“Would you look at those pretty lights,” Rene burbled from where he sat cross-legged on the ground, struggling to keep his head from sinking down into his chest. Stubbornly he held his gaze level with the horizon, where a vision of unmatched splendor and scale was drawing closer by the moment.

A sheet of thunder was unrolling across the land with the brilliance of a hundred thousand incandescent bulbs. One after another came the white-hot blooms as each cloud of fuel mix went off, consumed in balls of flame so intense they sucked in all the air around them in an instant and snuffed themselves out. Then followed the concussive bubbles of the blast waves, each many times larger than the initial detonations, expanding fronts of pressure radiating outwards from their explosive cores.

Rene could feel the whomp of the munitions through his quaking boots. As for the sound, he wasn’t sure if he’d been deafened by it or if the usual tinnitus caused by narcosis had just set in. Whichever the case, Rene was glad he couldn’t hear it. It was more pleasant this way. At least he could pretend that it was his very own stairway to heaven. He was going to climb up to the big black beyond on those lemon-puff steps and take in the sunshine at the top of the world.

“Our shuttle’s a minute thirty out—it still has to decelerate in order to pick us up at all. That’s the problem, really,” Exar was telling him, his bright young voice now betraying a shade of worry, “Goddam those bum techs! If we had just been able to shed that extra weight from the pod, we could’ve shaved off a couple seconds. I can’t work under these conditions!”

“No matter,” sniffed Rene, drying his eyes with his sleeves, “I’m about ready to go anyway.”

He peeled off the mines from his hands with difficulty and stood, raising his arms to receive his judgement. As he did Rene took one last look at Zildiz and the row of dead Leapers—the wounded juvenile had stopped spasming some minutes ago and gone quiet. In his heart he had already forgiven them and hoped that they too would pardon him.

“We shall soar with the Flight Eternal!” he sang to them sadly, welcoming them along for the ride.

“I’m real sorry, kid,” Exar broke the bad news as gently as he could, “But as nice as that sounds, I’ve got a percentage to keep.”

And slungshot from the other side of the globe came a grey-fletched dart moving faster by far than the advancing spread of thermobaric munitions. Faster and faster it sped, rocketing down out of the stratosphere in a straight, unerring line aimed right at the low-flying attack craft. The target saw the shuttle coming and tried to veer out of its way, but it was far too late for that—it had committed to the vector and its dive was too steep. The two craft met in midair, and for an instant Rene thought the shuttle had missed its mark, for its target was still locked on approach, the shuttle having gone right past it.

But then the mysterious enemy craft began to spin like a top, its pitch and yaw thrown hopelessly out of control by the supersonic glancing blow. It fought desperately to regain control and regain altitude, torn wings flapping uselessly, leaving spiraling contrails of smoke and liquid (was it his imagination, or was the flying machine bleeding?) in its wake as it disappeared into the very maelstrom of ruin it had created.

Rene stood in stunned silence.

“What did you do?” he finally asked the sphere. Strangely he felt more disappointed than actually relieved.

“I took a risk. Me and the shuttle worked out the ballistics together, but the margin of error was immense. Still, I had to take the chance. Shuttle’s a civilian craft, got no armaments to speak of, and the safety pod was slowing it down, plus we didn’t have time to wait for it to decelerate so it could land proper and fly us clear. So I figured, hey! Why not kill three birds with one stone. I told the shuttle to do the opposite of slowing down and really put the pedal to the metal. Right before impact I had it pull up at the last millisecond so that the safety pod struck the target instead of it totaling our only ride home. That’s what I was worried about, primarily—wasn’t too sure if the gantries attaching the pod to the shuttle would shear clean off or tear the airframe a whole new asshole, if you’ll pardon my Francais. Boiled down to luck in the end, and that’s something an Exar should never rely on.”

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“You really are a work of the ancestor-gods,” Rene said appreciatively. Exar’s rings of lights went a shade of blushing pink.

“Aw, shucks. Just doing my job, sir.”

The shuttle circled back around and landed on the grassy knoll, sleek as quicksilver. It had a burnt chrome look on its nosecone and underbelly, and four growling jet nozzles that set it down on its landing gears as light as a feather. A ramp descended from its posterior and from it unfolded gridiron steps lined by flashing diodes that flicked on and off in an undulating pattern, beckoning them in.

