Trent Jamieson - Night's engines

THE UNCONQUERED METROPOLIS OF McMAHON, TEN YEARS AGO EDGE OF THE ROIL

“Victory is certain.”

The words crackled and spat, springing from loudspeakers all along the front line and from loudhailers built into the shining bellies of the military class airships or clutched in the jagged-toothed fighting flagella of the Aerokin that floated, stately and predatory, above.

General Bowen's voice possessed such conviction that, for a moment, it was true and not a single soldier could doubt it.

Behind them the grand city of McMahon emptied. Its great bridges and northern roads strained with refugees — all fleeing, now that this last battle for their city was to begin. Smoke blackened McMahon’s sky, and everything stank of it, there had been riots that morning and into the afternoon. But as the Roil’s approach quickened, they’d quietened down. New laws (the Peace and Order Precepts, or as they were more popularly known, the Laws of Knife) were coming aggressively into play, as the dark curtain closed. Still, riots continued in some quarters, perhaps a final expression of denial or rage at what was being lost to them.

When the battle was won, those who had rioted would be dealt with by Verger’s knife or hurled into prison to rot and consider their folly. But now sixty thousand soldiers, two thousand ice cannons, eighty battle Aerokin, and two hundred airships, the wondrous weaponry of the new age, were perched at the abyss of battle. All of that military force intent upon a single goal: the obliteration of the Roil.

“Victory is certain. We cannot fail. For if we fail here, we fail humanity and Shale itself. And enter that great darkness and become shivering meat for Quarg Hound and Endym, Flute and Floataotons. We will not fall as Tate fell, nor Chinoy or Carver. This time we are ready. This time we drive back the dark.”

Surely Bowen was right, after all the Roil was a big dumb mass. It could not overwhelm this gleaming technology and the miles of soldiery arrayed against it, nor could it devour the grandest metropolis ever built. Yet, all it took was a turn of the head and the soaring terrible presence of the Roil and such arrogance was torn of its potency.

“Victory is certain,” General Bowen said once more, and his voice echoed like a thunder-crack into the sky and faded just as quickly.

“Victory is bloody certain all right,” Beaksley mumbled, checking his ice rifle for the umpteenth time, always checking his rifle, always. “Just not fer us.”

Sergeant Harper smacked her palm hard against his head, enjoying the rather satisfying thwack! She realised that she and Beaksley were the only two not looking up at the armada in the sky, and flashed him a dark grin. “Keep such sentiments to yourself, or you'll feel a knife in your spine. That is if you have one.” She said it with some fondness.

“I’ve spine enough — standing here ain’t I?”

No arguing with that.

The Roil was almost upon them, it had moved swiftly that day, as though anxious to meet them in battle. Harper shared that desire. She wanted this done. She wanted to go home.

Two minutes, no more, and the Roil would be in range, drowning out the sun with its great obsidian-like curtain, though it was already dark enough, a rank and bitter night. The air fleet overhead, made up of military class and converted merchant craft as well as Aerokin, hid the day almost as effectively as the Roil. Harper turned her attention a moment upon that drifting industry, the various ships' banners flapping in the wind.

There was strategy at work. They were here to deal with any creatures of the Roil that approached. The airships themselves were to attack the Roil airspace itself with endothermic jets and cannon. They would drive a wedge in the dark, as a series of moats were filled with ice, and coolant pipes running the perimeter of the city would be activated.

There was a furious signalling of flags across the sky; most of the airships were not fitted with the new radio technology. Endothermic weaponry had taken precedence over everything else; cannon protruded from the ships' bows and Aerokin's brain sections like the bristles of a Cuttleman. The guns made Harper feel uncomfortable, she didn't like this close fighting, didn't like the idea of all those munitions suspended above her head.

Harper spied a couple of Mirrlees dirigibles, the grey teardrop painted upon their cabins; she yearned for the River Weep.

Thirty months ago her number had come up. Conscripted, she had seen a year in the north, stabilizing what the Council of Engineers called a “rupture of treaty” with the Cuttlemen. It had felt like war to her.

Through luck and a particular aptitude for survival, she'd lived and kept on living, rising in the ranks to sergeant, this motley crew hers to bawl commands at: glad to be in the company of someone who had the knack of not dying. But she could take no comfort that she had helped forge a peace in the north, because before it had come to a conclusion her troops had been transferred down to McMahon, and this new endeavour, one that made little sense to her. How could an army face off the dark?

“Soon enough dead, I reckon,” Beaksley mumbled.

Harper was damned if she were going to let an idiot like Beaksley put an end to her chances now. She cracked him another blow to the back of his helmet.

The fool stared south, his jaw wide open. He pointed and Sergeant Harper’s gaze followed his shaking hands. The Roil raced towards them, not all of it, just the lower strata: a shelf of darkness some forty feet high. She could hear it, a snapping, clicking, the friction of chitin against chitin, barbed and wild. A fierce and boiling wind rushed from the south ahead of it, so strong that she had to lean forward. Guns and armour creaked; the wind tugged at her gear. Sergeants swore, or bawled out orders. Harper blinked away dust and smoke, her eyes stung; she opened her mouth to speak and the sky exploded.

Rolling detonations thundered in the heavens. At first she thought it was the airships firing their cannon — too soon, they were doing it too soon — until she realised it was the airships themselves, rupturing, being torn apart by… she didn’t know, couldn’t quite comprehend its quick bulk, pale howling flesh, wings that beat hummingbird fast. Flaming remnants of craft, red-hot fragments of the rigid ships's skeletons, and flailing and screaming air troopers rained down upon the soldiers around her, killing those they struck.

The Roil hit them, washed over the chaos, with a deadening darkness.

All was quiet, a soft intake of breath, a widening of pupils or the dripping of sweat. More thrashing bodies fell, but it was as though all the sound had gone from the world. It didn't last.

She breathed out, pumped the action on her gun and fired.

“Fight, you fools,” she shouted in the smothering dark. “Fight or die.”

There was a third option. A mass of darkness struck her eyes and her mouth.

Darkness that burned.

General Bowen calmly called the retreat from the deck of the Daunted Spur. Everything was madness about him, but he kept his head, and considered his terrible failure.

The army was gone. Sixty thousand soldiers swept up in darkness as though they had never been, and the Roil rolled on like a storm front, if a storm could possess such dreadful silent majesty. On the edge of the Roil, chaos bloomed everywhere, behind it only the quiet of the dark.

In the air, over half his ships were down, torn from the sky by the savagery of the two attacking Vermatisaurs, their many heads pale and serpentine, snapping and striking — ruining Aerokin and airship alike.

But Bowen knew that, while showy, they were by no means the most of their problems. Endyms and smaller things, Hideous Garment Flutes amongst them, crowded so thickly upon neighbouring ships's hulls that their weight dragged them out of the sky. The hydrogen-filled ships hit the ground sedately and exploded, gas cells igniting one after the other, their fires darkening the ozone before the Roil and killing the troops beneath them.