Hammer of Time (The Reforged Trilogy) (58 page)

"Yes, sir," Carson answered curtly.

Kharos looked at Maeve again. She was watching him closely, but through the tinted helmet, there was nothing to see. Kharos held out his hand. "Hand over the spear, Miss Cavainna," he instructed. "You and all your friends are coming with us."

She stepped back. There was an unhappy look on her face. Kharos raised his rifle again. The Arcadian man in the armor spread his wings and whipped his own spear to one side. The human with the strange hand – it seemed to be glass as well, Kharos thought – drew his big, ugly laser pistol from a hip holster in a blur of motion. A warning light blinked in the corner of Kharos' display as two thousand guns aimed at Maeve and her little band. Kharos was in the line of fire. He took another step back, bracing his rifle against his shoulder. The big alien ogre thing behind Maeve flinched and then glared with huge eyes at Kharos.

"Stop this!" he cried in a shockingly boyish voice. "Xartasia's on her way here! She's already wiped out Arborus. She will turn your entire planet into a ruin and then just erase you!"

"Easy there, big guy," said Kharos. "Nothing like that is going to happen. There doesn't have to be any bloodshed if you and your friends just put down your weapons. Hold it!"

This last was directed at another Arcadian man. He appeared to be wearing black scarves and strips of leather under his translucent glass armor and had been side-stepping his way slowly around Kharos. The fairy scowled and made a gesture with the hand not holding a spear that Kharos assumed was supposed to be obscene.

"We cannot," Maeve said with terrible finality. "Xartasia must not reach Level Ten. You will be ready to do battle with her, Commander Kharos, one way or another."

She spun her spear and leveled it at Kharos. He hooked his finger over the trigger of his sleek silver rifle. "Don't do this, Maeve," Kharos told her. To his surprise, he found that he meant it. She was clearly utterly insane, but Kharos didn't want to kill the pretty fairy woman. "Everything will be fine if you all just come with me."

Maeve didn't answer. She shared a lingering glance with the human man by her side. His pale blue eyes were hard, but he nodded once to Maeve. Behind her, a thousand Arcadians murmured musically, but did not run or fly. Largely unarmed and unarmored, they stood their ground as CWAAF soldiers inched closer, lasers held ready to burn them down where they stood. Some of the Arcadians held hands or embraced each other. An old fairy man was on one knee in the road, apparently praying.

What the hells were they doing? Kharos could not guess, but it was not his job to question. His orders were to round up the Arcadians and get them off Level One. Did the Arcadians actually believe the crazy things their queen said? Were they willing to die for her…?

"Get on the ground," Kharos instructed on the broadcast channel. His order echoed through the street. "Hands and wings above your heads."

"Stand your ground!" Maeve said. Her voice shook but carried somehow to every single ear. "Fight to your last. We need every moment that our blood may buy."

The Hyzaari boy nodded grimly. His hands closed at his sides and then opened again, red-gold fire burning impossibly between his fingers. The Prian with the glass hand trained his laser on Kharos. "Touch her," he said in a flat voice, "and you die first."

The man's eyes were cold as polar ice. Sweat beaded on the back of Kharos' neck and rolled down his spine, tickling under the thick layer of body armor. The warm, refined Level One air was taut with impending violence. A squadron of CWAAF fighters hovered noisily overhead, ready to fly down any escaping Arcadians. It would be a bloodbath. The fairies were committing elaborate suicide.

Kharos would have to move fast. If he could take the Arcadian queen down, the rest might lose their nerve and let themselves just be arrested. But as soon as he moved, the two blond men at her side would be on him. Kharos was certain that his body armor could easily withstand a broad swing from the Arcadian's spear, but a good thrust could probably punch between the reinforced plates. And the laser in the Prian's hand might have been ugly, but it looked powerful. There was no way it would miss at this range.

"Aim for her entourage," Kharos told his team from the privacy of his own helmet. "I need that blond knight and the Prian down before Maeve hits the pavement."

"With pleasure, sir," came Sanders' voice in his ear.