He had found his stairway to heaven after all. Suddenly reinvigorated, Rene gathered up Zildiz in his arms, and with the last of his strength and deteriorating motor functions he climbed up into the star going vessel. Exar tumbled off his crow’s nest and bounced harmlessly on the ground before climbing up after them, his locomotion a curious mixture of rolling and walking with his stubby spike legs.

#

From the forest far below the Leapers watched the silver-winged thing go screaming off into the sky, gibbering to each other excitedly.

Kryptus folded his glider and wore it around his torso like a poncho. His thirteen surviving braves gathered around him, all of them talking at once, unable to believe their luck at having survived the Vitalus’ wrath. Not only had Its will been denied for the first time in living memory, but the interlopers had struck down and destroyed a Hollowore. And not just any vessel of the god, but Udumnu the Thundermaeve itself!

“The Betrayers have come again!” clicked Telemaccus, “They defy the god of Arachnea! That, or the voidcrawlers have broken through the Mantle of Silence that protects our world! Woe unto the land of our mothers! Woe unto the halls of the Weeping Vipers!”

“Shut it,” Kryptus tsked, his mind focused on other matters, “You worry like a woman, and without their good sense.”

“But Kryptus, how can you be so stoic amid all this?” Agammon interjected, “We have lost our prey the hatchling. It has flown away in the belly of the beast which slew Udumnu, and has gone where we cannot follow, not even if we climbed to the top of the tallest storm catcher. What’s more, the Vitalus has learned of our disobedience. Our bloodlines will forever be erased—”

“Bah!” Kryptus rudely shouldered him aside. He climbed up a tree and took off at a run, bounding across the canopy towards the carpet of blasted trees. His warband followed him on their gliders, pestering him with questions.

“Grow a spine, why don’t you!” he said in reply to them all, “If the Vitalus has discovered our activities, there is nothing we can do at this point but play the usual game and weave a happy web of lies to mislead it. Either it believes us or it won’t, in which case we die and stop worrying about anything at all. It’s as simple as that.”

“As for the mad hatchling, I have left one last surprise in store for him,” Kryptus hinted deviously, “In the meantime I need Telemaccus and Agammon to come with me. The rest of you, see to it that our fallen brothers are buried with full honors. And take down those poor boys hanging on the spikes. It sickens me.”

Most of the warband obediently returned to the site of the massacre and began picking up the shredded remains. Some wept bitter tears inside their helms at the site of a friend or brood brother draped on the stakes or crumpled inside the snow-white starbursts of foam where the hatchling’s bombs had claimed so many lives. One unfortunate brave had been caught on the edge of Udumnu’s clouds and had vomited out his own ruptured sets of lungs. In the end they dug nineteen shallow pits in a circle on the top of the hill, wrapping what was left of the dead in thick sacks much like the ones they had been born in, this to symbolize their rebirth in the cycle of creation. The saddest sight of all was that of young Neroth, of whom nothing more could be found than his severed leg swinging like a windvane on the spike which had impaled him.

But the Kryptus felt the loss of his favorite nephew, he did not show it. He and his two betas reached the crash site and located the downed behemoth. Udumnu had come to rest in a deep trench of earth and uprooted pines. By some miracle of flesh the Hollowore was still alive, lying on its back with its limbs paddling in the air as it struggled to rise. Udumnu’s wings were tattered shreds of membrane stretched over broken ligatures, and it sported an enormous wound that had cracked its famed anvil head right down the middle, exposing the burnt, mashed-up pudding of its primary brain. Judging from its activity the secondary ganglia which controlled its automated functions were still intact. Having lost contact with the Vitalus, it had reverted to its bestial instinct: survive at all costs.

Kryptus felt a sudden bond of kinship with the dying creature. He understood that overpowering drive of self-preservation all too well, and right now it was telling him that there was an opportunity here unlike any other.

“What will you do now, alpha?” Telemaccus asked.

“Now? Now I am as the leaf which sways amid the storm,” Kryptus gloated as he approaching the downed monster, all eight of his limbs tapdancing with giddy joy, “I go where the wind wills it.”