by Myke Cole
The helos launched skyward, veered sharply, and set off, leaving Britton to clip in and watch the landscape unfold from the open bay door. The barricade wall of FOB Frontier passed beneath them, marking the bustle of men and the maze of buildings from the rolling landscape, brightly lit by the stars. The plain gently rose, clustered with tangles of vegetation. Campfires burned here and there, too far below for Britton to make out their sources. After a few minutes, the plain gave way to thick forest. Spiky treetops clustered so thickly that Britton couldn’t make out the trunks.
Fitzy signaled the flight officer, and the helo shuddered, the engine noises rising to a high whine, then suddenly dropping lower. Britton could see the rotor tips, the low blur shifting as the pilot made adjustments. The birds sagged in the air.
“Whaddya think?” Fitzy asked, grinning.
Britton started as he realized that he could hear the chief warrant officer much more clearly though Fitzy still had to yell. The birds were far more quiet than before. He’d never heard of such technology when he’d been flying.
“It ain’t silent running, but it’ll do,” Fitzy said. “We’re going to make a recon pass over a Goblin fortress. It’s causing us problems every time we want to reach the coast, and command wants it out of our backfield. You’re going to get a nice, long look at the field inside the palisade. Once you feel confident, we’re going to gate in and clear the place.”
The birds began to descend, dropping close enough for Britton to make out the pointed tops of the trees, sparkling with frost.
“No way this is quiet enough,” Britton said. “They’ll hear us.”
“But not until we’re on top of them,” Fitzy said. “Just keep your eyes open and get a good look. Less time on target, the safer we’ll all be.”
“If it’s such a problem, why not hit it from the air?”
“Because we want to capture the Hepta-Bak alive. Command thinks the other Sorrahhad tribes might fall into line if we can convince the leaders to negotiate.”
“The Hepta who?”
“It’s their leader. Like a prince. You can tell him from the white dots on his face.”
Britton thought of Marty, the white paint on his eyebrows, forehead, the base of his ears.
Fitzy paused, as if considering something, before he spoke again. “Remember when you asked me before about the Mountain God you saw when you first landed at the LZ?”
Britton nodded.
“Well, you just keep an eye out for anything like that.”
“What do you mean, sir? What am I supposed to be looking for?”
Fitzy frowned. “Anything like that, I said. Anything big and black or anyone who looks like they might be buddies with anything big and black. Sharp teeth, booga-booga, whatever.” He flapped his hands, irritated, and Britton decided not to press the matter.
“We don’t normally come in this low or this quiet,” Fitzy said, “so we should have a minute or so before all hell breaks loose. If that’s enough time, we’ll try to stay on the hop over the fastness. You keep looking until you have a good fix on the area.”
The helos swept low over the trees, their rotors still thudding loudly to Britton’s ears. The sharpened stakes of a palisade wall came into view. The rough bark had been scraped off felled trees, their sharpened points adorned with wooden turrets at regular intervals. Small watch fires burned in some of them. Britton could make out squat Goblin silhouettes, cradling spears. The central keep rose on a grassy hill behind them. Huge turrets thrust into the sky, peaked towers roofed with spiraling patterns of slate. An enormous gate, at least four stories high, split the palisade. Larger turrets rose to either side, each hanging a long triangular banner down the wall’s face, shrouded in darkness.
The helicopters put on speed, close enough that stealth was no longer a concern. Britton could see figures scrambling in the turrets. A horn sounded from one of them, deep and haunting, intensely loud even over the sound of the rotors.
One of the Apaches opened up with a rocket, and there was a short pop before the turret exploded, sending flaming shards of wood spinning. The helicopters raced over the wall and out over the swath of ground outside the keep. Britton could see scores of Goblins racing to and fro. A few fired ineffectual arrows. Some of the Goblins wheeled on the backs of huge, snarling wolves, shaking gleaming swords skyward. Small buildings dotted the ground, most with thatched or slate roofs. A pen teemed with some kind of livestock, squat and hairy, bleating in terror.