A green pinpoint of light appeared on Kharos' display and lit up in the center of the armored Arcadian's glass-helmeted head. Sanders was an ass, but he was the best shot on Kharos' team. The virtual sight – invisible to anyone not wearing a CWAAF display – did not waver. Somewhere in the distance, there was a deep booming sound. Kharos ignored it.

"On three," he told his team. "One, two–"

A red bar blinked insistently across his vision. Incoming transmission. Urgent. "Hold!" he barked, then swiped up the message with one glove.

"What the hells–?" Sanders shouted, loud enough to be heard outside his armor. Maeve exchanged a wide-eyed look with her Prian.

"All ground and sky teams, we've got an incursion in ailos sector of Level One!" shouted a dispatcher. Not the same one who had called Kharos out to Haven Field. "Orin sector… another one – no, two – in cyron sector…! We've got one coming into thela, too!"

Thela sector? Kharos looked up, jerking his weapon with him. At first, all he could see were fighter jets and helicopters circling wildly as they received the same broadcast. And then something boomed, shaking the ground and making sensors bleat in the soldier's armor. A ship plummeted toward Axis. It was long, angular and absolutely black, like a tear right through the star-studded sky of Level One. But the blade-shaped ship was streaming black smoke as it fell.

"Xartasia," Maeve gasped. She, too, stared at the ship. "She is here."

Kharos looked down at the fairy woman. She was only barely more than half his height. "That's what you were so afraid of? What you wanted us to fight?" Kharos asked. "That ship is crashing. Look at the smoke!"

"That isn't smoke," said the Prian grimly.

Suddenly, the gray-black cloud changed. Kharos could not have described it accurately… The smoke went somehow rigid. In an instant, it went from a gritty gas to something terribly solid, still spreading out through the clear, starry blue sky. And then it split open like a monstrous black flower.

"What in the three hundred hells is that?" Kharos asked.

"A Devourer ship," said the Prian.

The sinuous black filaments must have been twenty miles away, but Kharos could not stop staring. They twisted, writhing like impossibly huge snakes, and then speared toward the ground. Something dark rose from Axis' surface. Real smoke this time. A moan rose from the street full of Arcadians and the soldiers surrounding them shifted uncomfortably.

"Thela sector teams," a dispatcher shouted into Kharos' ear, this one recognizable as the same woman who had given him the order to apprehend the Arcadians, "does anyone have eyes on that… thing?"

"This is Sky Team 713," answered a voice. A pair of the fighters has turned on their tails and soared off in the direction of the black ship. "We're approaching now…"

"We've got civilian calls coming in all across the board," said the dispatcher. Kharos heard other voices shouting in the background. "Local law enforcement is trying to get close, but that thing has punched right through the upstructure and down into Level Two."

The two 713 fighters were quickly dwindling specks in the azure sky, but the huge black tentacle was all too visible as it darted across the sky. Something that big should
not
move so fast. The jet fighters exploded into shrapnel and momentary balls of red flame. And then there was only more smoke billowing into the sky, obscuring the silvery twinkle of the stars.

"Our enemy is here," said a soft voice. It was Maeve Cavainna, the tiny fairy queen. She was in a low crouch, her wings spread and her spear clutched tightly. "You can waste your time trying to arrest us, Commander Kharos, or we can fight."

"Damn it." Kharos turned his suit mic back to broadcast. "All teams, we're moving in on that landed ship. Arcadians, I can't spare the men to detain you. If you're smart, you'll get the hells out of here."

"Commander," said a voice over Kharos' helmet com. It was Sanders. Kharos saw the lieutenant's targeting sight still centered on the armored Arcadian man. "We can't just let them go! These bird-backs aren't supposed to be here!"

Sirens were beginning to sound across Level One. Kharos stepped back and turned to Sanders, grabbing the younger soldier by the front of his polished green armor.

"That thing just knocked two of our ships out of the sky like they were flies," Kharos bellowed, not bothering with the microphone. "We've got bigger problems than a few fairies. Now move!"

