Akkitus Orthwaine, standing at the jetellin's piloting console next to brutish Durkka-jan, marveled at the wild beauty of the horizon-obscuring bank of rolling fog that rapidly approached from the distant far northern side of The City. The fog bank was driven against the hot breezes that strengthened as the planet's dual suns began to set by an uneasy breach in gravitational force. That breach was a reminder that, out in space, the rift known as The Wound had left its mark on the landscape of The Withered Land. Disarray, upheaval and a cancerous entropic anarchy controlled the planet despite the best efforts of the Hegemonic Emperium's scientists to control the planet's slow atmospheric collapse. The fog reminded him of an exhalation of ash-laden smoke from a monstrous dragon's open mouth.
The paradox of how strange it was that something so close to poetry could bubble up from the depths of a machine-man's mind escaped him. His thoughts were focused on other things... Like how well the jetellin would survive the oncoming savage turbulence brought on by Grimmurmanthe's assault against Niyaddour.
The khaki-colored higher altitudes were already thundering, vibrating with the release of alien energies and the violent passage of techno-organic, robotized weaponry running strafing patterns.
Though he was better experienced with piloting the craft, Akkitus had assumed a more supportive role allowing Durkka-jan to guide the massive airship along the prescribed approach-corridor through Niyaddourian airspace. Akkitus remained as navigational primary, taking over for the airship's failing directional nav-computer, damaged as it had been by the buffeting and the pounding the vessel had taken over Peravendath during the cataclysmic storm. During his reign, the warlord Kolag Y'phree had installed civil air defenses that were tied in with air traffic patterns. As aerial vessels entered The City's air space, any incoming aircraft not conforming to navigational expectations would trigger the targeted launch of airburst cluster bombs to bring down what The City's computer-networked defenses saw as an "intruder". As a forcibly-conscripted member of the Warlord's urban air defenses force, Akkitus knew the codes for the proper navigational approach vectors and could input the information, fine-tuning the directional guidance of Durkka-jan's steerage.
"I've got thirty-eight amoebic air-beasts on a portwards banking approach over The City's southeastern perimeter, coming in fast from an altitude of 0.75 aeronautical leagues, flying into heavy particle beam-discharge cannon fire," Pnoom-Aig suddenly blurted from behind her surface-scan monitoring console. "And there's another twenty-five, at an altitude of 0.5 aeronautical leagues, coming in from starboard, moving at 30-degrees from horizontal towards the city's municipal center. We need to be careful not to cross their path. Their tentacles harbor an incendiary, corrosive gel powerful enough to liquefy the unarmored plates in our outer hull. The air-beasts appear to be relatively immune to the particle beam discharges and they're increasing their airspeed as they cross over the battlement walls. They get hit and the impact slows them down, but the beam impacts aren't doing them any lasting damage nor does the surface-to-air weaponry at all disorient them. I'm thinking the beasts are not independent units, but are instead a swarm controlled by The Arbiter through a select wing-leader."
"That swarm of flying, tentacled globs unleashed against The City and its defenders... they ignite and disintegrate any organic being they touch. Are they his primary weapon? Or are they a preferred way for this alien devil to enact attacks against multiple victims?"
"I have no way of answering that," Pnoom-Aig reluctantly answered.
"The Arbiter, how is it or he fairing against Kolag Y'phree's military?" Durkka-jan asked tensely.
"Quite well, unfortunately. Their numbers are definitely slowing down his advance, he's immensely strong but he cannot fight everyone all at once, however the Warlord's field ordnance is mostly ineffective," the synthetic woman responded. "I cannot see nor predict whether or not there will be any cumulative effect from Kolag Y'phree's field forces that will eventually impede the creature's progress."
"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."
"Oh, is that what you suspect?" Durrka-jan retorted. "So alright then, how exactly is that a help here?"
Pnoom-Aig took over the exchange from that point. "The Archivist is pointing out the fact that, although the Arbiter is clearly acting as the central command for the entirety of the predator-swarm, the swarm still retain access to their native, primitive collective intelligence. That means they can possibly be distracted and temporarily redirected away from the targets Grimmurmanthe has selected for them. We don't have to engage them in a generally fruitless and interminable firefight. But we can provide them with more interesting targets than the Warlord's army and the civilian population of Niyaddour and briefly override the Arbiter's commands, creating chaos, weakening his assault on The City."
"So why in Nine Hells didn't she just say that?" the former Battle-Captain of the Aerieakon darkly grumbled.
