THE DRAGONSLAYERS
by Christopher Ruocchio
Set in the world of the author’s Sun Eater series, here is a far-future world where archetypes of old find themselves replaying. The proud noble girl in far over her head in a deadly situation for which her life of privilege has ill-equipped her. An implacable enemy that is a cruel as it is effective. And one working class warrior of a centurion who knows that even though everything depends on him and his unit, doing the job and saving the young aristocrat is going to be one very hard day’s work. The only reward? Living to fight another day. And when there is a sentient alien tank standing between himself, his charge, and safety, living itself becomes problematic!
The flare burned high and bright above no-man’s land, casting red shadows over the bombed-out shapes of homes and office towers and what remained of Tatarga’s customary curtain wall. From his vantage point, the centurion could peer out and see the glassy countryside beyond that crumbling wall—the devastation where no living thing grew—and the wreck of starships strewn like broken gods unto the night-shrouded horizon.
“Still nothing?” Aron asked.
The centurion turned the knob above his left ear back, canceling the zoom on his helmet’s entoptics. “Dead as dead,” he said. “Nothing on comms?”
The junior man shook his head. “Not a thing, but that’s to be expected. Xenobites bathed the whole planet. Wave’s nothing but noise.” He tapped his own earpiece to underscore his point.
“Flare’s bound to draw ’em, Quent,” said Stas, his other subordinate. Decurion. First Grade. “Can’t stay here long.”
“No we cannot,” the centurion agreed, shrugging his red cloak back over his shoulders as he leaped down from the sill. “Birds should catch the flare, though. Shouldn’t be long. They’ll be here.” A wind picked up, blowing ash and bits of other detritus through the busted windows and down through the hole in the ceiling. “How’s the girl?”
One of the men near the far wall straightened, massaging the stubble on his scalp. “She’ll be all right. Scared. But all right.” He shook his head. “No place for a kid.”
“No place for anyone,” the centurion agreed, sparing a glance for the night sky and the three moons glowing in it. There was no sign of the fleet, no flash of antimatter or particle beam light lightning on the upper airs.
Cidamus was the thirteenth planet Quentin Sharp had seen since he’d left basic on Zigana, all of them burned, broken ruins left in the wake of the Cielcin horde. The invaders had streaked into the Empire from the Norman Expanse near the galaxy’s core, had swept southwest across the Veil of Marinus and into the Imperial Marches on the borders of the Centaurus Arm of the galaxy. Sharp knew they had as their goal the old Imperial heartland in Orion, where Old Earth lay in ruins and the capitals on Forum and Avalon glittered like beacons to the wider galaxy.
They’d been trying for centuries, burning world after world. The Emperor and his Legions had thus far succeeded only in slowing the alien advance. They’d won a few victories. Cressgard. Aptucca. Berenike. Too few. And those had been before he was born.
His own victories, on battlefields at Serenos, at Therabad, at Second Oxiana, had felt more like salvage operations.
The Cielcin had left so little to save.
But not nothing, he told himself.
“That kid’s the blooded Countess of this place, Altaric. Have a care, man,” he looked past the bare-faced legionnaire at the girl huddled in one of the other men’s cloaks. Countess Irina Volsenna was a little thing, a girl, really. Fourteen. Perhaps fifteen standard. Wide-eyed and terrified.
“She’s not countess of much now, is she?” the man Altaric asked.
“She got family, don’t she?” Sharp asked. “Some out-system noble’ll probably marry her, help rebuild for the rights to run this place.” He shrugged. “That’s got to be worth something.”
Altaric shrugged himself. “Nothing left to run.”
“That’s enough!” the centurion snapped. “Eyes out! Those Pale bastards are still out there. I want things clean. We’ve done in . . . let’s do out.” Altaric nodded, shut his mouth, and touched his chest in salute.
Sharp pushed past him and knelt in front of the girl. At first, he’d thought Irina Volsenna asleep, but the too-young countess’s eyes were open, glassy and downcast. “You all right, ladyship?” Sharp asked on one knee.
The countess nodded.
Sharp shook his head. It wasn’t right someone so young and so small should have to shoulder a whole planet. The girls her age back home would have been playing with their friends, helping their parents round the village, getting into trouble with the local lads. He opened his mouth to speak. “Won’t be long now, ladyship. Our birds’ll be down in just a minute, you’ll see. We’ll get you back to your people. Reckon your Chancellor will be overjoyed.”
Lady Volsenna’s eyes—she had powerfully green eyes—narrowed. “Victor Cellas is alive?”
Sharp was glad of his faceless centurion’s helmet. He wasn’t sure how to interpret the girl’s face. Was she pleased? Scared? Skeptical? “That’s right. Him and your father’s scholiasts, half the court, I reckon.”
“I hate Cellas,” she said, eyes narrowing again. “He always argued with Father. And he bothered my handmaids.”
“Well then, if your ladyship likes we can teach your Lord Cellas some manners when we get you to him, but we can’t stay here long.”
She made a face. “How many men did you bring?”
“Here?” Sharp asked. Couldn’t she count? “Twenty. Plus you and me.”
The girl shook her head. “No sir, your whole legion.”
“Oh.” What was the whole number? Whole cohorts stayed under the ice at a time, frozen for the trip between the stars. Sharp wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the whole 409th Centaurine Legion deployed at one time. “Hundred thousand?” he said. “Thirty thousand on my ship. The Tempest. Under Tribune Bassander Lin.”
Countess Irina Volsenna blinked. “And he sent twenty?” She sounded almost insulted.
“Like I said when we pulled you out of that hole we found you in: in and out, ladyship. That’s what we do.”
“But . . . twenty?” Her brows contracted.
Some gratitude. Sharp bit his tongue. Still, something of his irritation must have betrayed itself in his silence and stillness, for Countess Volsenna dropped her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Were you expecting an army?” he asked, trying to make himself sound conciliatory. The last thing he needed was to make an enemy of this noble woman. She could rain hell down on them when they brought her back to her people if she had a mind. Sharp didn’t want to think about that.
