High on the slopes of Mount Sesayung, she stood, and watched, and waited. A chill wind whispered across the mountainside, sending a shiver of dread down her spine. The wind was trying to tell her something. She knew she wouldn’t like what it had to say.
Another sharp gust buffeted her shining body, stronger and louder than before. This time, she could almost discern the words.
“Look up,” the wind seemed to say.
Her eyes tilted skyward. Something crawled overhead, unheard and unseen, but for the absence of stars in its wake.
Again, a voice on the wind. More than a whisper, now. “Wake up.”
She’d heard that voice before, many times. But never here. Never on Earth.
“Dad?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“Wake up, my daughter,” said Calbert Bitterbee. “He’s coming for you.”
Saskia sat bolt upright. There had been little ambiguity in her dad’s message.
It took only seconds to confirm the danger. On her minimap, red dots were tracking toward the temple’s location, moving too quickly and too directly to be travelling on foot, or in ground vehicles. A quick hop into the pilots’ heads told her everything she needed to know. Helicopters—military-style ones, with two sets of rotor blades stacked on top of each other. Some carried camo-clad soldiers, while others were bristling with guns.
There was something deeply unsettling about these soldiers—other than the fact that they were coming to kill or capture her. They weren’t talking. To anyone. Not each other, and not via radio to anyone outside of their squadron. Without anything she could follow back to its source, she could get no inkling of who had sent them.
They could be the Nepalese Army, or an international task force. But her dream suggested otherwise. “He’s coming for you,” her father had said. She knew of only one potential enemy who could be referred to as ‘he.’
The Ram. Ogunteng. The Infernal Spirit. These men must be his. But could Calbert’s words have been more literal than that? Could her enemy be here in person?
Probably not, she decided. Why would he take that chance, when he had this much firepower to fling at her?
“What is it, Sass?” asked her mum, rising from her bunk, a look of worry spreading across her face.
A bell rang out across the temple grounds, and through her oracle sight, she saw that it was Padhra who had sounded the alarm. She was presumably seeing the same thing Saskia was.
“We’re under attack,” said Saskia. Leaping to her feet, she pulled on her body armour, and dashed out the door.
Ivan was already waiting for her, looking way too calm for someone who was about to enter a combat situation.
Across the hall, Fergus let out a loud, “Feck!” and burst out of his room in his underwear.
“So soon?” said Raji, blinking blearily as he and Dave emerged from their shared room.
“We need to get to the hexapod,” said Saskia. “Something tells me these guys won’t be taking prisoners.” Fergus and Raji looked as if they were about to freak out, so she added, hastily, “It’ll be okay. The hexapod can take a beating. We’ve trained for this.”
“Once,” said Dave. “We’ve had exactly one training session. And that one time, Raji almost blew us up.”
“Hey it’s not my fault she decided to tilt the bugger just as I was firing,” said Raji.
“The hexapod only has seats for three gunners, but four of us have trained for the job,” said Ivan. “For some definitions of training. Who’s going to sit this out?”
Two hands pointed at Raji.
“Fine,” muttered Raji. “I’ll just sit here and sulk, then.”
“You’ll sit in the vault and sulk,” said Saskia. She looked at her mum. “As will you. Minus the sulking, I hope.”
“There’ll be no sulking on my watch,” said Alice. She looked at Raji. “First, we’ll round up the other non-combatants. No-one stays on the surface unless they have a gun in hand.”
“Or an urumi,” said Ivan.
To be fair, Padhra knew her way around a rifle as well, even if she preferred to wield that absurd multi-bladed monstrosity of a weapon.
There were about sixty people in the temple at the moment—considerably more than the twenty or so who had lived here before her arrival. Many of the extras were Yagthumba fighters who would gladly give their lives to defend her.
Today, it might very well come to that.
Saskia was still struggling with the fact that more people might die for her, after all the carnage she’d witnessed on Arbor Mundi. As a multidimensional being, she might survive the death of her human body, in some fashion. These people, however, had only one life—at least, as far as she was aware. It didn’t seem fair that they would throw away their irreplaceable lives to defend her expendable one.
