Emergence (26 page)

It had been wrong.

The flying creatures were not creatures at all.

The thresh turned its eyestalks on the fallen Drakon, and the thinking came upon it that
. . .
that what had dropped from Above was not beast but
. . .
but chariot.

Some form of chariot, the thresh was certain, and from which even now an injured and bloodied calfling crawled.

Around it, the revengers’ thrall strained and thrashed on the very edge of disintegration. The discipline of the war party was near breaking point and might have failed if Urspite Scaroth had not whipped out his great blade and decapitated another of his less reliable Hunn as a lesson.

‘HOLD!’ he roared. ‘The Hunn ur Horde will HOLD!’

‘Hunn,’ a few of the warriors barked with unthinking obedience. ‘Hunn
. . .
Hunn
. . .’

‘
Hunn ur Horde
,’ roared the surviving Lieutenants Grymm, which was very generous of them, and soon enough the entirety of the Dread Company had taken up the chant, calming themselves with it.

The BattleMaster turned his baleful glare on the thresh.

‘Did you witness these before?’ Scaroth demanded to know in a low rumbling growl.

‘No, my lord,’ the thresh replied, shouting over the death screams of the chariot beast. Inside the thing, yet another rider struggled to free itself.

‘Then pray the Sky Lords send no more down upon us, thresh. Now. Move.’

The thresh stumbled forward. It could not untangle its many thinkings and feelings.

It knew the fear of the unknown, of the uncertainty about the bright, hot light into which it would take the revengers. It knew pride that one so inferior might lead such a mighty force into battle. The thresh also knew that the war party was actually quite tiny by the standards of the Horde, especially the Grande Horde, but it had rarely seen the Hunn clan assembled in greater numbers than this, and never with the intent to have at a foe. It felt anxiety that it might falter and bring shame upon its nest like the Hunn that had lost control of its leash. And as it slowly began to lope toward the light, stretching out its gait, accelerating toward the enemy lines, there was the savage exultation of which it had dreamed so many times. The blood frenzy was rising.

The muddy ground, broken and uneven, dried out and became flat, slipping away beneath the thresh in a blur. The men, its prey, reacted to the charge, some fleeing, some climbing aboard their chariots, others holding the glowing amulets to their faces as if to hide behind the strange candle. As it closed with the calflings, the thresh heard more screeching as human riders reined in their chariots. It smelled a strange, alien miasma of scents, most of them completely unidentifiable. And it heard the most confounding sound.

A deep, thudding roar that filled the skies.

It searched in the direction of the sound.

Skyward. And what it saw froze the ichor in its carcass.

There was more than one skyborne chariot.

26

A
n NOPD command unit rolled up while Heath and his men were rushing to establish some sort of forward post in the po’boy shop. Dave wasn’t entirely sure what they were doing there. Building a little fort? Constructing a blind, like hunters, from which to observe the Hunn? Maybe just setting up a bolt-hole into which they could flee if necessary. The shop was a solid brick structure that offered more cover than the shacks and shanties around it, but that didn’t fill him with confidence.

They weren’t facing a human enemy. The Horde wouldn’t stand off and throw stones or even spears at this place. They’d swarm it.

He already felt as though he was just baggage to these guys, and apart from telling them which orc was which, he didn’t seem much good for anything besides getting in the way. He stepped out of the store just as the NOPD truck arrived. It looked like a mobile home to Dave, and he found it all too easy to imagine a couple of Hunn carving it up with cleavers and war axes. Professor Ashbury, wearing police body armour she had picked up somewhere, jumped down out of the rear cabin door before the vehicle stopped moving. Heath managed to look both pissed and relieved at their arrival.

‘I hope this is not precipitate, Emmeline,’ he said. ‘I do hope I have an OP to fall back to.’

‘Your guys took over the café at the hospital,’ she said. ‘It’s defensible. Compton even offered to stay and defend it –’ She smirked, all ham and wry. ‘– but they didn’t need his help.’

Dave could pick out the sallow face, fiery neckbeard and bald head of the anthropologist in the rear of the command unit. He was fiddling around with a bank of screens while taking notes on a stack of tablets and a block of paper. Jostled by the police and ignored by the SEALs, he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth. When he wasn’t busy, he looked at his cell phone as if expecting it to ring.

His problem is he never gets laid
, Dave thought.

Ashbury’s eyes met Dave’s. Was there something there? Dave thought there might be something there. And he wasn’t even drunk.

‘Hello, Hooper. I see you’re still hanging around like a fart in a telephone booth.’

Okay, maybe not.

‘For now,’ he said. ‘What’s on TV?’

He nodded at the banks of monitors inside the big van.

Heath didn’t wait for an answer, climbing the two small metal steps into the cabin. Ashbury followed him back inside, and Dave followed her, still carrying Marty Grbac’s splitting maul. There were half a dozen men and women seated at consoles in the command unit, all of them uniformed officers of the New Orleans Police Department. Compton and Ashbury were the only civilians besides Dave. For the first time in what felt like a long while, nobody paid him any attention. They were all transfixed by the scenes playing out on the two largest wide-screen displays. Both ran monochrome low-light vision from news choppers.

