Rift in the Races (83 page)

He released the spell. “I see them,” he told the colonel in low tones. “But they’re too spread out to take easily. I could fill the room with an ice storm, but I’d have to open the door and step inside, and the spell would take me longer than I think I have, and that assumes I can properly recall the spell. My time in that tank of Doctor Singh’s has rusted up the memories of even my old army spells.”

“You were in the army?”

“Yes. Every mage serves.”

“I like you better already,” he said. “How much time do you need?”

“A minute, perhaps?”

“Damn. Way too long. If I can’t get them myself in that much time, we’re both screwed.”

“Can you get me twenty seconds then?”

“Twenty seconds is still a long time.”

Altin agreed.

“They only have one shot each.” The colonel’s expression suggested he was calculating.

“Unless they are magicians.”

“If they shoot with the crossbows first, you should have the jump on them for magic.” They exchanged a quick look that said they both understood what hadn’t been said. “Just do your thing,” said the colonel.

“I will.”

“On three.”

Altin nodded.

The colonel returned to his position at the door and counted down on his fingers, silently, before cracking it open again. The man across the room saw the movement this time. He gave a shout and leveled his crossbow. Colonel Pewter rushed into the room and put an explosive round into the man’s forehead as he fired his crossbow. The bolt went wide, and Colonel Pewter dove forward, rolling up behind a suit of bright red plate armor worn by an ancient barbarian king. He heard the hiss as another quarrel whizzed past his face and buried itself into the wall with a
thunk
. Altin could be heard chanting from the other room.

Another quarrel pierced the ancient armor with the sound of ripping metal, its tip protruding through the steel greave nearly its full length, having stopped only a quarter inch from Colonel Pewter’s temple. As he crouched for cover behind the antique suit, he leaned away from the projectile, noticing as he did that a green liquid dripped like syrup from its point. He knew enough about war to know that stuff, whatever it was, would have been the end for him.

He feinted with a flick of his head and arms as if he were going to run back toward the door where he’d come through, and then rushed toward the opposite end of the room where the dead marksman lay. Once more, he dove for cover behind a primitive-looking suit of armor, which seemed to be made of little more than twisted wicker and woven sticks. Another quarrel sounded as it hit the wall behind him. That should be all of them. He jumped up and shot the nearest man who was just about done reloading his crossbow. The bullet took the man squarely in the chest causing him to stagger back against the wall. He painted a red stripe in blood as he slid to the floor and died.

The colonel aimed for another man who was frantically reloading, but the crossbowman looked up and ducked just as the colonel’s shot went off. The colonel saw that the fourth man wasn’t reloading his crossbow at all. Instead, as Altin had feared, he was chanting the words to some kind of magic spell. From the direction he was facing, the colonel was fairly sure the magic was going to be coming his way.

The colonel moved to fire upon him, but suddenly felt the bite of something cold knifing into his arm. He looked down and saw a foot-long icicle, thick as a deck bolt, had somehow embedded itself through the flesh of his forearm. His gun fell to the floor as the ice burned.

Altin, visible through the door now, suddenly barked out a command. The massive tapestry on the wall behind the two crossbowmen suddenly vanished, then reappeared. It reappeared in the space where the two Northfork men were, its length spread and its heavy weave materializing through the center of their bodies as if it were a razor that had just slit them vertically in half from skull to knees. Except they weren’t severed in two. They’d been joined with the tapestry, and it with them. A teleport making one single mass. Two men and a rug. Their eyes popped out and their tongues lolled, propelling gouts of spit and blood onto the floor as if they’d become synchronized fountains, decorations at some macabre festival. They fell with sickening gasps that were muffled beneath the tapestry and then lay silent and still.

“Good God,” muttered the colonel, staring up at Altin and back to the tapestry which, from the back, showed a growing pair of stains as blood found its way through the maze of its careful weave.

“Welcome to war on Prosperion,” said Altin.

“Remind me not to piss you off,” the colonel said as he pulled a bandage from a compartment on his belt. He wrapped up his wound with one hand, doing it as easily as if he did such things every day. The ice lance lay on the floor near his feet where he’d thrown it after pulling it out. It was melting quickly, already nearly halved at the middle by lingering heat from the colonel’s blood.

Altin glanced from that scene to the two bodies on the colonel’s side of the room, the mess of brain matter and the red stripe down the wall. “I could say the same,” he said.

The colonel shrugged and, with the barest movement of his head, motioned for them to move on.

The first shudders of the building told them that the Marines in the mechanized battle suits were coming through the outer walls now. More shouts from inside the house told them that Thadius’ guardsmen were going to put up a fight.

Altin worried that any teleporters in Thadius’ employ might have an easy time of it, merging the machines with other objects, if such a thing occurred to them. It wouldn’t be any different than teleporting a ship and, given the size, would be relatively easy for anyone above the rank of H or I. He cursed himself for not thinking of it before. He should have told them to take off the glass covers. Without the “box” effect, those machines might not be vulnerable to that kind of attack.

“Tell them to open the windows on their battle machines,” he barked at the colonel.

“What?”

“Just do it. If Thadius has teleporters, they can merge your men into the walls. It’s far easier to do than what I just did.”

Confusion flashed briefly, but he wasn’t about to second-guess Altin at his own game. He gave the order over his com. Krakowski questioned it only once, the severity of the order’s repetition convincing him to do as he was told. The colonel was already moving to the door at the northwest end of the room before Krakowski had even finished saying, “Yes, sir.”

This door was locked. The colonel tried blasting it open as he had done before, but the rounds from his weapon ricocheted off of it, two of them striking the wall near where Altin stood.

“That’s new,” said the colonel as he stared into the smoking hole near Altin’s left foot where the first round had bounced back and nearly cost the mage a toe. “Another ward?”

