“I mean us. You and me.”
She did a double-take at him. “You’re asking me about that now?”
Elaro shrugged. “Hey—as you said, we’re facing a giant army of bug creatures. I might not get another chance to ask—I might be dead in five minutes.”
Arani gave him a sour look. “Oh, please.” She carried a blast pistol in each hand and now she opened up with both of them, driving an attacking Skrazzi back. “Let’s focus on what matters, huh?”
“That does matter,” Elaro said, his voice low enough that only she could hear him. “I know you still think I’m some kind of double-agent, working an angle on behalf of Iapetus and the Sons, but—”
“Yes?” she said, cutting him off. “You’re going to tell me that isn’t true?”
“It isn’t any longer,” he said. He pointed down to the new, dark red uniform he wore. “I was a member of II Legion from the time I enlisted in the Imperial military academy, but that wasn’t my choice. They chose me. I’m a member of the Lords of Fire now. General Tamerlane gave me the opportunity to pick where I wanted to place my loyalties, and I respect and admire that about him. So I’ve changed sides—permanently.”
“Mmm hmm,” she said, still firing both pistols into the enemy formations.
“You don’t believe in redemption?” he asked.
She shot him a look. “I believe in actions,” she said. “Everything else is just talk.”
He considered this and then nodded. “Okay. I understand. I have to show you, and so I will.”
“You can—” she started to say, but then a Skrazzi leapt in, flying over the top of the one that had stood in front of it. Before she could fire, the creature lashed out with its stabbing arm, the needle-tipped point driving toward her chest.
And then she was being flung out of the way.
Rolling to a stop, she popped onto her feet and looked back toward Alaro. He was engaged in a sort of wrestling match with the big bug. It had its gun-arm off to one side, holding down his quad-rifle, while its stabbing arm raised high and aimed for his heart.
The shots took the Skrazzi’s head off cleanly at the shoulders. The body kept fighting for another long second and then slumped to the ground even as Elaro struggled to get clear of it. He gasped for breath and looked up, seeing Arani standing there, her two pistols smoking. He blinked, then grinned at her. “Thanks for that,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’d hate for one of those things to kill you,” she said.
“There’s that, anyway.”
She gave him a half-smile. “That’s my job.”
Elaro frowned at this, not sure how to take it. Before he could speak, however, a sheet of ice formed beneath his feet and he nearly fell.
Ice. He looked down at it, then up at a now wide-eyed Arani. They both turned to Tamerlane where he and the goddess stood, a short distance away, battling the aliens. They said the name at the same time:
“Phaedrons.”
11
The Phadrons—three of them, their bizarre beetle-forms swathed in fluttering black rags and their silver skull-faces leering—advanced from the rear ranks of the enemy army.
No one had yet discovered precisely what manner of beings the Phaedrons were. None of their bodies had been recovered from any battle; either they had yet to be killed in a conflict, or else they recovered their fallen comrades’ corpses very efficiently during and after a conflict. Or perhaps they simply dissolved to nothingness. In any case, the only information anyone in the Empire had on them was what little could be observed visually during the briefest of moments between a human spotting one and then turning and fleeing in terror.
For ahead of the Phaedrons, always, spread wave upon wave of raw fear.
It was utterly irrational, of course; the Phaedrons had yet to demonstrate any actions in battle to justify the terror they engendered. It was purely a telepathic effect, mentally projected by them as their primary weapon. And it was devastatingly effective.
“General,” Titus Elaro called to Tamerlane, “I’m thinking we really need to be getting out of here.”
Colonel Arani started to criticize Elaro for his sudden cowardice, but found she couldn’t—for, to her, nothing now seemed more important than fleeing this battlefield, and with all possible haste. A part of her brain kept trying to tell the rest of it that this was not a rational set of thoughts—that the weird aliens were making her think this—but the rest of her brain was increasingly disinterested in that line of thinking. It simply screamed at her, “Go!”
