After the negotiations were done, Ikamja told me that they’d actually taken place with remarkable speed. With all the different matters that had to be discussed, economics and politics and law and culture, it was only through a profound willingness to hurry things along and just say “yes” that the entire matter was settled an hour or so before sunset. That was still almost an entire day of sitting around and waiting. I had no real part in the negotiations, not even as a translator, one of Ikamja’s people instead taking on the role. Instead, I was just supposed to be there, a watchwoman keeping the peace with karth and tempar.
There was just enough time to rush back to Ikamja’s camp and see preparations for the mission beginning in the earliest stages before Earth claimed me once again. It was the first time in a while that I’d been reminded that Earth was my prison, my curse, as without the contrast of being trapped in a prison cell, a day’s work suddenly felt like one of those insane punishments Zeus hands out.
That day was particularly bad, because it went long. A dozen little coincidences piled up: I had to stay a little bit late at work because an experiment went wrong, I had to take care of something in the apartment, it was my turn to do the cooking. By the time I was finally able to get to sleep, it had been fourteen hours on Earth, and I was begging to have the chance to switch over. Yasmin could tell I was upset, and once again tried her whole “you can talk to me about your problems” schtick, which I promptly ignored.
When I awoke on Selene, it was already nearly midday, and everyone was waiting for me. Ikamja had selected the squads she believed would do best on the mission; not her strongest warriors–those ones she left behind in case something went wrong–but the quickest and most adaptable. Similarly, only half of the four hundred carried clockwork rifles, so that some would remain behind. Intelligence from Tarvaka suggested that the flying machine was close enough that they could travel light, so aside from the rations each stonewose had packed on her shoulders, the war party only needed a handful of pack animals for support.
We ate a quick and early lunch, supplied by Tarvaka’s knights as part of the first of a few free food shipments, then set off once more into the Desolation. It was shocking how quickly one went from the bustle of the Final City back to total emptiness. It wasn’t like Bluerose or any ordinary civilization, where outside of the cities there was still an active, rural environment, only gradually tapering away into wilderness. The Desolation was so hostile that technology was required to survive it in substantial numbers.
It was four days before we came across any sign of thinking creatures. In this case, it was a small outpost, a couple thousand humans and a few hundred stonewose overseers working a few small fields. A small aquifer made this place valuable, partly for the food that could be grown there, but mostly for the water that could be imported to the Final City to feed its massive hydroponic gardens. We traded about half of our meat for a load of vegetables, water, and some information about the last known whereabouts of our target, then moved on. As much as the idea of taking the time to rest may have been, it wasn’t going to help. There was no hospitality to be found in Tarvaka’s domain, and no time to waste.
The biggest challenge in all this was finding what we were looking for. We had point information, a few northern outposts that had been raided by the flying machine, but considering it could fly, and those reports were many days old, we were essentially guessing. If we didn’t find it quickly, four hundred stonewose warriors would be stuck out in the Desolation with no source of food.
We had five days of food left when we saw our second outpost. This was the one that the first outpost had told us was the most recent target of raiding, and you could tell. It wasn’t a complete ruin, and there were both human and stonewose survivors around to repair the damage, but even from a substantial distance you could see the collapsed and burned shells where the attackers had set to work. We were met, at first, with hostility, until I was able to convey to the knights in charge that we meant no harm.
“We are… foreign mercenaries,” I lied. “Tarvaka has hired us to defeat the flying machine.”
The outpost guards cooled down substantially after that, and cooled down even further once I explained that we had no desire to dig into their food reserves, which were already thin enough as it was. What I was looking for was information: what had happened during the raid, and where had the raiders gone?
An elderly, bent woman came forward to speak with me. She explained that she was a priest, and as such the best speaker of Old Mahasha that this small outpost had. I forgot, sometimes, that from their perspective it was like they’d just run into a mercenary who spoke only Latin or Old Church Slavonic. After some social niceties, I asked her about the raid.
“I remember so little. There were loud noises, like thunder, loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying and wounded. Those were the killing machines, punching holes in flesh from so far away.”