She shook her head and drew her knees up to her chin. “I thought Cellas would at least send a knight.”
Sharp said nothing, had to clamp his jaw shut to stop himself spitting laughter in her face. She was offended her Chancellor and the Legions hadn’t sent a better class of hero to rescue her. “Knights. Castles. Dragons. This isn’t a storybook, ladyship.”
“I know that!” she said, defensive. “I’m not a little girl.”
Yes, you are. Sharp thought, but once more held his tongue. He turned his head to peer our through one of the busted windows. The wreck of a downed frigate rose from the ruined hills like some awful range of mountains, black as hell and glistening in the light of Cidamus’s three moons.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I’m sorry Hadrian Marlowe’s not around to rescue you from your tower, ladyship, but it’s not exactly dragons we’re fighting, and Marlowe’s gone. Died fighting in the Commonwealth, they say . . .” He trailed off, realizing he’d said too much. It wasn’t his place to give her a piece of his mind. She was Countess of Cidamus, and what was he?
A centurion.
Not even a knight.
“I’m sorry, Countess. Look. Me and the lads, we’re no great heroes. But we’ll get the job done. This time tomorrow you’ll be back with your people. You’ll see.”
Then it was her turn for silence. Irina Volsenna chewed her tongue.
Shame bubbled up from somewhere far below, and, groaning, Sharp stood, the better to put some distance between himself and the palatine noble. Underneath the titles and the gene tailoring, she was just a kid. She had a right to be scared. To be ungrateful, even. She’d lost her whole world. Maybe she needed to believe in heroes.
Well, she’s got us. Sharp thought, and turning round asked, “Aron, Stas. Any eyes on that bird?”
“All quiet, Quent,” Stas answered.
“No sign of the Pale, either,” Aron added. “So we got that going for us.”
Sharp smiled down at the countess—remembered he was wearing his helm—and checked his MAG rifle was secure in its shoulder strap. “I don’t like it,” he said. “Someone run down and tell Mads to send up another flare.”
“On it!” One of the legionnaires hurried to the window and leaped down, relying on his repulsor harness to drop him neatly to the street outside. Sharp leaped back up onto the sill and watched his man float down and hurry across the street to the other building where six of his men waited. No sense in everyone hunkering down in one place. If the Pale did find them, they might escape while the others played the role of rear guard.
Aron clambered up beside him, and from the unsteady way he moved, Sharp could guess the man had magnified his suit’s entoptics. The soldier’s smooth, white face plate bore the twin horizontal stripes below the left eye that marked him for a decurion. His armor of segmented white ceramic over the red tunic and black suit underlayment was badly scuffed from long use and ill-care, and his cloak was gone—it was he who’d offered the garment to warm the young countess. “You think something happened to the dropship?”
The centurion looked out past the broken frigate to the shapeless hulk of what he felt sure was a Cielcin vessel, an ugly, cylindrical thing. Class-3, maybe—judging by the size. Maybe Class-2. Most of the fighting in orbit had died down after their initial assault. Tribune Lin and the Imperial fleet had chased the invaders halfway to the moons and back, but the initial assault had been nothing short of cataclysmic.
“Might have,” Sharp said after a moment’s pause. “Shit. You ever feel like we do as much harm as good driving off the Pale?”
“Nah.” Aron hadn’t even hesitated. “You know what the Pale are like. I figure this place is better off half-nuked than in their hands. Remember Oxiana?”
Sharp nodded. Aron had a point. He remembered Oxiana just fine. Thousands of human skins nailed to the walls of the city, to the base of the castle ziggurat. The fountains in the ducal palace still red with the blood of Lord Arcaro’s court. The mounded heads.
“Quent!” Stas called from the window opposite, “There’s no one coming.”
“Wait for it!” the centurion said.
No sooner had the words left him did the second flare burn bright from the building opposite. He watched it go, suit entoptics cutting the hell-glow of the signal to something his eyes could bear. Like a falling star, slow and silent it rose above the wounded city.
“Is no one coming?” Countess Irina Volsenna asked. She’d found her feet, holding Aron’s cloak tight about her slim shoulders. Seeing as she’d spent so much of their time together huddled in the corner, Sharp had forgotten how tall she was. Too tall. But the palatine nobles were all too tall. It was those vats they grew in in place of real mothers, Sharp was certain. More room to stretch out.
“Too soon to say, ma’am,” Sharp said.
“What do we do if no one does?” she asked. “We can’t walk all the way to the others, can we?”
Chancellor Cellas and the rest of House Volsenna’s resistance had dug in in an old Mining Guild outpost in the Eldmari Highlands. It was more than a thousand miles from Tatarga city, and across the none-too-narrow Narrow Sea. And besides, Sharp didn’t like their chances of making it ten miles under the open sky with Cielcin patrols still about, much ten times ten times ten. “No,” he said.
“If something happened to our evac,” said bare-faced Altaric, “they know we’re here.”
“Probably,” Stas agreed, checking his plasma burner’s intake vent. The weapon whirred in his hands experimentally. It sounded fine to Sharp’s ear.
The centurion raised a fist to silence the chatter among his men. They went still at once. “Ten minutes,” Quentin Sharp said. “We’ll give them ten minutes, then we need to bail.”
“Bail?” Stas asked, ever the confrontational one. “Bail where?”
They’d had three Ibis troop transports with eyes on the city to await their signal. They hadn’t counted on all three failing. “We have to signal the fleet,” Sharp said.
“Signal the fleet?” Stas asked. “With the Pale jamming every frequency? How?”
But Aron had seen through Sharp’s plan. “One of these wrecks ought to have a QET still working.”
The countess frowned. “A ket?”
