The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (14 page)

U’Sumi’
s arms went limp, his heart and muscles, weak.
P
aralysis overcame his motions, as he slid down into the trench with his eyes closed. Those squirming tentacles would find him
and
draw him into some mouth-like opening, where a
lancing
siphon would puncture his body
like a boil
and slowly suck away his blood. Already he felt the life drain
ing
from him.

He muttered softly, below the noise, “
No! I can’t let this happen! E’Yahavah, please, I beg you! Give me power to overcome the Elyo, as you gave my father to defeat gryndel!
”

Nevertheless, h
is prayer turned to ash in his mouth. The gryndel was one; the Elyo
were
many.

U’Sumi managed to bring himself back up to the lip of the
dugout
. He glanced down the trench on either side of him. At
the far end, nearest the crawl
way to the Tacticon’s command post, crouched his father. A’Nu-Ahki tracked the advancing infantry with a thunder-pike held to his shoulder in aiming position. On the other side, Iyapeti, who had proven
too poor a sharpshooter for
one of the coveted ranged weapons, waited with a spear pointed upward for the melee. He looked ridiculous
,
and the terror in his brown eyes said that he knew it.

U’Sumi turned again to the advancing enemy columns. The lead infantry were now at a range of about three hundred cubits. He lifted his own thunder-pike, and pulled out the retractable handle that transformed it from a pike into a ranged weapon. The tiny aiming reticl
e
popped out to make a cross-hair alignment with the pike’s razor sharp dorsal blade tip. Everything seemed to slow down as he picked out the nearest enemy infantryman and tracked him in—the first man U’Sumi would ever kill.

The enemy moved closer and closer, two-hundred cubits, one-hundred and fifty, one-hundred. U’Sumi could see his target’s eyes beneath a bronze helmet with the figure of a long-necked sea-leviathan carved out over the forehead. The boy had reddish-brown skin and black curly hair
,
just
as
U’Sumi
did. Did a mother wait anxiously at home on Aztlan’s distant subcontinent for him who only U’Sumi knew would never return?

The Tacticon’s voice barked over the mechanical roar of the approaching machinery; “Ranged weapons
free
!”

U’Sumi’s finger caressed the recessed button on his pike’s staff. The young soldier whose mother waited in vain fell over dead. U’Sumi never even heard the echoing crack. The recoil shocked him back to a normal sense of time, as he chambered another
round through the staff’s breech load. Then he repeated the process and another infantryman fell. He went through the motions, mechanically doing as trained. Most targets fell, some did
no
t, but soon all thoughts of distant mothers and wives ceased.

The first wave of infantry reached the base of the rise, on top of which skirted U’Sumi’s trench. He had time to chamber and empty one last round into a soldier who was just about to leap into the
ditch
, before he had to snap the catch that reconverted his weapon back into a pike.

“Melee
arms
front!” yelled his father, almost as an afterthought.

Infantry poured over the sides. Half leaped over the slit to reach the real line a hundred cubits to the rear. The other half engaged A’Nu-Ahki’s men in what was nothing more than a mop-up operation from the start. Only then did the chattering of belt-driven chain cannons and Avarnon-Set’s artillery engines open up on the approaching Elyo.

In the corner of his eye, U’Sumi thought he saw about five or six
Wyvernas
race down from the highlands to outflank the column of mechanized
enemy
units. It was a short-lived attempt. He took a quick moment to hack open an attacking foot soldier
,
and
then noticed that the advancing Elyo
had reduced all the
Wyvernas
to smoking hulks.

Another soldier dropped in and fell to U’Sumi’s pike. A wild energy overtook his limbs and eyes
, as a
sense of invincibility overwhelmed him
. He
existed
somehow at
another time
rate
that ran faster than the rest of creation. The motions of everything else slowed to the pace of cold honey, while U’Sumi somehow retained the ability to move freely at normal speed. One enemy infantryman after another fell to his berserker dance, as a power beyond his own carried him into a dark ecstasy of blood
, steel,
and fire.

He swung the bladed underside of his pike’s tip,
hewing
through the legs of those that tried to leap over his trench to engage the main line. Three more enemy soldiers dropped down to subdue him. One after the other fell beneath his weapon. All around him, in slow motion agony, men fought and died, until the floor of his trench became muddy with
sticky
-jam
blood.

His father engaged two thunder-pikers
; o
ne of whom raised his weapon to fire at A’Nu-Ahki’s head. U’Sumi ran him through,
seized his already chambered pike, and used it to blow the head from his father’s other assailant. Then another two infantrymen dropped into the trench and A’Nu-Ahki had to take one while U’Sumi engaged the other. It was only then that he noticed that his father and he were the only men of their regiment still moving in the trench. Iyapeti lay with a gaping hole in his shoulder, silent, bleeding profusely, with his chest still.

U’Sumi quickly dispatched his assailant, but when he turned to help his father, he found him also fallen, with his enemy ready to deal him a deathblow with a thunder-pike. U’Sumi screamed, and ran the man through where he stood. But his father no longer moved.

He was alone.

Blood and bodies lay everywhere
in a vast berry-stained stew
made out of people
. The enemy chain cannons approached—he could hear them spitting death into his grandfather’s trenches with mechanical ease.

Then he saw the first Elyo
approach his trench.

