Most of the light that lazily lit the lower half of the orange sky originated from the setting eastern sun, on its way to awaken another part of this ill-fated world. This light was further drained by the haze of dust that was constantly being ferried by the unremitting winds, thwarting a clean portrait of the dreary city ruins. The upper echelon of the sky was a tapestry of dark charcoal, falling like a curtain after a play, soundlessly freckled with the occasional star. The larger of the moons could be seen ascending, but its more erratic sibling was nowhere to be found, though the digital calendar told me she would appear in another hour. Apart from the howling winds reminding me of a particularly windy day at a particular beach when I was with a particular girl, the scene could not have been more soothing for me. With my eyes not exactly needed for anything besides skimming the horizons, I was given time to enjoy the view from my perch, seeing as Briannika was the real engineer and I was there more for guard duty. She concentrated on the prospective means of our deliverance, coming in the form of those two silvery spires on either end of the ship. Both spikes had some damage at their base caused by slugs and thermal detonators, but the transmitter at the stern still had most of its dish intact, making itself the obvious choice to begin repairs.
We were there for about half an hour before I perceived the eastern light dimming somewhat abnormally. What was at first a trivial piece of the black half of the sky, which had expanded to take up more than half by this point, appeared to be dripping into the fading orange section. It looked much like a drop of colored dye spreading in a clear glass of water, except at a slower rate, and no intensity of hue was lost by its dispersion. The sight entranced me as I tried to decipher what I was seeing, the spectacle being too far away for the zoom function in my eyes to make out any detail. It didn’t take long for this drop of black dye to become several drops more, consuming more of the already reserved daylight, making me believe the night was literally invading the world before its proper time came. Briannika called me to help her with something, but I instead called her attention to what I was seeing.
“What do you think that is?” I asked her.
Crouching near the base of the spire, she carelessly looked toward the direction I was pointing at, never quite taking her full attention away from what she was doing. Her first reaction, as if anticipating my concern to be directed at a funny-shaped cloud, was almost dismissive, but a longer glance forced her to rethink her position.
She walked over and stood beside me, saying, “It’s difficult to tell. It’s a bit too far to see anything, meaning it’s probably beyond the city.”
“Should we report it?” I asked.
“Nah, it’s not like this world has given us any reason to worry, right?” She went on to give the live feed from our scout to the rest of the party. After providing everyone a few seconds to study the feed, she asked, “Orders, captain?”
“Can the transmitter be retracted?” asked the captain, never putting needless concern on anything that wasn’t deserving of it.
“Not yet. The base of the transmitter was the most fucked up. I’ve already given most of my attention to it by lifting the panels around it and diverting the-”
“Short version.”
“I would need another twenty minutes to make it retract all the way.”
Make that your top priority. If that phenomenon turns out to be dangerous, then I would prefer the transmitter to be inside.”
“Will do, sir.”
As Briannika and those below worked with a little more haste, I kept my eyes on the embryonic mass of blackness. After several minutes had eloped, the opaque blob flattened out before it could completely erase all traces of the loitering light in the lowest portion of the horizon. For another few moments, the black incursion appeared to have stopped evolving and was merely sagging onto the night chunk of the sky. When I was beginning to think that the anomaly had stopped developing, I started to see that it was getting larger. I switched to the thermal image, but the aberration still mostly matched the temperature of the ambient air and revealed nothing. This held true for another handful of minutes.
The splotch of darkness continued to inflate until I realized that it wasn’t necessarily getting bigger as much as it was getting closer, inch by inch. Once my mind grasped this fact, I was better able to speculate what I was witnessing. The advance of the night’s flying shadow finally allowed my thermal vision to detect the mass as having a slightly higher temperature than the cooling atmosphere encompassing it. It finally dawned on me. This progressing form wasn’t a single massive object or entity, but it was made up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of living perplexities. The sheer density and distance made it impossible to pick out a single member of their company, but if they carried anything like the temperament of the subterranean imps, I thought it best that we weren’t left exposed when they arrived.
When I informed my squad as best I could about what I believed was approaching, Kiran ordered for Vasilissa to go up and aid Briannika, and for Emory to get the shuttle sealed tight. We would have preferred to get the shuttle into the hanger, but the two inoperable transports already inside would have taken time to move without the depowered machinery to assist us. Once a couple of minutes had elapsed, the eldrick had transferred her support to the talorian and I was able to catch sight of the first wave of the swarm’s samplings. It was a small group of half a dozen affiliates about a mile out from us. The first thing I could see were their diamond-shaped silhouettes gliding in the near complete darkness that drowned the vista, looking like an army of children’s kites that had their strings cut loose, a hint of the familiar in this unfamiliar cascade. The thermal imaging should have had a sharp view of the creatures at this range, but the minimal heat they produced provided no real details. It was night vision that delivered the best impression of the incoming beasts. Their diamond-shaped wing encompassed their entire physique, with the exception of their heads, which had an elongated neck and ended in a long curved beak. Their bodies were smooth looking and devoid of any feathers, their skin appearing to be made of a dark brown leather. What stood out the most, even with a mile separating us, were their white eyes, shining pure as crystal, and the nearer they came the more they impersonated the stars.