But what could she do? Turn them all away, and just roll over and die when her enemies come knocking? Keep running forever?
No, she needed allies. And that meant accepting that her allies would be in danger. All she could do was try to protect them in turn.
And that was where the hexapod came in.
With a remote command, she ordered the giant bug mech to make its own way to the surface. Meeting up with it on the other side of the temple grounds, they hurriedly loaded the main guns and piled up into the cockpit. Engaging its stealth field, Saskia piloted the hexapod out onto a rocky outcropping. Here, she’d have a good line of sight to the incoming helicopters when they drew close enough.
“Are you sure this stealth field will conceal us from radar and infrared sensors, as well as the visible spectrum?” asked Dave.
“No,” said Saskia. “It probably will though, otherwise what would be the point of it?”
“What if its makers never used those wavelengths?” said Dave.
She stared at him. That was a very good point.
“You had to bring this up now?” said Fergus. “Right when we’re about to enter a life-and-death engagement?”
“Let’s just operate under the assumption that they can’t see us, for now,” said Saskia. “Because the alternative is…”
“We’re fecked?” said Fergus.
“We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it,” said Saskia.
“The bridge into Valhalla,” muttered Fergus.
While this was going on, Saskia kept a sliver of her attention on Padhra and Minganha, who were organising the temple’s defenders, and, together with her mum and Raji, getting everyone else down into the relative safety of the vault. Her mum had the same level of access to the keystone as Saskia herself did, so she could activate the site’s automated defences once everyone was safely inside. Those defences only covered the underground passages and the vault itself, though. Hopefully, their enemies wouldn’t get that far, but if they did, they would be in for a shock. Perhaps literally.
The original control chamber was in a much more precarious position, with few defences remaining between it and the surface. They’d recently discovered another one deeper inside the underground complex, and Saskia had already relocated the keystone there. The new control chamber was less accessible than the original one, but far more secure. Now, she was really glad she’d—
Something was wrong. A purple dot had appeared on her map, moving faster than the choppers, and approaching from a different direction. It had no pilot—at least none whose head she could leap into.
She directed the hexapod’s night-vision sensors toward the new target, zoomed the camera and…there!
It was some kind of winged, windowless aircraft, high up in the sky. Not particularly large or imposing, but a pair of thick, stubby missiles hung beneath the wings like, uh…things she shouldn’t be thinking about in a life-or-death situation.
“Oh shit,” said Dave. “It’s an attack drone.”
“Doesn’t look like ancient alien future-tech, at least,” said Fergus.
“Yeah,” said Dave. “Not a Predator or Reaper drone, either. No idea who made it, but definitely a modern design.”
Through Padhra’s eyes, she watched as an orange-red glow appeared across a vast swathe of the temple grounds, telegraphing an incoming strike.
“We have to shoot it down,” said Saskia. “Like right now.”
“On it,” said Ivan, directing one of their gauss rifles upward.
The hexapod bucked as two shots rang out. Less than a second passed before the drone’s wing tore off, and it dropped into a tailspin, disintegrating as it fell.
Saskia whooped. “Great job—oh no…”
Her elation died as she realised the telegraphed strike had not gone away. The drone must have dropped its payload moments before its destruction. And now…
Padhra dashed inside the temple, bellowing at the other Yagthumba fighters to do likewise.
A muted boom sounded through the thick hull. Their sensors on the temple side whited out. A moment later, the shockwave hit, and the hexapod swayed on its six splayed legs. A huge plume of smoke billowed into the sky behind them.
Padhra picked herself up off the floor, coughing in the thick smoke. Her arms and legs were bloody, but the fact that she could stand was a good sign. Most of the blue dots on the minimap in and around the ground level of the temple—those representing the Yagthumba defenders—had vanished. Others were slowly winking out as they succumbed to their injuries.