Dave could see the leader of the war party on at least two monitors. There was no missing the ugly prick. The Hunn was noticeably larger than any other creature in its
. . .
in its
thrall
, he thought.
A war party assigned to a Master of Hunn is known as a thrall
, a word from the Olde Scrolls that could mean everything from a small raiding party of half a dozen Hunn and their leash of Fangr up to a Grande Horde. This thrall ran to roughly a couple of hundred strong and faced the marines, who were taking up position in and around an abandoned McDonald’s. On another screen, an injured reporter screamed and pleaded for someone to come and save him. One of the uniforms turned down the volume on that.

For a moment Dave found himself searching for signs of a physical leash, a chain or a long thick rope of treated hide that could bind a Fangr to its master, but that was his rational twenty-first-century mind attempting to impose a preferred meaning on a much older form of understanding. The leash was not physical. It was like
. . .
the authority of a squad leader, he thought, satisfied with that. The BattleMaster held all in his thrall. A Hunn dominant merely controlled a leash of Fangr.

Chief Allen appeared at the door of the truck.

‘All set up inside, Captain,’ he reported to Heath before following Dave’s gaze. The Hunn leader was festooned with fangs, scalps, and skulls with a headdress of Drakon scales forming a sort of Mohawk on his boiled leather helmet.

‘Nasty,’ said the CPO.

‘Yeah. That ugly-ass monster could really use some wardrobe advice,’ Igor said from the door.

‘A little Queer Eye for the Straight Orc?’ smirked Allen.

‘Just sayin’.’

Dave’s skin itched with the need to get moving, as though something inside him wanted to burst out and fly to the scene of the battle. A dumbass move for sure. No way was he leaving the protective circle of these heavily armed professional killers. Even the lady professor was probably better suited to this than he was. She had her Asperger’s thing to make her a little scary. She was rocking it. He was a freak with a magic hammer, so far out of his depth that just remembering to draw breath was an effort.

So Dave Hooper just stared at the screens. There were banks of them up and down the interior of the command unit. The SEALs and NOPD had pulled in a lot of coverage. Or rather, Ashbury had. A lot of the video was from the news channels, but at least half came from feeds he didn’t recognise. Drones, maybe? Or even satellites. Perhaps the CIA was stealing the video from the phones of those idiots who hadn’t run away yet. There were plenty of them still hanging around. Compton pushed the occasional button or stroked a touch pad to pull in close on an image, but to Dave he looked about as useless
. . .
well, as Dave felt.

‘There’s hundreds of those things out there,’ said Allen.

‘Yeah. Better to just take off and nuke them from orbit,’ Dave said.

‘Only way to be sure.’ Igor grinned.

Allen measured Dave with a look that clearly implied that he thought it could be a live option.

As much as his rational self knew not to be a damn fool, there was a damn fool part of Dave that wanted nothing more than to raise Lucille on high and charge into the Horde, swinging left and right. It was a hunger as needful as any he’d known since waking up in the hospital. Something inside Dave, deep in his blood, sang to him of the righteous urgency of closing with
dar
ienamic
and destroying them. That was how part of him thought of the Horde now. Not as monsters but as an enemy. As
ienamicae
in the Olde Tongue. He shifted Lucille carefully from one shoulder to the other. The heavy maul had grown even more uncomfortable to hold while he watched the drama on the command van monitors. Dave felt like she was humming with a resonance below human perception and the only way to silence her was to give voice to that song. A hymn to murder.

When he could stand it no longer, he turned to exit the van, needing to move, to do something, if only to get away, but he found Heath in the doorway blocking his path.

‘I need that air support, and I need it now,’ Heath said urgently, holding down the push-to-talk button of his headset. The navy man listened to a response that Dave could not hear, shook his head, and cursed softly.

‘Problemo?’ Dave asked.

Heath stared mutely at Dave for a moment, perhaps wondering whether to let him in on the conversation. After a glance at the screens, where more and more of the Hunn appeared to be spewing up out of the earth, he made his decision.

‘We’re trying to get some A-10s up, but the nearest units are in Georgia,’ Heath said.

‘And what? They’re on vacation? Or just sitting at home watching
Cake Boss
?’ Dave asked.

‘No,’ Heath said, almost offended. ‘These are experienced combat aviators. But contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, we generally keep the munitions separate from the weapons systems themselves.’

‘Why?’

‘So they don’t blow up,’ Heath said flatly. ‘Anyway, this sort of thing takes a bit of time.’

‘What about your other choppers?’ Dave asked, shifting Lucille over to his other shoulder. The heavy maul started humming to him again. Nobody else could hear it, of that he was sure. ‘They’ve got those big-ass guns.’

‘If I need to, I’ll put them in, but I’d rather not risk the Cobras after what I’ve seen with the news chopper,’ Heath said. ‘All I need now is a couple of choppers getting shot down and dropping through the roof of a mall. We have blocking forces in place, we have the initiative, and we have the advantage. I’ll wager where these things come from they don’t do close air support.’

