Alliance

by Bruce S Larson

  “And we are to trust you, servant of the Dark Urge?” Aekos challenged.

  “Trust that I fear death, alien beast.” The Great Widow snapped. “It is what compelled my service to her, and now my bond to your alliance.”

  “His plan will make him almighty.” Anguhr took a deep breath and flexed his fingers against his axe handle. “So, we stop him before it’s complete. No other enemy has been as great a threat.”

  “Now we find Octuhr’s body, and kill him once and for all.” Inaht said. She clenched her teeth and imagined committing the act herself.

  “My ships can bombard the entire surface of Hell and remake its wastelands into molten oceans.”

  “After we have left the surface.” Zaria quickly added.

  After a pause, Anguhr said “of course.”

  “You can rain down annihilation on a thousand worlds, but we must know Octuhr is less than ashes!” The Great Widow shrieked. “And I do not wish to be lost in your attack, eager Destroyer!”

  “If we need to kill Hell to save creation, we can conduct you from its bowels, old one.” Zaria assured.

  “We can?” Anguhr and Bahl said in unison.

  “Then I may not be able to reenter my web.” The spider said, wistfully.

  “Fear that or death.” Anguhr said.

  The Great Widow’s sigh seemed to move the air through the portal. “I have a third alternative, children. Why don’t I simply tell you where Octuhr is?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Dust devils raced in the distance as Tau watched across the toxic plains. The dust devils were ephemeral and mindless, or at least ambivalent things. Tau had helped complete something of great malignance. While Tau had labored near the ground or at great height, dust and wind would cut and howl through the enchanted steel the tick-like worker reshaped. At times, it seemed the steel itself made the cries during its metamorphosis. Perhaps it mourned its former master. Perhaps it bewailed never touching space again. Those seemed logical lamentations for the wreck of a powerful hellship.

  Tau and many of his kind refashioned the warship’s countless beams into the titanic half-dome threatening the sky. They also built the arc of beams that faced it on the ground as a jagged bulwark. The immense structure rose over the area called the Slags. It resembled a basket made from a weave of spider legs and needles, then half-buried on its side. The long-cooled flows of Builder’s waste metal nearby held remnant energies the new structure tapped and amplified. Its design also caught and amplified energies beyond physical ken. Now wind seemed afraid to touch the serrated colossus rising as high and as vast as some mountains.

  Something else was nearby, but like the wind, Tau knew not to go there.

  Tau worked metal. Others worked silk. The vast network of crystalline strands Tau understood as the ship’s nerves hung rewoven on the towering half-dome as an immense spider web. The gigantic web was not the style of cob weaver spiders, such as black widows, or their massive descendant the Great Widow. They wove strands of seeming chaotic, crisscrossed lines. This web held a circular pattern of spiders called orb weavers. A garden that could hold this web would dominate a terrestrial planet’s hemisphere. The web’s heavy support lines fastened along the edge of the reshaped beams. The connecting lines formed circular rows of concentric arcs. Each one bowed towards the web’s center as if pulled toward it by an unseen force like gravity.

  More beams ran along the ground in an arc before the web to form a jagged bulwark. The etheric beams once burned with a hellship’s aegis. Now they and the web caught energy beyond the physical realm and grew in power. Soon it would burn again and become indestructible. Then, Octuhr would take its center and use his web as a weapon to conquer creation.

  Tau had no opinion about celestial domination. Others took issue with Octuhr’s grand scheme. Tau saw two other red flares in Hell’s evening sky. As they came closer, it was clear what the beams had once formed. The two hellships under Anguhr’s command descended to the Slags and the gigantic structure holding the web.

  A third, glowing mass flew between the hellships. It was a duplicate of the red sun, but brilliant yellow. Tau was unsure it had ever seen yellow. The small sun was radiant. Hypnotic. It created emotions in Tau it never felt. It felt, somehow, good. The small sun lowered and nearly touched to the Slags. A portal opened beneath its radiance. An army charged forth from a darkened void. Tau became afraid. The tick-like worker rejoined many of his kind behind the bulwark.