“Telegraph, ma’am,” Sharp said. “Quantum telegraph. Only way to punch through the interference. We’ll call again for evac.” He glanced back up through the blown-out part of the roof to where the flare had faded, its pillar of fire gone to a column of mere smoke torn to ribbons by the wind. “One of these downed frigates should still have one operable. If no one comes, we’ll hike out and try for it.”
No one came.
All of Cidamus seemed dead as a tomb. Once, Aron thought he’d caught sight of the dropship low on the horizon near the center of the old city where the great ziggurat rose like a topless pyramid of steel and stone above the lesser towers spires of the city. But it was only one of the enemy, a Cielcin flier like a single black wing lopsidedly circling the ruins.
Hunting for survivors, Sharp thought. The xenobites needed to eat, after all. That made him think about the skins on the walls at Oxiana. They’d never found the rest of the bodies.
“That’s ten, Quent,” Stas said. “We calling it?”
“We’re calling it,” the centurion agreed. “Everyone! Up and at ’em. I’ll take her ladyship down. Stas! Fetch Mads and the others. We’re going.” He jumped down from the sill, offered his hand to the young countess, who had once more settled against the wall. Irina took it, and permitted him to help her to her feet.
The street below yawned its desolation, its utter stillness. No birds sang, nor any human voice. All was dead and silent but for Sharp and his twenty men. The burned-out hulks of groundcars and parked fliers lined the street. It was almost impossible to imagine that once Tatarga had been home to nearly two million people. Sharp would have been surprised to learn if even two thousand had survived, squirreled away in private bunkers or vaults beneath the earth.
“Stick to the walls,” he said, tugging his MAG rifle from his shoulder. It was an uncommon choice of weapon for a centurion. Not a front-line weapon at all, the railgun fired slugs of depleted uranium in a thin, ferrous casing. The ultradense bullets were designed to pierce heavy armor, and Sharp had carried it since his time on Therabad, when it had proved extremely useful in shooting down the xenobites’ fliers. The Cielcin little used and hardly relied on Royse-style defensive shielding—though he had noticed more and more the monsters could be found wearing pilfered shield-belts and other bits of appropriated Imperial technology. Word was they had some new chieftain, some new prince or whatever they called themselves, that he—it, whatever—was less afraid to get his hands dirty mucking around with human praxis.
“What’s that?” The countess’s high, thin voice broke the snowy silence.
She was pointing down a side street thirty feet back. Sharp turned, stumping back along the column of march to join her. Lady Volsenna was pointing at a crumpled heap of scrap metal and ceramic armor plating white as white could get. It was large, only a little smaller than the average drop shuttle, with a lozenge-shaped chassis that might have housed four or six men at a stretch, though at a glance Sharp marked no door or hatchway. The black fingerprints of high explosives marred the surface, and two of its huge, articulated limbs had been blown off with whatever turret or gun emplacements had crouched upon its back.
Seeing it, Sharp hoisted his rifle to his shoulder, but the beast was dead.
Along with several of the others, Sharp sketched the sign of the sun disc, making a circle of thumb and forefinger and touching brow and heart and lips.
From the dominion of steel, O Mother deliver us, he prayed reflexively, and answered the girl. “Demon, ma’am.”
“Demon?” she repeated the word, incredulous. “One of the Pale? I thought they were man-shaped.”
“They are,” said Altaric, still not wearing his helmet. “But some of them cut their brains out, put ’em into those things.” He nodded at the ruined war machine. “Or other things.”
The countess cocked her head, clutching Aron’s cloak more tightly about herself. “It’s awful,” she pronounced at last—rather lamely. “They cut out their brains?”
She looked round at Sharp, as if expecting him to gainsay his subordinate, but the centurion only shrugged. “Evil bastards,” he said. “Come on. We need to keep moving.”
As if to underscore the urgency of his point, a shadow passed between them and the gray and distant sun. Looking up, Sharp saw a black shape slide across the avenue. The ship was of strange design, like a hoop bracelet or rack of horns that formed nearly a closed circle, with the open end at the rear. He could not see the flare of repulsors or of engines, could not say how it was the vessel stayed aloft. It didn’t look like anything capable of flight, but then none of the Cielcin vessels did.
“Did they see us?” the countess asked, hurrying to his side.
Sharp threw an arm across her, pressed her back against the wall of the building. The others were all still as stone. The Pale could not see red, and so the brightness of the cloaks would be lost to any gunner or lookout on the craft above. To the beasts, they would be no more than a line of gray statues. Gray statues in a gray wilderness. And they could not see heat. No infrared. They could see X-rays. Ultraviolet. That much Sharp knew.
“Maybe not,” he said.
“We gotta get out of here,” said one of the lads. “I hate this place.”
“No one likes it, Gorren.”
“I know no one likes it, Eln. I’m just saying.”
Up ahead, Aron raised a fist for quiet, crouching low as he neared the end of the block. The ruins of the city walls were not more than three blocks away. They were not high—so many of the great cities of the Empire had walls not to defend against invaders as in the Golden Age of Earth, but only to delineate the urban districts from the countryside. No cancerous sprawl of neighborhoods and great bazaars, no skein of tangled roads. Just beyond, but for the caravansary and the Imperial courier service center, there should have been orchards and pastures right to the walls outside. In happier times, Sharp might have stood at the gate and looked out on sail towers and great oceans of grain, of olive groves black-green in the white sun to either side of the raised highway as it sliced across grasslands towards the next city and the Narrow Sea.
The arch of the gate still stood, but the highway beyond was shattered, its viaduct crumbled to the ashen plain where sunken starships still smoldered, their smoke darkening the ill sky.
“What is it?” Sharp asked.
Aron signaled for men to cross to the far side of the street, to fan out and scope the corner. Moving in a wedge, one trias did just that.
“What is it?” asked Irina Volsenna, tugging on Sharp’s cape.
The centurion just shook his head, held one finger over the spot where his lips would be were his face visible at all behind his blank, red mask.