At the base of one of the towers, a smaller pen was built, its railing higher and topped with sharpened stakes. Colored paint gleamed from the posts, clustered thick with guards, big by Goblin standards. Banners flapped from the corners, showing the same winged wheel that Britton had seen on the banner where the Apache Selfers had kept their hostages. The center of the pen was empty, but Britton squinted as he looked at it. The air shimmered, as if a heat haze dwelt there in spite of the cold weather. The helicopter moved too fast for him to focus on it. He turned to Fitzy to mention it but was cut off by sharp reports from the ground.
Gunfire sounded as the few Goblins with stolen guns opened fire. The big guns on the helos held their peace, but the soldiers returned fire with their carbines, far better shots. Britton saw a few of the creatures plummet, screaming, from the parapet walk.
He turned to Fitzy, ready to tell him that he had a good fix on the keep. Anything to stop the slaughter and get them out of there. He saw a streak of white issue from the base of the keep. “They’ve got a sorcerer down there!” he called to Fitzy, pointing. One of the Apache pilots had seen him and the cannon glowed on the undercarriage, the rounds churning the ground to mud. The white figure flung up its hands and vanished in the rain of lead.
“All right! All right! I’ve got it! I’ve fixed it!” Britton shouted. The ground was a blurry nightmare of shouting Goblins. The air stank of cordite. His ears rang from churning rotors and gunfire. He had no idea if he could gate back to the place. “Let’s get out of here!”
The flight officer nodded and shouted to the pilots. The Apaches fell into formation as the Blackhawk turned toward the palisade wall, gaining elevation.
And stopped in midair, wrenching so hard that Britton pitched forward.
His arms pinwheeled as he stumbled toward the open bay, the ground, hundreds of feet below, spinning under him. The soldiers cursed as they were thrown forward. A carbine went spinning through the air, tumbling to the ground below.
The carabiner, fixed firmly to the floor ring, yanked hard on his belt, checking his slide. Britton landed hard on his shoulder, one arm dangling out of the helicopter. Down the length of the bird, he could see the tail fixed firmly in a wooden grip. One tower burned brightly where the rocket had struck it. The other had grown outward, its wooden form budding, the planks sprouting leaves and branches. Fresh bark covered its gnarled surface, forming a massive fist that held the helo fast. A white-painted Goblin stood at the fist’s base, a leather cape sewn with metal discs slung around his neck. He gestured, and the fist moved inward, hauling the Blackhawk down to the parapet walk beside a post with a giant bird skull, striped red and orange, affixed to the top, whence it glared balefully at the helo that shuddered against the wood.
Britton stared at the skull. He had seen it before. “Sir, …”
But there was no time. Goblin warriors raced along the walls toward them, brandishing weapons, shrieking.
Fitzy rose to a knee, reaching out toward the Goblin Terramancer, but an arrow shot out of the crowd, forcing him to break his concentration and duck away.
Fitzy cursed. The Goblins closed fast. The Terramancer walked along the branch, surrounded by five Goblins, big for their race, wearing long hauberks of metal rings with extended drapes that covered their faces. Their long ears pointed out from beneath conical steel helmets, pierced through with golden rings. Three brandished curved, broad-bladed swords. The other two held pistols.
One pilot shouted into the radio while the other sp
un up the rotors, straining against the magic that held them fast.
“Shut her down!” Britton called to him. “You’ll tear us apart!”
Britton turned to the soldiers, leaning out of the bay with their carbines leveled. “Keep the parapet clear, and I can get us out of here!”
The Apaches wheeled above, opening fire, raining bullets on the ground. The throng on the parapet was too close to the Blackhawk for them to risk firing on them.
A bullet whined off the helicopter’s side as the soldiers opened up, the rhythm of their fire slow as they took careful aim. In moments, Britton began to hear the drumroll of three-round bursts as the crowd of Goblins swelled on the parapet, a group so large that even indiscriminate fire would find a target.
Britton called to the pilots, “Get your butts out on the parapet where I can gate you to safety! And wave the damned Apaches off! They can’t do anything here!”
The flight officer began shouting into his headset as one of the pilots struggled with his harness. Fitzy ran to assist him, his face pale. “Stay in the damned bird!” he called to Britton. “We can’t lose you!”