"What about us?" asked the blond girl that Kharos had noticed earlier. "We want to help!"

"Axis is an Alliance world," Kharos said. "And we're the Central World Alliance Armed Forces. It's our job to protect this planet and that's what we're going to do. You just stay out of our way!"

Kharos turned away and clenched his fist, sending the 'move out' order to two thousand men. He turned on his booted heels and ran for the shuttle. The bladed black shadows spread like a storm across Axis' bright sky.

"Death is just your body running out of ammunition. Slam in a fresh battery and keep fighting!"

– Victor Kharos (234 PA)

A squadron of shining silver Alliance fighters screamed through Axis' atmosphere toward the great black Glorious warship. Bizax hung suspended at the core, his nanite swarm linked out to the warship's weapons and sensors. The massive black ship was just an extension of his armor, a huge and devastating extension torn from the corpses of Alliance stations, ships and fringe colonies, deconstructed and reconstructed by nanites to serve this very purpose: to feed its Glorious masters.

Bizax's swarm raked Axis' starry sky with huge midnight tentacles longer and wider than the buildings below. The approaching Alliance fighters broke formation and fired a wide spread of red laserfire. Bizax saw it all without eyes, visual data transmitted directly from a hundred thousand sensors straight into his implanted computer. The defensive subroutine reacted at once, pulling the nanite armor into a glassy obsidian shield that refracted the lasers. And then Bizax sent the ravenous nanomachines after the Alliance pilots. A twisting tower of nanites split as it missed a fighter, hooked around and lashed out at the retreating fighter. It seized the wing, curling around the quickly crumbling fibersteel and tore through the ship in search of meat. The pilot ejected as his fighter collapsed into withering fragments. He arced a few yards through the air before a twisting spear of nanites tore the man in half. The swarm pulled apart both pilot and ship mid-air, drawing the dissolving matter back into Bizax's ship.

Another squadron of Alliance fighters wheeled and swooped in for another pass, strafing Bizax's ship with another energy weapon: EMPs. A wide grin split Bizax's blunt gray face. These primitive evolutionary accidents were trying to disable the Glorious nanites with electromagnetic pulses. They were hardly the first to try such tactics. Even the microscopic machines of the Glorious were hardened against all radiation. The Alliance's fight was useless and unexpected, Bizax reflected, but it whetted the appetite.

Ground forces massed on the surface of Level One. Lasers flashed far below Bizax, lending his black nanite swarm a hellish crimson tinge. Bizax's ship compensated, hardening the underside of the ship against the assault. CWAAF concentrated their fire against the front of Bizax's ship, trying in vain to overwhelm the black armor. Heat rose from the Glorious ship's hull in shimmering waves.

"Commander Dhozo," Bizax said. His swarm transmitted the words across Axis. "I have encountered resistance."

Resistance was not part of the plan. There were only fifteen of Glorious, each at the center of their own hungry craft, scattered across Axis. The approach had been flawless, every Alliance ship and satellite transmission countered and jammed. The Glorious ships consumed signals greedily as flesh and metal. The unsuspecting populace should have collapsed in panic and fear, just like millions of worlds before them. An organized counter-attack – however futile – was unexpected.

"Resistance?" Dhozo asked. "Details."

"Several thousand armed beings are massed in my sector. They're armed with lasers and EMPs."

"Can they damage you?"

Bizax hesitated. "These are better armed than the humans on Prianus," he admitted. "And there are many more. My swarm reads just over two thousand meat, three hundred ships and vehicles. Enough to overwhelm personal armor…"

A pair of ships lifted off from a walled landing field. Bizax slashed them from the air with an arcing blade of nanites two hundred feet long. The serrated black blade sawed through the hull and then slithered like shadowy roots through the terrible gashes, tearing the ship apart from within. But as Bizax consumed the two ships, one of the CWAAF fighter teams raced along his hull, raining concussion missiles. The impacts rippled across Bizax's great nanite swarm, absorbing the explosions with minimal loss of materials. But the warship shuddered around its Glorious master.