Boom.
A shot rang out, deep as the deepest sea and loud as any thunderbolt. The brick façade above Aron shattered as a bolt of violet plasma crashed into it. An instant later, something silver and oily sprang from around the corner and launched itself at the man nearest the uncloaked decurion. Six feet long it was and undulating, large as any of the adders they had to deal with on the qanats back home. The metal snake latched its jaws on the poor man’s neck—bypassing his energy shield entire—and drilled its way through the underlayment of his suit and down towards center mass.
“Nahute!” Sharp shouted, naming the alien weapon, abandoning all pretense at secrecy.
They were found out!
Unsure if it was the patrol ship that had passed them by or some other agent of the enemy, Sharp shoved the countess to ground. “Don’t move!” he said, sweeping the road ahead for a target.
He found none.
The man beset by the silver serpent was screaming, struggling with bloody hands to pull the thing from his chest. But he was too late. The Cielcin drone weapon had passed the synthetic armorweave beneath his ceramic plate, and bone and organ posed no challenge whatever. The man was already good as dead.
“Stas!” Sharp shouted to the decurion and drew his clenched fist across his throat.
The junior man hurried to the dying one, placed the muzzle of his disruptor rifle to the poor bastard’s head. Fired. The disruptor bolt convulsed through the dying man, killing him instantly, frying every nerve he had and the metal thing that had killed him. The snake’s tail flopped lifeless to the bloodied pavement.
Something struck Sharp on the side of his head, and he staggered back a step.
“Yukajjimn!” cried a rough, high voice. Recovering, Sharp saw another of the nahute coiling on the air, twisting away from where it had recoiled against his shield. It had flown at him too quickly.
And there, half a hundred feet away by the end of the next short block, stood the thing that had thrown it. The Cielcin berserker stood nearly eight feet tall, leaner and narrower in the shoulder than any man. Its armor was all black, a strange, rubberized substance that glittered like the shell of some horrific insect, styled to evoke the inhuman musculature beneath. Too long were its limbs, and too short its trunk, like the image of a man distorted in some dented mirror. It wore no helmet, for great horns twisted and swept back from its brow. It leered savagely at him, knowing its weapon would find its way through Sharp’s shield in a moment’s time.
The xenobite’s mouth stretched wider than any human mouth. Glass teeth shone in black gums beneath eyes like the hollow pit of a skull.
Sharp lifted his rifle, trained the weapon on that monstrous face, and fired.
The uranium rod struck right beneath those eyes, and the Cielcin fell backwards, dead as sure as its human victim. Sharp’s rifle was not really the right weapon for the nahute serpent, however, and he slashed at the floating snake with the barrel as though it were a sword. He succeeded only in slapping the thing aside and toward the ground.
Appearing almost from nowhere, one of his men stomped on the thing, pinning it with his armored boot. The weapon’s drillbit head rotated, trapped and ineffectual as the legionnaire—Mads, Sharp realized—unloaded two bolts of plasma from his short-barreled burner and shot the thing to pieces.
“Yukajjimn! Yukajjimn!” the alien cry went up, sounding from the block ahead and to the right.
“Aron! The girl!” Sharp pointed to where Irina still huddled by the broken storefront. “Move! Move! Move!”
The decurion hauled the young countess to her feet as the whole team surged forward, hurrying for the dubious protection of the gatehouse and the city wall. A deep droning filled the air, shaking the ash and dust loose from the crumbling masonry of the apartment blocs that lined the avenue to either side. Sharp didn’t have to look to know their ship was coming back around. Ahead, his men fired off to the right, and catching up with them he saw a trio of inhuman corpses fresh-fallen in the dust of a cross street.
The gatehouse lay just a thousand feet ahead.
Five hundred.
One hundred.
The shadow fell once more as the alien vessel—moving slow like some vile dark cloud—passed between the street and the sun. “Hold her!” Sharp shouted to his men as they reached the shadow of the gate. “Inside! Go!” Aron and Stas had reached the doors of the gatehouse barbican—which lay in splinters—and half-carried, half-dragged the young countess through. A single, mighty shot struck the wall itself above the gate, and blocks of stone burst apart and fell like killing rain. Sharp ducked, a useless reflex, and felt his shoulder blades contract. He hurled himself aside as the enemy ship fired again, striking the pavement not five yards from where he’d been a moment before. Plasma fire streaked overhead from his men safely ensconced in the barbican, but their guns could do little against the Cielcin flier, which had been made to weather the terrible frictions of atmospheric drop.
Then Sharp heard the inhuman cry and knew it was not the ship they fired on, but Cielcin troopers ravening behind. Rolling back to one knee, his red cloak all a tangle, the centurion saw a dozen or more of the xenobites charging up the road, waving scimitars pale as their alien hide.
“Holy Mother Earth,” he swore and prayed, and aimed the MAG rifle skywards.
Glad of the protection his helmet offered his ears, he fired.
Still the shout of the weapon was deafening. The uranium bolt flew straight as the stock kicked back against his reinforced shoulder, and struck the underside of the Cielcin craft.
Nothing happened. In the street ahead, one of the berserkers fell to plasma fire. Another stumbled as a disruptor bolt struck it but did not strike it down. Sharp did not curse, did not panic. He had been here before. On Therabad. On Oxiana. On a dozen worlds. He exhaled smoothly, picked his target. Fired again.
The second shot punched through the heat shielding on the underbelly of the alien ship near the extreme end of one horn. At once the broken circle wavered, dipped to one side and smoked blackly as it listed, spun, and smashed into the apartment building that stood at the left side.
Quentin Sharp did not wait to survey his handiwork. The Cielcin still in the street turned back, hooting something in their strange and hideous tongue.
“Come on!” Sharp shouted, jerking his rifle in the direction of the broken gate and ruined viaduct beyond. “We have to reach that frigate!”
