Chapter 102 - Air Raid
“Where’s Lura?” I asked Keeper.
She spun her beads before answering. “She has left her hunt to her lieutenant. With all speed, she makes her way to the narrows to find us.”
I grit my teeth. “Very well.”
I looked over at the ramshackle choppers being pulled down off the backs of the buggies and fueled up. “With Chuck already on his way to the Gorgers, I don’t think we have time to wait for her.”
“And at whose feet lay that fault, little brother?” scoffed Sourtooth. “Never mind. The tinder is set ablaze and we must outpace its flame or be scorched upon it.”
The old orc certainly had a way with words. With a final hawk of phlegm on the gravely floor of the canyon floor, he reached up and dropped the lid on the re-worked Big Hoss Rig. The heavy vehicle rumbled to life, spitting black smog from a pair of smokestacks at the back. Promo stuck his head out the side as it trundled past, giving me a salute and the sign of the right angle. “Don’t worry boss! We’ll do you proud!”
I waved him off as he and the other buggies, along with the half-dozen orc hunters still aboard Flock oryx and a gaggle of yapping cliffords, set off into the narrows to poke the bear.
Sourtooth had told me he wouldn’t face the whistler in a light buggy. So I’d built him something new out of the bones of Big Hoss Rig. I’d wanted a tank, but tanks require things like treads and drive sprockets and tensioners—things we simply didn’t have time to fabricate during the hunt. So BHR had been turned into something closer to an early armored car, 6-wheeled and up-armored, with a turret and sally ports for the goblins within to fire from behind steel plates. 2 separate engines kept the whole thing running. And I was reasonably sure it could survive a hit from what we were about to throw it against.
Meanwhile, we’d fixed the choppers that had failed to take off during the test flight, and built another besides. The Flock’s supplies of raw materials on-hand were dwindling, but the daily resupplies from Village Apollo helped keep us afloat.
“Ready, Armstrong?” I asked.
“Always, boss!” he said, pulling down his skull mask and swinging into the gunner’s station. A half-dozen other goblins climbed aboard, including our semaphore signaler zealot who strapped himself in at the rear. Over the past day, I’d canonized a set of signal flags and our signalman relished his role with religious dedication.
I patted the engine block. “Girmaks?”
“With you, King Ap. I will keep this vessel running smoothly.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” I said with more confidence than I felt. By sending my best pilot to help our rivals, I’d put a guillotine hanging over our own heads. I had to make sure we were out from under it before it fell. We’d come so far, and simulation or not, I didn’t want it to end here. A couple months ago we’d struggled to fight a low-level stone-sloth using a dozen goblins with makeshift spears. Now we were mounting up in attack helicopters and taking on kaiju. Well, small kaiju. The very monsters that kept most nations on Rava out of the Lanclovan interior (but apparently drew the orcs like a magnet), and we were butting heads with them. And even though the vast majority of our goblins were still stuck at level 1, we were venturing forth in our hundreds. Once I established food security, it would be in our thousands. And the orcs, the Prince of Habberport, the Ifrit, and the other races? They could keep the ground. I was claiming the sky.
Ok, confidence restored. I dropped a rockette into the starter slot and cranked the engine, bringing the aircraft to life. My chopper started to rumble, and around us, the rest of the fleet started to spin up. The rest of the goblins began to climb aboard, armed with poppers and slingers, pistols, and boundless enthusiasm. To my right, I spotted a portly canoneer tumbling into a gunship scrawled with designs of gears, crank cases, and tools. The zealots piled in with him, and the aircraft almost drowned out their fanatical screams. On my left, Neil, with his favored hunters—looking primed and ready for big game. How he managed to work the throttle and collective with his hook hand, I couldn’t say. But he’d proven just as deft a pilot as any of the wranglers who helmed the other craft.
“Light the flares,” I shouted.
At the aft of our aircraft, a pair of smoldering scat flares were lit by our semaphore goblin, hopefully giving the rest of the fleet some semblance of a way to keep in formation and coordinate our fire.
I pulled pitch and turned us on the ground, lining up with a flat stretch for a rolling takeoff before opening the throttle. We bumped and ground down the gravel stretch, building speed, and then with a shudder, bounced into the air. I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the fleet, who were all lifting off one by one in their loose, meandering formation.
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I spotted the dust trail of the buggies and BHR on the ground and angled toward them. They were heading into a narrow canyon with dozens of slender spire formations dotting the floor. Sparkling water coursed through in a selection of narrow streams, glinting in the sunlight. Long ago, a wide river must have carved these arches and pillars, but now it was little more than a trickle. To the west, the shadow of the eclipse marched toward the hunting ground. Sourtooth had mentioned that the whistler was like the pale lizards, most active and dangerous during the eclipse—but most vulnerable an hour before it woke.