“Definitely,” Altin said. “And a strong one.”

“Can’t you pick it, break through with some kind of spell?”

“Not without researching the lock. If I meddle with it, it will go off, and who knows what it will do. Probably a fireblast of some kind. That’s the standard stuff.”

More crashing and the sounds of rocket explosions came to them. A wall of smoke poured down the corridor. The colonel tapped his com. “You still see us?”

“Yes, Colonel,” came Krakowski’s voice.

“Good. We need your help. Give us a second to get clear, but we need you to take out a door at this position.” He turned to Altin. “You think the magic is stronger than one of our mechs?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve seen your missiles at work,” he said. “I doubt anyone expected that much force when they designed this spell. It was designed for men and magicians, not …
that
.”

They backtracked, coughing through the smoke cloud into the remnants of the now-decimated museum of armor and weaponry. The gray daylight of the outdoors came through a massive hole that had been forcefully ripped through the house, and the high-pitched whine of servomotors could be heard from the other side. One of the monstrous metal machines came tromping through the debris, smoke and dust to stand before the two men, dwarfing them as they stood in proximity to it. Other battle-suited Marines could be heard making their way through the rest of the house, their progress marked by screams and the sound heavy weapons fire. Explosions could be heard throughout the front half of the house.

“Easy on the civilians,” the colonel ordered into his com.

“We are, sir,” came the reply.

Altin recognized the dimpled chin of the Marine called Krakowski through the open canopy of the whirring and hissing Earth machine. Smoke curled up from the end of the weapon mounted on its left arm, the thing the colonel had called a
fifty-cal
.

“All right, through that door there,” the colonel said, pointing with his gun. “It’s charged with something and probably rigged to explode, so watch yourself.”

“Mind if I drop the canopy then, sir?”

The colonel looked to Altin, who nodded that it was okay. “Just do it quick.”

“Roger that.”

Krakowski resealed the canopy and then guided the machine a few steps into the room as Altin and the colonel withdrew from it. The battle suit whirred noisily as the Marine took aim at the door. A moment later the fifty-caliber Gatling cannon unleashed a furious barrage into the door, sending a spray of brass casings clattering to the floor around the battle suit’s feet in a hollow metallic din as it did. Surprisingly, the door held up against the onslaught. The stone around the door, however, did not. The wood paneling was torn away around the edges, revealing the bare masonry, and the sustained barrage of bullets cut into it markedly.

“Keep it up,” said the colonel. “We’ll go around the side of it then.”

“Roger that,” said Krakowski and once again the spray of bullets commenced. Shortly after, the magical lock went off explosively, throwing the assault machine all the way across the room where it landed on its back and slid halfway through the wall. Altin and the colonel, even a room away, where thrown out into the hall beyond that.

The colonel regained his feet first, though Altin was only a moment behind, and both of them ran back in time to see Krakowski’s battle machine thrashing about in the jumble of timbers and broken stone for a few seconds before going still.

The colonel climbed over the piled debris in the room and scrambled up the front of the battle suit, calling out, “Krakowski, you okay?”

He pressed a button on the side of the unit’s canopy and lifted heavily on a lever that wouldn’t budge. “Get up here,” he snapped at Altin. “I can’t get it off with one good arm.”

Altin climbed awkwardly up the machine, the hot metal burning the bottoms of his bare feet.

“Take hold here and lift. On three.” The colonel directed Altin to the black handle at the end of what looked like a long iron bar. “Ready? One … two … three!”

They both heaved as hard as they could, and with a rush of air, the canopy popped up.

Krakowski lay motionless inside. At first Altin thought he might be all right, but then he noticed the blood stain spreading across back of the cockpit and through the shoulders of the man’s uniform. It came from the back of his skull where the bone had been crushed by the force of the impact.

“Damn it.” The colonel tapped his com. “Sanchez, Russell, get back here and take Krakowski to the ship.”

“I can teleport him to a doctor I know in Leekant,” Altin said. “If he’s there, at least.”

“He’s got neural hookups and fluid exchanges with the machine,” the colonel said. “We’ve got to get him disconnected first.”

“Is he going to make it?” Altin asked. From the amount of blood and the strange, flattened way Krakowski’s head lay against the back of the battle suit, Altin was afraid to hold out a great deal of hope.

“He better.” The ice in the colonel’s expression suggested his assessment wasn’t much different than Altin’s was.

The stomping sounds coming from two of the huge battle machines preceded their arrival. Altin and the colonel scurried down and out of the way, allowing the new arrivals to lift the downed battle suit and carry it out, taking Krakowski with it. The whole scene in Altin’s eyes was nothing short of surreal. It was like watching two ogres made of steel working together as civilized men.

“Russell’s a hell of a medic. She’ll stabilize him if it’s possible to do,” said the colonel grimly. “Let’s get Orli. She’s got to be down that hole.”

The hole he referred to was the stairwell Krakowski had opened up. They ran down it taking the stairs three at a time. As they descended, animal sounds, growls and screeches, grew louder with every step. The door at the bottom stood open, flung wide and letting the cries through unabated. They slowed at the base of the stairs and looked out cautiously. The moment they did so, a rain of ice spikes, hundreds of them, much larger and thicker than the one that had struck the colonel earlier, began falling from the ceiling in a dense rain. They landed with a flurry of cracks like the rapid beat of an icy drum, the bits of them skittering across the floor on impact and covering it with chunks of ice and a thin film of snow.

“Snake bastard,” Altin swore as he stepped back into the stairwell. Just as he did, a long sheaf arrow clattered off the stone near where his foot had been as well. He watched it slide to a stop against the stone behind the lowest stair. He let out a low, frustrated hum.