by Chad Huskins
The response came back almost simultaneously.
The design approach Lyokh had just configured was roughly the shape of a triangle, with the four wings headed in opposite directions along its base before turning sharply and headed for the tip of the triangle.
“Eagle, Sharp, Kansas, you provide cover for their tails. All other fresh wings take up the rear guard while Fierce and Everest move up to the middle. Ares, join Gold at the fore.”
The calls of “copy” were background noise as he switched his camera feed to what was coming from Thrallyin and the other wyrms. They could not even get near all the fighting going on around the Dexannonhold, nor should they want to. It looked as though their enemy was converging on some terrible new force. As the night grew thicker and Rah’zen loomed brighter and larger, the flames licked higher and higher above of the streets around the Dexannonhold.
Eventually, the EyeSpy caught sight of something, and Lyokh zoomed in on it. It was some large, serpentine creature, climbing up the side of one of the pyramids at the foot of the Dexannonhold. It was difficult to see in the darkness, and its cold-bloodedness indicated it was no human, yet its lack of electrical components clearly meant it was not Ascendancy mechanicae.
“Is that one o’ them?” Meiks asked, looking at the same footage. “An uk’tek, or whatever they’re called?”
“Maybe,” said Lyokh. “I know they’re used in the Order Guard, and they protect the High Priestess with their lives.”
“Think this is all their doing?”
Lyokh shook his head. “Don’t see how it could be. It’s—”
Two things happened at once to cut him off. First, an enormous explosion, not too far from where all the battling was happening. Then the EyeSpy detected heat signatures. Thousands of them. All dashing away from the main thoroughfare that led right up to the Dexannonhold. Thousands of mechanicae were falling back, their grasshoppers bouncing from rooftop to rooftop and firing their railguns in a strategic retreat.
“What the hell was that?” someone shouted over the radio.
Lyokh didn’t answer. He was paying close attention to the EyeSpy’s feed. It showed the retreating forces splitting off onto different streets, headed north and northwest. On the monochromatic night-vision, he could see countless machines, soldiers, tanks, and grasshoppers, all dividing into smaller and smaller clusters, the streets looking like veins filling with some foreign pathogen that meant to kill the greater organism that was Vastill.
And he noticed something else. He noticed that lots of those fleeing were headed directly towards the backs of those mechanicae who were holding the street ahead of Lyokh’s assault force. Several hundred mechanicae and dozens of grasshoppers were coming right there. Like a dam bursting, the overflow was moving so fast it threatened to consume even the enemy stationed up the street from them.
The panicked masses were going to funnel directly into this street. And, ready or not, the other mechanicae were going to run out of room. Lyokh sensed what would happen. Either emboldened by the sudden reinforcements, or caught up in the panic of their fleeing comrades, or a bit of both, it didn’t matter—the Ascendancy throngs were about to charge them.
“All wings! Incoming! Look alive, we’ve got advancing enemy groups, several platoons’ worth, with at least a dozen grasshopper platforms! They’re coming right for us! Hoy up and man your positions! Ravager Two, move to the fore, behind the hulks, support posture! Hoy up!”
“The wall!” someone cried.
“THE WALL!” the others reported.
Lyokh smacked Meiks on the shoulder, effectively giving him command of the troops immediately around him. He nearly tripped over the corpse of a small boy as he hustled to the back, making sure everyone was ready. He found Abethik, his comms man, and asked him to sent out a burst to the War Council to update them. He reminded the medics to pull the wounded towards the middle for protection, and had the med bots take up arms and stand around the moaning soldiers. The least of them had taken rounds to the leg, the worst of them was missing an arm.
A flock of wyrms swam overhead, like eels in water. Thrallyin was not among them. Lyokh checked his HUD and found that Thrallyin was nonresponsive, its cams offline. He worried for Artemis of Artemis.
Oblivion awaits.
By the time he made it back up to the front line, there was already shooting going on. Warhulks and Ravager One were opening up on a slew of mechanicae that emerged out of the night and out of the smoke. Meiks and his group were firing over their cover, tagging the stragglers that got through.