The monster machine rose over the gentle
hill
like the dawning of a black sun, feelers writhing in front as mocking rays. As if locked in a trance, U’Sumi watched it head directly for him. Then a voice shouted inside his head. He broke himself free of the spell and dove
to
the
blood-mud
floor of the trench against the wall, right beneath the Elyo’s tentacles.

The hulking shadow reared up then fell across the slit. In a split second that seemed to last a whole minute, U’Sumi noticed a rectangular hole in its underside; perhaps some kind of maintenance hatch that had been ripped away when the machine had run over a large rock. The Elyo paused, its treads straddling the trench; spinning dirt in a stuck moment before it could pull itself back into motion on the other side.

U’Sumi used that moment without thinking. He leaped up into the hole
, accidentally dropping his thunder-pike when it caught on the steel aperture. After a split second of fumbling for the weapon,
he gave it up to
pull
himself
up
to a safe crouch on some sort of metal chassis, just as the mechanized colossus resumed speed on the other side of the ditch.

The ride grew rough over uneven ground, while the air sweltered from whatever fiery engine drove the thing. U’Sumi rested as he clutched his strut, to let his eyes adjust to the shadow. Diffuse light filtered in from compartments both above and in
front of him,
al
though armor separated the two from his little niche. The light came through tiny windows of thick glass. These apparently gave view
from the interior
to a pump just forward of U’Sumi’s cramped body. The place reeked of
piney
glakka tree oil—the engine, treads, or both
likely
used the machine lubricant in
huge
quantities.

Then he noticed the hatch lever behind the pump, all painted the same dark color. He reached around and tried the latch. It turned slowly until the metal door swung open with a bang against the pump, which nearly knocked him to a crushing death beneath the treads.

Had U’Sumi not been a “scrawny ‘tween”—as his elders liked to call him—he would have been unable to squeeze around the massive oil pump and thrust his legs through the narrow hatch. As it was, he had to remove his sword belt to push it through ahead of him.

A loud metallic clink
from above
startled him. U’Sumi pus
hed his body into the new crawl
space feet-first
,
on his back. He peered up through a tangle of metal grating, pipes, and wires. An inhumanly long gray arm with a hand like some monstrous tree frog’s carried a conical projectile above. It slipped the missile into a gigantic version of the breech load on U’Sumi’s lost pike. Another frog hand opened and shut the slot. Thunder shook the already quaking confines when the vehicle’s main weapon fired.

Other less
loud
, but more frequent, clinks and bangs issued from closer down—less than a couple cubits over U’Sumi’s head—the secondary cannons that lined either side of the rolling mini-fortress. These fired from
the
narrow metal platform grate under which ran U’Sumi’s
U
-shaped crawl-way. The open ends of the “U” fed into the forward cabin on either side of the carriage. Bundles of pale, pinkish-gray cables ran along the mezzanine grate, with two that reached up to the pivot brace and breech load of the small cannon just over his head.

One of the cables moved.

It did more than that
;
it twisted upward like a striking snake. The others slid and curled with it
, all along the gun ports
.

The nearest tentacle snaked into a storage
rack
opposite the gun and coiled itself around a projectile, while its partner tentacle opened the cannon’s breech with a suction-cupped end.

Lack of space trapped
U’Sumi’s head in a cage full of thrashing vipers. He
tried
to scream but his diaphragm froze. All around
him
,
the loathsome grayish-pink worms writhed and shot at various objects
,
each
contr
o
lling
some mechanical aspect of the Elyo’s
outer shell and weaponry.

Farther above, inside the turret, the pair of oddly bent arms continued to load and fire the main cannon. U’Sumi had no way to see where these members all converged, or even if he shared the vehicle with several different monstrosities.

He whispered, “
E’Yahavah, help me!
”

He closed his eyes so as not to focus on the pink snakes. For a long time he lay frozen, afraid to move
and
afraid not to. Then it came to him that inactivity paved the road to debilitation.
He muttered, “
I
must
reconnoiter
, as Pahpo would have called it.
”

He slid forward on his back and confirmed that each secondary cannon on the right side had two tentacles apiece to operate it. These formed separate ganglions along the mezzanine rather than branching out from a main conduit. More fleshy tendrils twined together in the front than at the rear of the vehicle, which told him that whatever creature or creatures controlled them did so from the forward cabin.

He poked his head through a small break in the machinery and quickfire conduits into the main turret space to get a better view. The froggy arms seemed so oddly bent because they also attached to
a set of
shoulders forward of the cannon turret. They worked
as
a man that used his hands behind his back. Yet they seemed to have no need to feel around for anything—the
y executed
movements swiftly, as if guided by sight.

Then U’Sumi noticed two screens of hexagonal facets on either side of the interior turret dome. They resembled the facet
bulges
he had seen on the Elyo cannon mounts
from the
outside. He saw the underside of those facets now—each connected to a wire, all of which were bundled into cables on either side, like the arms and tentacles
,
which went likewise into the forward section. The inside facet screens also had similar connections that joined the cable bundles of their exterior counterparts.

U’Sumi guessed that the facet screens worked like the compound eyes of a dragonfly, which he had studied under
crude
mag
nifying lenses at Nestrigati’s a
cademy. Perhaps the
y
somehow modeled
the system
after the giant bug’s eye, which had excellent visiospatial acuity for rapidly tracking other flying insects.
U’Sumi
quickly drew his head back down into the tangled
shielding of his crawl space
,
out of their “sight”—assuming his interpretation was correct.