The Shattering: Omnibus

by Van Allen Plexico

  And so now as she gazed out across the broad landing fields where, hours earlier, Tamerlane and Agrippa had overseen the final unloading of all the defensive equipment they could get their hands on, she saw the lines of human legionaries preparing to face the onslaught of many thousands of Skrazzi, the primary foot soldier of the enemy.

  The enemy. Therein lay the biggest irony of all. She had witnessed the man—the god, the being—who had engineered all of this being dragged down into the Below by a demon prince. But despite Goraddon’s absence, the forces he had set in motion continued to press onward, their goal crystal clear: the utter annihilation of the human race, and of all native sentient life in the galaxy. What the worlds of Man would look like after it was all over, Arani didn’t wish to contemplate. In any case, neither she nor anyone she knew would likely be alive to see it.

  More comets fell to earth. More hordes of Skrazzi emerged, their black carapaces shining in the afternoon sun. They advanced by the thousands; by the tens of thousands. They slashed with their blade-arms and they blasted with their disintegrator arms and they exploded in showers of gore when one of the soldiers of the legions managed to hit them with a weapon that could cause them sufficient harm. And still they came, more comets landing, more strange dark spacecraft settling to the ground around them, more Skrazzi leaping out to join in the attack. And more, and more.

  The Colossus walkers were doing a remarkable job. They blasted away at the newly-landed comets and spaceships with their massive plasma-cannon arms, melting dozens of them on the spot, before anyone or anything could emerge. They fired rockets and missiles into the densest portions of the Skrazzi lines, blasting them to pieces. And the simply walked over the ranks of enemy forces, squishing a dozen or more to paste with each step.

  Alas, such success couldn’t last forever. The enemy began to land larger vehicles from their swarm beyond Earth orbit, some of which survived long enough to split open and disgorge massive land craft of their own. Some had tracks like old-fashioned tanks; some hovered above the ground; some had legs and walked in the manner of the Colossus machines, or like gigantic insects. Within minutes the numbers of enemy walkers and floaters exceeded the number of human walkers. Then they began to exchange fire.

  The gods of the Golden City were impressive, certainly. But no one who was there that day, on the battlefield before the Old Palace of Terra, could ever again be impressed by a mere human-sized god. For those at the final battle of the Nightfall War witnessed machine-gods half a kilometer high trading plasma blasts and missile barrages across a dozen kilometers of distance, then rushing into grips with one another, wrestling physically, and crushing the infantry of both armies like ants beneath their feet all the while. It was stunning. It was awe-inspiring. It was terrible.

  It went on that way for nearly an hour. Arani would not have predicted beforehand that the legions could have held out even that long. Individual acts of courage and sacrifice abounded, however. The human race had its back to the wall—to the abyss. Every soldier fighting there that day fully expected to die. Not a one of them expected to live to see another sunrise. And so they gave everything they had, and more. Eventually they found some small measure of success, as the first wave of enemy walkers was beaten back or destroyed.

  There was no time for celebrations. Agrippa’s white walkers stalked relentlessly forward, driving toward the heart of the enemy landing zone, seeking to blast away the ships and comets before their passengers could disembark. For a time they were successful at this, and the human forces rallied. Lords of Fire and Kings of Oblivion and even Sons of Terra joined together and charged across no man’s land, firing their weapons at any dark shape that dared expose itself. The concrete landing fields and formerly lush gardens that surrounded the Old Palace had quickly been churned to mud—mud littered with the flattened, burned and dismembered bodies of both sides of the conflict. Through that mud the soldiers slogged, slowly gaining ground, slowly pushing the invaders back, slowly closing in on their central hub of ships and grounded comets.

  Then a second wave of enemy walkers and hover-vehicles emerged from landers just over the horizon. And then a third wave. They crashed into the III Legion machines with overwhelming force; the sound was like thunder, deafening and disheartening all at once. For another half-hour the two small armies of machine-gods smashed away at one another as the infantries of both sides had no choice but to withdraw out of the way and await the outcome.

  Agrippa’s walkers accounted themselves well. Unfortunately, the enemy’s numbers were far greater, and continuously replenished by more vehicles landing.

  Arani watched this play out from her vantage point atop the walls and understood the outcome that was increasingly obvious. She nodded her head, accepting what she had long known was inevitable. The Imperial legions were going to fight gallantly and to the bitter end—that she’d known all along. They were also going to run out of soldiers and equipment long before the enemy did.

  She took a certain satisfaction in gazing down at the seeming ocean of dead aliens and their wrecked war machines. The Earth might well be theirs in only another few hours at most, but they would be gravely depleted from this battle. Whatever number of them remained to plant their flag atop the Old Palace would be a much diminished force from what had first entered Terran airspace.

  The battle entered its second hour—this fact alone surprised her—and then began to go badly for the legions. This fact did not surprise her at all. The last few Colossus walkers were surrounded and beaten down by the enemy’s largest machines. Soon all twelve of them were naught but smoking debris covering a vast swath of the muddy battlefield. The human forces lost heart then and began to retreat, back toward the walls of the palace. This, Arani knew, was pointless. If they were somehow all able to withdraw inside the walls and keep the force field in place overhead, they might hold out another hour or two. But then, given no other options, the enemy would likely resort to full-scale bombardment and sooner or later would penetrate the shield and reduce the ancient edifice to dust.