Britton ignored him, stepping out onto the parapet walk as the first of the soldiers began crying for ammo. One of them was firing one-handed, the gas tube on his carbine so hot that the plastic dripped from burned fingers.
They would be overwhelmed in moments.
The Goblins thronged the parapet, climbing over their dead as they scrambled for the helo. A few more rounds cracked from stolen weapons. Britton felt a hiss of air pass his head. He threw open a gate on Portcullis’s loading bay and grabbed the soldier with the burned hand by his body armor, hauling him through.
“Leave it!” he shouted to the rest. “Get in the damned gate!”
The air gusted violently. The hair on Britton’s neck stood up as the smell of ozone filled the air. Another Goblin, painted white and wreathed in crackling lightning, looped over the helo’s rotors, slowly spinning down. He shouted at the Goblins thronging the parapet in their own language, waving his arms, motioning them to move aside.
The Apaches hovered impotently, jerking higher into the air as the Goblin Aeromancer appeared.
Two of the soldiers turned and dove through the gate. The last one looked up at Britton just as an arrow hissed out of the advancing mass, catching him below his neck. He rose and stumbled, falling against Britton’s thigh, tracking blood down his trousers.
Britton hauled him upright as Fitzy appeared out of the helo’s open bay, firing his pistol just as the Goblins reached the helo’s nose, swarming over it, stabbing at the windscreen with their spears. The plastic exploded as the pilots fired their pistols through it.
Britton threw the wounded soldier through the gate just as the first Goblin reached him. It snarled, clad in leather armor, face mostly hidden behind a mail drape hanging from a crude steel bowl of a helmet. It leapt forward, slashing downward with a two-handed axe.
It might as well have moved in slow motion. Britton could see its strike rise, exactly where it meant to fall. The creature’s movements, its eyes, the angle of its shoulders; all telegraphed the axe’s destination. It was faster than an animated corpse.
But it was slower than Fitzy and far slower than Britton.
He sidestepped the blow, catching the axe’s haft and torquing his arm, sending the creature banging into the helo’s side before dropping off the parapet walk and plummeting to the ground below. The Goblin behind it was even slower, stabbing with a pike that dangled beads on leather thongs. Britton grabbed the weapon’s head and opened another gate. He ran the creature halfway through it, then shut it, leaving half a Goblin shuddering in the Source.
Britton turned, leveled the gate horizontally, and sent it slicing down the parapet. Goblins were cut in two, leapt to their deaths, or ran screaming back to the turret.
Fitzy’s words rang in his ears. Once you have learned how to integrate your Gate Sorcery with MAC, you will be deadlier than an entire rifle company.
But the other end of the parapet swarmed. The front of the helo was black with small bodies. They reached through the broken remains of the windscreen, hauling the pilots out.
The Terramancer appeared at the end of his wooden fist, striding triumphantly over the tail boom. He paused just outside the range of the slowing rotors, said something to Britton, and gestured. The parapet walk erupted, sprouting into gnarled branches, blossoming with buds. Hooked wooden fingers reached for Britton…and stopped. “Get back in the damned bird!” Fitzy cried, gesturing at the Terramancer.
Britton raced back into the helo. The flight officer and one pilot held the other pilot’s legs, engaged in a brutal tug-of-war with five Goblins standing on the nose of the Blackhawk. Britton rushed the cockpit, grabbing the pilot’s ankle and adding his strength to the contest. They struggled for another moment, but at last the pilot came flying back through the windscreen, howling as he left skin on the ragged shards of plastic.
The Goblins reached, and Britton opened a gate in the middle of them, slicing them and the helicopter’s nose in half, sending the remains spiraling to the ground. The gate looked in on Portcullis’s loading bay, where the three soldiers were tending their wounded comrade. James the armorer stood over them, buckling on a tactical vest. A few soldiers milled around him in various states of readiness. Their eyes went wide as the gate opened. Britton motioned them back and threw the wounded pilot through.
“Go! Go!” he shouted to the remaining men, who nodded and jumped through. The flight officer paused at the gate, turning back to him.