Saskia’s mouth felt suddenly dry. She’d known there would probably be casualties, but this…
“Get the survivors down into the vault,” she told her vassal through the oracle comm link. “There aren’t enough defenders left to do much good out here.”
“What about you, Old One?” choked Padhra.
“We’ll…do what we can.”
The helicopters were now in sight range, looking like a swarm of mosquitoes in the sky. She zoomed the sensors in on them so her friends could get a better look.
“Kamovs,” said Ivan. “Attack and transport choppers. They’re Russian-made, but many countries and companies use them.”
Saskia gritted her teeth. “Whoever they are, they probably think they’ll just be cleaning up after the airstrike. Let’s teach them the error of their ways.”
“We have very limited ammo, so make every shot count,” said Ivan. “Set projectile speeds to maximum. That’ll punch through their armour, for sure.”
“This is so fucked up,” said Dave. “It’s like we’re in War of the Worlds, only we’re the Martians.”
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“I’m thinking more District 9,” said Fergus.
“Could we please focus?” said Saskia. “You can debate which movie we’re in later.”
“Shoot the attack choppers first,” said Dave. “If we can take most of them out in a coordinated first strike, before we reveal ourselves, it’ll make our lives a lot easier. Otherwise, those rockets will fuck us up big time.”
“Uh, which are the attack choppers?” asked Fergus.
Dave gave Fergus his patented ‘I’m looking at an idiot’ stare. He used that a lot. “The ones with the big fucking guns and rocket pods.”
“There are five of them,” said Ivan.
“Well we’ll just have to do the best we can, won’t we?” said Dave.
They waited for several agonising minutes while the choppers closed in. Saskia, who had taken double-duty as pilot and gunner, controlled one of the main gun turrets, while each of her friends took one apiece. She and Ivan both had aiming cheats—Ivan’s had his magus abilities, while she had her oracle targetting assistant. Fergus and Dave had no such cheats, but they had proved to be reasonably capable marksmen during their practice session, thanks, in part, to the first-person shooter games they played. Saskia could also help them adjust their aim based on what her oracle senses were telling her, but it was hard to keep track of more than one trajectory.
“You’d think a giant fucking robot would come with auto-aiming,” grumbled Dave.
“Yeah, that sounds like a great idea,” said Fergus. “Give machines the ability to shoot people without any human intervention. Because that worked out so well in every sci-fi movie ever.”
“Auto-aiming doesn’t mean there can’t be humans pulling the trigger,” said Dave. “It just means we wouldn’t have to rely on shitty human hand-eye coordination to hit anything.”
She didn’t bother to mention that the hexapod actually did have an auto-targetting option. The problem was that their bullets were hand-forged, and so wonky that their trajectories were impossible to predict without…well, magic. Until they improved their process or got hold of a modern manufacturer who could make ammo to their specifications without raising any alarm bells, the auto-aiming system would be worse than useless. Now wasn’t the time to be having this discussion, though.
“Concentrate, guys,” she said. “You still have your targets?” After receiving confirmation, she began the countdown. “On my mark. Three…two…one…”
The hexapod bucked, lifting up onto two legs as the simultaneous shots almost knocked it over. Three hypersonic projectiles leapt toward the incoming aircraft. An instant later, two of the attack helicopters crumpled and fell from the sky in expanding clouds of debris. A third attack chopper spun wildly in the air and smashed into one of the transports, bringing both of them down in a spectacular fireball.
Saskia felt sick. How many people had they just killed?
“Feck!” shouted Fergus. “I think my gun’s jammed!”
“We still got four of them,” said Ivan. “Not the right four, but it’ll do.”
Unfortunately, the two surviving attack helicopters had already deduced their location, and a swarm of rockets were heading their way. With the stealth field up, their enemies presumably couldn’t get a lock on the hexapod, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t fire at where they thought it would be. If they carpeted the area in explosions, accuracy wouldn’t matter.
Time to move.
Saskia sent the hexapod charging back toward the burning wreckage of the temple as the ridgetop exploded behind them. The six-legged tank staggered, but continued on its path.