  But something unexpected happened. Before the leading edge of the retreating legions could reach the gates, a blast of horns sounded from within the walls. The gates, still open, now disgorged another procession of walkers. Eight of them—the eight that had been in the shop, all now fully repaired, or at least repaired enough to go into battle, when the fate of the world and its people was at stake.

  Sadly, the rally was short-lived. The eight Colossus machines proved to have been cobbled back together just enough to get them into motion, but compared to Agrippa’s elite walkers that had been secretly stored within the Palace, these were walking death traps. Their guns were faulty, their engines undependable, their armor cracked or thin. The enemy, seeking to avoid another encirclement like the one they’d just overcome, lit into these new walkers, scarcely allowing them to get far beyond the gates. Ten minutes after they had strode out to attack, the repaired Colossus machines lay in flaming ruins.

  Now nothing stood between the invaders and the walls of the Old Palace.

  The retreat signal went out over the Aether and the surviving soldiers in red, blue, black and green all abandoned their posts and began to trudge through the wrecked fields toward the gates. Hot on their heels came the enemy horde.

  Arani watched this happen and inhaled deeply; the air was a seething morass of smoke and death, but she ignored this. She nodded to herself. So—as expected. She would be in the heart of the battle, because the battle was coming to her.

  Grasping her energy rifle, she motioned to the others under her command who stood alongside her on the wall to follow her. Then she ran for the stairs.

  5

  As the retreating soldiers raced through the half-open gates, they passed within the gateway two figures that stood like rocks amid an onrushing stream. Ezekial Tamerlane and Arnem Agrippa waited there, staring out at the oncoming foe, preparing to make one last stand. Flames danced about Tamerlane’s arms and Agripp
a held the massive Sword of Baranak in his outstretched hand. Seeing them, the survivors took heart; many of them actually stopped and turned, inspired to join their two leaders. Soon enough the two had become the nucleus of an island of resistance, a knot of heavily armed soldiers waiting there before the gates. Waiting for the enemy. Waiting for death.

  The Skrazzi did not disappoint. They came on like a tidal wave and smashed into the last lines of legionaries, not faltering until they at last broke upon the rock that was the generals’ position.

  Agrippa swung the sword; it was a scythe, slicing through rows of alien attackers with each motion. Tamerlane unleashed his cosmic flame, burning the Skrazzi where they stood. The two were not gods, but the death and destruction they dealt upon the enemy at that moment of the battle was awe-inspiring and almost divine.

  The attackers quickly grasped that these two figures posed the gravest threat to their campaign. They concentrated their efforts against the two generals, pouring more and more of their forces into a direct, frontal assault against the little island of defenders led by the man in the red uniform and the man in white armor. As the Skrazzi, climbing over one another in their fervor to reach the two, closed in on Tamerlane’s side of the formation, Agrippa took notice. He shifted a quarter-turn to his right and struck, beheading a trio of the vile creatures with the golden blade. As he did so, the Skrazzi on his side of the crowd struck. They couldn’t use their disintegrator weapons in such close proximity to one another—and, as the humans had observed from the start, in the heat of combat they tended to apparently forget they even possessed those weapons. Instead they preferred to rely upon their wickedly curved blade-arms as first, middle and last option—and this was what they employed now, diving en masse at Agrippa, overpowering the soldiers around him and nearly overwhelming him with their sheer mass.

  And some of their stabbing blows made it through. Through the soldiers who sought to shield him; through his rugged Deising-Arry power armor, and through his tough hide. The blond general cried out despite himself as two of the needle-sharp blade-arms penetrated his flesh in almost the same point, nearly skewering him.

  The surviving legionaries around him leapt to his defense and drove the attackers away, and then Tamerlane burned them to cinders. But the damage had been done; Agrippa had dropped to one knee and blood ran heavily from the twin wounds. It looked as though he’d been bitten by a gigantic snake.

  The attack ebbed for a moment at that point, and Agrippa seized the opportunity. He gritted his teeth and pulled away the white ceramic/metallic armor component from that quadrant of his chest to expose the bloody wound. Then he looked up at a shocked Tamerlane.

  “Do it,” he growled.

  Tamerlane blinked, then understood. He didn’t hesitate. There was simply no time. He reached down, pressed his hand to Agrippa’s chest, and summoned the flame.

  Despite all his toughness, the big man screamed.

  Tamerlane, filled with rage now, pulled his hand away. The bleeding had been successfully stopped. He met Agrippa’s eyes. “Can you stand?”

  The other general didn’t answer. He merely stood. He grasped the hilt of the Sword of Baranak and raised it high. “Let them come again,” he said, his voice ragged and filled with pain but still booming. “Let them come and see if I yet live.”

  Tamerlane smiled fiercely at his friend and comrade. Then he turned back as the men and women around him shouted—for the enemy was doing precisely what Agrippa had dared them to do.