“Seems quiet down there, boss,” said Armstrong. He leaned forward over the nose of the aircraft, far enough that I had to tilt the controls back to counteract the shift in the aircraft’s CG. “Feels weird, gettin’ the drop in broad daylight.”
I could understand that. But if this thing could sleep through the racket of a dozen buggies and choppers besides coming into its den, it probably needed a bomb to wake it up anyway. I craned my neck, though Sourtooth had been cagey when I’d asked for details on the beast. They’ll do little good, and you’ll know it when you see it. Stay clear of its path, was all he said.
I banked us around for a better look, avoiding the spires that crowded the airspace.
The ground itself looked… fairly clear. I didn’t spot anything huge and horned, though a few small herd animals scattered before the buggies. Scrub brushes dotted the gravel near the streams and along the walls of the canyons. I banked again, angling us through the maze of spires and dropped us low enough to clear a natural bridge connecting two adjacent columns, curious at the spiral ridge on the closest spire. Sourtooth had arrayed the buggies in a wide wedge formation, and had his turret raised and turned toward us.
“Wot’s he watchin’ us for?” asked Armstrong. “He should be lookin’ for ‘is whistler.”
Despite the heat of the day and the boiling engine block behind my seat, a cold feeling crept down my spine. A shadow passed over us, and I looked up at the underside of the rock bridge spanning the two spires on either side of us. Dozens of dangling vines waved in the breeze.
Not vines. Legs. Dozens of legs. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. The ridges spiraling the spires to the left and right were undulating, curling themselves around the rock formations. They weren’t rock as I’d first thought, but bone, lined with thousands of small holes. The whistler was apparently a giant segmented insect—like a millipede. Gross. I’ve never liked creepy-crawlies. Especially the ones with too many legs. I swallowed my disgust and pressed on.
I pushed the nose down and got clear, looking around frantically for the head. A dozen of the pillars were now alive and undulating, and several of what I’d taken for natural arches and land bridges were actually parts of the monster spanning the gaps.
“Where’s the front?” asked Armstrong. “What am I s’posed to—”
His sentence was cut off by a noise like a freight train’s steam whistle passing directly in front of us in a blur of clacking jaw parts and milling legs. The noise was immense, and the rush of the thing blasted us with a concussive force that knocked us completely off course. I struggled to control the chopper, maneuvering it away from the new airborne obstacle.
The head of the creature reached another pillar, and started to spiral down, before doubling back and launching itself across the gap at yet another column. The noise was incredible, and I think it came from all the little holes on its carapace making a sort of natural whistle as it passed through the air.
On the ground, the BHR fired up at the whistler. An explosion struck it on the side. It immediately changed course, jumping towards a low pillar near the canyon floor. But its tail still hadn’t cleared the pillars in front of the fleet. This thing had to be hundreds of meters long!
Armstrong leveled the front guns and put two recoilless rifle rounds into its carapace, as did several other choppers. The explosions rippled across its hide, drowned out completely by the shrieking of its natural airhorns. I spotted a few cracks in the bony plate as it blurred by, but nothing substantial. This was a tough nut to crack, and we could hammer it until we were bingo ammo and blue in the face (well, blue-er), and not make a scratch.
“After the head!” I shouted. Not that any of the other choppers could hear me. But they could follow our flares just fine. I dipped the stick and dropped collective, chasing after the head as it zig-zagged across the canyon towards the Big Hoss Rig. The whistler was faster than the choppers, but it seemed to only move in straight lines. Of course, the more it doubled back on itself, the more obstacles in our flight path. It reminded me of playing Snake on my old man’s cell phone back when I was a kid, the way you had to dodge your own tail as it kept getting longer and longer. Only this wasn’t a game.
The whistler doubled back again, cutting directly in front of my flight path, and I yanked us over almost 90 degrees to avoid getting chomped. One of the choppers with us was not so lucky, and it caught the bony ridges and flew apart as though it had been hit by a full speed train.
“It’s really got it out for us, boss!” shouted Armstrong.
No kidding!
Still, I could see the head as it spiraled down the pillar, and I got us lined up. Armstrong had managed to catch his loader and keep the goblin from being flung out of the aircraft by my maneuver. He yanked the goblin back in place and the two started hammering rounds home as fast as the tiny hands could open the hatch and slam fresh rounds in and Armstrong could get the barrels lined up.
Bursts of flame and dust erupted on the face of the pillar, and the whistler roared, even louder than its natural shriek. It hit the canyon floor, zig-zagging towards BHR and I led the choppers in close behind it. Now that I’d identified it, System helpfully stuck an XX over its head. And, of course, we all know what that meant it thought our odds of success were. Maybe it was right. But maybe we were going to kick this thing’s carapace-covered butt.