The men came pouring from the barbican, laying down suppressing fire as Aron and Stas emerged with Countess Irina between them. “You shot it!” she said.
“It wasn’t shielded,” Sharp snapped, keeping it simple.
“You shot it!” She sounded like a woman in shock.
The floors of the apartment building creaked and broke beneath the weight of the alien vessel, and the ship itself sheared in half, one of its horn sections torn off in the ruined building. The rest, the crew section in the center and the other horn, fell back into the street, streaming smoke and pale fire.
Someone thumped him twice on the back, the signal for last man. “Time to go, Quent!”
But Sharp had seen something. Something moving in the wreckage. He stood as one transfixed, eyes wide beneath his mask. Through the smoke Sharp discerned the movement of huge metal legs shifting like the fingers of some vast hand. It was like watching a sand crab struggling to unfold itself from its shell on the banks of the qanats that connected the sparse oases of his home. Only it was huge.
“Quent, we got to go!” the last man shouted again.
Sharp didn’t need to stay to know what it was he’d seen. They had, after all, seen its twin burned-out and broken in the street, it was one of the great war machines of the enemy: a walking tank, a chimera of alien flesh and machine large as an elephant. He did not need to stay to see the armored core, the metal legs bent like those of spider, the twin guns handing from its underbelly, the great turret above scanning back and forth like a glaring great eye.
He ran, following his men out through the piteous gate and onto the viaduct. The frigate they aimed for lay on the blackened plain below, across perhaps a mile—perhaps two—of once open ground now pitted and broken by huge chunks of the vessel tossed free by the cataclysm of impact. There wasn’t much time, but Sharp reminded himself that beneath the demon’s iron hide lay the mind of one of the Pale. Just one ordinary soldier, one of their zealot berserkers, one forced or willing to sacrifice its body and ordinary life to serve its fell master, the Prince of Princes.
“Over here!” Aron shouted, waving him to one side of the road ahead. The right edge of the viaduct had all crumbled away—whether from the impact of the frigate or some other part of the fighting was any man’s guess—and the first half dozen or so of the men had already leaped down over the edge, relying on their repulsor harnesses to slow-fall the two hundred or so feet to the floor of the plain below. Tatarga City had been built along a lineament where one of Cidamus’s tectonic plates had long ago risen up and thrust above another. They had since fused, would never form anything so majestic as the mountains away to the southeast or the Eldmari Highlands on the far continent, but it must once have rendered the city walls and towers a truly impressive site from the alluvial plain below where the farmers plied their trade in the shadow of the highway viaduct, and rang with the music of Chantry bells.
Sharp looked down, checked the controls for his own shield-belt and harness. “I’m in the blue,” he said, meaning all was well. “Aron, you got the girl?”
The decurion nodded.
“Are we really going to jump?” Irina asked, despite having seen six men do it already.
“Float, Princess,” Aron said. “Here, I got you.”
The countess protested Aron’s title and brusque manner as he scooped her up like a man carrying a common tavern maid upstairs. There wasn’t time to lecture the man on propriety.
A shot sounded just behind, and Sharp whirled to find Stas had raised his gun—and three others with him—and fired back on the gate. Sharp saw the white-horned figure of a Cielcin fall in the shadow of the gate.
“Over the side!” Sharp shouted, sure the tank would be right behind. “They won’t be able to follow us quickly! Go, go, go!”
Aron leaped into clear air. The countess screamed in his grip as they dropped away, falling a quarter the speed they should have done in Cidamus’s heavier-than-standard gravity.
“I said over the side, Stas!” Sharp said.
The glum decurion turned his red striped visor toward him, head cocked.
“I’m right behind you!”
Something whined and thumped just beyond the gatehouse inside the city walls. Sharp raised his rifle again and fired, striking down one of the xenobites as it streamed out—alone—onto the viaduct. The centurion’s shot took it in the chest, and it staggered and slumped back against the inner wall of the gate.
Satisfied his men were safe, Sharp sighted along the barrel of his gun, waiting.
Waiting.
The white-armored body of the war machine stomped into view, metallic joints creaking like old trees in the wind. Steadily it lowered itself, for the gateway tunnel was half-collapsed and barely wide enough to accommodate its hideous bulk. Sharp saw the red glare of its lonely eye and fired.
The shot exploded on impact, the ultra-dense metal blown to powder, the powder blown away.
Sharp cursed black enough to darken the sky.
It was shielded.
He threw himself from the viaduct, repulsor harness kicking in, yanking him back like a parachute as he plunged toward the plain below. He checked his rifle as he fell, reloading from the bandoleer that crossed his chest. The repulsors at his hips thrummed, and his cloak flapped like wings as he sank at last to the gravel and scorched loam of the plain.
“Was that?” Stas started to ask.
“Spider, yeah. Big one.” He slung his rifle back over his shoulder and gripped the decurion by the shoulder. “I’m not sure if it can take the fall. It might have to find another way down! Move it!”
Before they had gone half a mile, a high, piercing wail went up from Tatarga above and behind them. It echoed off the low clouds until the air was filled with the ringing of it.
“Whole damn city will be down on us now,” Stas said between breaths.
The countess looked back over her shoulder—still jogging along as fast as her pampered feet would allow. Her eyes were wide as silver kaspums. “Do they know about me?”
“I’d wager not!” Sharp shouted ahead. “It’s just the dinner bell!”
“Dinner bell?” the countess’s eyes went wider still, and she stumbled, hitting the ground in a heap. Aron and helmetless Altaric stopped to help her up. Accorded a moment’s pause then, Sharp turned to look back. The black shapes of Cielcin fighters stood on the ruined viaduct like a row of statues, of vultures hunched in a line. He saw too the silver gleam of their nahute weapons streaking through the air.
And there was the walking tank, a goliath thing standing upon the raised highway, its white armor glistening in the thin sun. Its single red eye flashed, and Sharp barely had time to shout a warning before the energy lance flashed across the wind between them and struck their column.