“They had a similar appearance to the metal machines that some of our soldiers are carrying?” I asked.
“Yes. Much like those. The knights did not stand a chance.”
“So they were soldiers? Were they wearing green uniforms?” Green was the more-or-less official color of the Cassandran Empire.
“The ones with the killing machines were, yes. And they moved like soldiers, swift and purposeful, searching from building to building to find food. And captives… Mm, but the soldiers, they were not the most dangerous ones! They were human, after all. The others were not. I didn’t know that such creatures lived in this world, who walk on two legs but tear flesh with jaws and teeth.”
My heart skipped a beat. There was only one thing I knew of that fit the description: Tersine’s wolves. A few more questions confirmed that that was what the old priest was talking about.
“So they came in the flying machine, the beast-women attacking anything that moved, while the green-clad humans sought objectives, like food stockpiles and live captives? Did you see anyone who looked like a leader, a commander, anyone who was giving orders? Or any other specific person that stood out?”
The priest hesitated, face wrinkled with concentration. I tried not to let my anticipation show on my face and influence her recollection, vaguely remembering having heard something in a psychology class about the way interrogators can influence their targets. The good news was that I probably didn’t influence her. The bad news was…
“No, I don’t remember anything like that. It’s a miracle I was able to remember everything. Everything was violence and chaos, and I was racing just to be able to survive…”
“No, I understand,” I said. “Thank you for speaking to me. I imagine it can’t be easy to talk to a human like this.”
The priest laughed about it, and after a few more rounds of pleasantries, I returned to inform Ikamja about the situation. I was disappointed that we still had no sign of Tersine, but weirdly, not as disappointed as I could, or should, have been. If the wolves were around, then Tersine must necessarily have been close; even if she and Falem weren’t with the airship, it was always possible that we could trace it back to wherever it was they were hiding. And if the priest was wrong, if Tersine and her automaton were with the raiding party…
We set off before sunset, moving as quickly as possible in the direction that the airship had fled in. Or rather, Ikamja and her followers did, because once again I had to return to my obligations on Earth, leaving them to haul my unconscious body around on top of one of the pack beasts.
It was the day after the outpost that we first saw it. The Desolation was a flat country; the ground may have been broken and rocky, but it never rose or sank more than a couple hundreds of feet at a time, and long bands of total flat separated the outcroppings. That meant there was little to see on the horizon, the distant view fading away with Selene’s curvature long before anything interesting could be revealed. Growing up in Illinois, you get used to that sort of thing; I’ve been told that for people who grew up in mountainous areas, the flatness of the horizon can actually be unsettling. But Illinois had one thing the desolation didn’t: skyscrapers.
The top of the Sears Tower is 1451 feet above the ground, meaning you can see it from about forty miles away if the sky’s clear. Even from the outskirts, you can always look to the horizon and see Chicago’s center. Airships, meanwhile, can go as high up as a mile without even needing a pressurized cabin, and as such can be seen from much, much further away.
We didn’t notice it until about forty miles off, according to Ikamja. Even then, you could only really see it using a telescope, and only then if someone pointed out the proper direction. It looked like a cloud, just a little white puff in the distance. But clouds move with the wind. Clouds don’t have hard, perfectly rounded edges. And clouds don’t rotate in place. It was an airship, and the chase was on. We had to get close enough to start causing damage, which meant getting within about a mile of its ground position and hoping that Ikamja’s best clockwork rifle snipers could hit at that range. And we had to get that close without being seen, because I doubted we could outrun it.
Ikamja knew what to do, though. The four hundred troops were divided up into fifty squads of eight and ordered to spread out, maintaining a between-squad distance of around two hundred feet to ensure communication remained possible. Then, camouflage. Needless to say that coating myself in dust and random sticks was not a pleasant process, especially seeing as we were going to have to start sleeping that way, but if it meant taking Tersine down, I was more than willing to endure.
It was the slowest terror I had ever experienced. No panic, no sudden action, nobody dared to raise their voice or move more quickly than a steady walk. It was like hunting, or what I imagined hunting to be like, except instead of stalking a target that you could just barely see through the brush, we were stalking a target plainly visible in the sky tens of miles away. We tracked the airship for two and a half days, starting as soon as I’d woken up and ending as soon as I fell asleep, constantly monitoring its every action as it swayed back and forth across the skyline.
