Five thousand of her best militia clustered together on the gate, muttering and jostling and anxiously waiting. The tallest, toughest avians—falcyr and a few of the stronger caracarans—made up the inner ring of dark feathers and sharp talons, while thousands of squat passerines, slender corvani, fur-covered redenites in their sweeping robes and machinist masks, and even a clutch of brightly-colored gaskals, with their enormous repitilian eyes, made up the outer rings.
Though they were on a mission of peace, this would be the Gaiam’s first military incursion into Cyre, instead of the other way around. The xenos of the Cauldron were nervous. At least their weapons were new and their uniforms were riddled with technological improvements given to them by the Divine Maker Khadam. Their weapons could fire in short bursts, and their padded armor was strong enough to stop bullets. Ryke had seen it tested herself.
With so many standing side-by-side, they were a force to be reckoned with. Nothing compared to Cyre’s legions, but Khadam and Laykis’s intel suggested they would meet only token resistance on Cyre. The Emperor’s legions were missing… Only a skeleton guard force had been left to police the rest of the Empire, which reached around the planet in a constellation of shipping cities and early-age colonies.
Ryke had faith in Khadam’s intel. And she had faith in Kirine’s assessment (“they won’t welcome us with open arms, but cyrans prefer peace, at least when the warmongers are away”).
Of all the soldiers on the gate, Ryke thought she might be the most nervous of all.
When the cyrans first opened the gate, more than two decades ago, they purged the Cauldron’s military, and wiped out much of Gaiam’s old warrior traditions.
This would be a test of how much her people trusted her. The fact that anyone had agreed to come along on this mission in the first place should have instilled all the confidence she needed, but there were whispers, and some were rather loud. More than one of her commanders questioned the sensibility of opening the Cauldron up to cyrans in need. What have they ever done for us?
That wasn’t the kind of Queen Ryke wanted to be. Besides, the soldiers were gathered, and they were growing restless.
One of her Falcyr captains caught her eye. “Shall we give the signal, my Queen?”
Ryke shifted in her long, flowing robes. Muted black, the color of war. Underneath, she wore plates of adaptive metal covered with some stretchy, flexible-yet-durable fabric that was supposed to protect her from projectiles. Bullets, shrapnel. At least, that’s what Khadam had claimed. So much trust in the word of a god.
Eolh stood next to her, and grazed her hand with one black-feathered finger. He held her gaze and bowed his head at her. His message was clear: I am here with you. No matter what.
Mustering all the confidence she could, Ryke shouted, “Open the gate.”
The falcyr echoed her call, letting it carry over the five thousand heads. The arms began to gyrate around the disc, until their movement cut a screaming song through the air. The disc grew cold, freezing her talons to the metal. No turning back now. A flash of light.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. A different sea breeze, crisp and clear and salty. Different stone, different soil. And the plants… something’s wrong.
The last time Ryke was in Cyre, it had been a burgeoning city without compare, almost a paradise. Now, it was a disaster.
Around the gate, people picked through the remains of tents and stalls and overturned carts. Broken statues littered the edges of the concourse, and directly ahead a temple had been shorn of its clay-tile roof, leaving only a few dozens shingles hanging precariously on naked, wooden slats. Trees that lined the avenues were snapped in half, spilling their fruit and olives across the cobbles, and Ryke couldn’t find a single window that still held its glass.
“My city…” Kirine’s mouth fell open. Ryke followed his gaze up to the hills.
The sun-gold hills that once rose above the city were gone. A pyramid, taller than any mountain Ryke had ever seen, took their place. A looming, sheer shape—whose sides were made of perfect lines that came together at the peak where some structure made of thin metal and twisted glass caught the afternoon light.
Crowds of cyrans gathered in the streets, some crying, some shouting, but most standing in silence as they tried to make sense of what had happened to their city. The ones closest to the gate watched Ryke and her army with a sense of fear. Her falcyr barked orders, demanding defensive postures. Ryke’s soldiers bristled their weapons, aiming out in a ring as the gate slowly thawed, mist rising up from their taloned feet and boots.
The crowds backed away. No attack came.
“This feels off,” Eolh said. “Where are their soldiers?”
“Kirine,” Ryke turned to her ambassador. “Where do we start?”
