Alliance

by Bruce S Larson

  Bahl imagined Sutuhr brandished it before falling dead. He wondered if it was in final salute to his mother, or a last act of defiant rage. Bahl’s vision could penetrate the ship. He saw the demon horde was nearer an ash pile than their lord whose many dead eyes looked skyward in a final snarl. Bahl snatched away the mace. Sutuhr’s fingers around the handle shattered as burnt twigs. Bahl brandished the mace and then looked out across the wasteland as if seeking an enemy to fight.

  “You seek revenge, great Bahl?” Aekos asked.

  Bahl said nothing.

  “He looks like her,” Inaht said as she considered Sutuhr’s face. “Or, at least the legend of her.”

  “Her?” Aekos queried. “His black-hearted mother?”

  “No.” Inaht looked over at Aekos with a stare of dread. “She, the thing the Dark Urge keeps. The Great Widow.”

  Aekos said nothing, but the flesh above his eyes pitched up to show confusion.

  “She is legend,” Bahl said. “She is vast, but little seen even by us born in Hell. She, the Great Widow, is the companion of darkness and fear. She is a giant spider.”

  Aekos was silent for a moment as his features relaxed. “I have seen spiders. They have more legs than me, and scuttle in the dark holds of ships. Somehow, out of instinct, I knew they were alien and did not like them.”

  “This one owns the shadows,” Bahl continued. “She always was, and is perhaps forever.”

  “We have all learned sagas and poems from many worlds in our campaigns, mighty Inaht and Bahl. Yet, your tone, your serious gazes—this creature—you do not relate mere legend.”

  “No,” Inaht said and stepped away from Sutuhr’s corpse while holding her sword grip. “We relate the oldest denizen of creation.”

  “And she serves the Dark Urge?” Aekos asked.

  “All things serve the Dark Urge.” Bahl said as if a programmed response from long ago escaped his mouth.

  “The Great Widow has seen all things, and will see all that happens now.” Inaht said as she watched more debris strike the atmosphere and burn.

  “She sees us?” Aekos asked. “Then why are we not attacked?”

  “The Great Widow is old. She acts to please the Dark Urge.” Inaht looked at Aekos and smiled. She enjoyed the monsters unsettled state revealed by slight a quiver. “Perhaps she watches over her slumbering form.”

  “But she did not see us arrive so long ago!” Aekos seemed to chew the words as he spoke.

  “I imagine she bides time.” Bahl said. “It is hers to weave. All things are enmeshed in her web.”

  “Even the Dark Urge?” Aekos asked.

  “Perhaps,” Bahl turned his attention to the crashed ship. “Perhaps Hell does not blow apart because the Great Widow keeps it bound. I cannot fathom the acts of a creature older than Hell.”

  “And you are both sure she exists?” Aekos ended his sentence with a low hiss.

  Bahl and Inaht said “yes” in unison.

  Aekos sighed. “I walked more confidently today, even on the surface of Hell. Now, you two have restored my caution. I should not like to be food for a giant spider.”

  “The Dark Urge is hunger.” Bahl pointed to the Red Giant. His companions knew he indicated the Iron Work wrapped around the star supposedly fed by the ingots forged from sundered worlds. “The Dark Urge is fear. The Great widow is—”

  Bahl halted speaking. He looked over to Inaht with a questioning gaze.

  “Unknown,” Inaht said. “Just as our future.”

  “I dared to entertain hope,” Aekos furthered. “I thought perhaps our days as lesser parasites were over. Now I wonder if a great bug will crawl forth and take in our shadowed refuge.”

  “I wonder who killed Sutuhr.” Inaht said and peered into the wreckage looking for something useful, such as weapons. “Is that force our liberator, or destroyer?”

  “Three. Red.” Bahl took in a deep breath of hot dust as he recalled Valthazar’s last, cryptic message and then the life of his friend. Bahl turned to look at his companions. “Three hellships.”

  “Here is the wreckage of just one.” Inaht said.

  More falling debris caught their attention. They felt and heard the shockwaves as it assaulted Hell’s atmosphere. Dust rolled as waves in the distance from other impacts.

  “Perhaps that is the scattered remains of a second.” Inaht offered.

  “And the third?” Aekos asked. “Perhaps that ship is the victor. A new rebellion dawns!”

