Chapter 46: The Piercing Thorn
Scratching an itch that had formed on the tip of his nose, Haisel Ragora made sure that his arms were back down by his sides before any of his subordinates on the ship’s massive deck turned around to see him. The level of activity aboard the Piercing Thorn had intensified in recent days as the ultimatum given to Sir Alistair Morrison continued to tick down. By the Gods, the last thing Haisel wanted was to have to besiege the city—but it sure looked more and more like an unavoidable conclusion, one that would see many thousands—if not more—dead as a result of it.
If he would just fight us with honor or surrender, Haisel thought, the weight of his responsibility heavy in his chest. What man of honor would bring this upon the people he has vowed to protect?
As the second-in-command of the Royal Roses, Haisel was more powerful than any other member of his guild aside from the guild-leader himself. For this reason, he had been the only person trusted to oversee the final preparations here on the Piercing Thorn, which in a sick, twisted sort of way, was a wondrous sight to behold. It was hard to believe that, in just ten years, the Royal Roses had actually managed to build this prehistoric ship from blueprints so old they’d needed to use advanced AI algorithms just to make legible. And now, here he stood, on this relic of ancient human technology: a ship known as a Nimitz-class Aircraft Carrier.
It had actually been Haisel’s idea to recreate the carrier, though he never imagined he’d actually be required to use it in a real combat situation. Back then, he’d embarked upon this decade-long project for the purpose of scratching an itch that had formed inside of him as a child on the day his late father had told him the truth about humanity: the truth that was so secretive only the highest-ranking officers from each guild were permitted to know of it. The viciously guarded secret that they, human beings, were not originally from this world. Their kind came from a faraway world called “Earth” whose very existence had only been pieced together through various artifacts from many millennia ago, such as manuals and blueprints like the ones Haisel had ordered followed in the construction of this “Nimitz” carrier that he had named the Piercing Thorn.
If any of the other races ever discovered this fact, it would paint all of humanity in a terrible light.
An hour before nightfall, the late-afternoon sun still packed enough of a punch to make sweat glide down the back of his neck as he marched his way through the noisy, boisterous upper deck, watching as service technicians refueled the twelve F-15E Strike Eagles before resuming their training exercises. As far as Haisel was aware, it had been nearly eight-hundred years since the humans of Galterra had rediscovered the method of battle known as “conventional warfare.” Back then, all of humanity had united together in a horrific, twenty-year war with the Lizard Folk. It had been a war that humanity had seemed all but certain to lose—at least according to historical records.
But then, the Guild of Gentlemen had unearthed blueprints from humanity’s long lost home-world, and the guilds had apparently reconstructed the very-same fighter jets that were now being refueled atop this aircraft carrier. The history books, of course, would claim these new weapons to be the invention of the guilds at the time, but only Haisel and a select few others knew the truth: these ancient weapons were the product of minds that existed many, many thousands of years ago when humanity was at the peak of its greatness and power.
For fifteen years, human beings had lost territory, millions of lives, and had endured an unimaginable amount of suffering as the Lizard Folk, who’d been both higher in level and had far more level-1 troops to use for fodder, had simply overwhelmed even the best of their fighters. The entire war had been fought because the Lizark folk wanted to stem the continued pursuit of human expansion. Their goal had been to confine all human beings to North Bastia. They had been succeeding, too.
Yet, all the while, in secret, humanity had spent those fifteen years on a project that had required the cooperation of every guild and every resource. It had been an undertaking so vast that nothing less than the absolute, enthusiastic coordination of each guild’s most capable minds would allow so much as a chance of success. To even begin building these flying machines of death first required the construction of factories capable of producing the parts. And to even begin building those factories required completely separate factories, and so on and so forth.
But as more and more ground had been seized by the Lizard Folk, something had awakened within the human spirit that had been dormant for so long it had been forgotten. Human beings, known as the most fractious, divisive, and self-destructive race on all of Galterra, had the unique tendency to unite in previously unimaginable ways when faced with a common enemy. It would be a lesson that none of the other races would ever forget: that for all their faults, if threatened as a whole, the power of humankind would unleash upon whoever threatened it.
Thus, the human guilds persevered. Even with losses mounting month after month, the project continued until finally, in the early-morning hours on the first day of spring just before the sun had risen, the guild-leaders had authorized a fleet of the newly completed F-15E Strike Eagles to begin launching a counterattack against the Lizard Folk from the skies.