Heeten did a good job for a minute, but eventually there were too many for her mech’s auto-targeting to keep up with. Here two mechanicae slipped through, and over there a grasshopper, and now here came a dozen more mechanicae. Two dozen. Some were in mechs of their own, or large power armor that allowed them to go toe-to-toe with a warhulk. Ravager One was swarmed. Two of its turrets’ barrels were yanked off by the mech warriors. A headshot from up high took one of them out, probably from Takirovanen.
Lyokh fired until he was spent. Ducked behind cover. Reloaded. Resumed firing.
Eventually, the first wave was defeated, with a few stragglers stuck in the in-between ground, hiding from the Republican soldiers but cut off from their cohorts.
There was a lull. It lasted maybe five minutes. Lyokh tracked the incoming hordes via the EyeSpy’s footage, he saw the next wave coming. It nearly toppled Heeten and her fellow warhulks. In the darkness and the dust and the smoke, there were occasional bursts of light from rockets, blades of laserfire, and blue-green particle beams. Tongues of fire rippled up the bodies of soldiers on both sides.
A rocket smacked hard into Susi’s leg, and she staggered, went down.
“Heeten!”
Lyokh watched her fight her way back to standing. She fired the gatling gun of her right hand while her left hand snatched up a mechanicae by its face and crushed it.
“Where are you, Ravager Two?”
The tank commander’s voice said, “Right behind you, doyen!”
He looked over his shoulder, and saw the black behemoth crawling over the various downed vehicles and rubble that his people had been using for cover. Lyokh shouted for everyone to get out of its way, but he needn’t have bothered. Everyone dashed out of the Ravager’s path as it came up behind the first Ravager, which was now overwhelmed, only its railgun still operational and firing into the oncoming hordes.
A few enemies still got through, and went leaping over Gold Wing’s hiding places, firing at point-blank range or else fighting in CQB with long, steel rods that pistoned out of their gauntleted wrists. Lyokh witnessed one of those steel rods punch through the chestplate of an armored Gold Winger, through his chest, through his spine and out his back. The pistoning rod hissed steam, apparently powered by some pressurized system.
Lyokh killed that mechanicae with a single controlled burst from his Fell. A second later, a tinzer’s beam smashed into his rifle, cooked it, and Lyokh dropped the melting thing to the ground. Without hesitation, he transitioned to his pulser and dove for cover, just as a salvo of large-caliber rounds smashed the building behind him.
He peeked over his cover, fired into the undulating mass of Machinist freaks running at them.
The street soon turned into a macabre scene from someone’s fever dream. Dark, dusty, with bombed-out pyramids and buildings with smashed windows looming over the scene. The bodies of shredded civilians being stomped into the cobblestone road by mechs and heavy booted feet. Technologies from different worlds and different histories colliding. Insect-like machines clambering over each other, fighting in a tangled mess. Grasshopper platforms climbing the walls and rooftops. Tanks rolling over all of it, crushing the dead and the living alike. Two mounted Mantises fired their railguns into the onslaught of machine-men. Wires and viscera exploded in the air as both sides sent fusillades into each other.
The air detonated every five or six seconds. Nova ships got in on the mix, hovering
overhead and firing into the screaming masses of mechanicae. A flock of wyrms descended into the streets, clawing and biting and rending flesh from wires.
Had Lyokh been a Mahlist, he might have rejoiced at the defilement. Heaps of bodies were involved in an orgy of violence barely witnessed in most battles. And yet here, at a nondescript street juncture, between shops and temples and apartments where people had lived and shared meals, more blood was spilled in a single place than Lyokh had ever seen.
“The wall!” Heeten screamed. “The w—”
Heeten was killed in an instant. Lyokh spotted her warhulk getting punched by high-powered railgun rounds from almost point-blank, her plasteel window splattered with her meat and blood.
Gone. Just gone. That’s how fast it happened.
Lyokh had no time to think. His mind temporarily visited a pit of remorse, and then returned mercifully quick to rejoin the battle.