In the meantime, even as he fed Durkka-jan coordinates to get the vessel through the complex protective sky-shield over the metropolis, Akkitus Orthwaine established and secured a tenuous communication link with the group's combat team. They had disembarked from the jetellin to be dispatched along the topmost fortification battlements of Niyaddour's towering defensive perimeter.
The Combat Away Team were messaging the airship's bridge using short-range audio-frequency harmonics transmitted along a laser-tether carried by Vandessha'Jai. The laser light acted as a directed carrier wave that provided positioning telemetry along with electromagnetically-conducted, encrypted voice-data communication. Of course, the main problems with that mode of transmission were its limiting the team's transmissions to line-of-sight locations and it was subject to being interrupted or blocked altogether by physical structures. The arrangement was the best they could do, though, considering their technological shortfalls and the hazardous circumstances in which they found themselves.
The jetellin abruptly bucked, dipping from the back end low enough to bring the ship's nose up at nearly forty degrees vertical, and the interior resounded with a deafening metal squeal as the outer hull shuddered. They all stumbled as the ship's forward momentum was unexpectedly arrested and the engines began to complain in a metallic grinding noise that vibrated the deck flooring. The ship and its occupants were encountering a frightful external force that felt nothing like the assault of any known particle beam or percussive payload weaponry.
Something very, very large had grabbed the vessel in its taloned claws...
"I don't understand. This is just not possible," Durkka-jan whispered as his eyes locked onto the image from the vessel's external closed-circuit camera monitors. "This can't be. That can't possibly exist..."
Pnoom-Aig saw it, too, prompting her to softly utter a single, shocked word. "Incredible."
One look at the control console's screen made it very apparent that the amoebic, invertebrate Teuthidapods weren't the only extinct creatures Grimmurmanthe could pluck from another SpaceTime period to serve his demonic will.
Its leathery flesh was in tatters that fluttered in the winds as it flew and a ghostly blue-white light burned from what looked to be a caged star caught inside its massive rib cage. The thing, a bat-winged, half-avian, half-crocodilian creature trailing a long, flowing mane of reddish-orange hair from its eel-like neck, roared from a long, fang-filled maw large enough to swallow half a dozen men. It was, in most ways, an animated cadaver, dead flesh made animate. The aft end of the jetellin was tightly clasped in two of its four cattle-sized claws.
Durkka-jan recalled having seen a drawing of one of these beasts before in the pages of an old scholarly text during his brief time at Instructional Academy... It was a Rapturaenadex, a ferocious flying raptor with a twenty-three meter wingspan.
"Rapturaenadex," Yllvanea Razor intoned breathlessly, her eyes bright with the fever of a growing hysteria. "The fabled 'Serpent of Venohmarya'."
It, and every species like it, had gone extinct nine thousand solar orbital heliars in Teshiwahur's prehistoric past, a period of time equal to that of ten thousand, seven hundred and seventy five years on distant planet Earth. Time enough for the predatory creature's bones to bleach and dry in the glare from Teshiwahur's dual suns. Time enough for the beast to be interred by Teshiwahur's mountainous dunes of scorching sand. Time enough for it to become a mythic symbol of murderous horror.
Time. A doorway through which Grimmurmanthe fiendishly snatched and enslaved the dead brutes it used as weapons.
"The cannons, we can't position them to hit the beast --- it's right over us in the blind space over the main structure's stern. We'll need to remove the emitters!" Akkitus Orthwaine decided, thinking aloud, as he rose and launched himself into a sprint towards the bridge's elevator. His purpose was to race the length of the ship to the vessel's artillery battery. "If we detach the armaments from their anchor cradles, we can remove the particle emitters! Then we can target the thing with cannon fire!"
* * *
The cloaked man's front kick hit the man high in the chest and knocked him tumbling head over heels down the stone steps, his arms and legs flopping about at crazy angles, his weapon falling from his grasp. Even as one man fell victim to the steep fall down the stairwell built into the side of the battlement's inner wall, another sentry leapt out and opened up with a trio of ion bursts from his handheld ion las-gun, the coherent light bursts sizzling just past the left side of the cloaked man's torso to burn smoking holes in the wall behind him. The cloaked man ducked, rolled, and came up in a crouch, his left hand lashing out. A savage backhand strike caught the pistol-wielder under his helmet's chin strap, smashing into the man's throat and crushing his windpipe. The knife-hand karate strike hit the man with force enough to clothesline him and his booted feet flew into the air as he dropped heavily onto his back. The sentry tried to rise, but the cloaked man kicked him in the face, shattering the visor on the man's helmet as his head snapped back.