First-hand sources from the time had indicated that, at best, the expectation was that their new weapons would provide humanity with some breathing room so that they could continue to train and level new defenders for the continuing war effort. This, however, had been a dramatic, overwhelming underestimation of their destructive new capability. What they had created would change the balance of power throughout all of Galterra and reestablish human beings as the dominant race.
Very quickly, it became apparent to the guilds that these absurdly powerful weapons of war were able to gun down not just the fodder on the front lines, but even the best of Lizard Folk’s warriors, some higher than level 50. Even tanks with exceptionally high constitution could not withstand the explosive force of what had been called an “air-to-surface” missile. The success on the battlefield was so great that it not only turned the war around in a matter of weeks, but it had enabled humanity to retake all of their lost territory in under a month—along with the entire continent of South Bastia, which had previously been shared with the Lizard Folk.
Of course, most of that was a matter of public record one could read in any basic history textbook. What would not be said was unfortunately how overboard humanity had gone with these new “toys.” Desperate for revenge and thirsty for blood, the guilds had retaliated with a bombing campaign that had intentionally targeted civilian areas and cultural landmarks, especially those with great religious value to the Lizard Folk. Yet even that wasn’t enough for some.
Long after the Royal Roses and other human guilds had abandoned the war effort, the Guild of Gentlemen had unilaterally embarked upon an attempted genocide in the name of revenge, one that went well beyond what the Lizard Folk had ever planned for humanity. They had wanted to contain humans—to prevent them from spreading. But the Guild of Gentlemen wanted to eradicate the entire race of Lizard Folk. To this day, the two still shared bad blood. Which was why, at this very moment, the Scale-King himself was in court to discuss aiding the current war effort. The Guild of Gentlemen remained as the only guild to never have made amends with the Lizard Folk.
It would be very useful to have them on our side.
As Haisel inspected each of the aircraft and asked pointed questions of the technicians who’d overseen their restoration, he nodded with satisfaction. Unlike the aircraft carrier, these fighter jets had not been built from scratch. They’d been taken out of storage and had needed extensive maintenance and refitting to be brought into working order. The last conventional war had taken place almost a hundred years ago, and it had been solely between humans. The cost in lives had been so great that conventional warfare had fallen out of favor, replaced instead with the current traditional system of mutual, open-field combat with the fighting to be done far away from cities or other highly populated areas.
And now, we’re going back to the old ways, Haisel thought sadly.
No one wanted this. No one enjoyed having to turn back the clock and resort to these antiquated tactics of mass death and civilians caught in the crossfire. Should justice prevail, then the name “Sir Morrison” would be forever shamed for allowing his personal cowardice to bring about this unfortunate escalation. Yet this was the game he’d chosen to play, and the Royal Roses would not back down. They would pull out all the stops if necessary.
Already, in anticipation of a return to conventional warfare, the Royal Roses had begun manufacturing and replacing the standard, military-grade HC-58 rifles with something far deadlier known as the “M4 carbine,” which used 5.56mm rounds of far greater lethality than anything from the HC-line of weapons.
They asked for this.
All Sir Morrison ever had to do was fight on the field of battle with honor and dignity befitting a respected member of a guild. Failing that, Haisel would gladly have accepted his surrender. At the worst, he would have had to forfeit some of his gold and assets in exchange for his freedom. But now? Well, unless the buffoon came to his senses, the Royal Roses would have no choice but to besiege the city of Shadowfall Coast and take it by force. Their hands had been forced. They were now going to use the same technology the Guild of Gentlemen had rediscovered centuries ago to put an end to their legacy once and for all.
*****
As Alistair listened with skepticism plain on his face to the simply outrageous claims put forward by Iris Roduncrest, his chief scientist, he found that he could not bring himself to believe what he was hearing—even more so, he did not want to believe it, either.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Iris, what you’re saying is impossible,” Alistair said.
He sat with her in what was both a scientific complex and also a bomb shelter located far below Shadowfall Coast that had not been used in hundreds of years—and from what Alistair could see, had not even been known to exist. Unlike the stockpiles of ancient weaponry located in the tunnels up above, there had been no record of this facility, even deeper belowground, where large amounts of equipment had been frozen in cryo-storage. Though Alistair had no doubt that some of it might indeed be very powerful and useful in the coming battle, the claims Iris was now making were so ludicrous that he adamantly refused to accept them.
“It’s not impossible,” she said. “It’s reality.”
Iris was a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a face that was far more wrinkled than it would otherwise have been if not for her frequent smoking. Even now, as she spoke to Alistair, she kicked up her feet on the rusty metal table in this mysterious, perplexing bunker and lit up another of her smokes.
“You really have no care for decorum, do you?” he asked her.