  “One hellship against two?” Bahl said low and deep. “Doubtful.”

  “As doubtful as Hell’s first General betraying her almighty mother for the love of a Khan?” Aekos asked, again smiling. “Perhaps the legacy of Sargon and Azuhr, if there was issue of their love, now acts to avenge them in war with their killer.”

  Inaht and Bahl exchanged dark but knowing glances. They knew Aekos understood their role in that part of history. He used it as an example, but knew it was also a sharp taunt.

  “We have the legacy of that love, recovered from exposure in Hell’s wastes.” Bahl said. The sentence seemed to pain him.

  “Yes. The legacy. Of a sort. This thing I know.” Aekos rolled his shoulders and drew circles with his spear as if preparing to hurl the weapon at the object of his thoughts. “The sleeping hostage. The other hellish corpse.”

  “A corpse that grows more awake.” Inaht growled.

  “Then pray you can keep it a hostage.” Aekos stopped moving and flashed his dark, predator’s eyes at Inaht.

  “Pray? Pray to what?” Inaht demanded as she grew agitated by Aekos’ stare. “The once all-consuming darkness now sleeps. Or do you pray to some great, transcending hollowness?”

  Aekos shrugged and turned his eyes to Sutuhr’s corpse. “I pray to the force that drove the Dark Urge to her bitter slumber, and killed her son.”

  “And where do your prayers go, Aekos?” Inaht continued her interrogation. “Where is this phantom champion? Does it hear your passion?”

  “Taunt me, Inaht. Fair enough.” Aekos dipped his spear’s point several times as if to emulate a nod. “But my hope is with something ascended from here. Free from Hell. And fighting.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The child ran. People from the lost age of humanity might think she was a girl of their kind. But there were odd things about this child. Even stranger, and actually terrifying, was her playmate. It corralled and guided the apparent child in circles. Those circles were drawing her backward to the playmate’s objective. The process took time, but the playmate had a predator’s unwavering patience. The pace was cautious. It was necessary to keep the human-like child happy. For, in another form, the girl-thing had tried to annihilate all life. She was what remained of the Dark Urge. Her strangest feature was her manifestation of feeling halved when her sister Zaria left her. The young-girl avatar was missing half of her head. The line fell neatly down the center. The remaining face smiled. The child-like creature that once threatened the universe now only giggled as she ran. Nothing with full-awareness would look at her playmate and smile. It was a giant spider.

  The Great Widow kept guiding the shattered remnants of her former ruler. It was a long and tedious game to contain the remnant Dark Urge, but she needed to reach the cleft in Hell that hid the ancient spider’s quantum-interlaced web. That vast, seeming chaotic structure enabled her to see across spacetime. Information was critical at this strand of history. Information might bring her freedom. Yet the Great Widow dared not let the Dark Urge run free, lest she find her mind in Hell’s steel labyrinths and circuits of flame and wage apocalypse again.

  Somehow, Zaria had contacted the Great Widow in a cryptic dream after Anguhr’s victory. Zaria’s suggestion was to either eat the mentally crushed Dark Urge, or watch over her. If the Great Widow ate her, Hell might die. Thus, she would be the spider’s last meal. The spider opted for caution. The child form was harmless. For now, that suited the oldest, largest arachnid in all creation.

  The Great Widow kn
ew the world before the Builders transformed it into a massive machine. Her eight eyes also watched one silent mind become two. As a single being, they were the operating system of the Forge. A schism occurred from tampering with the Forge’s mind. However, to the giant spider’s joy, the two resulting minds could talk to her. She had endured a lonely existence for longer than geologic ages.

  The Great Widow’s greatest skill in her eons of life was survival. She adapted to the energies of the Forge. Then, after the schism and Zaria’s flight, she survived by serving the Dark Urge. When Hell formed around her, she did her best to stop it closing on her as jaws. For now, she kept her own fangs in check. Her right, rear leg found the cleft in Hell. She had reached her web. She shuddered. There was a resonance from the vast network of transcending silk. Something, another, unknown presence, had touched its strands.