And once again, Ikamja’s skill showed through. There were dozens of layers of calculation with which I wasn’t even familiar, ways of moving that kept the band together while making them appear from a distance to be disconnected, different types of terrain that were more or less conducive to becoming invisible. Those two and a half days of stalking gave me a revelation: it wasn’t just the guns that had allowed Ikamja to conquer so much.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the close calls. There were a handful of moments where the airship turned suddenly, and for a quarter of an hour the entire squad would be alight with fear that we’d been seen, and they were either fleeing or turning around to hunt us down. Inevitably the airship would return to its normal motions. There were a couple of incidents as well, moments that could have shattered our cover entirely. Once, one of Ikamja’s soldiers fired her rifle prematurely, believing she’d seen a Cassandran soldier. Once, one of the squads was ambushed by a large predator, and the noise and tumult were so bad that we went to ground for the better part of an hour.
But we survived, somehow. The last hour was the most terrifying, the airship turning suddenly from a tiny blob on the horizon to a looming, visible object suspended impossibly in the air. I could see its individual parts, the grid pattern of the skeleton underneath its skin, the spinning airscrews jutting out of its flanks, the convoluted, almost marine shape of the body suspended below the gas bags. It was as though I could reach out and touch it.
One of the other members of our squad informed Ikamja that she was fairly sure she could hit the airship from that distance. I believed her, even though it felt like there was so much closer we could go. The order went out to halt, conveyed at that point by hand signals and messengers instead of shouting; even though the airship was solidly a mile and a half distant, the fear of being overheard was too great. The plan was for the first volley to come all at once. All the rifles would take aim, but nobody would fire until they’d heard the first shot, which would come from the markswoman in Ikamja’s squad, who herself was under orders only to fire on Ikamja’s signal. Those final seconds were when the tension really ratcheted up, violence imminent, ready to be released.
Ikamja slapped the markswoman on the shoulder. She fired a three-round burst, carefully aimed. A split second later, the entire field erupted into noise.
Hundreds of guns fired all at once, some firing carefully-aimed bursts while others unloaded everything they had. The noise was indescribable, a constant rip of violence in the air, no pattern or consistency, just constant and deafening loudness. But I remained stalwart, even as I lost most of my hearing, and focused on my task: gazing through the telescope, looking for any sign that our bullets were having some kind of effect.
It was ambiguous. I saw some kind of rippling movement in the air around the airship, but that could have just as easily been the hundreds of bullets flying through the air. From a mile and a half away, it simply wasn’t possible to see something as small as a bullet hole against the massive flank of the airship. What I could see, within a few seconds of the start of the barrage, was that the airship was turning. We’d attacked it from a three-quarters angle, but with each passing second, the silhouette lengthened, turning to present its side directly towards us. That was odd; wouldn’t you want to present the smallest target possible if you were under fire?
Then I saw it: a flash of light from somewhere in the undercarriage of the airship. Time slowed to a crawl, and everything made sense. In all of our planning, all of our calculations, there was one aspect that we had totally failed to account for. It hadn’t even come up in conversation, probably because the eyewitnesses at the stonewose outpost hadn’t mentioned anything about it. But it only made sense that the airship would have held back its strongest armaments when it was raiding: they didn’t want to damage any potential loot.
But that Cassandran flying machine was a warship. And warships have cannons.
I screamed something, but even if my voice could have been heard over the sound of the clockwork rifles, I was screaming in a language that could only be understood by Ikamja. I had a brief window, three seconds, before the shells arrived. So I used that time to grab Ikamja and start running. I wasn’t nearly fast enough.
The first blast went off somewhere behind me. I dived, pushing Ikamja in front of me so that my body could absorb the concussive blow. Ikamja landed under me, completely frozen in shock. The air around us was suddenly a thunderstorm, the sound of artillery blasts so loud that even the rifles were suddenly quiet by comparison. None of them landed on top of us directly, but it almost wasn’t needed; the air was full of shrapnel. A billion shotgun firing off from every angle and every direction, ripping and eviscerating flesh.