Kirine blinked. Closed his mouth. And inhaled, putting himself back into sorts. He straightened the hem of his suit jacket, and said, “Right. We’ll have to spread the word first. I’ll see if I can find some of my old contacts…”
While he spoke, Ryke eyed the loose crowds around the gate. By Khadam’s message, Ryke thought they were walking into a zone of disaster. But the people here… there was no sense of urgency. She had expected the cyrans to be lined up by the thousands, pushing and shoving and begging for Ryke to get them off-world.
They don’t know what’s coming.
When the gate thawed, she ordered her soldiers to spread out around the concourse. Ryke told the captains to offer help where possible. “Avoid violence. I will not be the cause of a new war.”
Eolh spotted them first. A group of exaggeratedly thin beings that seemed to slither across the cobblestones. They wore strange helmets that covered their faces completely, with glass masks that reflected the light, and their limbs twisted and curled as they huddled together. Historians. The Historians were trailed by a clutch of cyran priests in their ceremonial robes, or in other hurried states of dress, each one looked more dazed than the last.
The whole group was led by Laykis and Khadam.
“Make way!” Ryke commanded, and her soldiers split apart.
“Divine One,” she bowed at the waist, displaying all her royal crest feathers to Khadam.
“Ryke,” Khadam bowed awkwardly back.
Laykis bowed before the Queen, and the Historians followed suit—though Ryke noticed there was a distinct separation between the android and the Historians. Only the cyran priests did not bow. Instead, they were standing in a loose group, arguing among themselves.
“I figure if we can move them in batches of 10,000,” Khadam said, “We should have most of the city evacuated in a little under four days. The gate will need time to recharge—”
“And what about them?” Eolh nodded at the arguing priests. “What if they don’t want to go?”
Ryke had to raise her voice to be heard over their squabbling. “Priests of Cyre, are you to be the first on the gate?”
“We haven’t decided!” one shouted back.
“The Emperor will return!” Another said, which was followed by half-hearted grumbles of agreement, and a few jeers.
“Yes,” Another said. “And what about my position? From what I’ve heard, this Gaiam is a backwater compared to-”
Khadam cut them all off. “The Emperor is dead. And you will be, too, if you don’t get on that damn gate right now.”
They went silent. Even the clamor of the crowds nearby stilled. As if the people weren’t sure what to make of her. You fools, Ryke thought. She is a god. You must listen to her.
“What makes you so sure he is dead?” the first priest said, his voice dripping with skepticism. “I did not see the holy body.”
“This could be a ruse, a strange trap set by these birds to deprive us of our fortunes-”
“Vile fiends!” a voice roared from behind Ryke. “Hypocrites! Liars!”
Kirine barged into the middle of the crowd of priests, both hands behind his back, his chest out. He barked like some military commander, looking down his prodigious nose at the cyran holy folk. “The avians have done what no cyran would ever do. They have offered a home to our people. Death is coming. Death to all cyrans who stay. You who sit upon piles of other people’s gold, you have no idea what is at stake here. Fortune? What fortune. It is all gone. You have two options: stay here, and choke on it. Or leave everything behind, and earn a new life on Gaiam. This is your only chance. What say you?”
Kirine’s words struck a chord with the priests, and the crowds beyond. She could sense their fear, too, and Kirine had done well to press into that. As he should. There was much to fear, if what Khadam had told her was right. The city’s recent changes were only a sign of what was to come.
One priest stepped forward, and said, “My constituents are reluctant. Many find it hard to believe what they cannot see. Perhaps the Emperor is dead, and some—” he waved his hands vaguely, “—machine force is truly on its way to Cyre. But Cyre has always defended herself. We will defend ourselves righteously, as we have so many times before.”
“Indeed,” another priest added, “We are cyrans. This planet was given to us by the gods, and here we shall remain. By force, if necessary.”
And on and on came the disagreements. Ryke knew her role. Nothing she could say would convince these people—in fact, it might only have the opposite effect. But she had been right to bring Kirine, for he cut down each of these priests’ concerns one by one, either turning their minds, or turning their words against them.
The sun rolled across the sky, and the Scar followed it, and the crowds grew. Kirine and a few other cyrans stood on toppled bricks to shout their message to the people. Soon there was a vast sea of cyrans waiting at the gate. Some carrying packs over their shoulders, ready to leave.