  The surface of Tectus was dark. The land and sky looked to merge at the horizon, but for stars dotting the black of space. Myra enjoyed looking into space and knowing her ancestors had escaped doom and come so far so that she and her species could survive. Tectus was never paradise, but it was hope. Its darkness was never ominous. Now more points of light descended to the dark surface and brought dread. The invasion was underway in full force. Still, Myra’s people had thwarted the will of Hell and lived. Now they would survive this new threat. She told herself that outcome was not hope, but certainty.

  Two other citizens made soldiers had joined Myra’s group with another small band of children from the evacuated village’s far side. An agricultural engineer, Strace, and his partner, the hydrologist Lona became a rear guard. Lona held a museum rifle like Myra’s weapon. Strace carried a modified laser scanner. It could at least blind enemy soldiers. If the laser could shine through any protective lenses they wore. This was if they had any type of eyes.

  The danger to the students increased even as they fled into the low mountains to hide in the range’s deep shadows. The surface was smooth and easy to climb, even though the dust kicked up with greater ease on the rising slopes. They had kept a good pace, but the ground became steeper as they ascended the mountains’ base. They slowed. More children were tiring and beginning to lose footing and slide backward. Lona and Strace encouraged the children in low voices and helped them climb.

  Myra came to a cleft in the slope. As a child, she knew the colonists had kept food stores in small, cool canyons. She had little choice but to trust one lay beyond the cleft. She flipped the rifle to one hand and quickly waved the children through. Myra heard Lona and Strace urging the lagging children up the slope and looked toward the sound. Then Myra heard other noises. They were not voices or footsteps but measured pulses. A form of communication. The invaders had discovered them. The pulses might be coordinating an attack. Myra saw a jostling mass approaching from behind the struggling group.

  Suddenly, Strace turned and fired his laser. The intense pulses of yellow-orange light struck the dark mass. Myra gasped. Her people’s last military force was on Poledoris. Not even a formal police force was ever needed on Tectus. Yet, once Myra took the rifle, she expected even alien soldiers to look like her: a biped with a weapon, but wearing a uniform or protective suit for multiple environments. Instead, she saw some kind of armor in the brief flash, and the attackers were nothing like bipeds.

  Myra blinked. Her augmented corneas halted blindness. The awful sight of her enemy lingered as an afterimage. Her mind worked to grasp it, sped by her brain’s equivalent of epinephrine. The laser revealed an invader frighteningly near Lona. Its sectioned body held the shape of a blunt blade and hugged the ground. Prismatic, rectangular eyes retracted beneath a half-turret head as sickle jaws instinctively slashed at the pulsed laser beams. Machined rows of short, pyramidal spikes covered its armored sections as if welded from a rock grinder’s cutting head. If they had projectile weapons, they were too alien to detect, quickly. The enemy ran on undulating rows of larger spikes. Nine, longer, and perhaps vestigial arthropod legs scuttled along their sides in strange, asynchronous motions.

  As Myra’s brain processed the image, in the same fraction of time she screamed orders and waved for the last running children to enter the gap.

  “Run! Run! Lona!”

  Lona opened fire. A loud staccato of booms and smaller flashes left the muzzle of her rifle. Myra aimed her own weapon to give covering fire and yelled.

  “Lona! Strace! Run!” Myra hardly heard her own voice among the rifle blasts. The reports stopped as a mass surged in the darkness and blocked the two colonists from view. Even without intense light, Myra knew the invaders cut them down. She saw another laser burst from the beyond the rising, dark surge, but it aimed only at the sky. Lona and Strace had sacrificed themselves to give Myra and the other adults and children time. Myra slid through the gap. Just before she entered, her eyes caught a glimpse of red among the stars.

  The powerful bipeds of Ru’cenorian inhaled Tectus’ dusty air with no ill effects, other than displeasure of the scent. They formed the largest army of the marauding fleet. Their heavily armed soldiers deployed from swooping landing craft and instantly organized into columns on the plains outside New Poledoris. The colony ship that became the planet’s one city glowed on the dark horizon. Re-energized force fields gave it a greenish haze from ionizing radiation. The shields and a lack of comprehensive data precluded a commando-style assault on the city’s infrastructure and defenses. The last rows of Tectus’ people streamed through temporary open zones of the energy fields, so far without enemy fire.

