David Farland - Beyond the Gate

And so they slipped quietly over the ocean for the next few minutes as Maggie’s mantle displayed the view ahead. The sky was clear until they reached the coasts of Babel, and there a thin line of dark clouds showed on the horizon, an approaching thunderstorm.

“Buckle in back there and prepare for rapid descent,” Maggie called to the others.

The aircar dropped low and screamed over the hills and valleys just above the treetops at mach 9. The clouds and rain obscured her vision out the windows, so Maggie relied completely on the head-up holo that her mantle displayed. The holo showed the Telgoods looming ahead, a line of bony white teeth, and Maggie fired her smart missiles, then opened her eyes and looked out the front windows to verify that they left. The missiles streaked ahead of her on antigrav, leaving a flash as the air around them became superheated.

The aircar whirled, dove through some narrow canyons, and the AI fired a burst on the incendiary cannons, blasting a lone wingman from its path. And suddenly the aircar seemed to leap in the air as it cleared a mountain, then lurched as it plummeted toward Moree.

“Four targets hit, three destroyed-” the AI flashed a message on her screen as soon as the ship had visuals. The head-up holo displayed the scene-three of the five dome-shaped spaceships going up in mushroom clouds. A fourth had been hit, but had not exploded. Maggie looked out the windows through a heavy rain, saw the trunk of fiery mushroom cloud begin billowing up as she passed, an incredible inferno. They were diving right through the periphery of its flames.

Two dronon walking fortresses had taken fire from the explosions. One was flying apart, huge metallic chunks spewing out in odd angles as its munitions blew. The other had flames boiling out its cargo hold and was trying to retreat from the white inferno that had once been a starship. The dronon walking fortress left a trail of flames and burning debris as it crawled away, looking for all the world like some great black spider in its death throes.

A smart missile was coming in from directly ahead, launched from one of the intact walking fortresses ten kilometers to the south, and Maggie almost subconsciously fired both plasma cannons, detonating the missile in midair so that a brilliant flash blinded her for a moment.

Their aircar was still dropping toward ground-toward the perpendicular rocky cliff face where the Harvester’s chambers should be-when the AI flashed a message in red letters through the head-up holodisplay: “Permission to abort mission?”

Maggie looked about desperately at the scene below, wondering why the AI would ask that, wondering why one of her missiles hadn’t taken out the Tekkar’s airfield instead of a starship, its secondary target. She looked toward the dun-colored fields below and saw the reason: none of the Tekkar’s military transports were on the field. They’d all been moved.

“No!” Maggie shouted in frustration, but her AI took that as a rejection of permission to abort, and in half a second they slammed to the ground, and her aircar began sending pulsed bursts of antigravity through the substrata.

Maggie looked out the windows, shouted, “Gallen, the airfield was clear! The Tekkar must have their transports out searching for us!”

But Gallen was already clearing the hold, with Orick, Ceravanne, and the Bock all following. Maggie silently willed her mantle to radio the message from mantle to mantle, and she looked around.

“Message received,” Gallen said through his mantle. “But we can’t stop now. Do what you can, then get out of here!”

Maggie wondered what to do. She couldn’t leave Gallen stranded here in Moree, but certainly the Tekkar airships, with a capability for mach 10 speeds, would be here in seconds. Even if they were out a hundred kilometers away, they could be here in thirty seconds.

Maggie bit her lip, studied her surroundings. For the moment, her ship was partly hidden under the rock cliff face to her south. To the north and east, the mushroom clouds from the exploding starships were growing redder and redder as their caps of smoke and flame rose higher into the thunderheads. Static discharges caused by the explosion were suddenly setting off a series of lightning blasts that spanned the sky. The door to the shuttle hummed shut, and almost unconsciously Maggie realized that a huge hole had had opened in the cliff face to her south. From inside the aircar, with the exterior sounds shielded, she heard and felt nothing as tons of rock slid down the face of the cliff, leaving a gaping hole.

Gallen, Ceravanne, and the others were running over the ground, and now that the hole was opened, the transport’s AI began emitting a cloud of Black Fog, a harmless aerial dye that blocked nearly all light.

At this moment, Maggie was supposed to move the hovercar, begin circling on a path around the Harvester’s subterranean throne room, collapsing the tunnels leading to the room so that the harvester and the Inhuman would be sealed off from aid, and from any avenues of escape.

Maggie swung the hovercar forward in a long arc, covered a kilometer in a matter of seconds, and watched as her aircar’s antigravity collapsed the tunnels ahead, leaving furrowed ruins.

Tunnels fell in and chambers opened in a regular pattern. Maggie had made nearly half the circle when an alarm sounded. Her AI flashed an image of two approaching aircraft, smart missiles blurring toward her.

Maggie had no missiles left to fire back, and it was too late to escape.

Orick was running up the hill behind Ceravanne and the Bock, with Gallen in the lead. A gritty rain hammered his snout, and red pillars of fire blazed across the countryside. All around them the ground had collapsed in pockets as tunnels and chambers caved in. In those places, Orick could see slabs of broken stone protruding from the ground. In many places across these fields, there were fires coming up out of the horrific rents, and dust rising from the earth. Armageddon. It looked like some vision of Armageddon.

Orick had seen that much of the damage was already done before their transport even landed-apparently the explosive power of the starships had been more than the architects of this city could have planned for.

Orick was running full tilt when suddenly the ground at his feet began to give way, and he lunged forward just as a tunnel collapsed beneath. In front of him a hundred yards there was a sound of splitting rock, and almost all of the face of the cliff just before the group began sliding down, as if it had been a sand castle dashed apart by a child’s foot.

The sounds of the splitting rock, the roaring infernos of the distant mushroom clouds, the blasts of lightening, the cries of people, the shaking of the earth-all rose together in an incredible tumult, and for one breathless moment Orick stopped to watch in the distance as one of the starships-a gigantic globe nearly half a mile across-lifted from the ground without any visible means of propulsion, heading upward for the safety of the stars.

Gallen stopped for a moment, and Orick could feel the ground weaving and bucking beneath his feet. The movement bothered the humans and the Bock more than it did Orick, and they stood balancing precariously.

Where the rock wall had collapsed, they could see at least six levels of rooms that had been in that part of the Tekkar’s city. At the highest level was a tall chamber, with forty-foot ceilings. The Harvester’s throne room. But to reach it they would have to climb the wall of broken rubble that lay before them, scaling the stones.

“That way!” Gallen shouted, pointing out a path over the rocks.

The whole world smelled of fire and smoke and broken stone.

Orick was vaguely aware of Tekkar running through those apartments, of wounded people crying out, but suddenly a wall of Black Fog swept over them as Maggie released their camouflage. And then they were swallowed by utter darkness.