed to bend and flex, then vanish. They disappeared from sight fluidly and instantly, in the manner of octopi or squid. Rain continued to fall on them, and though they were certainly much harder to see now their shapes could just barely be discerned by the holes they poked in the precipitation, as well as the way the rain dripped down them.
Layanna’s other-self erupted from inside her, and the great amoebic sac, part translucent, part pink and white, bristling with long, groping tendrils and pseudopods of the same hues, brought with it a change in reality itself. Strange lights and sensations flooded the alley. Encased in her glowing amoeba-facet, Layanna’s human self seemed to float off the ground, hair streaming around her lovely face as though in the grip of undersea currents. Swollen organelles blazing with exotic energies drifted through the sac around her. Without hesitation, she launched herself on the two members of the mystery party, meeting them in the larger space where the two alleys met. In her amoeba-form, she was huge, and she took up most of the space of the intersection.
The mystery party met her, lashing at her with their tendrils even as she struck at them with hers. Her limbs failed to incinerate or melt them, which shocked Avery, since he could clearly see where her tentacles struck them, repeatedly, in some cases seeming to fling them back. Their tentacles, however, had a clear effect on her. Light radiated where their limbs hit, veining her sac with unhealthy blue lines, and she reeled back, her sac shrinking and shrinking around her.
Coming to her defense, Uthua brought over his own other-self, much larger and darker and more nightmarish than Layanna’s, but he could not emerge into the same space Layanna occupied but filled up Avery’s alley instead, elongated and serpent-like, massive and black and awful, fringed by tendrils and amorphous limbs. His pseudopods strove around the shrinking Layanna, toward the attackers. He hefted one up, curling his tentacles around it, and instead of trying to poison it or melt it as she had tried and failed to do, he dashed it against the wall. The shape was instantly pulverized, and as quickly became visible. In death its octopod-like camouflage faded.
The second and third members of the mystery party, however, tore into Uthua, inflicting him with, Avery was sure, the same toxin contained in the venom-whips; it was what they had done before. Just like Layanna, Uthua oozed back, veins spreading throughout his sac, the edges of which began to flame and whither as he shrank. Layanna surged to his defense, but one of the two remaining mystery party members lashed at her, forcing her back.
Growling, Janx slipped around Uthua and fired his revolver at the blurs, but he only got off one shot when two more snipers, positioned like the others at the corner of the cross-alley, blasted at him. Blood flew from Janx’s shoulder where a round grazed him, and he ducked for cover behind a dumpster, swearing.
As the invisible shapes continued to descend on Layanna and Uthua, Avery tried to think of some way to help them but came up short.
Just when he was about to despair, a motorcycle screamed from up an alley. Gunfire sounded, and two of the mystery party’s forms pitched over dead from around the corner. Someone had come up behind the snipers. This individual stepped into the intersection, a smoking gun in each hand. The two invisible beings wheeled toward her, but too late. She fired at the blurs, again and again. The shapes reeled back, became visible, and collapsed to the ground, blood spreading out from them.
Gasping, both Uthua and Layanna released their other-selves, becoming human-ish once more, though both looked pale and sweaty. Avery handed Layanna her clothes. Uthua slipped on his pants but didn’t bother about anything else, even his shoes.
All turned their attention to their savior.
Sheridan, wearing motorcycle gear beneath a waxy black trench coat, gazed at them over the bodies of her vanquished foes. Smoke, likely from a bomb, had stained her face, and a cut dripped blood from a wound on her scalp.
“Jess,” Avery breathed, and started toward her. Before he went two feet, he caught himself. Layanna. He had to be careful. If she found out about him and Sheridan, she would abandon their cause and surrender the world to her kind. “How did you get here?” he asked instead.
“I followed the convoy.” Sheridan indicated the bodies. “Same as them, I suppose.”
“Thank you.”
“Fuck that,” said Hildra, lifting her hook. “
It’s Sheridan. We should gut the bitch and use her head for target practice.”
Sheridan half-raised her guns.
“Cool it,” Janx told Hildra. “We need everyone on our side we can get.”
Hildra spat.
His face clouding with fury, Uthua stepped forward. His claws flexed at his side, and the air shimmered around him, dangerous with implications. “You betrayed me,” he said, and his voice was a growl.
Real fear shone in Sheridan’s eyes. “I—”
“You stole the Codex from me and left me for dead!”
Enraged, barely seeming to contain his fury, he took another step forward, then another. One hand straying to a blade at her hip, Sheridan edged back. With another growl, Uthua moved forward.
Avery rushed forward and interposed himself between them. “She just saved your life,” he said.
Uthua knocked him against the alley wall and pressed forward. He seemed afraid to go too fast lest he spook Sheridan into fleeing before he could reach her—or his tentacles could. Propping himself up, Avery spat blood from where he’d bitten his tongue yet again and climbed to his feet. Hildra held him back when he tried to put himself between Uthua and Sheridan once more.
“He’ll kill you next time, bones,” she said softly.
Uthua took another step. The air blurred even more violently around him …
Throwing both guns to the ground, Sheridan fell to her knees on the wet cobbles and clasped her hands before her. As Uthua loomed over her, huge and ready to unleash his divine wrath, she prayed.
“Lord Uthua, I beg forgiveness for my actions. I knew not what I did. I was wrong and acted rashly, forsaking he whom I should have revered and saving him who I should have reviled.” She cast an apologetic glance at Avery, but he only nodded, encouraging her to go on. “Lord Uthua, I’m yours to do with what you will, only know that I always did what I thought right and that I’ve served you faithfully for many years.”
Uthua glared down at her. “I trusted you above all other mortals. I spoke up for you before the other Collossum at the Great Temple.”