Tamerlane meanwhile found himself giving ground, moving backwards, one step at a time. As he became aware of this, he frowned in confusion; he hadn’t consciously made the decision to retreat, yet his body was doing exactly that. He looked to the others and saw many of them doing the same. Such was the telepathic power of the Phaedrons—and particularly an unholy trinity of them, such as they faced now.
“Teluria!” he called loudly, only to see that she was right behind him. He opened his mouth to speak to her, and found himself wrestling between two different things he wanted to say. His original thought had been to ask her if she had any way of combatting their psychic powers. When he started to speak the words, however, he found them coming out as, “Open a portal and get us out of here!”
Teluria raised her hand to begin the process, but Tamerlane stopped her. “Wait,” he said, and she looked back at him, surprised and expectant. By sheer force of will he managed to convey his intended message, to which she shrugged and then shook her head.
Tamerlane cursed. His troops were in full retreat now, the broad arc of advance they had carved into the Skrazzi ranks collapsing, the objective they had been aiming for now utterly lost. The Phaedrons had turned the tide of the battle and it was pointless to deny it. He started to re-issue the order to open a portal and escape when he was abruptly knocked to the ground, his head smacking the concrete and sending stars and comets through his vision. He recovered his senses a second later, only to see Teluria lying nearby, also dazed, about to be attacked by a Skrazzi. He rolled over to her and shoved her out of the way, then raised his hand just as the insectoid attacker lunged. Flames leapt out and engulfed the creature—but it kept coming, now a moving, blazing apparition of death. He redoubled his efforts and sheathed the creature in blast-furnace fire; in nova-flame. It stumbled forward, crumbling to ashes as it moved. He leapt to his feet as the last charred remnants of it hit the ground directly in front of him.
Teluria was up as well, and was trying to say something to him, but he couldn’t hear her over the din. Elaro and Arani reached them then, having fought their way across the short distance that had separated them. They formed a little triangle around Teluria and blasted away at the attacking horde, as Tamerlane issued the emergency retreat order via the Aether link.
For long moments they held out, the Skrazzi now all around them. A dozen more legionaries made it to their location and expanded the defensive formation, but Tamerlane was realizing now that he had lost a great many of his troops in only the last few seconds. He concluded that his desire to abandon this battlefield was not entirely an artificial idea placed in his head by the Phaedrons, but also a genuine tactical evaluation of their current situation. As soldiers on either side of him fired into the swarm, he took a moment to close his eyes and access the full Aether mental display. On it, glowing dots of color represented each of the troopers under his command in the local theater of action. Soldiers no longer among the living were marked by a gray X. He could see many gray Xs but only a few red dots, and all of the dots were clustered around his current position. Everyone who was able to retreat, then, had retreated. Now all that remained was to escape.
“Teluria!” he shouted. “Time to go! Open a portal for us!”
Looking back at him wild-eyed, she shook her head. “I cannot! We are surrounded—there is nowhere for me to—”
“Alright,” he barked back. He looked around at the others of I Legion, firing desperate
ly into the rapidly-constricting ring of alien fighters about to engulf them. “Down,” he shouted, while simultaneously sending the message across the Aether. “Everyone down!”
Puzzled, the soldiers all obeyed their general and crouched down low. They continued to fire as best they could.
“You too,” he yelled at Teluria.
“What?”
He reached out, grasped her shoulder, and pushed her into a crouch, over her strenuous objections. Then he raised back up, now the only one standing in the circle, and lifted both arms out to his sides, perpendicular to his body.
The Skrazzi roared their fury and launched themselves at the circle of kneeling humans.
Tamerlane closed his eyes, turned slowly, and unleashed the full power of his flame blast.
Like the effects of a detonating warhead, the ring of fire ignited just beyond where his soldiers knelt and spread rapidly in every direction, washing over all of the Skrazzi.
