“Shutdown complete. Wormhole should dissipate in…”

Alice’s voice cut off mid-sentence.

“PVNC to PVN one. Come in PVN one. What’s going on, Alice?” Susan’s voice grew less and less calm with each attempt to raise Alice.

“PVN command, this is Observation Mars.” The call came on a different frequency. The one used by the observation post in Mars orbit.

“Not now, Mars. I’ve lost contact with PVN one.”

“That’s why I’m calling, Major. PVN one isn’t there.”

“What do you mean she’s not there?”

“She got sucked into the wormhole just before it vanished.”

“That shouldn’t be possible. The wormhole should be completely passive unless something approaches its even horizon. And even if she did go through the wormhole, the quantum relay should still work.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Major. It’s also not the only problem we have.”

“What now?”

“Something came out of the wormhole when PVN one went in.”

“What?”

“Something came out. It was all blurry on the ‘scopes, so we can’t tell what it was, but we could see two distinct objects coming out, and then both of them just vanished.”

“That can’t be good. Try to locate and identify whatever it was, Mars.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Mars out.”

“People’s Victory Network Command out.”

Major Susan Pierson, commander of the People’s Victory Network and the mind behind the wormhole generator, turned back to her console, sifting desperately through the data from the last few seconds of the test activation in order to find out what happened to the ship and pilot.

Or, at least, attempted to.

“Major Pierson?” This interruption didn’t come from across the solar system, but rather from across the room.

“Is this urgent, Captain?”

“I’ve got pawns on the radar, Major!” answered Captain Peter Vale, who was in charge of the defense of PVNC.

“We’ve got pawns within range of the base at least once a month, Peter. They can’t locate us unless we open the access tunnels. Keep monitoring them. I have to figure out what happened to PVN-01.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“That’s just it, ma’am. This isn’t a random search. They’re headed straight for the north entrance.”

“Very well, Captain. Put the Dwarves on alert, but keep the door closed until we know for sure that this isn’t just a coincidence.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Susan barely had time to locate the point in her data where it started to diverge from her projections when Peter interrupted her again, sounding far less calm than before.

“Major, all Dwarves except Dwarf six are disassembled for maintenance!”

“WHAT? Procedure for Dwarf maintenance is that only one can be down from alertness at any given time!”

“I know, Major. The maintenance orders came signed with both of our signatures, and I know for a fact I didn’t authorize this!”

“Neither did I. Is there anyone who could access our consoles?”

“I can’t think of anyone, ma’am. The only one who has the access codes is…”

“…Edmund!”

Two sets of eyes turned towards the third console in the command center, and the chief communications officer sitting behind it.

“Took you idiots long enough,” sneered Leftenant Edmund Norton, soon-to-be-former chief communications officer for PVN-Command.

“What did you do, Edmund?”

“Not much, Major. I just sent down maintenance orders for the Dwarves.”

“How do the Pawns know where we are? Did you give that away too?”

“Oh no. That wasn’t me. I mean, I would’ve, but the Queen already knew where you were. She knew it before you even built this facility.”

“Why, Edmund? I thought you were one of us.”

“Because it was hopeless!” Edmund almost shouted. “It had always been hopeless! The only reason that your puny rebellion hadn’t been crashed before was that the Queen needed you to open that rabbit hole. And now that you did, your usefulness is over.”

“That’s enough!” Peter interjected. “Lock him in his room, and make sure he can’t communicate with anyone!”

The guards Peter paged to the command center while Edmund was talking grabbed the traitor and marched him out of the room.

“What do we have, Peter?” Susan asked wearily.

“One operational Dwarf. One battalion of infantry, including an anti-chess platoon.”

“How long to reassemble the rest of the Dwarves?”

“Half an hour, give or take. And the Pawns will be on us in ten minutes.”

By now, the remote cameras could pick up the approaching Pawns. The ten meter tall war machines looked like white marble statues depicting medieval foot soldiers. Each of the eight Pawns was armed with a huge pike, which Susan knew was capable of launching rays of freezing cold. And each one was far harder to harm than the 21st century tanks that failed to stop them five hundred years ago, when the White Witch Queen first appeared on Earth.

“It’s not enough,” Susan sighed. “Even without other Chess Pieces, we need all ten dwarves to have a chance at fighting them off.”

“What are your orders, Major?” Peter asked quietly.

“Send out everything we have. Try to stall for as long as possible. And tell the mechanics to get the Dwarves up and running in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

***

First Sergeant Roger “Rogin” Ingram, pilot of PVNC Dwarf six, was not what anyone would call sane. You needed to be at least a little unhinged to climb on top of a nuclear powered mechanical monstrosity in order to fight against what the best scientists on Earth could only describe as “Bullshit magic golem thingies”.

At least, in Rogin’s opinion, a Dwarf was more metal than those bullshit magical golem thingies. Standing on two tungsten legs, each one wider than Rogin himself, the Dwarf was twelve meters tall, top heavy due to the nuclear reactor located in its torso, and armed with the best weapons PVNC could find, make or steal.

Dwarf six, for example, had an old 20th century TOW launcher, a brand new gamma ray laser cannon, and a frostpike looted from a Pawn Rogin took down half a year ago.

It couldn’t quite fight a Pawn toe to toe, but Rogin was fairly confident in his ability to fight the Chess Pieces with some reliable backup.

Unfortunately, that backup would be very late to the party, being hastily reassembled in the bays next to his.

Not that Rogin let that stop him from climbing into his Dwarf and going out to fight eight of the Kasparov-damned things, with nothing more than a battalion of infantry as backup.