Celestial Hit List

by Charles Ingrid

“Be there, Amber. Be there.”

  The armor shifted behind him.

  The dust storm hit him head on. The plastishield screen of the skimmer immediately pitted as Jack buckled down and sat tight in the pilot’s seat. The cloud boiled about the vehicle, shredded apart and died down, that quickly. The skimmer nosedived, whined, pulled itself up and steadied.

  The buffeting pulled Bogie off the equipment hooks and Jack found his hands full trying to keep the armor on the back of the skimmer. He lost control of the vehicle and it skewed around as he wrestled with the weight of the Flexalinks. Green forest treetops whipped below him and when Jack finally had the bike righted, he’d lost track of where he was.

  Hovering, the skimmer came to a stop and the Black Piss River came up on the target screen. No blips moved. No heat screening came up other than the low grade of decomposition. The Bythians had never come back for their dead. Jack cruised north.

  His rear view screen showed the dust storm cloud moving south at a rate that was difficult to track. The fore screen showed a structure with apertures at random. He studied it a moment before downshifting the skimmer and bringing it in.

  If he did approach the sand crèche, he wanted to do it on foot. Taking the skimmer over it would alert whatever Thraks were manning it.

  He was wearing Bogie when he stepped away from the skimmer, helmet hooked at his weapons belt. The armor throbbed about him, humming with power. The breeze shifted and he caught it in his face and felt grit in his teeth. The hair at the back of his neck prickled as the sand-ridden wind brushed across him.

  His mouth had gone dry. Jack unlocked his helmet and put it on. The less scum he got into the suit the better. The holo bathed him in its pinkish light. He’d taken his shift off and crimped on the leads about his torso. Power stung him at both wrists to let him know it was there.

  “Computer tracking. Pinpoint artificial structure,” Jack ordered. Screens flashed, and then his compass map came up, pointing the way. He strode in that direction, taking the landscape in leaps and bounds, unwilling to leave the skimmer down and alone for very long.

  Bogie had stilled in his mind. He wondered, as he had over the last several weeks, if he’d gone insane when Amber left. At his back, the chamois he’d installed a generation ago for comfort and to catch the sweat that always trickled down his bare skin, hung close.

  The brush here billowed as high as trees, cloudlike and thorny, pulling at him. It scratched harmlessly across the Flexalinks. Jack homed in on his target and waded through. He was in a hurry.

  He plowed to a stop and then he had an inkling of a realization why the Bythians had attacked first, and in force, at Black Piss River. The stone ruins had been but a gateway to this massive and intact temple.

  The temple was old. So old it was as beaten and rounded as the mountain peaks cupping the valley it stood in. So old, its stone was etching away into dust at the base of its columns.

  But not so old that its bas-relief pictographs were worn away.

  “Shit,” he said, and his voice seemed to blare inside the helmet. He looked around, thinking that Colin might have been happier had he never come. Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

  Jack moved then, toward the temple. He made sure his scanning cameras were recording as he passed among the friezes and columns. He did not have time to read the religious history engraved there, but knew he had to have a record of it. As he moved through the roundabout of stone and marble, he kept the altar in view.

  So fascinated was he by the temple that he tripped and fell over the leading edge of the sand crèche that was steadily engulfing it. Jack spat out a pungent word, then rolled over on his elbows. Sand scratched deeply into his visor. He stared at it, face down, almost without recognition. Then the chilling realization brought him to his feet.

  Colin’s interesting “rock structure,” ancient temple, and sand crèche were one and the same.

  Now Jack knew why the Bythians had fought the Dominion encroachment so fiercely. The Thraks had already been here, and done the ultimate desecration.

  Jack grimaced as he kicked aside a Thrakian larva squiggling through the hip-deep sand in the valley beyond the temple. He gagged. The Thrakian hivelike structure in the center was buried almost to its spirelike tip, and the sand spilled out of it.

  Nowhere were there guards… other than the six suits of battle armor arranged about it, on their feet, still and motionless.

  Abdul. And the five others missing for the three weeks since the battle of Black Piss River.