Around him, three more men went down, hit hard by gauss rounds. One of them was incinerated by a tinzer rifle, his flesh bubbling and sloughing off before he even hit the ground.
And all the while, Lyokh fired. His STACsuit’s sensor package was struggling to highlight all the enemies on his HUD, for there were just too many. Uncountable freaks churned down through the streets, over rubble and vehicles and each other. He fired at them, screaming inarticulate rage. A missile exploded in the air above him, knocking him to the ground. The shear-thickening liquid in the underlayer of his STACsuit hardened when it sensed the heavy impact, softening the blow. Yet still, for a moment, he blacked out…
…and there he was, standing in a field of grass, on some alien world with three moons, and a wyrm’s wings flapping somewhere…
Two seconds later, he was back. The shear-thickening substance inside his suit had turned to gel again, and his STACsuit was injecting him with stimulants. He fought back to his feet, even as the enemy overrode them, trampling him into the ground. He remembered that Heeten was dead, but then dismissed the knowledge. Kept fighting.
He tried firing, only figuring out seconds later that his pulser was dry. He flung it away, clawed his way up the next leg that trampled him, fought his way to a standing position and drew his field sword. In one motion, he activated its plasmetomagnetic field emitter, and swung the plasmetic blade to cleave an enemy in half. The blade spat tiny electrical arcs, almost too tiny to see in all this madness. The runes of blessing that ran down the length of the blade glowed brightly, and flesh sizzled as it hung from the edge.
Heeten.
The name and the face attached to it flitted through his mind’s eye. It was gone as soon as it arrived, and Lyokh ploughed through the next half-dozen enemies, hewing them in half and using the Forty-Seven Steps to evade their line-of-fire. As their barrels came up to him, he batted them away with his blade, or else guided their fire into another mechanicae.
Lucerne.
Eulekk.
The names were all bouncing through his mind, echoing down through empty dark chambers, in search of something to connect with.
Lyokh dialed up the power of his STACsuit, shoulder-barging every opponent in his path, knocking them down, stomping them even as he skewered the one behind them. Some of the mechanicae joined him in melee combat, extending their steel rods or else pistoning them at him, and Lyokh met their weapons with his. Their weapons clanged against his, and electrical volts ran down each of them like cascading blue water. Sometimes one of his squadmates took them out, sometimes he did, but no matter what the onslaught did not cease.
Indeed, it only intensified.
The hordes rushing down the street had now started walking over the corpes of the fallen, and many of them died atop those mounds, adding to the wall of the dead. A Ravager backed over them, became stuck as bodies ground between its chassis, its treads, its gears, tipping it on uneven ground. And the meat-and-blood soup beneath the tank made slick puddles that yielded little traction. The Ravager extended its insectile legs and tried climbing over it, but power-suited mechanicae grabbed hold of those legs and hindered its movement, dragged it down.
Overhead, Mantises unleashed hell, trying to discourage more mechanicae from entering the street and stem the flow.
Egleston.
Names kept coming to his mind, even as he slipped and recovered, slashed and hacked, side-stepped and shuffle-stepped. Heeten. The names repeated over and over in his mind. But that was not what he was saying through gritted teeth. The words he repeated in his blood-drunk haze were a familiar mantra.
Two words. Repeated over and over. The same two words that had led them through those tunnels, on whatever planet that had been. And while their repetition brought him no solace, they gave him focus to kill the next enemy.
And the next.
“HOW MANY?” SAID Donovan, leanining forward in his seat, straining his ears to make sure he had heard DeStren right.
“Right now seventeen, skipper,” said the chief sensor room operator. His voice sounded tense, but was tinged with an ounce of hope. Just an ounce. “Popping up at different points around the system. I…I think we’ve got some help, sir!” He laughed anxiously.
“Conn, Comms One! Tightbeams from Ecclesiastes coming in now. They show the latest data from Cryzek. They’ve encountered three ships and proven the profiles of the incoming vessels. Registered with the Isteninyahu Penal Colony. Brotherhood ships all, skipper.”
Lord Ishimoto’s crew let out a cheer, but never stopped working.
“They arrived,” Donovan breathed. “Already?”