Tamerlane gritted his teeth and poured it on, not letting up for an instant. He visualized a sea of charred and broken alien bodies and he opened his eyes and made that happen.
At last he ran out of energy and, with a gasp, he dropped to a knee himself.
Elaro and Arani were up then, supporting him on either side. Sweat dripped from his brow and he could barely see, his head swimming as though he’d just run three marathons. As he came back to himself and looked up, he beheld the exact sight he’d imagined: all around them lay the burned-out husks of the Skrazzi horde. Of the Phaedrons there was no sign whatsoever. He pulled away from the two officers and stood there, staring out at what he had wrought.
“That was amazing, General,” Elaro told him, grinning. “You took them all out!”
Tamerlane attempted to reply but all he could manage was a series of painful coughs. He started to slump down again but Elaro caught him and lowered him gently to a clean portion of the concrete. He sat there, coughing for another minute, as the others fanned out, weapons at the ready in case any more enemy elements should appear.
“No sign of enemy activity, General,” one of the legionaries reported in.
Tamerlane acknowledged this via the Aether, then used the same method to address the others. His throat felt too raw to speak. “Mark this facility as liberated, Colonel.” He winced. “One down, a million to go.”
“A victory is a victory, sir,” Arani replied, before turning away to send word back to the Ascanius. With luck, a I Legion battle cruiser would be somewhere in the neighborhood and would now be able to secure the manufacturies of Tolkar without massive loss of life and expenditure of munitions in the process.
“If you can do that a few dozen more times, General,” Elaro was saying, “we have a real chance in this war.”
Tamerlane shook his head. “I can’t,” he croaked. “I probably shouldn’t have done it at all.” Speaking was too painful; he switched back to the Aether. “I probably won’t have the power back again for a day or more. And,” he added, “let’s be honest. It would be a few hundred more times. Or a few thousand.”
Elaro appeared crestfallen. He nodded his acknowledgement of the general’s more accurate estimate.
“Organize the troops, Colonel,” Tamerlane sent to Arani. “Time to get out of here.” He allowed Elaro to help him back to his feet, then turned to the lady Teluria. She appeared shaken—something extremely unusual for her.
“Very impressive, General,” she said. “I doubt Vashtaar himself could have done better.”
“I doubt he’d be this wiped out afterward,” Tamerlane replied. He nodded to her. “Time to go.”
Teluria raised her right hand and exerted her will and the fabric of reality obeyed. Spacetime parted and a portal ripped itself open, lights and fog swirling within.
“The Ascanius awaits,” she said.
Tamerlane motioned for the others to pass into the portal first. When they were all safely through, he and Arani and Elaro stepped into it, followed by Teluria.
He took one last look back before Teluria allowed it to close. His expression was bitter.
“You should be happy,” the goddess said to him. “You won a victory today—a victory over a relentless and implacable foe.”
He looked at her, then shook his head. “No.”
“No?”
“It’s too little, too late. The Empire is almost in ruins. Liberating Tolkar will only allow us to resist a little longer.”
The opposite end of the portal opened onto the strategium deck of the flagship. The troops emerged, Tamerlane and Teluria coming through last. The goddess gestured and the pathway through dimensions closed.
Arani and Elaro were engaged in an intense conversation and moved off to one side. Meanwhile support staff—who all appeared shocked at the much smaller number of soldiers coming back than had originally gone through—came forward to assist the wounded and help remove armor and weapons. The exhausted soldiers practically collapsed into their arms. The general himself dropped heavily into a dull gray metal chair, Teluria hovering nearby.
After issuing orders to go back and secure Tolkar and retrieve the bodies of the fallen, Tamerlane looked up at Teluria and nodded toward his wrung-out troops. “You see? And these are the cream of the crop of I Legion.” He motioned to her and she leaned in closer, so that he could whisper to her. “We control the manufacturies again,” he said, “but what good are more guns and bullets and blasters when we are rapidly running out of soldiers to use them?”