She took a puff, coughed, and then let out a chuckle. “Fuck if I care.”
Alistair sighed. Since they were alone, he decided not to reprimand her. Had anyone witnessed her display of impertinence towards him, he would have had no choice but to make an example of her or else risk losing the respect of the men and women who served under him.
The room they were in was dark, and dust rose into the air like smoke. It had to have been several centuries since the last time someone had been down here, and if what Iris was claiming was indeed the truth, then it had been a great deal longer than that. According to Iris, it had been closer to thousands of years since anyone had set foot in this facility.
Quite shockingly, Alistair wasn’t even certain what this place was, exactly. Several days earlier, he’d sent a team down to retrieve the anti-missile systems that secret, guild documentation claimed was stored in various secret tunnels beneath the city; his men had returned mere hours later with two pieces of news.
The first bit of news was as he’d suspected: there was a sizeable stockpile of defensive equipment that would be useful in protecting Shadowfall Coast in a conventional war against the Royal Roses. Alistair hoped these anti-missile systems still worked and, if not, that he would have the time needed to repair the equipment before the inevitable siege.
As things stood, it was looking increasingly unlikely his reinforcements would arrive before the ultimatum expired. Most likely, the city was heading towards a resounding defeat. Earlier this morning, he’d received word that the Plains of Mist had finally fallen, and now, the People of Virtue had claimed the territory as their own. Shadowfall Coast was likely to be next.
Unless Alistair could somehow convince the Royal Roses to delay their invasion for three more days at the minimum, there was no way the units stealthily heading to Shadowfall Coast from the Plains of Mist would arrive in time to protect the city. But even if they did, it was still not likely to be enough. Put simply, the Guild of Gentlemen held just a fraction of the power that it had wielded even just two decades prior in the aftermath of Peter IV’s defeat. More and more these days, it was looking like the end was now in sight for the several-thousand-year-old guild—or so Alistair had been convinced.
But then came the second piece of news. Supposedly, a cable had snapped while his men had been lifting one of the SAM turrets out of Storage Tunnel C, and it had rolled into—and broken through—a thinner-than-expected wall, which his men claimed had led into a completely separate area that ran far, far below the tunnels. When questioned, his men claimed this other “area” had not been marked on or listed in any of the documentation Alistair had provided—which should not have been possible.
The Guild of Gentlemen were meticulous when it came to documentation. For thousands of years, the guild had always taken great pains to ensure that all of its secrets and all of its hidden resources were coherently described and passed on to successive generations to ensure the survival of the guild. For this reason, the very concept of a “secret area” or an area that had not been detailed in existing documentation came across as absurd on the face of it. It was to the extent that Alistair had not been willing to believe it until he’d seen it with his own two eyes. Frustrated, he’d asked to be led to whatever it was they’d claimed to have found.
Following one of his men, he’d descended a series of stairs that led down to a passage that came to an abrupt, dead end in the form of stone wall that had the words “my gift to humanity” carved into the stone. Wanting to get to the bottom of this, Alistair had ordered an immediate excavation. Not only was this place seemingly hidden, but whoever had been responsible for it had taken great pains to make sure it was not easily accessible. It had taken days for the excavation team to safely unearth a secondary passageway, which led even farther beneath the tunnels into what was a gigantic bomb shelter that also served as some kind of scientific laboratory; it was filled with equipment preserved in cryo-storage. Promptly upon making this bewildering discovery, Alistair had dispatched Iris to investigate the nature of this unmentioned facility and report back to him.
Yet, in a highly unusual measure, she’d sent a message requesting he come down to her, claiming that what she’d found was something she needed to tell him in person. And so, here he was, in this highly unusual subterranean research bunker, listening to Iris make a series of claims so outlandish he found himself completely unable to believe them.
“In all the years you’ve known me,” Iris said, coughing as she took another hit of her smoke-stick, “I ever been wrong about anything, Ali?”
Once more, he was glad that the two of them were out of earshot, as there would be no way he could overlook such blatantly undignified behavior otherwise. With a reluctant grunt, Alistair said, “No, you haven’t. But you’ve also never suggested something this outrageous before, either.”
“Yeah, well, what can I say? It’s true, and you can either accept it or not.”
Alistair slowly bobbed his head from left to right as he struggled to seriously consider the possibility that Iris was correct in her assertions. Logically, he had to admit that the very existence of a secretive place such as this meant there were things he did not know. But her claims were so farfetched that the suspension of disbelief required to believe them bordered on insurmountable.