  Ru’cenorian Assault Leader Su’anff watched the scene with his magnification scope. Those entry zones would be key assault points, if anything of the city remained after orbital bombardment—whenever that occurred. Air drones failed to relay closer images due to unexpected jamming from the natives. He lowered his scope from his wide, bony head. What appeared as a heavily bristled beard were many small calipers to move food to a vertical mouth. His small, ochre eyes sat to the sides of a heavy ridge of bone. It was a complex organ for generating and receiving sound. Their acoustic skulls were useless in space and thin atmospheres, but worked perfectly in the waters of their world’s many wide and slow rivers.

  Thick frames made Ru’cenorians able to endure a wide range of gravity fields. They were also good engineers, and capable soldiers. They all wanted to be engineers, so that field was typically full on their homeworld. Employment as soldiers was always an option. As fear of Hell spread across the galaxy, more Ru’cenorians became mercenaries. This army’s commitment to war for profit was about to be tested, just as the effectiveness of their weapons, and speed of their heavy legs. At the moment, the dark brown hulks in black armor looked unstoppable.

  Next to Su’anff, his superior, Over Commander Hur’runk, watched his forces form up in the distance with only his harsh stare. Then he glared at the city. He felt the invasion was rushed. His forces and the fleet had insufficient reconnaissance. A map of a largely smooth ball and one city was not a war plan. Hur’runk wondered what undiscovered defenses could kill his soldiers, and why this world among all others needed conquering. His anger peaked as his forces readied for a classic attack, but so far without coordination of the initial salvos. His side nostrils hissed like volcanic vents in anger.

  “Any new data from the great traffic officials, overhead?” Hur’runk barked. “Or do they intent to use us as a target?”

  “Negative, Over Commander.” Su’anff replied. “And I hope also negative to the second query, Over Commander.”

  Tok! Tok! The loud raps came from Hur’runk as he struck his large molars together. It was an auditory display of rage once used by his ancestors to challenge for prime riverbank territory. At times Hur’runk had made the sound when considering the use of his army against the pointless captains’ council, or simply shooting the inter-communications corps.

  “The last clear transmission restated the Ison battalion was deployed to secure the mountain region.” Su’anff offered as he lowered his scope and lo
oked at his irate commander.

  “Flat creatures taking mountains.” Hur’runk snorted.

  “Less strange than our fleet taking this planet.” Su’anff said. He raised his scope back to his eyes. “I can see some rogue worlds with mineral wealth or materials convertible for fuel. But this world—”

  Su’anff stopped speaking, suddenly.

  “This world suits Buran, for whatever reason.” Hur’runk said as he glared at New Poledoris. “Until we take his vaunted ship, we follow it to boost our—”

  Hur’runk stopped as he heard his lieutenant’s scope hit the ground and his racing steps. He was running away. A murmur rose over the army from its far edge. Then came war cries, or screams, and the echo of sudden, sporadic weapons fire. Hur’runk quickly recovered the scope as the sounds grew more intense and louder. He scanned across his army. They faced and fought the sudden attack, but were overmatched in strength, ferocity, and firepower. His heart sank as he rocked back on his heels. The enemy attacked as a black wave rolling down from the sky. Airborne support ships and landing craft fell in flaming pieces as bodies and parts of Ru’cenorian soldiers flew up from the churning assault by the most feared warriors in the galaxy.

  The attack also struck high overhead. An orbiting ship visible as a point of light flashed into a fireball. Streaks of the enemy’s missiles made the sky appear as a striped curtain and then struck more orbiting ships of the allied fleet. The silent explosions in space lit Tectus in bright, erratic bursts of light.

  Hur’runk now dropped the scope. He drew his large sidearm from its slot in his armor. The sounds of his army’s resistance or slaughter merged and grew closer and loud. He stood fast and contemplated his death, either by suicide, or by demon.

  Myra scraped her shoulders against the cool walls of the ravine. She recalled the channels started as cracks between differing accreted minerals and widened by gravity and increased atmospheric pressure over time. At the specific moment, they were the only shelter away from the Hull from invaders. The dim stars over Tectus shone between the crest of the dark ravine walls. Their faint pinpoints of light created an inverted trail for the group to follow without collapsing upon each other as they ran. Myra was now at the rear, just as Lona and Strace had been. She knew their killers were coming behind her.