Teluria frowned at this but had nothing to say in reply.
Tamerlane shook his head. “It’s no good.” He reached up and allowed one of the medics to help him to his feet. As he made his way toward the exit, he looked back at her and caught her eye. “We have to find a better way,” he said, “and soon. Before there’s no Empire left to save.”
BOOK TEN:
SNOWFLAKES FALLING
1
Days earlier…
Snowflakes the size of cities floated peacefully in the void. Comets the color of blood knifed toward them, filled with malice and malevolence.
Realization of their impending doom came slowly but with inexorable force to the poor, unfortunate Dyonari who stood on the curving glass bridges and walkways of the outermost snowflake city-ship. Waves of pure psychic force preceded the comets; waves powerful enough to bring the telepathically-sensitive inhabitants to their knees, clutching their heads in agony and numbing fear. Those who could manage to do so looked up despite the pain and stared in awe and in horror at the sight that greeted them. What they saw was, simply put, their doom.
The first of the comets struck the first of the Star-Cities dead-center, with the ballistic force of a Minie-ball impacting a watermelon. The city-ship shattered, flinging glasslike shards outward in a rapidly expanding sphere of debris. Mixed among the broken pieces of the ship hurtled the bodies of untold thousands of Dyonari, most of them never having the opportunity to know what was happening to them, nor even to cry out before the end.
Two more snowflake-cities exploded under the impact of the leading edge of the comets before the Dyonari even began to understand what was happening. Once realization came, however, they gathered their wits and their resources and fought back. A powerfully psychic race, the alien Dyonari quickly worked to combine their telepathic powers to form a wall of sheer force that surrounded the formation and deflected the next few comets away.
The sinister intelligence that drove the comets on was not about to allow itself to be denied a victory so easily, however. The creatures that dwelt deep within the comets gathered their own massive psychic powers together and pushed back, forming an invisible wedge, forcing the second wave of comets through the Dyonari barrier.
Slowed by their difficult passage through the barrier, this second wave crashed into the surviving snowflake city-ships like bowling balls, penetrating but not obliterating the fragile psychic atmospheric bubbles that surrounded them and held in their atmospheres. Still wreaking incalculable destructi
on as they struck, these comets tumbled across open spaces and gouged out jagged troughs in the outer surfaces before lodging themselves into buildings and walkways.
As the last of the comets came to a halt on the surfaces of the last few of the snowflake-cities, the terrified Dyonari inhabitants began to emerge from their homes and places of refuge to inspect the damage and to look upon these strange attackers. They allowed themselves to believe that perhaps they had won, or at least survived with the loss of only a handful of their majestic city-ships.
They were very wrong.
Even as they tentatively ventured out into the streets and began to congregate around the still-glowing red comets where they rested, half-buried in the glasslike material of the cities, fresh waves of fear emanated from the strange objects. Crying out, the Dyonari stumbled backward, each of them driven in an instant almost into a frenzy. Meanwhile layers of ice formed in expanding concentric rings all around the crash sites as the temperature plunged.
Dyonari soldiers—impossibly tall and slender warriors in translucent glass armor of many different colors—moved through the retreating crowds and forced themselves to advance on the glowing red objects. Their long, curved swords in hand, the soldiers peered at the comets in wonder. It appeared the objects were composed of ice, each of them some twenty to thirty meters in diameter and radiating a baleful red glow. The ice itself was dark and impossible to see very far into.
“Advance with caution,” called the commander of the forces on the innermost Star-City, called by its inhabitants Dalen-Shala. “Be prepared for anything.”
“They are merely projectiles, are they not, Commander Siklar?” asked the Dyonari soldier to the leader’s right.
“Perhaps. But how would that account for the psychic power we yet feel emanating from them?”
The soldier considered this and said nothing.
Just ahead, the first two warriors reached the comet and began to prod it carefully with the tips of their curved swords.
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 67