Beneath the shroud of billowing smoke, their sensors couldn’t see much, but it also concealed them from the sight of the enemy pilots. Not even the telltale ripple in the air would be visible now. And unlike her opponents, she still had her oracle interface to tell her where the helicopters were.
She and Ivan fired off another round each. Her friend was firing blind, but somehow his magic still allowed his shot to find its mark. The remaining attack helicopters became clouds of debris, raining down across the treetops.
Meanwhile, a pair of transport choppers were landing in Tengsanpalem, while several others had circled around to offload soldiers above the temple. They were out of her line of sight now, so there would be no shooting them down until it was already too late.
A quick hop into the head of one of the villagers revealed that the soldiers in Tengsanpalem had shot at least two men, and they were rounding up the rest, beating them with butts of their rifles when they offered any resistance.
Crap, this was bad. The hexapod couldn’t defend both the village and the temple at the same time, and their enemies knew it.
“We’re going to Tensanpalem,” she announced, as she sent the hexapod bounding down the slope. “At the speed this thing moves, we can be there in minutes. If the attackers get to the temple before we do, the vault defences should be able to hold them off for a little while.”
“But Raji and your mum…” said Fergus.
“I know!” she said. “It’s a risk, okay? But the villagers can’t defend themselves against these guys. They have, what, a couple of rifles? If we don’t help them, it’ll be a slaughter.”
While they made the journey, she informed Padhra and Minganha of the situation over the oracle link.
“Glory to you, Old One,” said the priestess. “It is the right decision. The Old Mother”—that was what they called Alice Wendle, much to her dismay—“has prepared the vault defences.”
“We will hold off the invaders until your return,” added Padhra.
Nearing their destination, they stopped briefly while Ivan cleared Fergus’s jammed gauss rifle, then crept forward as stealthily as a fifty tonne hunk of metal could creep.
The scene that awaited them in Tengsanpalem was not unexpected, but it was chilling. Camo-clad soldiers patrolled the area. Bloody bodies lay in the dirt—more than had been here when first she looked. The survivors had been herded into several of the larger buildings. One of the men was splashing oil across walls and onto thatched roofs. Another rigged what looked like explosives under a floorboard.
“So what do we do about them?” asked Fergus. “As soon as we start shooting, they start killing hostages. And we don’t have much ammo, in any case.”
“Let me handle them,” said Ivan. Saskia felt essence shifting through the air. “I think…we should be good to go now.”
“What are you doing?” asked Saskia.
“You’ll see, assuming it works,” said Ivan. Sweat poured from his brow.
“If you say so,” said Saskia. “Be careful not to fire toward the buildings where the villagers are being held. For the ones around the perimeter…set phasors to disintegrate.”
“Aye, aye, cap’n,” said Fergus.
On her mark, several squads of soldiers were abruptly swallowed up in billowing clouds of dirt and debris. Only craters and smoke and red smears remained in the spots where they’d been standing.
Some of the surviving soldiers aimed rifles and carbines and rocket launchers at the hexapod, while others dashed to the buildings where the villagers were being held. Bullets ricocheted off the ancient machine’s armour. Far fewer than she expected, though. Men were clearing their jammed weapons, only to find them jammed again the moment they tried to fire. One of them shot himself in the foot, and fell to the ground, clutching the wound. A rocket fell out of a launch tube and exploded, killing three men in an instant.
Then the hexapod was upon them, flailing its limbs, stomping and kicking, sending battered bodies tumbling through the air.
Within a minute, only one of the hostage-takers was still alive, and he was in a bad way, having had his legs crushed beneath tonnes of metal. Ivan stepped out of the hexapod, snatched up the man’s carbine, and pointed it at his head. “Who sent you?” he shouted.
The man looked at Ivan with eyes so dead he gave Ruhildi’s zombies a run for their money. Then his hand darted out and pressed Ivan’s finger down on the trigger.
Saskia flinched as the gun went off, splattering red and purple gore across the cold earth.
