"Be careful out there... Homeworlders can be a hard bunch to read, especially these days, what with the advent of the Displacement Rip and all," their Downplanet Excursion Leave Officer, a female officer with the rank of Captain named Serap'cela Nix, said as the duo arrived at Annet Galjeshir. Like most Extraplanetary military personnel, she referred to The Wound as the "Displacement Rip", a more technically accurate term for their solar system's unwelcome quantum spatial aberration. "Lately, and on more than one occasion unfortunately, the sight of a Star Legion uniform has sparked violent unrest among the civilian population. It's like they suddenly blame the Emperium's expansion beyond our homeworld's borders for the appearance of the Rip in the sky and for whatever awful, negative effects the Rip has had on the planet. Keep your wits about you."
Crusader-Major Mune'stahr and Crusader-Sergeant Pylott left their sub-orbital landspeeder in the Central Transit Authority's Visitors Garage at Koombari City's Sky Terminal, at the metropolis' southeast perimeter. The Sky Terminal was a seven story-tall building in need of serious repair and general upkeep, a dirty and litter-strewn mess, and the workers, like the parking valets, ticket takers, electricians and janitorial staff were a dull-eyed, over-worked, grizzled group of burnouts who wandered the building's corridors attending to as little as possible without incurring the wrath of their harried supervisors.
A dizzying, ill-tempered, impatient mob of easily two hundred travelers from all parts of the continent milled about the Master Lobby, reading destination boards and scanning map holograms and retrieving luggage and arguing travel rates with local ride-for-pay drivers. The place was a hub of barely controlled chaos. Mune'stahr and Pylott shoved and hustled their way through the anthill of activity with practiced precision. They'd seen dozens of places like this on at least a half dozen different worlds in their travels over the last few orbital heliars. The only thing different about this one was the fact that Koombari City was a place relatively free of fahkirs and beggarmen, which either hinted at a very organized distribution of local wealth or a tyrannical police state.
The duo were suddenly startled by a piercingly loud mechanized wail. They heard the deafening sirens of the Hazard Alert Public Warning System blaring even before they'd reached the street outside.
The siren was a warning to alert the public of an approaching atmospheric event. Since the advent of The Wound, urbanized metropolitan areas had done what they could to quickly address the issue that the suddenly dangerously unstable and violently unpredictable planetary weather posed to the general populace. Those climate changes went far beyond mere high winds or rain storms. The actual underlying physics of normally predictable, but complex, meteorological events had undergone fantastic and frightening mutations. Scientists couldn't tell the public what to expect, only to say that things were bad and getting worse. So when those sirens began their ear-splitting wail, most people dropped whatever they were doing and rapidly scrambled for cover, often not bothering to be very polite or orderly about how they did it.
Mune'stahr and Pylott, who had been briefed their ship's Shore Leave Officer about such things, were startled to see how frenzied the people at and around the Koombari City Sky Terminal immediately became as they slammed into one another or knocked each other down trying to find safety from what was approaching. It presented to them a sad and mean-spirited spectacle that left them with a feeling of disappointment towards the city.
Not that it mattered.
Out on the late evening's uneven horizon, under a sage-colored sky streaked with swirling stripes of aubergine, there was aerial movement as a slate-hued thunderhead cloud swelled in size, propelled by a surging wind. A massive flock of long-necked, bat-winged birds flew noisily ahead of the oncoming stormfront, the flock splitting into two snaking lines that whipsawed across one another and then intertwined in a helix pattern running parallel to the dune covered ground. Sunburst explosions of tangerine-red color periodically erupted, flashing dazzlingly in the shadowy gloom and the air began to vibrate and then quake with the arrival of a growing vibratory thrumming sound.
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...