Hostiles (The Galactic Mage series) (32 page)

“How long till we have a starship in orbit?”

“At least nine more hours, sir.”

“Get the suits out of the fortress. Those walls aren’t going to matter against … whatever this is, and we can’t fight in a box. Spread out by company. Get the rest of those goddamn fighters in the air.” It was with some difficulty that he kept the calm in his voice despite the rapidity of his beating heart.

He got back to his feet again and spun to check the status of his men. A few of them were still pounding off toward Little Earth, but most had come back and were fighting over the downed machines of their comrades. The Prosperion cavalry was streaking past as he watched.

The beast that had hit him stood like a mutant spider over the mech unit of Corporal Chang. Its massive limbs fell in rapid succession upon the battle armor like giant fingers drumming the cadence of Chang’s demise.

Colonel Pewter could see the blue flicker of Chang’s plasma shield, which was both good and bad. He only had the two tumbling flights he’d just taken to gauge by, but he was sure the power unit wouldn’t hold up for long if Chang had suffered multiple hits like that.

He sent two anti-aircraft missiles at the monster and then opened up his fifty-caliber cannon as he ran in to assist. The missiles blew off four of the creature’s legs and the spray of bullets opened up a huge rent in the black angles of its body, spilling out rivers of pale yellow goo.

He was on the monster in twenty quick strides, the Gatling gun still unloading bullets into the beast at point-blank range. He switched on the jackhammer blade of the mech’s left arm and punched through the hard shell of the monster just as it spun on him.

It tried to throw him off, but he spread the claw hand of that left arm wide, like a grapple stuffed into the beast’s abdomen, and the creature could not shake him loose. He triggered the jackhammer and pulverized the creature’s guts. It was dead in moments, and soon Corporal Chang was back on his feet.

“I thought I was fucked, sir,” admitted the wide-eyed Marine.

“Not this time,” the Colonel said.

They both spun and realized the monster they’d just fought was the third of its kind, for the two that the colonel had seen as he spun through the air the first time were still in action, making a ruin of two mech units in Major Kincaid’s platoon. The colonel didn’t have to say a thing, and both he and the corporal charged in. Four more missiles threaded their exhaust trails over the plain, and one of the monsters erupted like a grenade pie. The second felt the fury of both fifty-caliber cannons and spun toward the two incoming Marines.

The colonel and the corporal had cut it nearly in half by the time the downed Marine was back on her feet and adding her own weapon to the mix. Soon there lay a smoking pile of black plating floating on a swamp of red-and-yellow ooze.

“They may be big,” shouted Corporal Chang, “but they go down like little bitches.” He just started to sound off a long and profane battle taunt when the colonel cut him off.

“There are more,” Colonel Pewter said, turning back in the direction from which they’d just come. “Lots more.”

And there were. Six more. None of them quite like another. Some much smaller, one much bigger, but all black as a moonless night and all hideous and indescribable.

“Get these other units up and keep on to Little Earth.” He switched to the command com. “Get the transports in the air. I don’t want those ships caught on the ground if this goes bad. Fighters up, bombers up and mechs down, then I want those pilots at twenty thousand feet until I say otherwise.”

“Roger that, sir,” came the com officer at Little Earth.

Little Earth was in sight by the time the six misshapen monsters caught up to them. Colonel Pewter almost made it back to his reassembling platoon when one of the smallest of the monsters caught up to him, leaping into the air and landing heavily on his back.

The computer-controlled gyros and gravity compensators did their best to keep him on his feet, but he still stumbled forward and had to brace himself with one arm to avoid having his mech sent sprawling face first into the mud. He twisted his head around to see the beast pounding on the canopy and trying to push one of its twisted claws in through the gap he’d made by opening it as he had.

He had faith in the shield, but he didn’t want to trust his luck too far, so he tapped the control and sealed himself back in. If one of the Prosperion mages decided to teleport him into the center of the planet, well, then today just wasn’t his lucky day.

Reaching back with the suit’s left arm, he clutched the creature by a portion of what might have been a tail. With a mighty yank, he whipped the creature off his suit back and pinned it to the ground, stuffing the end of his Gatling gun right into its twenty-eyed face and letting go a ten-second blast. Its pus-colored blood hissed and steamed off the plasma shield, and its legs were still twitching as the colonel finally rejoined his men.

He could see the formations of the other companies spreading all around. More ships were landing even as others took off. Very soon he’d have his ten thousand Marines. It might only barely be in time.

Looking back out over the plains, he saw at least twenty more of the black monsters on their way. Long-range sensors showed others appearing in the distance, popping into existence as if … by magic, which he knew was, most likely, exactly what it was.

He’d trained for a lot of things over the course of his forty-two years in the corps, but never for battle against wizardry. He told himself he needed to stop underestimating them. Every time he did, they ratcheted the surprises up another notch.

The twenty beasts crawled across the prairie like animate tumbleweeds, their speed unnervingly fast, but they stopped inexplicably, holding up just over five hundred yards away, the lot of them twisting and reaching limbs and claws into the air, mandibles and jaws and vacant orifices filled with teeth shaping the sound that could only come from such manifest monstrosity. The colonel hoped they might be considering a retreat based on the number of Marines forming up, but the movement from the others behind them, the new creatures appearing in the distance, proved him wrong. These were waiting for the rest to come. From the looks of it, the army itself, those behind the creatures, had no intention of breaking ranks. They appeared, at least for now, committed to letting the misshapen black behemoths deal with the colonel and his men. He couldn’t decide if that was good news or bad, but either way, more of the giant creatures were on their way. Lots of them.