Ivan swore, and threw the carbine aside. Then, apparently thinking better of it, he picked it back up. He unclipped an ammo belt from the dead man’s body and put it around his own waist.
Following Ivan’s example, the rest of them hopped out to loot some weapons and ammo from the fallen soldiers.
While they did this, the rescued villagers crowded around them. Their praise and gratitude were even more effusive than usual today.
“Back off, please,” she told several of the villagers who were getting too handsy with her. “The temple is still in danger. We have to get back there without delay.”
“We will go with you!” offered a man with a dark bruise spreading across his face. “We will help fight the invaders!”
A few of the other men stepped up behind him, murmuring their eagerness to join the battle as well.
“The hexapod is almost out of ammo,” said Ivan. “And it won’t be able to enter the smaller tunnels, if our enemies have gotten that far. We may need their help.”
Saskia pointed at her carbine. “Can you shoot these?”
The man nodded. “I have shot wolves before.”
Some of the others piped up with similar deeds of hunting valour. Never mind that the rifles they had used were unlikely to handle the same as these military-style weapons.
“Okay, we can fit several of you in the hexapod’s storage bay. The rest will have to follow on foot—but we won’t be waiting for you. Grab body armour and weapons from the fallen soldiers, and be quick about it.”
A few minutes later, they were carrying several kevlar-clad villagers back up the slope to the temple. Saskia pushed the ancient machine to its limits, but every second that passed seemed like another second too late.
On her map, swarms of red dots had arrived at the temple grounds. The attackers had located the stairs down to the upper control chamber, and had blown open the entrance to the vault. In the passages beyond, their progress was slowing, presumably thanks to the automated defences her mum had enabled. They weren’t going to be held back for long.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Another team had found the doors leading to the ramp straight down into the bowels of the vault—the one used by the hexapod. How they’d found that entrance, she had no idea. It was very well hidden. Saskia could only watch in dismay as they blasted a hole in the cliff face, and the metal doors behind it, and swarmed down the ramp. From there, they could bypass most of the defences and just waltz straight down to the hangar, where her mum and Raji and Padhra and Minganha and everyone else waited.
With enemies coming at them from both sides, there was no way out.
“We’re nearly there!” Saskia told Padhra and Minganha through the oracle comm link. “Just…try to hold out for another minute or two.”
Arriving at the temple grounds, Saskia and her friends made short work of most of the soldiers waiting outside. They left the villagers to deal with the rest, and charged down the ramp.
In the time it took her to reach the halfway point, the assault force had already reached the bottom, where Padhra stood guard with a handful of other Yagthumba fighters. To make matters worse, the second enemy force had almost breached the last of the defences on the other side, taking only light casualties in the process.
Gunfire erupted in the hangar below. The Yagthumba’s hunting rifles and melee weapons were no match for military-issue assault rifles, grenades and body armour. The attackers outnumbered them two-to-one, held the high ground, and moved like a well-oiled machine, always keeping the pressure on as they advanced. The Yagthumba could hunker behind barricades, whereas their opponents had little natural cover, but that hardly mattered, given the barrage of fire coming their way.
Minganha knelt on the floor by the firing line, her forehead crinkled in concentration. Saskia immediately banished her oracle interface and withdrew her view from Minganha’s eyes, though she continued to watch through Padhra’s. Oracle magic interfered with a magus’s abilities, but only while it was being actively projected into her vassal’s mind. The more she could see, the less she could change. Quantum mechanics was weird like that.
As Saskia’s vassal, Minganha now had almost as much magical strength as Ivan. It looked as if her efforts were paying off. The enemy fire faltered as most of their weapons jammed simultaneously.
Then Minganha fell back, clutching her shoulder, where a bullet had grazed it. One of the Yagthumba fighters pulled her away, despite her protests, dragging her through a door. To her surprise, she saw that it was Mig, Amlya’s husband. Returning her oracle sight to her vassal’s head, Saskia watched as Mig dragged Minganha down a tunnel and into the lower control chamber, where Alice Wendle sat with Raji and the other non-combatants.