  Zaria held the portal open as Bahl’s forces were again unleashed from the void they used to escape the Dark Urge’s wrath of heat and radiation during the rebellion. Now they used it as a transport. It was a needed alternative. Many had cheered Anguhr and welcomed his hordes as warriors in the same cause. Now apart from the emotions of battle, boarding a hellship felt near to betrayal of all they had lost. The same ships and beings had destroyed many of their planets. Zaria eased conflicting emotions by using the portal and her own power to transport Bahl’s diverse army and preserve the new and near paradoxical alliance.

  A corps of Khan warriors deployed, lead by Aekos. They formed a defensive line that crackled with energy from their seemingly simple spears. The line of warriors moved forward and expanded with speed as the main force touched ground behind them. The Bandors made waves of rolling dust as they struck the wasteland. The Drokatt in their living armor rolled out as balls of scales and jumped up to assume their more familiar, semi-humanoid shape. Their single eyes scanned the wastes for anything to annihilate.

  As Bahl’s forces assembled, dust rolled at the edges of their formations as demons flew overhead. Falcons leapt into the air to join them in seizing control of the sky. They were unopposed. So far.

  Anguhr dropped from his ship as lightning arced between the bottom of both ships and energy from Hell’s surface. He held his axe with Azuhr’s sword locked to his armored back. He hit the ground and a small tremor rolled from beneath his boots. Anguhr walked among the lightning. A few bolts struck the blades of his axe. The bolts vanished as the ships rose to dominate the sky and any strategic challenges the enemy had in store.

  Octuhr had waited for Anguhr’s arrival. Then he entered in epic fashion. Generals were giants. Octuhr’s ego was bigger. Likewise, his projected form filled the new web that dwarfed Anguhr, Bahl, and all the opposing titans. The half-dome and web began to ripple with waves of crimson. Octuhr used the entire web to project an image of eight eyes in a loose circle. The eye closest the ground grew to over twice the size of the others and displaced them as an arc above it. The red eye was familiar to Inaht who held her sword with both hands as she looked up at the web and eyes some distance from Bahl’s assembling army.

  The large eye and its companions looked like a circle of red lava boiling in a caldera. The iris was a dark, metal disk that seemed to burn as it floated dead center of the lava. Spider legs erupted from the circular edge of all eyes. The limbs formed writhing rings that shot forth, curled toward the web, and then disappeared as more reached out of the lava in a constant cycle.

  The eyes also stayed in motion. The largest eye appeared to crawl up to its right as another descended and enlarged to replace it. The eyes moved in a rotating crawl right and then left, with the one closest to the ground always becoming the largest and staring at Anguhr and his allies. A voice boomed from behind the web and echoed across the wastelands.

  “I bid you welcome, Anguhr. And to your recently made friends who were surely your former enemies. Now I ask that you surrender and die, lest I destroy you all in a variety of horrible ways.”

  Bahl paid no attention to Octuhr’s display and words, only to the structure they came through. The thing the Great Widow feared was already complete. Bahl motioned with his mace to the huge web. “We must destroy that web. With speed.”

  “And kill Octuhr,” Anguhr replied as he also ignored the starring eyes. “This must be the final battle.”

  “Fine,” Octuhr said with disdain. “Here are a few horrible ways.”r />
  Octuhr had not only remade the wreck of Sutuhr’s ship, he had his tick workers scavenge its interior. They recovered demon weapons from arsenals and bodies. Octuhr used them to arm another breed of huge spiders. Thick bodied and vicious arachnid demons burst from hundreds of concealed trapdoors that formed a defensive arc away from the bulwark. Their calipers and front legs were configured to grasp and fire two demon rifles. Enlarged spider eyes took immediate and lethal aim as they sprang from their burrows.

  The sudden onslaught raked and fell warriors that rushed to form units. The impact of the rapid salvos flared like countless balls of lava against the once invisible shields that now rippled with increasing heat.

  A Drokatt soldier blocked a stream of bullets as its fellow soldiers dove behind a Khan phalanx. He returned fire from his cannon-eye, but his living armor didn’t stop the all the rounds from punching through and ending a millennia long existence.

  Demons screamed from overheard. They dove and fired. But in the exchange of fire, they also fell from the same bullets they rained down. The demons quickly formed strike units protected by similar force fields as ones from Khan spears, but generated by the swords of their leaders.