The beam weapon struck one of the junior men ahead, and his shield flickered as the earth about his feet erupted. The laser blast happened in absolute silence, but the energy of its impact hurled the shielded man skyward. His shield should have saved him, but Sharp did not have time to see just where he fell.
The frigate still lay about a mile ahead like a ridge of volcanic rock, its outer hull torn open, superstructure exposed like the ribs of some massive sea creature. Too far.
Another laser blast strafed the desolation ahead, carving a burning line across the ashen soil. The earth smoldered where it passed, silicates fused to molten glass. Ahead and right, a tangled mass of metal that might have been a part of the frigate lay stretched upon the plain.
“Mads!” he shouted to the man in front. “Take cover!” He gestured wildly at the wreckage, risked a glance back. The Cielcin were clambering down the arched pillars that supported the viaduct, crawling head-first like spiders themselves.
Where had the tank gone? It was no longer on the broken road overlooking the Tatargan hinterland. It couldn’t have jumped down to the plain below, could it? Sharp staggered and tumbled to the earth. But he didn’t stop; the centurion rolled back to his knees and kept going, encouraged by the sight of his men darting behind the wreckage.
Joining them, Sharp pressed himself against the back side of the broken vessel. The main body of the frigate lay dead ahead, across half a mile of open ground, flat but for the chunks of shrapnel that dotted it like stones in an unplowed field.
“Mads!” Sharp exclaimed, picking out the junior trooper from the pack pressed against the fallen ship. “Pass me the flare gun!”
The soldier tossed the weapon to Sharp without hesitation. “Why?”
Sharp didn’t answer him, but peered out from around the edge of the ruin and back towards the enemy. The pack of silvery drones still flew toward them. The nahute sought heat, tracked movement, were guided by only the faintest glimmer of intelligence. Sharp wasn’t sure if his plan would work, if it was worth tracing a line direct to their location across the sky.
He aimed the flare gun at the swarm of questing drones. Fired.
The shot streaked across the gray wilderness, casting hellish red light on all below, illuminating the silver drones and the black-clad monsters that had thrown them. The flare rose steadily, arcing to meet the onrushing cloud of serpents.
It streaked right through them, carving its arc back toward the viaduct and the city walls. Sharp clenched his teeth watching it, then barked a short, rough laugh as he saw the serpent-things turn to chase it.
Then the ground before him exploded.
Sharp felt his body lift from the ground and fly backwards. He hit earth shoulder-first and skidded across the loam, his rifle trapped painfully beneath him. Again, there had been no sound, but his entoptics had blacked out and his suit system blared alarms in his ear—warning him his Royse shield was nearly compromised. Sharp felt hands on him, heard a man’s voice say, “You’re all right, boss!” It was not a question.
“Can’t see,” he said. All he could see was the inside of his face plate. The two lenses that projected directly onto his retinas were dark, had switched off to save his eyes from the laser light. They should have come on by then. “Black planet!” he cursed, and fumbling blind found the controls that opened his helmet. The faceplate and cowl folded back like the petals of a flower, like one of the paper sculptures the Nipponese lords were always surrounding themselves with. Sharp blinked at the unfiltered sunlight, colorless and drear. The whole world smelt of charcoal and ozone, and he took a shuddering breath. The poor girl had been breathing it the whole time. Shaking his head to clear it, Sharp said, “Found the blasted tank.” He tugged his rifle off his shoulder.
“What’s our move?” asked Aron, crouched near at hand.
Sharp glanced from the decurion to the countess. “You take her, Mads, and two others. Make a break for the ship. Signal command if you can. Tell them we need evac.”
Aron drew back. “And what? Leave you here?”
“Lock yourself down in there best you can. We’ll draw them off. Buy you some time.”
“You can’t!” Irina Volsenna interjected, springing to her feet. “I forbid it!”
Sharp looked up at her and realized as he did so that she’d not seen his face before. He knew what she was seeing: a lowborn plebeian soldier, shave-pated and scarred, his complexion gone bone pale from years in space and in the suit. Hardly the picture of the heroic knight. “Told you we’d get you to your people, ladyship!” Sharp said. “This is how it’s done.”
“But!” she looked round, expecting someone to back her up. Sharp could see her struggling to find the words. “You can’t!”
“It isn’t dragons we’re fighting, remember?” he said, and did his best to smile. He felt sure the effect left much to desired. “This isn’t one of your holo-dramas.”
Irina Volsenna dropped her eyes. “This isn’t a storybook,” she murmured.
“Damn right,” Sharp said. “Take her, Aron.”
The decurion pounded his chest twice in rapid salute, then—taking the countess by the hand—shouted for Mads and two legionnaires.
Sharp watched them go, hurrying across the field at an angle that kept the wreckage between them and the ship proper. When they’d gone already half a thousand feet, Stas leaned in, his red cloak snapping in the burnt wind. “What’s the plan, boss?”
“It’s shielded,” Sharp said, looking round at the dozen or so men still with him. “Which of you’s got the heavy charges?”
Altaric raised a hand. “That’d be me!”
The war machine was somehow more terrible when seen with the naked eye. There was always something unreal about the world when seen through one’s helm entoptics. The way the helmet muffled sound, perhaps, or the way one’s breath blew back off the faceplate. With images of outside projected directly on the retinas, it looked to any legionnaire’s viewpoint as if there were no helmet at all, but the claustrophobic sense that one’s head was encased in titanium and ceramic and a layer of impact gel never went away.
Seeing the tank with none of that interface was something else. White against the blackened plain and the city on its hill it moved, six mighty legs leaving craters where fell its heavy tread. It did not move quickly—though Sharp knew well from previous experience just how quickly one of the behemoths could move. The alien intelligence that moved it was in no rush.
It had the humans right where it wanted them.
Or so it thought.