  Rescue came this time from a different direction. As the forces around Tamerlane and Agrippa began to give way once more to the attacking horde, Colonel Arani struck from the side. She and her troops had descended from the heights of the walls in record time and they moved in without hesitation, driving a wedge into the Skrazzi formation. Titus Elaro battled at her side, and for once she didn’t seem to mind that. The two of them barked orders and their forces responded, protecting the two generals and allowing them to continue their devastating counter-attack.

  A moment later, Sister Delain—now surrounded by a dozen heavily-armed brothers of the Inquisition—fought her way to the rear of the island of resistance, where she contributed to the cause by using her own powers to distort and partially hide the human soldiers from the enemy. As she worked, she saw Tamerlane glance back quickly at her and smile. This filled her with an unexpected sense of happiness, and she lamented that soon they would all be dead.

  “Close the gates,” Tamerlane shouted over the deafening din. Simultaneously he sent that command via the Aether link.

  Hearing him, Arani was glad she had decided to come down from the walls and join him. With the gates closed, there would be nowhere left for the human forces to retreat. They would have no choice but to make this their final stand. She did not wish to die inside the Old Palace, run to ground by an already-victorious horde of aliens. She much preferred the idea of dying here, in combat, and next to the generals. And next to Titus Elaro.

  The gates clanged shut, the sound like the death knell of the galaxy. Briefly Arani wondered if they had made the right decision after all, before, at the Tower Between the Worlds. Should they have allowed the Dyonari to simply destroy the galaxy, thus saving it from genocide or enslavement at the hands of the enemy? For a moment her resolve on this point faltered; perhaps they should have embraced oblivion when they were given the chance. Perhaps it was nothing but foolish hubris for them to have believed they could somehow fight against this force—fight and win.

  But no, she decided at length, even as the overwhelming wave of Skrazzi closed in. No, this was better. Either way they would all be dead, but at least this way, they were going down fighting. The human race was going down defiant to the very end. Let the Skrazzi and the Phaedrons have what remained of the galaxy now. It was no longer her concern—no longer humanity’s concern. All that mattered now was making peace with the situation, preparing for death—and taking as many of them along with her as she possibly could.

  Arani gritted her teeth, swapped out power cells in her blast rifle, and readied herself for the final onslaught.

  And then something wholly unexpected happened.

  6

  In the days that followed, the survivors would tell many different tales of what they saw, there on the battlefield in the midst of so much death and destruction. Only a few things remained constant among all the various stories, but they were generally the things that mattered most.

  There on the plains of ancient Terra, before the Old Palace of the grand emperors of antiquity, General Tamerlane and General Agrippa and the final remaining soldiers at their command had resolved to make their last stand. The enemy had closed in around them—an enemy so confident of inevitable victory that the strange reluctance of the Phaedrons to involve themselves directly in the battle went scarcely noticed by the Skrazzi leaders. As did their subsequent silent withdrawal from the battlefield and up into orbit, and then back into hyperspace.

  Let those strange creatures who seek to command us do what they will and go where they want, the Skrazzi commanders crowed to one another in their harsh clicking and chittering dialect. They are not needed here! Their debilitating psychic fear-mongering will be wholly unnecessary. There is no hope for the Earth under any circumstances.

  And so the hammer was poised, awaiting the final blow, and with it the decimation of the last of humanity’s defenders.

  At that moment, as that little island of human resistance had become surrounded before the gates of the palace and grim fate closed relentlessly in, a sudden sound had caught everyone’s attention and caused them all—human and alien—to turn and look up at the sky. What they beheld there was unthinkable; it was impossible. The starfleets of the Imperium and its neighbors had all been eradicated in the previous days and weeks. There simply could not be anything left to send against the enemy.

  And yet, there in the skies above old Earth, a vast flotilla of starships was descending from the heavens, their guns blazing as
they blasted into the waves of stunned and suddenly panic-stricken Skrazzi.

  The humans of the three legions before the palace walls could do nothing but watch—and watch in awe; in stunned silence—as the newcomers methodically blasted, bombarded, and otherwise shredded the enemy. It took some time to eliminate them all, but the assault was as relentless and methodical as it had been unexpected, and eventually every single Skrazzi crawling about the surface of the Earth had been slaughtered.

  Then the wave of ships circled around and began to land.

  7

  From the moment they began to touch down on the surface of Sacred Terra, the Phaedrons could sense—could feel—that something, somehow, had gone very wrong. Even before the strange and unexpected fleet of starships dropped out of hyperspace and began to annihilate their comets and the Skrazzi armada in high orbit with a blinding barrage of weapons fire, they knew that—inexplicably, impossibly—they had drawn a losing hand.

  What had seemed an easy and utterly inevitable victory had begun to go sour in what passed for their mouths the moment they failed to contact Goraddon the Adversary—or even sense his presence in the universe at all. Following that, their invasion force had suffered casualties far beyond what had been projected by its leaders as it struck at the Earth. Goraddon had assured them that his stratagems would result in the utter collapse of morale on the part of the humans. Clearly he had been wrong about that; they had somehow rallied and, despite their paltry numbers at this stage in their many wars, they had mounted a strong and spirited defense of their ancient homeworld.