Ryke saw Eolh and Khadam whispering together. The human had her eyes closed, and was concentrating, and the corvani was staring up at the sky, where a great Scar glittered its strange light over the world.
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“Almost there,” Eolh was saying. “A little more. There. That looks right.”
“What are you doing?” Ryke asked.
Khadam’s eyes opened, her inorganic pupils twisting as they focused on Ryke’s face. “Repositioning the dam. I want to be ready, when the worst comes.”
When? Ryke thought, a shudder of fear running down her spine. She is so certain of what is coming.
“How long do we have?”
“Who knows? Weeks. Hours. All I can say is the sooner you start moving these idiots—sorry—these people, the better.”
***
Giant, hulking buildings made of marble surrounded the concourse around the gate. Temples, and political seats of power, they were ordained with sculptures and statues and waterspouts and columns, each one a work of art. Only now, cracks as wide as Ryke’s hand carved through the thick walls of the buildings, and gaps of sunlight shone through the gaps in the vaulted ceiling.
It was up here, at the top of a temple dedicated to a pair of goddesses, that Ryke set up her command tent. From here, she had the perfect view of the surrounding city—from its noble district rolling up the hills, to the canals and the slums that grew toward the coast.
Eolh had come to her that first night, though they were both too tired to do anything more than collapse into each other’s arms. In the morning, Eolh told her that Khadam needed help in the Black Library. Ryke kissed him, and told him to be safe.
“Relax. The gods will watch over me,” he said with a smile. “Well, one of them, anyway.”
That had been two days ago. Now, it was only Ryke and her captains and her cyran allies to direct the evacuation. Kirine had been a boon every step of the way. The lower classes loved him, and the strange xenos who lived in Cyre’s darkest places clung to his every word. These were the easiest groups to usher onward, for they had nothing to gain by staying.
“My Queen,” Kirine said, “We had ten thousand go through in the last hour. Mostly xenos, though I did get a few hundred cyrans on that one. Many were eager to escape debts they had here. I think we’ll find the rest more reluctant. But we’re working on them. With the priests and even a few nobles swayed—”
“How many are left?”
“Two hundred thousand have gone already. That leaves… Two and a half million.”
“Gods,” Ryke said. “So many.”
Only months ago, she would have never imagined the Cauldron might fit more than a few thousand more bodies. But now, with the hurricane wall Khadam had built, they could populate the whole Wash, and even push back the jungles beyond. Still, even if they only counted the city of Cyre, they would double their population…
“The problem is the nobles. They’re doing everything they can to dissuade the populations. They won’t give up their land, nor the workers who make it profitable. Any reason I throw at them, they perceive as a threat.”
“Then we may have to go without them.”
“They’re holding contracts over the peoples’ heads. Paying off naysayers to discount our word. As long as the nobles are against us, the whole city will be slow to listen.”
“What course can we take?”
The tent flap was thrown open by a sudden gust of wind, and a flash that cast the entire city in an overexposed light. All the stones turned white for a brief moment. Another batch of cyrans, gone through the gate. They were so used to it by now, that neither Kirine nor Ryke turned to look.
Kirine said, “The only thing that will get these people to move is money. Or…”
“Or?”
“Perhaps we should threaten them?”
“No,” Ryke said.
“If the Swarm comes,” Kirine said, “You may not need to. Besides-”
The frenzied beating of wings just outside. One of her falcyr burst into the tent. “My Queen! The other gate!”
Kirine and Ryke passed a dark look between each other. Ryke wrenched off her royal shawl, and rushed out into the blazing sun. She had to blink away the brightness.
The ocean was calm, with gentle slits of white-capped waves. The wind smelled of salt and the heady scent of ripening olives. But the gulls were silent.
And to the west, where the city’s ancient wall had mostly crumbled away, there was a stirring in the trees. And the sound of screaming, and desperate gunshots.
Ryke squinted. The wind ruffled her feathers, but she stood as still as stone.
She saw the glinting of metal as thousands of machines stalked through the trees.
The Swarm had not come through the central gate, like they expected. Instead, they had come from the auxiliary, the one that the Emperor’s legions used to branch out across the connected worlds.