  Jack’s skin crawled. He keyed the com on. “This is Captain Storm. Rise and shine, boys. We have a skimmer and it’s time to move out.”

  Low, static crackle answered him.

  No one responded. Was the armor empty? Who had taken them out, six of the emperor’s finest, and left their empty apparel here? Were they an offering? Had the Bythians taken them like so many scalps?

  Or had the Bythians hoped the invincible Knights could take out a sand crèche?

  They must have because Jack saw no adults anywhere. He waded along the outer edge of the beige and pink grit. He found a piece of chitin, empty and hefted it in one gauntlet. Laser fire scored the edge.

  There had been a battle here, then. The Knights, victorious to the last. Then, nothing. The crèche still existed. Soon it would be checked on. Jack knew they would not leave it unmonitored for long. Sand was being manufactured, young grown.

  So why then hadn’t Abdul called home… called for back ups or a lift out.

  Why was there no sign of life in the armor?

  He clenched his teeth against his fear, knowing he’d have to approach the suits and lock visors, or even remove a helmet, to examine them. Dust and gravel crunched beneath his boots. Unpleasant memories made him flick the sound on high, the mikes picking up and amplifying the tiniest sound.

  Something growled.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Jack ground to a halt. He swallowed hard.

  The nearly imperceptible noise came from the armor nearest him. Its black and green Flexalinks winked obscenely in the sun’s reflection. He faced it directly and brought his gauntlet up.

  He could not be awake. Or alive. Perhaps the skimmer had gone down and he was now as much a part of the Bythian earth as the rocks and gravel.

  Maybe he’d taken too much mordil and still lay in the barracks, thrashing in sleep that was supposed to be drugged dreamless, aching for Amber.

  Anything.

  Because this was one of his nightmares come to life.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch,” Jack broadcast. “Come and get me.”

  The armor crackled apart like an eggshell, Flexalinks exploding in a shrapnel about them, the power of the eruption kicking up a cloud of sand. And it reared out of the leavings of what had been a man, then a host, then nothing but a few gnawed bones and stringy ligaments.

  The berserker saurian roared. Its crest came up as it leaped out of the armor, and behind it, Jack heard echoing awareness from other suits. He aimed the gauntlet and opened fire before the towering beast could tackle him. Nothing fought worse or faster than a Milot berserker, armed or otherwise.

  He hit his power vault, somersaulting over the head of the beast. Teeth that could rend his armor flashed below him, snapping at his heels. He fired wrist missiles at his fellow Knights as he jumped, knowing that the armor harbored nightmares beyond belief.

  Two exploded in flame and smoke, but another one crackled open. The berserker lay curled inside, immature but waking. Jack hit his power vault again and lasered it from midair. When he landed, the first berserker was waiting for him.

  It bowled him over. Circuitry fused from the impact. His rear camera blinked out for a second. Jack lashed out, his laser searing everything in a semicircle around him, sizzling into a puddle on the ground. It hit him again and the blow made Jack gasp.

  *Get up, boss.*

  Bogie reached him. Winded, Jack lay inside the cradle of the suit’s gad
getry and technology, temporarily helpless. He managed a twitch, which the holo picked up and translated into a powerful kick and the berserker roared. Green-yellow blood squirted from its hind leg.

  The berserker picked him up and threw him. He crashed into the skimmer, sending it rolling. It burst into flames and Jack staggered out of range of the explosion.

  The berserker bounded after him and picked him up a second time.

  Jack fought a dizzying moment, then realized what the beast had done. Had tracking picked him up, inside full armor. He swallowed fear and air. One of the leads had come loose and his armor’s right leg was dead because of it.

  “I can’t move. I’ve lost power.”

  *?*

  The sentience had done it before, on Lasertown. “Power my right leg, Bogie. I don’t have time to replace the lead.”

  *■)*

  “Dammit, Bogie. Hear me … remember.” The ground twirled beneath him. He’d never last a crushing fall.