  The last warriors left the void and Zaria collapsed its portal. She rushed forward as a small sun to envelop and protect Bahl who attempted to summon and project a force field through his recovered mace as bullets sailed by his sides and collided with the mace.

  Anguhr advanced against the trapdoor spiders. Bullets blew apart and ricocheted against his armor. The barrage annoyed him. His axe swung down and destroyed a burrow. His boot stomped fleeing spiders. His axe moved as a massive, cutting pendulum. A cloud rose from his attack as if a powerful bomb had detonated. Bahl held his mace ahead of him and charged after Anguhr.

  Aekos and his unit struck forward at trapdoors ahead of them. Their force fields crushed firing spiders, but glowed hot from constant bullet impact. Other arachnid demons were impaled and slashed apart by warriors’ spears and every sharp edge attached to Aekos. Inaht watched Bahl disappear into the storm of axe-cleaved wasteland and called after him.

  “Bahl! Bahl! Who will—?” Inaht halted her question. She knew the answer. “I will lead! Warriors! Break into mobile units and make shields. We will draw out these new beasts. Then both we and the demons will cut them down! Today we conquer Hell!”

  The warriors formed smaller phalanxes and moved between the fixed positions of the trapdoor spiders. Bandor salvos annihilated whole burrows. Drokatt eyebeams seared spiders and exploded their rifles. Bolts from spearheads did likewise and cut down fleeing survivors.

  “Oh, yes. My death-door demons are overmatched.” Octuhr noted. His voice mixed with the sounds of weapons fire and explosions. “But like, you all, they have allies. Please now fight my own version of scorpion flies.”

  A massive, buzzing cloud rose from behind the web’s half-dome. The flying creatures were a monstrous twist on his venom hawks. Each was an elongated, flying spider with rapid wings of a gigantic wasp. All gripped and fired the demon rifles beneath their stretched cephalothorax. Their sectioned abdomens ended in an upwardly curved tail with an acidic stinger.

  Aekos and his unit assaulted another spider burrow. The deep pits became larger as they moved closer to the bulwark and massive cloud made by Anguhr. Then the scorpion flies attacked overhead. Energy bolts from spears shot down several airborne arachnids.

  The death-door spider that leapt on Aekos’ back had its weapon and calipers hacked off, yet it still had massive fangs. They bit and found a space to slide into his skin. Venom rushed into his tissues. He flexed and knocked the spider free. His warriors cut it apart. Aekos raised his spear to join in, but began to convulse from the toxins. Aekos fell among his stunned unit.

  Solok and Uruk led their hordes into a massive tornado of demons and scorpion flies. Bodies of both began to plummet back to Hell.

  “Solok!” Uruk called out knowing his former lieutenant would hear his voice over many frequencies. “These new creatures can kill us, but they react as a swarm. We will defeat them with strategy, not mere firepower.”

  “Brains over brutality!” Solok answered as he fired in midair. “I am almost loathe to admit you are right, Uruk. We will make curving formations and trap the enemy.”

  “And cut them apart as they ascend to escape into the higher atmosphere.” Uruk banked and clubbed a scorpion fly with his rifle. “If Hell will not have us, it will have no mock demons. We are their death!”

  “Victory is ours!” Solok cried and then barked commands.

  More bodies fell to the ground. Most were scorpion flies.

  On the bridge of Anguhr’s ship, Gin felt an odd ripple of energy through his now physical form. He thought it was nerves.

  “Shouldn't we, for lack of a better phrase, blow up more stuff?” Gin asked Proxis.

  Proxis calmly stood at his dais and watched the battle on the main screen. Occasional salvos from the secondary batteries lanced out and destroyed arachnid demons in air and on ground, away from the main force of demons and Bahl’s army.

  “We kill what we can without bringing harm to our own forces.” Proxis answered. “There are two, near complete hordes, two Field Masters, and two ships for fire support. Typically, one ship and horde is enough for stellar empires.”

  “But this is a war on Hell, itself.” Gin said

  “Yes, but our duties do not change in each battle, only the enemy. The ship’s focus is strategic. Should Octuhr send some other form of ship or energy weapon, we must intercept and defeat it. If Lord Anguhr calls down missiles and batteries, then we open fire on a greater scale. Until then, we provide fire support, but hold our position to protect the forces engaged on the terrestrial theater. And take note, those forces include Lord Anguhr.”

