The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWELVE

Mune'stahr and Pylott watched mesmerized even as they darted for the cover of a nearby vaulted masonry arch covering the entrance promenade of a nearby merchant galleria.

The ominous thunderhead drew ever closer, covering the distance from the horizon to the city's borders with surprising swiftness, until it rotated slowly overhead, like a nightmarish giant pinwheel. Anyone staring upward could see the spiraling striations in the cloudbank begin to shift and jerk, filling in with sizzling lines of eye-searing, interior cloud-locked lightning. For only a few moments more, the eerie humming noise persisted with no change in modulation or volume. Then it stopped and somehow the silence was more threatening than the sound that had preceded it.

"What is THAT supposed to be?" Mune'stahr wondered aloud, his tone uneasy as he eyed the sky. Pylott, standing next to him, frowned and shook her head, indicating she was as bewildered as he.

Abruptly, there was a brilliant flash of retina-scarring light and the air resounded with a single colossal crack. Then all hell broke loose.

On other Earth atmosphere-similar planets, there occur infrequent weather phenomenon called "microbursts" which are small-scale, but strong, wind systems emanating from single, high-altitude aerial sources, usually thunderstorms, blowing in a straight line downwards to expand in all directions simultaneously. Cool air rapidly descends and accelerates as it approaches the ground, and as it does, the cool air fans out in all directions. This divergence of the wind creates the signature of the microburst, which is the low-level, horizontal wind shear caused by its gust front. The effect is like a supersonic shockwave generated by an explosion. The wind generated by such bursts is non-tornadic in that it does not rotate and the microburst can be either wet or dry in nature, creating or having liquid precipitation or not. Microburst events go through three stages, those being the downburst, the outburst and the cushion stage. The phenomenon can generate enough force to uproot trees, toss around small automobiles and flatten small, non-reinforced buildings.

On Teshiwahur, what Koombari City suddenly experienced was a thermo-explosive microburst. It was a supersonic, electrical-based downburst accompanied by flames. It blanketed an area of thirty-four square city blocks in fiery fury, horrifying some twenty-four thousand people. The wind roared. Everything standing vertically within the microburst's outburst zone not knocked over or flattened by the extreme winds, furiously erupted into fiery conflagration. Moreover, the ionic static charge within the winds created jagged electric arcs, localized heat lightning, that zapped towards and over every nearby exposed metal surface.

A pair of aging, rusted transport vehicles parked streetside blew up loudly, throwing molten shrapnel in all directions. An outdoor merchant's stall selling clothing sparked into a small inferno as the cloth caught flame. The windows of a nearby eating cafeteria swelled and bowed outward, away from the walls into which they were set, and then erupted into a cascade of flying razor-sharp shrapnel. Fire ran along the lengths of electrical cables strung on utility poles, crossing the street, jumping from antenna to rooftop to balcony to eaves, like a fuse lit to a bomb. A lighted marquee sign above a curio shop ignited and then nearly jumped out from its moorings as it burst into flame, the glass tubes on its facing splitting and shooting hissing geysers of hot steam in the now ash-laden air. An overwhelming scent of burnt copper and vinegar mixed with old alcohol descended on the area. A two-story structure was quickly enwrapped in a swirling curtain of crackling fire and one of its walls collapsed...

It had suddenly become very hard to draw a clean breath. The quality of the air went from bland and non-invigorating to tumultuous and super-heated, tasting of baking stone and metal, like breathing in air spewed from an open furnace.

A trio of young women swathed head-to-ankle in loose cloth robes, running towards an open doorway for cover, screamed as they caught fire, becoming madly jerking, contorting, writhing torches as their flesh bubbled and burned.

A very loud and manic hysteria infected the crowds on the streets outside the spaceport.

And then all the lights on the street and in the nearby buildings, as well as those from inside the Sky Terminal, all blew out spectacularly. Hot sprays of blue-white sparks from shorted electrical mechanisms rained down on everything. The street went dark, under a cloak of billowing smoke, except for the light cast by the conflagration.

"What in the name of sanity is going ON here?" Pylott demanded as she ducked under a surge of searingly hot wind that swept in from the far end of the street where the inferno appeared to rage the fiercest.

"I don't know, I don't know," Mune'stahr reluctantly admitted while his eyes scanned the tumultuous scene. "This is way beyond anything we were told to expect."

A stack of plastic-encased liquid fuel cells near the transit gates to the airfield outside the Terminal suddenly and noisily burst, dramatically ejecting a three-story tall rooster's tail of burning blue vehicular fuel towards the darkened sky.

"Pylott! Is your comm-unit still online? We need to speak with Tactical Scanning's planetside operators. Maybe they can help us get handle on this...," Mune'stahr rasped past a smoke-induced coughing fit.

"I think the storm may have brought down a transmission tower. I'm getting nothing but static," Pylott said. "My helmet visor's optical read-out doesn't show any connection to the wide-area messaging network."

"My helmet's tracking network Ship-to-Shore dispatch audio-feed is down, as well," Mune'stahr groused. "I'm getting nothing."

"This place is a transmission dead zone now. We're on our own, my friend," Pylott said. "And I don't have a good feeling about any of this getting better as the storm passes."

The sounds of pain, fear and chaos abruptly dulled around them, muting as if something had turned down the volume on an audio dial, and then the storm's pervasive mechanical humming noise returned, the mysterious sound vibrating in their skulls and chest cavities.

But the powerful winds emanating from the microburst continued to hammer down on the city, howling, tossing crates of metal, clouds of pulverized masonry, fisftfuls of rent plastic and shattered glass across the embattled landscape. A three acre-wide ton of dry, powdery dust violently whirlpooled some two stories above the street.

"Uhm, Pylott?"

"Yes, Mune'stahr?"

"Look over there, just to the left of center, near the burning wreckage of that transport vehicle," Mune'stahr said. "Any idea what it is I think I'm seeing?"

"What? Oh, oh dear. Not good. Definitely not good."

They saw the silhouettes of a pair of very large, very non-human somethings slowly emerge from the brightest heart of the flames, wide bodies lumbering, huge muscles bunching and contracting under armored reptilian-looking hide against the planet's unfamiliar gravity as they materialized onto the street amid the wreckage...