The bit of wreckage Sharp and his men had hidden behind must have been perhaps a hundred cubits from end to buried end. The remains of some gunning tower, Sharp guessed, that once had stood over the dorsal hull of the frigate behind. They’d come to it from the southerly end, and it was at that southmost corner the machine had shot Sharp, burned out his helmet, and nearly compromised his shield. It was towards that south end the machine prowled patient as a sand panther, doggedly pursuing its targets to the place they’d last been seen.
“It’s almost here,” Sharp hissed, peering over the topmost edge of the gun tower from the north end. “Get ready.”
A few dozen feet on the dirt below, Stas waved his arms to the man they’d left on the south corner. Sharp saw the fellow raise his lance in acknowledgement. What I’d give for working comms, he thought, and peered up over the lip again. Just as he’d thought, the Cielcin troopers in support of the artillery had broken off, were making to circle round the north end of the fallen tower to take them in the rear. They’d be at the north corner in a matter of seconds.
It was all coming together.
Sharp turned to Altaric, who crouched unsteadily beside him on the little shelf made by the shape of the fallen tower’s hull beneath them. “Get ready.”
The grenadier nodded and shifted the detonator in his hand.
Sharp leaned out over the men on the ground below, gripping a stanchion with one hand, he waved the other, “Now!”
Below, Stas double tapped his head and waved to the man away south. With only the barest hesitation, the fellow swung out from the south corner and fired his lance at the approaching monster. The tank’s shield-curtain flickered like an aurora, its solitary red eye and turret swiveling to focus on its relocated prey. Sharp imagined alien eyes narrowing as that turret and the beast’s primary beam flared into the ultraviolet. Their gunner tried to pull back, but his merely human reflexes were insufficient to the task, and Sharp saw the tell-tale shimmer of the man’s shield as he tried to pull away. The tank must have gotten a straight hit, or maybe the poor bastard’s shield had been in worse shape than Sharp’s own, for it shattered in the next instant, and in the instant after that a pair of legs fell to the ground.
The man’s upper half was gone, blown totally to atoms.
“Mother Earth!” Altaric gasped.
But Sharp had no time to mourn. The man had done his duty and played his part. To die for Earth and Emperor was to die for all mankind, and that was its own reward. Sure it had found its quarry then, the inhuman monstrosity hurried forward, scuttling like the enormous crab it resembled. “Go!” Sharp nudged Altaric on, and leaning out once more shouted, “Now Stas!”
The men below circled round the north corner even as the tank reached the south, roaring to meet the Cielcin troopers that had hoped to play the hammer to their tank’s anvil. Sharp himself leaped up onto the top of the fallen tower above the newly minted chaos below, and snapped his gun to his shoulder to peer through the scope with his naked eye. There must have been two dozen of the xenobites rounding that north bend. They had his men nearly two to one.
Three shots later, Sharp had narrowed that lead by a fraction, and drew back to reload.
Boom.
Sharp glanced aside in time to see a rosette of violet plasma flower at the south end. Dead the poor bastard who’d played the lure might have been, but his work had paid off. The Cielcin tank had walked right onto the charges they’d buried for it to find. The tank itself staggered, fell to one side, and Sharp saw one of its legs had shattered in the blast. The mines had been close enough that the chimera’s shields did little good.
But the behemoth yet lived.
Lame, the crab-thing lurched back to its feet, sparking and smoking where the mines had wounded it. That was where Altaric came in. The grenadier had leaped up onto the top side of the broken tower and had nearly reached the end. Lacking time to watch, Sharp slotted the next cartridge into place and turned back to the battle happening directly below him. His men had clumped into their triases, little knot of three working in tandem to fight the Pale on the sands below. Three men lay dead or dying—he didn’t need to count. Their white armor gleamed brightly against the scorched earth. Exhaling, Sharp caught sight of one of the xenobites as it wrestled another of his men to the dirt; he squeezed the trigger.
The creature fell atop its would-be victim in an instant.
The centurion swept his eyes over the field below. White faces shone up at him from among the fallen battlements of the tower below. Two of the Cielcin were climbing. Sharp shot one and saw black ichor spray like a fine mist as the bullet stuck home. The second raised a pilfered energy lance and fired.
Nearly too late, Sharp flung himself back against the tower behind.
Another blast sounded from the south end, and twisting his neck Sharp caught sight of Altaric hurling another pair of grenades down at the wounded tank. His first grenade had found its mark, had fallen slow enough to pass clean through the weapon’s shield and clamp itself to the beast’s armor.
Another pair of explosions followed in the next instant, and the tank reeled. Smoke blacker than oil escaped from some crevice in its adamantine hide as the inhuman brain inside scrambled to find the source of the attack. Like so many a human being, what remained of the Cielcin within had forgotten to look up. One of its secondary guns swiveled, turning like an eye, and found Altaric.
Sharp neither heard nor saw the energy beam at his angle, but Altaric did. The grenadier hurled himself backwards just in time, threw himself clear over the far side of the fallen tower to plunge half a hundred feet to the plain below. His repulsor harness caught him, and he seemed to float as one suspended by a chute.
“Teke! Teke!” A strangled cry issued near at hand, and Sharp looked up in time to see one of the Cielcin towering over him, energy-lance raised in both hands, the bayonet aimed down to stab him in the heart. Desperate, the centurion lashed with his rifle, clubbing the xenobite just inside the knee. It stumbled, and the thrust that might have killed him went wide. One-handed, Sharp pointed the gun at his assailant and squeezed the trigger. The uranium bolt passed clean through the monster’s armored core, but so fierce was the recoil that Sharp’s rifle flew from his hand and tumbled over the side of the tower.
The tank’s side.
Sharp cursed, clutched his aching shoulder as the body of his foe fell back the way it had come, taking its lance with it and leaving Sharp with nothing but his sidearm. Grunting, the centurion found his feet, found his gun lying in the sands fifty feet below. The tank had not seen him, was even then limping its way northward, closing in on his embattled men around the north bend of the tower.