  The screen displayed the billowing cloud of hewn ground and dust from Anguhr’s axe. A swarm of scorpion flies flew over the dust cloud. An arc of flame channeled from within Anguhr and thrown up from his axe exploded from the cloud like a small coronal mass blasted from a sun. The swarm incinerated.

  Gin took a deep breath. “I stand at greater ease, Proxis.”

  A communication alarm flashed on screen. The demonic face of the recently appointed ship leader Granok on the second hellship bridge appeared.

  “Fleet Master!” Granok gave a slight bow as he saw the image of Proxis. “Uruk now fights, so I obey the order of command set by Lord Anguhr and seek your counsel. The allied Ignitaurs also serve this ship. They perform well and are loyal. One wishes permission to attack the surface.”

  “You have coordinated well, ship leader.” Proxis replied. “If you find it important, let the alien speak.”

  Mintek, the lead Ignitaur that negotiated with Uruk stepped into view and spoke. “Fleet Master Proxis, I am Mintek, Ignitaur commander and horde liaison. Our sorcerers detect a new spell, likely cast by Octuhr. It falls within our expertise of energy manipulation. I have warriors and a willing detachment of demons. With your permission, I seek to deploy to the surface. There we can aid the General.”

  Proxis arched an eyebrow. The image of this red, bull-like alien on a hellship bridge appeared wrong. Then he recalled the even stranger looking Gin stood near him. It was indeed a different age. His eyebrow relaxed.

  On the surface, Anguhr halted a few steps from the jagged bulwark. He noticed bodies from the air battle fall against something unseen extending over the web and Octuhr’s revolving glare. The slain demons of each form struck the invisible force and burned like a slowly rolling meteor hitting atmosphere.

  “It is an impressive construction.” Bahl said as he came up behind Anguhr. “Now call your ship. Level it!”

  “Proxis--!” Anguhr raised his axe for emphasis to his coming command. But halted as he considered the force field struck by corpses. The flames were being released from within the demonic bodies. “Wait.”

  “Destroy this, now!” Bahl shouted.

  “No.”

  “H
e’s right, Bahl.” Zaria appeared in her armor-clad form. She stared up at the structure, not Octuhr’s sequence of huge, burning eyes. “This web has a modified aegis. All such fields capture and redirect energy. A hellship’s salvo will only feed Octuhr’s web. We must fight him with our personal strength.”

  All heard a cataclysmic sigh.

  “Well, I am disappointed.” Octuhr’s voice rattled the ground before all three heroes. “As yet, I cannot stoke the Forge to fry you all. That will come, but I so wanted to turn your perceived strength against you and watch as your vaunted ship provided the means of your death. Symmetry.”

  Octuhr sighed. Then he continued speaking.

  “Now, why should I permit the ships to exist if they do not serve me, the Omniurge? Behold, if you will, the power that can reshape worlds. A massive bombardment of solid matter. I will use the very fragments of your campaigns as simple, brutal weapons to annihilate your ships. And you, of course.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Anguhr was rarely shocked. His career as one of Hell’s Generals took him across the galaxy to worlds weird, awful, and even wonderful. He fought opponents such as planet-spanning storms, immense, toxic dragons, cybernetic armies, intangible assassins, and recently metaphysical Titans and the alien Admiral Buran. Some, such as Buran, stood as his equals in different ways. Victory was as often the act of adaptation as the use of great force. At times, combat also required the use of deception to hide knowledge that a power, large or small, could inflict harm.

  A sudden flash of ethereal energy caused a sudden, intense sting on his right leg and defensive jerk of his axe. Bahl jerked back as well. Only Zaria remained unaffected. All three stood as giants over the materialized group of Ignitaur soldiers, sorcerers, and a unit of demons. They all bowed. Anguhr resisted scratching his leg.

  “We come to offer aid, Lord Anguhr! Please do not eat these aliens.” The demon Skon spoke and gave a salute of his rifle. It was not lost on Skon that he now protected the very species whom he fought on his own ship, and that the female giant in emerald armor had slain his first General, Xuxuhr, the Ravager. Nevertheless, his loyalty was now to General Anguhr and Field Master Uruk. Both of whom could kill him. Thus, he would act to kill whatever threatened them, not his former enemies.