More and more of them appeared, and at a rate of escalation that went from exhilarating, given his recent victories, to something out of a nightmare. In the course of eleven minutes, the number of the black beasts had tripled and would soon approach the same number as his Marines.

“Colonel, this is
Raptor One
, reporting. Do you want us to engage?”

He looked up and saw two fighters hovering above him at a thousand feet.

“Roger,
Raptor One
. Let’s see what they think of Tiny Tim.”

“Roger that. A quarter kiloton of
fuck you
on its way, sir.”

“Visors dark, people,” ordered the colonel. “Gravity set to
dig in
.”

No sooner had he said it than the contrail of a long slender missile streaking from one of the planes above drew its chalk line across the sky. Even with the canopy nearly black, the blast seemed blinding, and the colonel had to squint and turn his head away.

He turned off the dimmer right after and watched the mushroom cloud rising even as the pressure wave came at them. It blew by and then, a moment later, sucked back, pulling with it a few bits of cloth that made the colonel turn around.

The Prosperion cavalry had reformed its lines some forty yards behind where he stood, or at least, they seemed to have been attempting to do so when the concussive wave set all their horses to bucking and more than a few, along with their riders, tumbling through the grass. He counted them damn lucky they’d been as far off as they were.

He looked into his monitor. There was no movement in the area where the monsters had been gathering. That was good. However, in the time it took for the dust and smoke to settle so they could view the crater where the monsters had been, long-range indications showed there were over twelve thousand of them now near the main host of the army.

“That’s not even possible, is it?” came Private Sanchez’s voice. “You guys are seeing all this, right?”

“
Raptor One
reporting no survivors at impact site, Colonel. Total kill.”

“Well, they’re not hard to destroy,” said Major Kincaid from her position, fifty yards off with her platoon. “But there’s a crap-ton of them now.”

The young Prosperion officer with the red plume in his helmet rode up to Colonel Pewter’s battle unit then. He moved boldly out in front of it and tapped on the canopy with the end of his lance. Which made the colonel laugh good-naturedly, for it was a curious thing for the officer to do.

The colonel switched on the megaphone and turned the volume down low enough that he hoped it wouldn’t startle the officer’s horse. “What is it, son?”

“On my world, sir, we say that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my ally.’ I feel that, given what I have just observed, that you and I may be in a circumstance so described.”

“I can see how you’d want to see it that way just now,” observed the colonel. “So what happened? Your magicians lose control of their monster brigade?”

The puzzled look that came upon his features struck the colonel as genuine even before the clean-shaven rider spoke. “These demons are no work of my men.”

“So, what are you trying to tell me?” asked the colonel. “Whose … demons are they then?” He watched the man very carefully as he spoke, his years of command, years of working with young men who often had a tendency to manipulate the truth, serving to filter every movement, every twitch of the face, every word of the young Prosperion.

“I assure you, sir, I have not the least idea. But you have my word, on the honor of the House of Forland, that those things are not the work of any of my men.”

“So, assuming I assume you’re not setting me up, what are those things?”

“Demons, sir.”

“You said that before. Do you mean demons like, well, like fire-and-brimstone demons? Wrath of God and all that stuff?”

“Yes, sir. Precisely, sir.”

The colonel wanted to laugh, but the absolute solemnity upon the Prosperion officer’s face, and the newfound humility, was such that the reflex died before it had wind enough to fly. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“As death itself, sir.”

“So why don’t you undo it. Send them back to hell. Isn’t that the point of all that magic you people do?”

“It can’t be done. There is no spell for it. Or at least none that Her Majesty would allow. We are witnessing the very thing that marked the end of the dwarves of Duador.”

“Yes, I remember hearing about that a time or two from my daughter and her boyfriend. Unending hordes still running around somewhere. Total genocide.”

“That is correct.”

“How do I know this isn’t the work of your Queen?”

“The legions of orcs that have gathered at the outskirts of the city are evidence enough to my eyes,” he said. “But I can’t say how you would know that this was true. But even if it were some incomprehensible plan of Her Majesty’s, which I do not believe for a moment, then I am as troubled by it as you.”

“Orcs?”

“If you could not see it, there is an orcish army gathered out there beyond all those demons.”

“Orcs. The people that hit Tytamon’s castle a few months back?”

“They are not people, but yes, the same. They are less of a problem than the demons. Those must be stopped immediately. If such a thing is possible.”

“Well, I think we can kill them easy enough,” said the colonel, pointing to the crater a half mile away. “That was a little one. But if their numbers keep growing like they are, I don’t think your Queen is going to be too happy about what we have to do to the countryside to finish them. She may have to find a new place to live for the next few centuries.”

The officer looked as if he at least partly understood, but he returned to his original point. “May we then, for the time being at least, call off hostilities between our forces, until such time as this new threat has been abated?”

The colonel laughed and nodded. “Yeah, we’ll call a truce for now. But if I see any of those ice blocks busting into even one of my people, I’ll turn my guns on you personally.”

“Very well. Thank you, sir. I will let my men know we have an arrangement for now.”

“You do that.”

The young officer started to turn away, but the colonel stopped him, having thought of one other thing. He released the canopy on his suit and let it open all the way. “What’s your name, son?”

“I am Manduval Forland, son of Gustemore Forland, Baron of Dae and Westmore, and I am second lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Seventh Cavalry, sir.”

“All right, Lieutenant,” said the colonel as he unpinned his com link from his uniform. “I’m Colonel Pewter, First Marines, Northern Trade Alliance. Glad to know you.”