  *No, Boss. It is you who cannot hear me.*

  His mind flooded with Bogie’s voice, and he shrank from it, even as it reached out to embrace him.

  *Let go. Let me in. You fear me worse than the ones we fight.*

  Sweat and blood trickled down the side of his head, and he knew Bogie was right. Whatever Bogie was, a part of him or a parasite, he feared it worse than the beast racking him over now. And whatever Bogie had been, it was a powerful, mature voice flooding him now. Jack forced himself to lay still within the armor, blanking out his thoughts, reaching for Bogie like a drowning man reaches for land.

  Jack kicked out with his left leg. Hesitantly, his right kicked. It was odd, almost as though it was numb. His leg moved because the armor did. The berserker staggered under the weight of the armor. Jack began to kick furiously.

  It dropped him.

  Jack rolled. He got his left leg under him. Awkwardly, the right followed. He straightened up and stood dead center as the creature charged him. He put his gauntlet up. The berserker bent over, snapping, fearsomely carved ivory scissoring inside a cavernous jaw. He fired right down its gullet.

  Even then, he took two more vicious blows before it died.

  Jack staggered over to the last two suits. The men inside were dead. He fired them anyway, afraid of what might be feasting on their flesh inside the suit. He lasered down half the thorn forest to make a bonfire to consume the sand crèche and the armor. Without knowing what caused the infestation, he dared not bring the dead back.

  Then he wrenched his helmet off and was violently ill on the grass outside the temple archway.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  He remembered thinking that he’d lost too much blood. He was dizzy and light-headed as he stood, watching the funeral pyre of six Knights, their armor and their nightmare destroyers, and a Thrakian sand crèche. The heat washed against him, white-hot, hotter than an ordinary fire, fueled perhaps by the alien sand and machinery that made it. He put his helmet on against the heat and stood watching it, watching the blue-white flames dance until the night was its darkest plum.

  Tired unto death, he staggered back from the bonfire and found the remains of the skimmer. It would not yield enough scrap to make a wastebasket, let alone take him home. He stood looking down at it in a stupor.

  *Let me take you,* Bogie said.

  “You’ll have to,” Jack answered him. “I can’t make it otherwise.” He yielded all, surrendered all, to the armor.

  In the far, faraway years of a long ago Earth, his Amerind ancestors celebrated the medicine walk, a spiritual walk of the soul, to find truth and gain knowledge. Storm walked that pathway now, his soul linked with that of an even more ancient beast.

  They began in the dawn, as the dust season hit, and only an armored man could have hoped to make it through.

  The Bythians gathered to watch the suit of All Light striding through their lands. The armies had pitched their camps, dug in, sheltered themselves from the storm as best they could. The first would be bad, a warning of the season to come, then there would be a few weeks of peace, and then the season would begin in earnest.

  This storm caught most of them by surprise, out on the land, fighting for their beliefs, whatever they might be. They would wait it out and then return home, to their mills, farms, looms, shops, ordinary lives, until a more favorable time in which to wage war.

  But the suit changed all that. The Holy Men knew now why their forecasts had been incorrect. The God of All had wanted them trapped in the dust, in the sterility of the grit and the storm, to see the being walking through it.

  The more bold of the Bythians, first eyes closed against the stinging wind, walked out to meet the being. They would greet it, offer fruits and vegetables and water. He would stop. If they were very lucky, he would remove his helmet to drink the water and accept their offering. Then they would gasp at the strangeness of his features and bow their heads respectfully to the ground until he left them.

  Many Bythians had never seen a human, never wanted to. A few had seen the Thraks… insolent creatures who walked upon their lands as if they already owned them. There was no doubt in any Bythian mind that the Thraks intended to, one day. The only doubt was whether it would be with or without the Third Age.

  And so the Bythians did what they had never done in their lifetimes, which were incredibly long. They left their sensible shelters from the dust and followed after this being with the suit of All Light, to see what he would lead to. This was a time of prophecy.

  Hussiah heard the rumblings in the land. He left his cave and stood in the wind, where he could feel the gritty edges of the storm to come, and he listened.