‘Not that I know of
. . .’
Dave thought for a moment, but nothing came to him. Flying creatures were not unknown to the Hunn, especially dangerous ones like Drakonen. Urgon, for his part, didn’t have anything helpful to offer. ‘Pretty sure they don’t, anyway.’

Heath’s eyes lost their focus as he pressed one finger to his earpiece and took in some new development.

‘Acknowledged. I’ll have my second platoon of marines attack from their position,’ he said. ‘They can still flank them.’

Allen was at the door again. ‘Sir, we can get there faster. Second Platoon simply isn’t going to make it.’

‘Well, they’ll have to,’ Heath said calmly, as if he were a commentator for a golf match. ‘Or we will. Air support is taking too long.’

‘Too late,’ Dave said. On the two big screens beside him, the Hunn had finally turned themselves to face the downed helicopter and the marines of First Platoon. With a loud, ground-splitting bellow that he could hear inside the command vehicle, the Horde charged forward.

Heath bounced out of the vehicle, grimacing as he landed badly on his artificial leg and hobbling to run in front of Dave. ‘You stay here. This is our job.’

‘I’m cool with that,’ he said.

But something wasn’t cool.

Outside on the street he found the SEALs ready to roll, but the SWAT team stood at the edge of things, arguing among themselves. Igor the giant jerked his thumb at the cops. ‘Sure glad we brought those guys along.’

Heath waved a warning finger at Dave –
stay put
– and limped quickly over to Lieutenant Ostermann. ‘What is the problem?’

The senior police officer looked pained as he pointed at his own headset.

‘I’ve got the mayor arguing with the chief, and I can’t get clear orders,’ Ostermann said. ‘Mayor wants us back at the hospital. Right now. Chief says we’ve been detached to you. Mayor says you’re not paying the bills. Chief –’

To his eternal credit, Captain Heath did not shout or curse or grab the SWAT officer by his collar and beat him to death. Dave watched the man grit his teeth and take one step forward into Ostermann’s space. He spoke in a calm, quiet, reasonable tone, low enough that even with his newly enhanced hearing, Dave could not tell quite what he said.

Ashbury stuck her head out of the command vehicle. ‘Second Platoon is jammed up with refugees and tourists. They can’t get to First Platoon.’

‘Ostermann?’ Heath said, with more volume.

‘Yes,’ the now-compliant SWAT officer said.

‘Please get
your
Second Tactical Platoon to assist our marines on Claiborne at McDonald’s. The ones who are dying for this city right now.’

Ostermann reached up to his throat mike for his radio, presumably to call his fellow platoon commander. Dave ignored him, staring down the long road toward the waste ground where the Hunn had emerged. He could see nothing of them beyond a thickening crowd of refugees. Two cars had crashed at the intersection a block down, creating a dam in the flow of terrified civilians.

‘First Platoon is breaking cover and advancing toward the downed chopper,’ Ashbury said. ‘They say there are survivors. The hostiles are charging them.’

Shit was getting out of hand. Dave didn’t need to waste four years in ROTC to know that. Didn’t even need his limited chops in
Call of Duty
. Heath had a team of disparate groups not used to working with one another dealing with something they’d never seen before. They weren’t in some shitty neighbourhood in Baghdad or the mountains of the Hindu fucking Kush. They couldn’t just switch to full auto and open fire, and hose down the problem. Even a dude like Heath could do only so much with limited resources and unlimited constraints. But he had to do something, and quickly. Dave could clearly hear the massed gunfire and the rumble of the Hunn stampede. It reminded him of being trackside at the Kentucky Derby.

He thought about putting his head back into the van to check on what was happening, but as soon as the thought occurred to him, he staggered, almost dropping Lucille, stunned by a low-grade electrical charge that ran through the handle, into his arms, and up through his skull. Or something that felt like an electrical charge.

‘Prof, what’s happening over there?’ he asked, almost gagging. ‘With the marines.’

She didn’t bother to look away from the displays, answering him by raising her voice.

‘The Hunn are charging them. Getting shot down. Charging again. It’s keeping them out of the residential streets for now. Shouldn’t you be leaping tall buildings or swinging your mighty tool or something?’

Dave spun around, not really sure why but aware that he’d just heard something that sounded like a hissing whip crack.

A strangled cry and the sound of a man falling to the hard road surface drew his eye to one of the SEALs. Impaled by a four-foot war shaft. The arrow of a Sliveen scout. Blood boiled up out of the victim’s mouth as his body spasmed in shock, and everyone dived for cover.

‘What the fuck?’ gasped Ashbury.

Compton went rigid with fright, then launched into a tangle of uncoordinated action, diving for the command unit’s door and trying to slam it shut.

‘Sniper!’ Allen yelled.

‘Sliveen arrakh,’
Dave corrected him at high volume without thinking, without even knowing what he’d just said until he actually thought about it. ‘Arrows,’ he cried out then. ‘It’s arrows.’