The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Five

"Casualties?"

Pnoom-Aig was slow in answering, as if she were having a personal issue emotionally processing the data she was collecting. "Over one hundred sixty human military fatalities. I can only estimate the number of soldiers and mercenaries wounded, but the data indicates the number is nearly twice that of fatalities."

No one on the jetellin's bridge spoke for a few moments. They were neither adherents nor apologists for Kolag Y'phree's forces, but they weren't immune to feelings of sorrow and regret for the carnage enacted against his army.

"There are no less than three banks of land-based anti-aircraft cannon targeting and firing on the aerial swarm," Pnoom-Aig continued. "Imaging telemetry shows localized particle beam anti-personnel fire directed at the alien giant. It's not having much effect, so far as I can tell. His epidermal armor is highly resistant to coherent irradiated light and directed-stream electromagnetic weapons streams. His skin, if indeed it is skin, isn't even heating up. This Grimmurmanthe creature may be the most powerful of The Arbiters we've yet encountered."

"The explosions from those airburst bombs aren't exactly helping with our flight stability," Durkka-jan groused as he struggled with the jetellin's flight controls. "And all the optical flashes are occluding air-to-surface visibility. Aural projection-scan object-detection isn't proving all that reliable due to the scans being warped by the density of the electromagnetic force-shield partially protecting the metro zones."

"That won't be a problem. I have all the traffic corridors memorized. I can get you in," Akkitus said as the jetellin was suddenly rocked by the craft's proximity to a percussive wave. "Just keep us out of the path of those swarms of air-beasts..."

"How the hell are those things even flying?" Durkka-jan queried past a breathy grunt as he manhandled the flight controls. "They don't have wings or sails and I don't see any siphon-orifices providing them propulsion. So far as I can see they don't even have faces. And that shell of thick, bump-covered body armor on them doesn't look especially light..."

From the rear of the bridge-pilothouse, Yllvanea Razora's voice emerged from next to a cluttered pile of electronic components where she was working on restoring the jetellin's external proximity probe database under direction from Pnoom-Aig. "Teuthidapods. The air-beasts are an ancient, supposedly extinct species of mollusk, intelligent, neurologically-advanced, shelled invertebrates, that evolved multiple, large bladders filled with lighter-than-air gas. The creatures used to live in metaheuristic swarm-colonies among the clouds. But they're supposed to have died out over fifteen thousand orbital solar heliars ago."

"Well, if they're extinct, then how is it they're flying around all over the city killing people?"

"Obviously this 'Grimmurmanthe' demon has the ability to pull them from out of their point of SpaceTime Modal-Origin at will. He's reaching into the Past to retrieve these predators and transplant them into the Present."

Durkka-jan was clearly astonished by the width and depth of the Red Archivist's wealth of obscure knowledge. "What did you say? He's reaching across TIME to collect a couple giant handfuls of flying killer beasts and it should be 'obvious'? And what is Metaheuristic?"

Yllvanea sighed, rolling her eyes as she grappled impatiently with a banded collection of multi-colored insulated wires, and said, "A high-level methodology to generate, find or select procedures that may provide a sufficiently good solution to an optimization problem. These beasts are a kind of swarm intelligence. Their collective organizational behavior is decentralized, guided and impacted by the sensory information and biological needs of their collective and subject to the influence and direction of external stimulii. Anyway, that's how they behaved historically. I suspect, though, that The Arbiter has definitely hijacked their natural proclivities to better serve his own agendas."