XO Vosen echoed his disbelief. “They were meant to rendezvous with us, but that was after we had infiltrated the system and become situated. Even if High Command alerted them of our situation, they can’t have gotten here this fast.”
“However they did it, I’m damn glad to have them. Let’s send a tightbeam telling them just that. Make a quick data package of our situation, then send it to Ecclesiastes to spread to the penal ships. Tell them if they can help us clear these bastards out of Phanes, I’ll contribute my entire year’s salary to their church of whatever-the-fuck goddesses.”
MISS PERSEPHONE HAD smashed through two walls of torpedoes now, accepting the damage to its extend ablative plates as it went barreling towards the Ascendancy ships, which, now seeing the true extent of Captain Trepp’s madness, had started to turn and run. They had simply never encountered this kind of tactic before, Trepp was sure of it. The Ascendancy ship’s ass end did not have any torpedo launchers, nor much in the way of defenses, just one gauss turret that meant nothing to the behemoth currently streaking towards it.
The other Ascendancy ships tried to take Persephone’s flanks, but Trepp had ordered the unleashing of all torpedo tubes and dispatched all starscreamer squadrons to harass them. Trepp did not relent, even as her crew sweated, obeying her orders to follow, follow, follow, out away from Dutimeyer and pretty much disregarding their mission of protecting the gas giant’s installations. She might be reprimanded for it later, but Trepp knew the true tactical power of her Scythe-class ship. Coupled with her own suicidal thoughts, which had developed strongly here at the Fall of Man, Miss Persephone must appear, at all times, like the meanest, stupidest, most illogical ball of compristeel and spite. It must show no fear, only obstinate fury, only single-minded hate.
When the Ascendancy ship began cueing up it’s A-drive, it was clear their enemy meant to flee.
“Call down to engineering,” Trepp said to her XO. “Have them cue up our A-drive.”
“We’re…we’re not going to chase it, surely. Ma’am…if we leave Dutimeyer—”
“The Visquain have left us out here to hang on our own, like always!” she barked. “I want to hound them, XO. I want them to run. I like seeing them run. Don’t you?”
“Ma’am…skipper…”
Two more torpedoes slammed into their forward ablative flaps, and they felt a slight tremor, as well as temporary weightlessness as both arti-grav and inertial dampeners went through a hiccup.
“Conn, this is Comms One! We’ve got a message from an incoming vessel! Was just tightbeamed to us as it came out of its FTL bubble around Dutimeyer.”
“Play it,” she said.
A voice emanated from her tac station, a voice that resonated with tones both humble and ominous. “This is Bushido’s Culmination,” it said. “Starship of the Itinerant Fleet, out of the Isteninyahu Penal Colony. We are broadcasting our transponder code to you now for verification, and ask that you welcome us, the Brotherhood of Contrition, into your fold, and allow us to join you in your quest to purge the evil from this system.”
THE “STAC” IN STACsuit stood for Strength Tactical Assist and Combat. The Tactical Assist part came from the suit’s ability to identify hostiles, measure their weapons capability, and designate each one with a priority. Halos of red lights appeared above the heads of the most dangerous targets, green lights above the easiest. Even as enemies popped in and out of cover, a STACsuit’s computer monitored their progress by cross-referencing data from its sensor package—IR, radar, ladar, echolocation, respiratory byproducts, neutron-imaging—and formed guesses of where the enemy might be headed while it was unseen. HUD ghosts, they were called, translucent outlines that looked like spirits moving behind walls. The suit’s echolocation sensors also helped the user predict walls, corners, furniture, and other things that were behind them, unseen.
If not for HUD ghosts, Lyokh would have died within seconds. He tracked where they were going, dipped behind cover that his HUD showed on a prediction screen, reappeared delivering a blade, or a teep-kick, or an elbow, or a hammer fist to his enemy.
The slaughter did not cease, even when Lyokh was pushed back into a partially collapsed building. He crashed backwards through a window, his field sword cleaving another enemy, whose corpse sagged bonelessly against a cabinet of someone’s office supplies.