The Traveler in Red stopped fighting only long enough to wipe a thick smear of warm blood off from his sword blade before moving on to the last attacker in the small group. From his wide-legged, low stance as he wielded his machete-like chainblaze blade, Wilder could tell that man was a more experienced in-fighter than his compatriots. The two of them danced around in a tight circle for a moment, sizing each other up as they feinted, snapping off quick attack-lunges at one another, and then Wilder dropped down onto one knee and spun, whipping out with one long arm and flicking the forward tip of his sword out at the man's lower abdomen. The trooper stumbled backwards awkwardly in an attempt to avoid being disemboweled by the blade, the threat of his chainblaze blade eliminated as he staggered, unintentionally pointing it up at the sky as he fought for his balance. As the fortress sentry tottered clumsily, the Traveler then leapt up to his full height, moving forwards, and flipped his own sword blade horizontally in a slashing motion. The man screamed as his intestines exploded from out from the half-meter wide slit under his navel.
The Combat Away team would have had an easier time of it, had the shock-troop sentry assigned to the flanking tower's outer bailey watch house not decided to remain at his post past his appointed schedule. The battlement's open air parapet walk between turrets would have been empty and Adam Wilder and his companions would have been able to traverse the wall to the entrance to the inner bailey, behind the gatehouse, and then make their way down to the expansive courtyard plaza that opened to The City proper. Once there, they would have stayed to the shadowy backstreets, silent and unseen, until they made their way into Kolag Y'phree's command center. They would have been able to get inside the city-fortress without raising any alarms. That had been the plan. But that one sentry's change in his watch shift brutally derailed that strategy.
And so the Traveler in Red had been forced to kill a five man team of Kolag Y'phree's mercenary sentries.
Ryonne, Lumynn and Vandessha'Jai silently jogged past Wilder and the fallen mercenary soldiers, their sense alert for more attackers as they moved onward to resume the team's original infiltration plan. As they expertly and stealthily penetrated further in towards the courtyard, Wilder noticed Rae'vynn Wyyng standing over the bodies of a pair of men she'd been forced to take down, her exotic and deadly fist daggers dripping gore. He nodded wordlessly to her. She returned the nod. Whatever differences and enmities there yet remained between them had been set aside in favor of a more pragmatic and emotionless determination to see their mission through. On the battlefield, there was no room for personal vendettas between team members.
If they survived, they'd settle their accounts later. And that was beginning to look like an awfully big 'if'.
The shock-troop sentry had managed to trigger the fortification's First Level Breach Alert from inside his watch house before he'd been put down.
Descending the last landing of the stairwell, Ryonne encountered another pair of armored guards, each carrying a collapsible, high-voltage electro-pike. On seeing her and the rest of her team, the merc sentries activated their weapons and charged forward, working as together with practiced precision, one man horizontally swinging his pike high while the other swept low in the opposing direction, seeking to trap her inside their deadly arcs, and the electro-pikes were fully extended. Ryonne leapt up from off the cobbled stone landing to land, her legs scissored, atop the broad shoulders of her closest assailant. She had him by his throat, her strong thighs squeezing, suffocating him, and using her body weight to wrest control his balance and attack direction from him. The other guardsman slashed recklessly at her with his pike, abandoning all attempt at keeping his compatriot from harm, and Ryonne parried his attack with her bone-pommeled broadsword, once twice, three times. The man on whose shoulders she sat dropped down to one knee suddenly, succumbing to a lack of oxygen, and the movement threw her slightly off-balance, but she recovered with an acrobatic shoulder roll that ended in a jump-kick that deflected the staff behind the electro-pike's end-mounted conductor bulb. Resetting her stance, Ryonne slashed up from the ground at a diagonal to her attacker's torso and the man's protective chest-plate trauma armor ruptured from waist to shoulder. He staggered, falling back. She lunged and stabbed forward, impaling him. The second sentry tried to raise up from the ground, but the blind, albino woman-warrior had already completed a 270-degree spin that put her sword's razor-honed edge at the trooper's throat. His head literally flew from off his shoulders, trailing a thick arc of spurting blood.