I sent this footage to everyone in the group, and wanting her opinion on the matter, I asked the doctor, “Any idea what these things are?”
After a moment of reviewing the recording, she answered, “They do resemble some specimens we found, the largest of which were four feet tall and had a wingspan of about seven feet… Gods, is that what that swarm is comprised of? How could so many go undetected before now? This planet was dead when we arrived… and now…”
Compared to the dwindling words of the doctor, hearing the more stalwart voice of my captain call Briannika’s name almost made me flinch.
“Just a few more minutes, cap,” our head mechanic replied.
“You know what to do, greenhorn?” the captain continued.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
While I stepped to the edge of the cruiser, I placed my rifle at the activated magnetic holster on my back to enable the use of both my unburdened arms. I next outstretched them and began to concentrate on Ember’s topsoil. The sand was easy to lift, but the cracked soil was more stubborn, almost unusually so. And it wasn’t as if I sensed someone else using their own warping ability to offer resistance, it was more analogous to feeling that the world itself resented the use of its land being controlled by foreign hands. The chronicled words of the late Dr. Krauss came to mind: I can’t help but feel like this place is somehow… active…. In any case, the soil did yield to me, however reluctantly, and I began rapidly lifting it the seventy feet to the top of the ship. I was soon able to gather a few piles of well over a ton of dirt and sand on the roof, which I next applied in my next design. These piles of Ember wrapped their way around the range the workers and the transmitter were in, and, at the same time, spread upward to meet the apex of th
e device. Within moments there was a round wall of compacted soil and sand encircling the restoration mission. While still positioned at the outside of the fortification, along with the scout, I compressed it as tightly as I could, hardening it until the density was assuring enough to where I believed it could stand up to a grenade blast.
My teammates thus sheltered I focused my attention back to the throng of gliding diamonds, feeling secure in the fact that I could enter my earthen shield at any time. I sought out the first wave of fliers I had seen, but couldn’t find them in the air. It was the scout that showed me that they had alighted on a sandy field about half a mile away from us. Perceiving no threat from them, I turned my attention to the greater flood above. It was much closer now, so close that I was sure the entire night sky was actually composed of these animals and that it would simply crash down on top of us when they reached the cruiser. The width of the gliding swarm must have been at least two miles across and two hundred feet thick. I could not see its end. As they soared closer to our position, I saw multiple pieces of the living storm break off and dive to the ground, like an impossibly heavy monsoon. Some of these groups joined the first wave, but most strayed to other random spots.
When the foremost airborne swell was less than seven hundred yards from the cruiser, the winged ocean truly began to impress a deep sense of awe in me, not only due to the absurdly impenetrable mass of living bodies, but in how relatively quiet such a bulk could move. I expected to hear some type of chatter stemming from them, whether malevolent or benevolent, but all that my suit’s ears picked up was the flapping noise coming from the irregular beating of their wings, reinforcing the idea that what was above us was indeed the manifestation of nocturnal itself. At less than five hundred yards away, more and more beasts dove to meet the ground, as if they were intent on spawning a living, breathing carpet. This carpet continued to unfurl with the advance of the swarm.
Exaggerating a nervous tone to pretend I was not in reality getting pretty nervous, I asked the workers, “Uh, ladies? How much longer?”
“Just another minute or so,” Briannika answered, casually enough to get me rolling my eyes.
“This is no time to lie,” said Vasilissa.
“I did say ‘or so.’”
Shaking my head, Emory’s voice entered my helmet, saying, “Hey, rookie! Lift me up!”
He was down by the shuttle in the western side of the cruiser. I went to his side and warped the soil beneath his feet, raising it upward to make a spontaneous elevator to the roof.
“Thanks,” he said when he hopped up near me. “Whoa... Should we start shooting now or would that just piss them off?”
“Even if the entire cruiser were filled with ammo blocks, I don’t think we’d enough to get them all,” I replied.
With a sharp crack of unlatching metal and hiss of released pressurized air, the entry hatch to our right opened up. Popping out from the opening was the captain’s head and his lengthy body came slithering out after it. By the time he was wholly outside, leaving the heavy hatchway open for a quick escape, the horde was no more than three hundred yards away, or a little less than the length of the cruiser. Kiran said nothing. His concentrated eyes simply stared attentively at the oncoming deluge he looked tall enough to reach out and touch, a claw-tipped finger on the trigger of his hefty rifle. Draken never sheathed their powerful claws inside their suits, always wanting as many weapons accessible to them as possible, and their razor-sharp claws were undeniably capable enough to tear through the elephant-thick hides of their prey back on their homeworld. For a draken, seeing a human hunt with anything more than a handmade bow or spear was absolutely laughable. Emory and I followed his wordless lead, prepared to stand our ground for as long as we could. The persistent stillness of the captain told me he was only going to shoot if he saw the creatures actually head directly for us, seeing as they were already well within the range of our bullets. It seemed odd to play it cautious, especially from his species, but I supposed he hoped the swarm would ignore us if we didn’t fire at them needlessly. After all, those that found the ground gave some proof that at least a few were acting as aggressively as a flock of migrating geese.