“So let me get this straight,” Alistair said. “You’re saying there is a weapon here that will not only save this city, but that it is so powerful it will enable us to once again unite all of North and South Bastia under our rule?”
She nodded in a way that was far too casual given her claims. “Yep,” she said, shrugging. Then she took another hit of her smoke-stick, which resulted in her coughing for what seemed like ten minutes but was in actuality only a few seconds.
“Can you understand why I find this difficult to believe?”
“Sure can,” she said with a smile. “But that’s on you.”
“Explain it to me one more time, beginning with why you invoked the name of one of our earliest guild-leaders.”
She frowned as though annoyed. Then she crooked a thumb over her shoulder at the vault door that led into an area she claimed was too dangerous to enter without wearing a protective suit that she’d assured him her team was now creating for the both of them.
“Basically,” she began, “from what little documentation I was able to find, one of the Guild of Gentlemen’s founding fathers, Moldark, had commissioned this place in secret to create a weapon that the Elvish rulers at the time were exhaustively trying to bar him from possessing.”
“Are you sure it said Moldark?”
Moldark had been one of the earliest members of the Guild of Gentlemen. It was believed that he had also been one of the first human beings to colonize Galterra, though that was very much a closely guarded guild secret. Quite frankly, Alistair knew very little about Moldark other than that he existed. The earliest days of the Guild of Gentlemen were very murky and not well detailed. In a way, that would explain why this place had remained a secret for so long. Had anyone in the past several-thousand years discovered it, they would have written it down for future generations to know about.
“I know what I saw,” Iris said. “But you don’t even have to take my word for it, Ali. I’ll just show you everything after I get back in there once we get the suits. Shit, I hope I wasn’t exposed for too long.”
“About that,” Alistair said. “You said it’s irradiated. How can that even be?”
“It has to do with the weapon he built in here. The one you refuse to believe is real.”
Alistair grunted. “Because the way you described it…it sounds impossible.”
“Oh, it’s very much possible. I mean, hell, I can’t believe no one’s thought to make something like this in all the years ever since. I refuse to believe ancient humans really were all that smarter than us. In many ways, their technology, especially with regards to energy, pales in comparison to what we’ve achieved. But Gods! When it comes to war shit, they knew what they were doing, oh yes they did!”
“Explain it to me one more time, please.”
She sighed. “It’s called an ICBM: an intercontinental ballistic missile. It delivers a nuclear payload capable of leveling an entire city with just a single warhead.”
“That’s the part where you lose me,” Alistair said. “How can one single missile destroy an entire city?”
“It doesn’t just destroy the city,” she interjected. “That’s just the initial blast. According to Moldark, this weapon then contaminates the area so that human life can’t even exist in the region for decades afterwards, if not longer. It’s a weapon of such destructive power that it’s said to rival the smiting of a God.”
Alistair scratched his chin as he processed what she was telling him. “Let’s just say for a second that I believe you, and that this…this ICBM really can do what you say it does. How long would it take you to learn how to fire this weapon? Or restore it to operational status if need be.”
She coughed out a laugh. “About a week longer than you have.”
With a sheepish laugh of his own, Alistair said, “Let’s say through some miracle we can hold that long. Then what? How does this missile save us the way you implied it can?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” She grinned, slapping her palm down on the rusty metal table. “You go and launch this mother fucker at Giant’s Fall, and the entire world will surrender to you right there on the spot. It doesn’t matter that there’s only one of these things in here. They won’t know that. You go and tell the guilds you’ve got plenty more where that came from, and the next thing you know, you’ve got North and South Bastia by the balls…sir.”
“How many will die?”
“In Giant’s Fall?”
“Yes. If everything you’ve said so far is correct. How many would die?”
“Uh…all of them,” Iris said.
“Every single person?”
“Yeah, definitely. Well…maybe not from the blast. But anyone who lives is just going to die from radiation poisoning a few weeks to a few months later.”
“I can’t…I could never do that,” Alistair whispered.
Once again, she shrugged. “It’s them or us, Ali. But you’re the one in charge.”
As Alistair regarded her, he could not control the fascination he felt that this wrinkly-faced, smoke-stick puffing woman would so casually and easily suggest to him that he launch an attack with a weapon so powerful it would kill tens of millions of people. Worse, he was now so pressed into a corner that he was actually considering it.
“Them or us,” he said, repeating her words in his head. He sighed. “Too bad we’ll be dead before we ever have the time to see if this thing works. Maybe that’s for the best. If this really is what you say it is, then I don’t know if I want to be in a position to use it.”
“Afraid you might do it?”
He nodded. “Very much so.”