The airship must have had multiple guns, fast-firing small cannons that could turn companies of infantry or entire un-armored trains into wreckage. The longest gap between blasts was about two seconds, but they just kept firing, again and again and again, dozens of shells crashing down. Anyone who didn’t have serious cover wouldn’t stand a chance, either spotted by the airship’s gun crews and vaporized, or else perforated by fragmentation. Even stonewose, as tough as they were, couldn’t take unlimited abuse. I was on the ground, motionless, and even still I took stinging, bleeding injuries all over my back and legs.
I don’t remember the moment when the bombardment stopped. The old misunderstanding that PTSD was the result of the brain being rattled by artillery fire suddenly made sense, the sheer concussive force leaving me not only deaf, but off-balance and brain-fogged. I also figured it was better to play dead and hope that the airship would consider its business done. That might have been the excuse to not make my body move, though.
I rolled off of Ikamja’s back, nudging her with my elbow. “Are you alive?”
“Yes,” she said weakly. “Thank you.”
I giggled drunkenly. “I guess my ass really was fat enough to stop the fragments from getting to you.”
“How many hit you?” Ikamja said. “Did you keep count?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen or so, if I had to guess.”
“Six.”
I rolled over, suddenly concerned. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” she said. “Lost much blood, but my wounds could still heal faster than they were dealt. Hence why I thanked you.”
I sat up, blinking furiously in hopes that my eyes would come into focus. “Do you suppose anyone else is alive, then?”
It didn’t look good for the answer to that question being “yes,” suffice it to say. We were surrounded by craters, bodies, and things less than bodies. Even though the stonewose were spread out, the sheer quantity of explosives that had been rained down upon us by the Cassandran airship could not be evaded, turning the entire field into a hellish killing grounds. Off in the distance were a few rocky outcroppings that could have served as cover, but in the few seconds I had I didn’t notice movement.
Except, of course, for the airship. For an object so impossibly massive, it could move so quickly, crossing the space between us and it in a handful of minutes, already sinking towards the ground.
From up close—no, not up close, the airship was still easily half a mile up, it just looked close because of how immense it was—it became obvious how little of a chance we had ever stood at winning. It was like fighting an entire fortress. The main gas body was the size of a small town, and suspended beneath it was an iron battlement, walls and towers of riveted iron plate suspended upside-down and looming over us. I counted eight turreted guns in a zig-zag pattern, their barrels searching back and forth with predatory intent.
Just when I thought the airship was already on top of us, that it couldn’t possibly drop any lower… it did. The pale body of the airship blotted out the entire sky, its shadow turning the killing field below it into a cold, twilit ruin. Then, something opened up in the undercarriage of the airship. For a moment I thought it was a bomb bay, that we were all going to be incinerated by one final act of supreme overkill; but then the shadowy hangar disgorged… a platform, suspended by a dozen thick ropes.
Which, I suppose, explained how the raiding party had gotten to and from the airship without the proper ground equipment to land. That thought snapped me out of my reverie: Ikamja’s troops may have been decimated, but there was still a chance. I grabbed Ikamja by the shoulder and asked her to follow me stealthily.
I crawled through the craters and over fields of steel fragments, shutting my nose and eyes to the broken bodies of the fallen. With only Ikamja at my side, we were able to avoid the attention of both the cannons and the landing party as we tracked the location where the platform was coming down.
It settled onto a plain of flat sand with a heavy thump and a rush of escaping air. I watched from about thirty feet away, hidden behind a large stone, carefully observing the opposition. There were about twenty Cassandran soldiers, and twenty more wolves, the former with clockwork rifles and the latter with nothing but claws and teeth. At the center of it all were two figures I recognized all too well. Falem’s steel mask loomed head and shoulders above the others. At her side was Doctor Tersine.
“Search for survivors,” she said in Rochathan. “And look for information on who these people are; I have a suspicion that there’s something more behind this attack than it seems.”