Her mum let go of the keystone with a sigh. She looked at Minganha. Her lips curled back in a snarl. Then she drew a pistol from beneath her overcoat, cocked it, and dashed outside.
What the frock are you doing, Mum!?
Things were getting desperate out in the hangar. Reaching the bullet-ridden remains of the barricades, the soldiers shoved them aside, stepping over a pile of bodies…
And were met by a whirling storm of steel and blood. Screaming, Padhra tore into them; whip-blades flailing around her as she spun about. The walls turned red. Severed limbs flew. Men shouted and fired into the darkness.
And Padhra fell to the ground, clutching at a bloody hole in her chest.
One of the mirrors in Saskia’s oracle interface shattered. Where moments earlier an image of Padhra’s stern face had been gazing back at her, now there was broken glass clinging to an empty frame, and a hazy silhouette, receding into the distance, as if standing on the trailing carriage of a departing train.
“Fuck!” she whispered.
Her Lingya bodyguard-turned-vassal had been a constant, reassuring presence in her life since the day they met. There were none more steadfast or selfless than Padhra. Saskia couldn’t ask for a more loyal friend.
And now, in a single moment, her friend had been ripped away. In her place, a yawning, hollow void.
Before she even knew what was happening, Saskia was no longer in the hexapod; no longer herself. She became a writhing storm of impossible shapes and twisting tendrils, snatching up shrieking men, pulling them apart and hurling them into walls. Not against walls. Into them—entombing their bodies in solid stone.
Then she was standing naked on the cold stone, surrounded by…
Oh god.
Saskia felt bile rising in her throat. This was too much. Why did this keep happening!?
She could remember everything now. Everything that had happened over the months in Arbor Mundi since her first…departure, right up until the moment the rift opened up in Wengarlen.
Oh what the frock!? There were two Saskias!?
Standing in the doorway, still holding her loaded pistol, her mum was staring at her, open mouthed. Mig stood behind her with an identical expression.
Saskia cleared her throat and tried to speak. And in that moment, the second assault team burst out into the hangar, raised their weapons and…
Two shots rang out. One of the soldiers fell back, clutching his throat. Alice Wendle stalked toward them, screaming words that Saskia had never, ever imagined coming from her mother’s lips.
The soldiers reacted instantly, dropping into prone positions and returning fire. Bullets cracked the wall behind her mum, missing her by a hair’s breadth. Mig fell back, blood blossoming from his tunic. Saskia, jolted out of her daze, also fell to the ground.
More gunfire. Coming from behind, this time. It was Ivan, Fergus and Dave, dashing down the ramp. Ivan fired without aiming, yet still he managed to hit one of the prone soldiers.
Abruptly, her friends skidded to a halt. Their eyes went wide, and they turned their guns toward her.
“Get back, Sass!” Fergus’s voice was full of panic.
Saskia glanced about in confusion as a dozen blood-covered figures rose to their feet around her. A few were clad in kevlar armour. The rest wore the simple garb of the Yagthumba. And in their midst stood Padhra, looking like a creature out of nightmare. Something moved inside the gaping, bloody hole in her chest. Tendrils of amber writhed beneath her skin.
As one, they turned to the soldiers emerging from the passage across the hangar—and charged.
The men turned their weapons on the tide of the dead, but it didn’t even slow them down. One of their own fallen rose up in their midst, growling and swinging his carbine like a club. They ducked back into the tunnel, with their fallen enemies and comrades in close pursuit. Screams emerged from the tunnel beyond.
When it was over, Padhra emerged from the tunnel, and slowly, tentatively stepped closer. She opened her mouth to speak, but only a gurgling, choking sound came out. She coughed, and turned, and spat blood, and tried again.
“Sashki? Great drackens, I feel…fair odd.”
Saskia swallowed. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes. “Ruhildi? Is that really you?”
Padhra—or the creature who now occupied her body—was silent for a long moment, as if weighing her answer. “Aye,” she said finally. “Methinks ’tis me.”