“Sir, what ab…”
“I’ll get him!” Britton shouted. “Get out of here!”
Britton ran back to the parapet, where Fitzy stood over the Terramancer, slumped and bleeding. The chief warrant officer wrenched back and forth, Goblins hanging from his arms. One leapt and wrapped its arms around his neck while another grabbed his leg. Fitzy hauled the Goblin over his shoulder, hurling it into its fellows. Another Goblin threw its sword down, grappling his waist.
Slowly, Fitzy sank to his knees. Britton shouted and ran toward him.
Then he was ripped off his feet, spinning in the air, whipping through the helicopter’s cabin. He came out the other side of the bird, his body whirling through hundreds of feet of empty air, the helo shrinking in the distance.
He hung in the air. A Goblin Aeromancer faced him, its grimace cracking the white paint that covered its body. It leaned forward, grinning, prying one eye open wide.
And then Britton was falling.
Terror unleashed a flood of adrenaline that threatened to swamp him. He felt the Dampener kicking in, shunting the terror aside. The wind whipped his face, his dry eyes too painful to keep open.
So he closed them and concentrated on the soft couch in the recreation area at LSA Portcullis.
He felt the shift in magical currents, the sudden change in smells, temperature, air pressure. He slammed into the soft couch, sprawling among soldiers who squawked, scrambling. His kicking boots knocked the TV off its stand. He bounced, his nose spraying blood from the impact, his shoulders and chest reporting the hit. He didn’t think anything had broken, but couldn’t be sure.
There was no time.
Britton sprang to his feet and leapt off the back of the couch. He heard the shouts of the startled soldiers, saw Don and the blond desk officer staring openmouthed, then he’d opened another gate and jumped through, slamming shoulder first into the Goblins swarming Fitzy, sending them flying. A few clung stubbornly to him.
The Aeromancer swooped over them, screaming, a dark cloud spinning behind him.
“Get out of here!” Fitzy screamed.
“Sure thing,” Britton said, locking his arms around Fitzy’s neck. A Goblin squirmed between them, clinging to Fitzy’s waist. The Aeromancer descended, cloud pulsing with light. Britton gripped Fitzy tight, pushing off with his thighs, opening up the gate behind him.
They slid on the loading bay’s smooth floor, t
he gate shutting behind them. Britton’s shoulder collided with James’s shin, sending the armorer tumbling over them.
It took them a moment to scramble free, the Goblin crawling out from their midst, gasping. It scrabbled a few feet on the concrete floor, its fur cloak flipped backward over its head. Fitzy hauled himself to his feet and threw himself on it, grabbing the fur-covered lump of the Goblin’s head and slamming it into the concrete again and again.
Britton moved to stop him, but hands gripped his arms, holding him back.
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Fitzy screamed over and over, punctuating each shout with the muffled wet sound of the Goblin’s head striking floor. At last, the creature was still, a dark stain spreading across the cloak.
Britton looked around. Soldiers crowded one of the SOC soldiers from the helo. The arrow had been pulled from his collar, white gauze pressed to the wound. He stirred weakly, his skin white and sweaty. The injured pilot sat beside him, dressing his own wounds with the help of the flight officer. Radio chatter blared somewhere in the darkness.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” James whispered. “What the hell happened?”
Fitzy whirled on Britton. “Genius here pulled a bunch of heroics instead of getting himself to safety like he was ordered! You goddamned idiot! Do you have any idea what it would have meant if you had died? What if they captured you?”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Britton screamed back. “I saved your goddamned life!”
“You’re not in the life-saving business!” Fitzy yelled, spit flying. “You’re in the shut the fuck up and do as your told business! When I want to be saved, I’ll order you to do it!”
Britton shook his head. “…damned crazy.”
Fitzy leaned in close, his breath sour. “You think this means I owe you. You think this means we’re buddies. You remember one thing, contractor. I am not your friend. I am not your comrade in arms. I am here to make you into a righteous engine of war. Nothing more, nothing less.
“You’re paid to be a weapon, not a hero. Remember that.”