“Full alert,” Ryke said to her captain. “Get every soldier in line. Form a defensive perimeter around the gate, and take anyone who comes to us.” The soldier cracked a salute, and flew off.
Then, she turned to Kirine, and said, “We need weapons.”
“A few of the nobles might have fangs, hidden somewhere on their estates.”
“Do anything you can to get them. Use every threat at your disposal.”
***
The machine that once called herself Vorpei knew this gate. Her malformed fingers (if they could be called that) scraped the disc.
Her knowledge went far deeper than the visual reports from her fellow machines. There was a memory here, rotting away in the organic remains of her brain.
I lived here once.
I commanded here.
Vorpei could not imagine the burden that must have been. To make so many decisions, to be in control of so many organic beings. What a disgusting mess of a life it must have been. Never knowing if you were making the right decision, always wondering if were doing something (everything) wrong.
She remembered the feeling of confidence. Was that not the same as believing you could see the future?
What an awful lie to tell yourself. How blinding, this ego.
The machine that was once Vorpei pressed her head against the metal, and uttered a prayer. Hail to You, oh Sovereign, for through Your will I am remade.
The Sovereign removed the chains of responsibility from her, and gave her all she could ever want.
There was no wish, but the Sovereign’s. No choice, but the Sovereign’s. No burden, but the will of the Sovereign. And the Sovereign was always right.
The war camp around the auxiliary gate was devastated. There had been thousands of tents here once, housing tens of thousands of cyran soldiers and warehouses for their necessary supplies. Now, the swarm, newly born out of cyran flesh, surged over everything. Tearing, killing, crawling, running. Finding fresh metals to enhance themselves, or to create more servants of the Sovereign.
The screams of the dying intermingled with the smell of fresh blood, of impure iron.
Vorpei reveled in the scent. She lifted all three of her arms, letting the longest one drag on the disc of the gate. She bowed the shaggy metallic growth that had once been her head, and gave thanks to the Sovereign for this ripe bounty.
Delicate protuberances sprouted all over her body, and these sensors tasted the air. They caught a new scent. Not just any metal.
Human-made metal.
A ship screamed through the sky, blasting both of its lances as it streaked overhead. It lit the ground on fire, disintegrating dozens of machines, and mutilating a hundred more as the newest army of the Sovereign reared away from the gate. Three more fangs sailed overhead, screaming behind the first, lancing the ground again and again. They circled and dove and dodged around each other, but the pilots were new to their ships.
One fang wobbled as it arced up. It turned, and came back for another strafing run. Flying too low to the ground.
In another life, Vorpei might have run for cover. Or, she might have stood still to show her soldiers how strong she was. Or, she may have rushed out some half-measured plan, getting her own soldiers killed.
Now, she didn’t even have to think. The whole body of the swarm thought for her.
No two members of the Swarm were exactly alike. Some were small, half-formed things with dagger-like legs that allowed them to crawl through the mud, or run up the trees. Others were hulking behemoths, dragging long machine tentacles behind them. And then, there were the ones that could fly…
A machine screamed a chittering cry as it sprang out of the seething mass of machines. Dozens more followed suit, flinging themselves at the strafing fang.
The fang ripped through them, splitting the machines apart, throwing pieces of their bodies across the masses (only to be consumed once more). But one machine clamped on, and pierced the fang’s hull with its razor-toothed appendages.
The fang smacked into the ground, throwing up waves of dirt and crushing a handful of machines. Those that weren’t, however, flooded toward the fang, and started ripping it to pieces. One of them tore a cyran, kicking and screaming, out of the ship, holding him high above the masses.
Thus, even as the Swarm died, the Swarm would continue to grow.
***
Why is it always one or the other? Ryke wondered. Why can’t we ever find middle ground?
There were tens of thousands of cyrans now, clamoring to get on the gate. Some unfortunate souls were trampled, even as they tried to avoid trampling others. People shoved and pushed their way to the front, handing their children over the crowds. The very same people she had begged to evacuate not two days ago.
But the gate could not work constantly. Sometimes it took less than ten minutes to open it. Sometimes, it took more than fifteen. And right now, all they could do was wait.
Ryke was on the ground, screeching to be heard over the mass of people, when the crowds moved suddenly and she was enveloped by shouting cyrans, pressed too close together. She could not even spread her wings to lift herself out. Someone stepped their whole weight on one of her talons, and she felt a crack. Ryke’s scream was drowned in the noise.