At 150 yards out, a distance one would estimate they would begin to drop in altitude if their aim was to harm, the gigantic subsisting cloud continued its leisurely pace at its five hundred foot mark, with the exemption of the waves plunging like a waterfall to the solid division of the planet. At this close a range, it was now more than ever that I felt like that little chicken from a folk tale long told. When they were only one hundred yards away, I clasped my rifle tighter, kept my eyes wide open, held my breath, and the flapping of their wings replaced the thoughts in my head. Then, breaking my warrior’s resolve, I exhaled and loosened my grip when I saw a grand display of coordination begin to unfold. The vanguard of the inverse tsunami began to split apart at exactly where the cruiser rested before them. It was like a vast river had met an invisible mountain it had to circumvent, except this was all happening in the heavens.
Just like that, the prodigious flock skirted the ship and ended up on either side of us, giving me a sense of what it was like to be among them. All that we could do was stare agape at the scene around us, turning back to see them reunite the river a hundred yards away, as though they had rehearsed this countless of times before. Not all avoided us, however. The beastly rain continued to come down, some touching down on the ground alongside the cruiser, while others landed on the cruiser roof itself. They created loud banging noises on their clumsy impact upon the metal of the ship, but they shrugged off the unpleasant landing and merely settled on the spots they had dropped onto. They paid no obvious attention to us, treating the ship like any regular boulder that they came across. With this up close inspection available, I was able to see that the creature’s inept movements proved it be as graceful as a walking bat, if bats were entirely hairless. The extremities of its diamond wing, including the lone tip making up its squat tail, had four curved, stubby claws at each end. It was easy for me to imagine that these animals also relaxed by hanging upside down in their off time before coming out to feed, or do whatever it was they were doing now.
The eye of the living hurricane above us revealed that the sunlight was virtually quenched, but that had little effect on the incandescent eyes of the feigned bats. Their bulbous white organs only grew bigger and brighter in the close, heavy night, acting like a myriad of fireflies inside a broad cavern. Even when I switched from my night vision to my regular sight, I was still able to distinguish individual alien bats by spotting their pairs of disembodied pupils floating coldly in the distance.
At long last, after a couple of minutes witnessing the typhoon of fireflies bypassing us, the pair of mechanics were able to get the transmitter to retract within the confines of the ship.
“The swarm doesn’t appear to be aggressive, captain,” said Vasilissa. “Should we continue working on the transmitter?”
Kiran retained his attention to the onrushing swarm that seemingly had no beginning nor end. “Everyone inside,” he replied. “We’ll let the rest of the swarm pass and then we’ll see.”
We followed his wise counsel. I cautiously collapsed part of my earthen wall, so as to not accidentally spook the alien bats, and once I released my teammates, we made our way down the exterior and inner hatches.
When we reached the bottom, Captain Kiran said, “Uriel, I think it’s about time you take a breather. Make it an hour.”
As soon as he gave me permission to feel my weariness, it rushed into my muscles. “Yes, sir.”
Only Brent had taken any kind of respite thus far, which had transpired soon after his rescue, and came more from guarded evaluation than actual rest. Strange to say, but repose almost felt unnatural to do in the field. The modern warrior could go days without ever experiencing the ill-effects of sleep deprivation, for our nanotech could supply a steady stream of stimulants directly into the brain to stave off the instinct of sleep, eve
n after long durations of exertion. Of course, it was best not to push technology and mind too far, especially for those who drained some of their vida reserve, that being my case. A vida reserve was not endless, and just like blood coursing the body, depleting it had its consequences, and since no drug existed in all the known worlds to safely overextend its power, only rest, time, and sleep could replenish it. As the Sacred Script declared in an ancient axiom, “Vida is the agent of the soul, and only in quiet living can one replenish it.”
With my comrades making their way to the lower decks, I stayed in the living quarters to grab a bed in one of the nearby rooms. It no time at all, I settled myself at the bottom of one of the two twin-sized bunks. Preventing me from feeling right at home was the fact that this was no time to remove anything but my helmet, meaning I had to sit up against the wall at the head of the bed to make it comfortable enough to sleep in my armor. The silence of the room was felt as much as not heard. It was the kind of quiet that was normally sensed in an empty house when all its residents were away. It felt strange knowing that these residents might never enter their own rooms again. I leaned the vertical KAA-74 against my bed, treating it much like a valued childhood toy I couldn’t sleep without. There were many thoughts that wanted to dribble out, but in what took less time than I thought it would, my mind let go of the waking world and drifted off into the illusionary.
Chapter Nine
I saw nothing, my mind’s eye fastened behind a lock and chain, but the sounds and smells were exactly the same as the previous reverie. I heard her scream, that succinct, heart wrenching scream, but it did not awaken me this time, though it seemed louder than before, as though she were at my feet and not partitioned behind an unbreakable wall. The terrible stillness that followed the terrible shriek lasted for several long moments. Eventually, the quietness of the objectless dream was broken by a muffled sound of a woman sobbing without restraint.
Ember's Echo (The Nimbus Collection Book 2) Page 8