  Then he turned and said to the hatchling, “It is time.”

  “Time?”

  “The Holy Trial you’ve been trained for is upon us. Come with me.” He left the cave and valley without a second look.

  Dhurl received the scouting report with considerable distress. “The entire crèche destroyed? What happened?” His synthesizer crackled, bleeding out at the scope of his annoyances.

  His aide bowed low on his spindly chitinless front legs. “I’m sorry, Ambassador. We had been out of communication with them—our attention had been diverted to placing our ship in orbit and cloaking it there—when we reestablished a link, there was no answer. We skimmed out to see what the problem could be and found all destroyed.”

  “No. No. You guaranteed me that temple was a holy spot—that the Bythians would not dare to attack it, no matter what the consequences.”

  “The temple still stands, your eminence.” The groveling creature strove to keep its features in a mask of contrition, but one plate or another kept sliding off into abject fear, its truer emotion.

  “This is disaster. This will set us back years.” Dhurl turned away from the subordinate for a moment.

  “We found only this at the site.” The aide crept forward, dropped the artifact, and then backed into its former position.

  Dhurl picked it up. His faceted eyes recognized the Dominion insignia immediately. He dropped the equipment plate. “Those chitinless Knights!”

  “How—how could they have known?”

  “It matters not how. Knowing this, they will soon put other pieces of the exoskeleton together. We have only one recourse before us now.” Dhurl drew himself up to the limit of his height. Warrior genes made for taller Thraks, but for a diplomat, he was impressive. His mask reasserted itself and when his aide looked up to see this new expression, he let out a short rasp and quailed back to the flooring.

  News filtered into the Forked Tongue almost quicker than anywhere in Sassinal. Ted was meeting his merchant employer and making arrangements to smuggle in a few barrels of forbidden thread from the holy city of Tharb, in the northern hemisphere, when he got the word. They dropped their beers abruptly and made their way to the Dominion barracks in the South Quarter.

  A young, white-haired boy with eyes of limitless blue stood sentry at the door. “Captain Storm?” he said in response
to their urgent inquiries. “He’s out on patrol.”

  “Patrol my ass. He promised to make sure we got out of here when the time came, and I’m here to tell you, it’s here.”

  The young man looked at them in blank astonishment. “What are you talking about?”

  “Take me to your commander, fella. I don’t want’t‘be telling this twice.”

  Rawlins chewed it over, then went for Kavin on the run.

  Kavin sat on the edge of the conference table, frowning slightly. “I don’t see how the Triad Throne or the Dominion can be held to any private commitment Captain Storm made, whatever it might have been.” He held his chin high, as though offended by the smell of the two men sitting in front of him. He might have been. Nervous sweat ran off the two of them, the arthritic merchant no better than his hired smuggler.

  “Then let me put it to you this way: when that curtain of dust lifts, we’re going to find about twenty thousand Bythian free soldiers sitting outside those gates.”

  “Bythians don’t travel during dust storms.”

  “Not if they can help it, but this one’s been prophesied.”

  “As what?”

  “As the beginning of the end of the Second Age and the dawn of the Third Age, or the end of the world. Either way, you and I don’t want to be in town.” Ted swallowed convulsively in his effort to be persuasive.

  Kavin sucked on a tooth for a second. He looked at Rawlins. “When’s Storm due back in?”

  “He’s overdue now. Early reports indicate he was caught on the leading edge of a small squall up north.” But Rawlins’ eyes flickered slightly and Kavin thought he read more trouble there than he heard in Rawlins’ voice. Why hadn’t Storm called in himself?

  Kavin felt a queasiness roll over in his stomach.

  What if the Thrakian sand crèche had proved out? There were sixteen kinds of hell and trouble brewing in one of those. He stood up. “What can we expect from the Bythians?”

  “Prophecy time. They’ve been looking forward to this for hundreds of years. There will be a Holy Trial… three champions… one survivor… if any survive. If one does and some religious mumbo jumbo occurs, we’re talking Third Age. If not… the Bythians will annihilate themselves and anyone else living on the planet.”