Where are my guards? She couldn’t see anyone. There were scales, both shining and dull, and gills and fins, and not a feather in sight.
Two piercing shots—not gunshots, but some kind of energy weapon—scored the air just above Ryke’s head. The crowds stilled, many of them ducking. Laykis stood there, at the edge, both of her hands steaming with spent energy.
Eolh spotted Ryke, and swooped down from above, holding his talons out to catch her. “Got you,” he said, as he pulled her up into the air, and let her go to fly on her own.
“There’s too many of them,” Eolh said, as they set down on the gate.
“We have to wait. We can’t let them all die.”
“They’re not your people, Ryke.”
“I will not leave them to this fate.”
“The swarm is taking out the fangs,” Kirine said. He looked haggard, and not just from exhaustion. Was he wounded? “We’ve lost all but one, now.”
“What about Khadam?” Ryke asked.
“She’s still working on up there,” Eolh pointed up at the Library, directly overhead.
“What is she doing?” Ryke said. “Can we talk to her?”
Laykis tapped her head, in a way that Ryke thought meant yes.
“Tell her we’re out of time. Tell the human if she’s going to do something, she needs to do it now.”
***
The machine once called Vorpei stood at the base of the vast pyramid that shadowed the city. In the background, the music of war raged.
A token resistance of xenos slowed the pace of the Swarm. Their weapons were newer in design. They had forgone those crude rifles, in favor of something with real bite. And they wore armor that spoke of a truly-intelligent hand.
Curious.
But questions were not her responsibility anymore. And she was called to another mission…
The Sovereign chose her to investigate the pyramid, and now that she was here, she understood why. It smelled of him. The Everlord of Cyre, the god she had never met, but obeyed all the same. She could sense his hand in every welded plate of this pyramid.
She could smell him.
His scent intermingled with one that her sensors could not identify. A stinging, bothersome scent, like the burning of metal. But no oxide nor silicate ever smelled like that. Nor any organic compound. This was an otherworldly residue, and no matter how much particulate matter she breathed, her sensors failed to identify it.
Only her organic parts, rotting as they were, could make sense of it. Perhaps this was why the Sovereign sent her forth; to learn through her.
The pyramid was thousands of feet high and a mostly-smooth face of segmented plates locked together, forming a ramp that her organic fingers would have no hope of climbing such an edifice.
But she was remade.
She extended the longest of her three articulated limbs, letting it slap against the pyramid, generating a dull ring. The tentacle bit into the metal, giving her more than enough purchase. She started to climb.
Something made her pause, and look up. The sensors lining her shoulders and the top of her “head” picked up an anomaly in the light, puffy clouds above. They passed, blocking out the sun, letting it shine, then blocking it again.
And then, a heavenly spear of pressure shot down from on high. With it, came a piercing, wailing, rhythmic pulse that screamed in every node in her electronics.
She should not have felt anything, but the pain was unbearable. Her power sources went flat, her switches died, all of her motors dropped. She slid down into a heap at the base of the pyramid. Around her, and all throughout the city, the machines collapsed. Not just the Swarm, but the ancient constructs, the drudges and servile bots and haulers and floating platforms that the cyrans had built their civilization upon. Lifeless.
A human.
A human had done this.
The Emperor? She could not be certain.
Her organic eyes, though clouded and festering with some untreated swamp disease, blinked up at the heavens. There was a hole in the clouds, where the invisible spear broke through. The clouds swirled in a ring around the spear, blocking out the sun even as they burst and dropped their rain in dazzling sheets of water.
She could see the Light dam, high above. Pulsing as that echoing, electronic pulse crashed over the city. A human was doing this.
In the city beneath the pyramid, cyrans poured out of their homes and leaned out of the windows, raising their hands in victory. They were cheering.
They should have looked to the skies. Tens of thousands of lights, like stars shining even in daylight, were warping into the space above Cyre. The lights grew brighter, resolved into gargantuan shapes, until it was all but impossible to see anything but the underside of the Swarm’s hulls, hanging heavily in the stratosphere above. A hundred thousand ships, each one made of its own perfect design.
Now, the Swarm had come.