In the meantime, Lumynn had leapt from off the stair's landing and was racing across the west end of the courtyard's forwardmost series of arches, set parallel to a glass enclosed promenade behind which lay a small sitting garden with terraced flower beds. A shrill whistle filed the air, presaging the arrival of a solid fuel-propelled rocket grenade. Lumynn threw himself to the ground as fire and thundering sound demolished the wall of glass, partially collapsing a stone archway. He rolled away in a direction perpendicular to the blast and jumped unsteadily to his feet, sword drawn and ready to counter any assault.
Adam Wilder, following his team into the open courtyard, saw yet more sentries from the Warlord's home-guard unit, all brandishing their weaponry with experienced ease, pour into the area from an open doorway at the opposite end of the court. Things were really beginning to get serious far too quickly. The Traveler in Red pressed the button on a wide dial set into the metal of his armor's forearm gauntlet.
Nothing happened. He waited a pair of heartbeats and pressed the button once more. Still nothing. That button activated the prearranged signal for the jetellin's artillery to seek target acquisition, then lock onto the objectives and fire its cannons...
When the jetellin didn't respond, Wilder immediately knew that things had gone from bad to worse.
Spitting out a string of bitter invective and cursing his perpetually bad luck, Wilder charged into the thick of the fight, both his plasma-burst beam pistols drawn...
* * *
This was not how his life was supposed to be. He was, in the greater scheme of things, a non-entity, a small man performing a task of minor importance. Living a mostly anonymous existence, he couldn't be involved in things like this. He was supposed to be safe and secure in his innocuous life, in his job, in his small and sheltered sphere of existence and the macabre, often dangerous affairs of more important men were not supposed to touch him. That was how he liked things. That was the unspoken deal he'd made with the celestial Powers-That-Be.
He was never supposed to be in a situation where events beyond his control would result in him seeing his own blood.
Quarry-master Czarik Drameklion looked into the flaring, madness-inflamed eyes of the otherworldly monster named Ka'esh-Woganhi'e and knew that his life, or what little was left of it, was doomed to darkness.
A monster had found him.
In the dismal gloom of the secret underground mine beneath The City, Drameklion vainly tried to control the trembling in his legs as the mutant half-humanoid, half-mechanical spider paced back and forth, blocking his path from out the Warlord's Ikarenium mine. He'd known, of course, for some time about the existence of the creature, working covertly, as Drameklion often did, for Karliandras Dru'ell, but she'd always kept him from actually having to confront the alien abomination. He'd never had to give any thought to what the creature's existence meant in the greater tapestry of events that drove the fate of Niyaddour and its Warlord. Drameklion had only known that whenever the Grand Vizier had mentioned the alien thing by name in his presence, that always meant she'd arranged for a special off-the-books reward be granted the Quarry-master.
But now here he was, standing in front of the creature. The thing had made its way into the depths of the mines by way of a hand-excavated, labyrinthian set of dry, dusty burrows that ran parallel to The City's two main industrial-traffic byways. Its breathing came hard and labored, sounding wet, diseased, rattling in and out from lungs that couldn't properly adapt to a tactile environment beyond its evolutionary programming. He could see that it had been badly beaten and wounded. It was in pain, but the torment seemed only to feed its hateful determination. He could clearly see that it was angry and vengeful. Worse, he could see that it was growing more desperate with each passing moment. And the spur of desperation in an alien, baneful, genetic horror like the being that currently examined him through glowing eyes meant terror and barbarity waited for someone like Drameklion.
He was a small man doing small things. He shouldn't ever have had to become involved with anything like what was now confronting him. That was how things should be and should ever remain. And that was the way he'd liked it.
But now, he sensed, standing next to the mouth of one of six multi-kilometer long tunnels that stretched into the blackness beneath an aging battle-torn, brutish city once forgotten by the World Father, that old life had ended. Were he not as frightened as he was, he would have mourned that as a tragedy.
The thing spoke in a voice that sent sharp jabs of psychic agony through Drameklion's brain.
"Well, look at you... Something about you appeals to me. Maybe it's your total uselessness as a sentient being. Maybe it's the perfume of your cowardice. Regardless, I get a sense of gray hollowness from you that invites my attention."
"Wh-wha- what do you mean?" Drameklion managed to stammer past dry lips.
"The world has grown dangerous for me. I need a place to be. Someplace to hide. A new face, as it were. I think you'll do splendidly," the creature boldly examined him, discourteously looking Drameklion up and down before finally saying, "It's only fair for me to tell you that all the fires in hell are about rain over your pathetic, wormy little soul. This is going to hurt. But you'll be so much better for having experienced and survived it... after all, by then you'll be ME."
Czarik Drameklion never even got the chance to scream.
* * *