It didn’t matter.
The whole plan—the whole plan—had depended on that gun. If the mines did not kill the damn thing, if the grenades failed, the rifle would not. The uranium rods were designed to pierce the chimera’s armored hide, and though its shield would save it, would shatter any projectile above a certain high kinetic energy threshold . . . the shield would not work at point blank range. Sharp had planned to leap down onto the back of the crawling tank and shoot down through its plated back until he struck a fuel cell or the disembodied brain that drove it.
The centurion knew a moment of quiet then, alone atop the ruin. Looking to the greater mass of the sunken frigate half a mile across the plain, he saw no sign of Aron and the girl. He hoped they’d found a working telegraph. He hoped they’d be all right. He knew he what he had to do, knew that unless Mother Earth and God Emperor both were looking down on him then and there, he’d not be seeing them again.
All he had to do was let the monster take another couple steps. Just another thirty feet. Maybe half that. Sharp shook himself, took in a shaking breath. “O Mother, deliver us,” he prayed, and, touching fingers to forehead, heart, and lips, Sharp raised his hand to the sun in benediction.
Just a little farther . . .
A shout resounded from below, and turning back to where his men were fighting, Sharp saw another go down, a Cielcin scimitar lodged in his neck. His men should have had the advantage. The Cielcin ought not to have had shields, but if even a few had taken belts in spoil off the dead of Tatarga, it would explain why the fight had stayed so even.
It didn’t matter. If the tank reached the north end, hit them from behind . . .
It hadn’t seen him, hadn’t learned its lesson from Altaric’s attack. If it had marked the sniper fire from the tower’s top at all, Sharp guessed, it might have assumed Altaric was the sniper. The tank was nearly straight below him then, almost directly on top of where his gun had fallen.
“Come on you evil bastard,” Sharp muttered to himself, peering over the lip. “One more step. Just one more step.”
Dragging one torn limb behind it, smoking like the very pits of hell—like a dragon, Sharp thought—the tank took that step.
Sharp leaped, harness catching to slow his fall. He hit the torn ground half a pace from his fallen rifle and seized it. There wasn’t time. Teeth clenched, Quentin Sharp ran up underneath the body of his iron foe, heedless of its great legs and of the cluster of lesser guns that hung from its belly. He pressed the mouth of his rifle against the monster’s underbelly and did not hesitate.
The ultra-dense uranium rod tore through the titanium. Sharp wasn’t sure if it had exited the other side or not. He didn’t care. He fired again. Fired a third time. A fourth. A fifth. It didn’t matter that after the third shot the gun was empty. Teeth clenched, Sharp fumbled for his bandoleer, ejected the spent cartridge, scrambled to reload. The titan above his head wavered, iron joints creaking as some component within whined and an alarm began faintly beeping. Something pale as milk dripped from one of the holes, and Sharp staggered back out from under the monster as it wavered and crashed to the one side. The ventral guns swiveled round, and the turret, too. Sharp raised the rifle again, fired blindly. The first shot exploded against the tank’s shield, the second against the stronger dorsal hull as that shield failed.
The ventral gun found him first as the desperate brain within—which had been born to but two eyes—struggled to orient more than a dozen camera lenses to try and get a bead on him.
The little laser bloomed white-hot, and Sharp had the absurd thought that he was staring down the gullet of a dragon as it pumped fire from its belly to burn him alive.
Maybe the girl wasn’t so wrong, he thought as the laser flared.
“Quent!” Rough hands shook him. “Wake up, damn it!”
“He’s not dead?” another asked.
“Just a little crispy.” The first voice answered.
Sharp opened his eyes. The left hurt to open, and he pinched it shut again. Stas was crouched over him, had yanked him half into a sitting position. “What . . . what happened?”
“That thing blasted you,” the decurion said, and raised a gloved hand to his face. “You got burned pretty bad, but I think its focus was off. Beam should’ve taken your head off.”
“How bad?”
“Well, you still got your ear,” Stas said, and waved a hand over the left side and top of his head from eyebrow to crown. “Burned through there though. Don’t see no bone, but we gotta get you help.”
Sharp winced. His head swam, and his vision slid in and out of focus, so that it seemed two of Stas looked down at him. “Not sure about my eye,” he mumbled. “The Cielcin?”
“Got ’em all,” the decurion said simply. “That was good work on that big fucker. I didn’t think the plan would work.”
“The plan was to drop down on top of it,” Sharp said. “Lost my gun.” He looked round, but regretted the move almost instantly, and Stas had to steady him as his vision grayed out. “Where’s the girl?”
Stas shook his head. “Not come back. I sent two of the lads after her and Aron.”
“We can’t—shit!” He clenched his teeth. “Can’t stay here. Too exposed.”
“Ship should have some med stuff, if the Pale haven’t looted it to hell by now,” said Altaric, trudging into view. “We can hold out inside better than out here.”
Stas was nodding. “Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Someone help me carry the boss here.”
By the time they got Sharp to his feet, his vision had recovered enough that he could see the ruin of the tank still smoldering in the shadow of the broken tower, its white armor ash-smeared and scratched. It looked somehow less real dead. A heap of ceramics and scrap metal, its lights and guns all dead. “Dragons . . .” Sharp shook his head,
“What’s that?” asked one of the men holding him.
“Nothing!” Sharp said. Thinking better of it, he opened his mouth to explain, but the words were lost as the scream of engines filled the air above, and fearing some new devilry the men all snatched up their weapons. The two holding Sharp steady went to their knees, dragging the centurion down with them.
But it wasn’t the Cielcin.
The new ship circling above had the black knife-shape of an Imperial shuttle, a blade against the sky. Cheering, the men around Sharp raised their own blades in answer.
Aron and the girl had evidently succeeded.
Their birds had come at last.