J. King - INVASION

"Will we have the velocity for a shift?" Sisay asked.

"Velocity won't be the problem. It's whether we've got time between the portals and the treetops before we crash," Hanna replied easily.

Sisay laughed. "That's the kind of problem I like. Here we go." She shoved the helm hard to fore.

Weatherlight's engines ceased for a moment. She lolled upward in a weightless arc, rolling her stern skyward. Dominaria swept smoothly from aft to fore.

Squee, still strapped to the stern gun, squealed as his feet swept out toward the sun.

Then, greedy and inexorable, Dominaria grasped Weatherlight and yanked her down. Creaks ran stem to stern. The prow seemed to stretch away from amidships, and it from bridge and spankers. The airfoils folded tight along the centerline, spilling air instead of grabbing it. Weatherlight plunged.

Squee was still squealing. Even so, his view of the skies was not as terrifying as everyone else's view of the land. Llanowar seemed a leopard, crouched to spring.

Weatherlight's engines engaged. Intakes dragged a deep breath. A white-hot column of energy formed within the engine. Fire burst from exhausts. To the ship's terminal velocity came impatient force, ramming it down.

Llanowar sprung. The forest roared up to swallow the ship. Its rot-black treetops groped into the sky. The sea of portals seemed only a slim membrane above that reaching place. In moments, Weatherlight would punch through the portals and into the tree-tops.

"Shift to where?" Sisay shouted over the roar of the engines.

"The course is laid in," Hanna called back. "A place in need of Phyrexian bombs."

There was no more time. Weatherlight impacted the plane of portals. They swept from prow to poop in a heartbeat. Spacio-temporal stresses clawed across the deck. Bombs, half-emerged, hung in countless portals, too slow to catch up with Weatherlight. Squee and the folded wings cleared the portals.

"Shift!" Sisay shouted, staring at the ground as it soared up to meet them.

The ship hurtled all the faster. Wind tore at her rails. The black treetops resolved into individual boughs, and the ruined houses on those boughs, and the running figures among them. A jump-envelope welled out from the forespar. It swept a wide wake, encompassing thousands of portals.

"Shift!" Sisay shouted once last.

An enormous bough rushed up to smash through Weatherlight's windscreen-except that no bough remained. Black and green had given way to jittering gray.

Beyond the ship's rail, the envelope rattled. It held back the hissing, glaring emptiness between the worlds. Chaos churned and spun. Nightmare forms reared their heads out of darkness and dissolved again before they were fully created. Lines jagged away in recursive ribbons. There seemed no more horrible place in all the multiverse…

Until chaos transformed at last, solidifying into tortuous Rath.

Overhead, red clouds roiled like boiling blood. Below, red rills coiled like flayed muscle. Arrayed all across those hellish hills were army after army of Phyrexians, waiting to invade.

Weatherlight's planeshifting envelope dissolved around her. Heat and smoke washed over her prow. Airfoils swept out to grab the bitter air. She slowed, leaving in her boiling wake a field of portals.

From those toppling, spinning devices, plague bombs hailed. They fell among the troops arrayed there. Devices meant to slay elves fell instead among the monsters that made them. Many were crushed under the pounding things. Others were mowed down as the spheres bounded across the ground. Bombs rolled to a stop and spewed white spores out across the shrieking hordes.

"Nice work, ladies!" Gerrard shouted, whooping.

Orim was cradling Hanna's bleeding, unconscious figure in her arms. "Get us out of here! Get us back to Llanowar!"

Gerrard staggered across the pitching deck toward the two women. "You heard her!" he rasped out, kneeling before Hanna and wrapping her in his arms. "Planeshift!"

Tumbling head over heels, Barrin was hurled into the red skies over Shiv. He'd been in the middle of a losing battle in Keld when he was yanked away by alerters- artifacts that sniffed for glistening-oil. They went off massively. A full-scale invasion was beginning over Shiv. The volcanic land was the world's only source of manufactured powerstones. If the Phyrexians captured or destroyed the Shivan mana rig, Urza could not build new machines of war.

Still, it was rude to be literally hauled out of one battle and flung into another.

Barrin righted himself. Brimstone breezes fled into his robes, plucking away the last stink of battle in Keld and replacing it with the stink of Shiv. He gazed at the land.

Here, the flesh of the world was but a fragile crust, suppurating with lava. In every direction lay calderas and smoking crowns, seas of magma, hissing vents, ropy coils of rock, basalt cliffs, gnarls of obsidian, pumice, ash, sulfur…

In the midst of the fiery desolation towered the mana rig. It was a massive, ancient factory, set crownlike on a basalt headstone. A huge dish of metal girded either end of the rig. One wing was anchored into the ground. The other perched on enormous articulated legs over a sea of lava. Atop these dishes, great domes rested. Between them ran a long hall, built up like the porticoed temple of some forgotten god. From the structure, veiny pipes ran down the cliffs and into boiling lava. The tubes conveyed red-hot magma up into the structure, there to turn the heat of the world into powerstones and living metal-weapons to slay Phyrexians.

A massive portal-larger than those at Benalia, Zhalfir, Yavimaya, or Keld-gaped wide in the sky. The first three Phyrexian cruisers advanced from the darkness. Shiv painted their bows red. Each ship was the size of the mana rig. Hundreds more crowded behind.

"Where is Urza?" Barrin hissed, yanking the alerter brooch from his sleeve and hurling the blazing thing away.

As if in answer, the air beside Barrin shimmered. A creature formed itself from spectral winds. Urza's gemstone eyes glared out of his materializing skull. The figure grew an armored war-stole, done up in gleaming sigils. A shaft of radiance formed in his hand. It became a great war-staff. Urza lifted his other hand, grasped the blazing brooch on his own sleeve, and vaporized the thing.

"Glad you could make it," Barrin said with quiet irony.

Urza lifted an eloquent eyebrow. "Exigencies of war and all that."

Barrin gestured outward. "Here's an exigency for you."

Nodding solemnly, Urza said, "The Metathran ships are en route. Until they arrive, it's you and me, friend. We cannot hope for goblins and Viashino to stand against-"

"Look!" Barrin said, pointing toward the emerging ships.

The three cruisers blazed with sudden flame. Giant fire dragons swarmed the ships, breathing destruction across them. Huge though they were, the wyrms seemed small against the black vessels. Still, there were hundreds of serpents. Their wing beats flung back bolts of black mana. Their fangs crunched Phyrexian crews. Their incendiary breath was only augmented by glistening-oil. Flames belched from their mouths and spattered across the hulls of the great ships. Rails melted. Conduits ruptured. Engine cells cracked.

"Rhammidarigaaz," Barrin said wonderingly as he watched the leader of the fire drakes. A millennium ago, the young male had fought beside Urza and Barrin in a war with angels. Indeed, Barrin had ridden him into battle. Today, ancient and huge, Darigaaz would fight beside them in a war with devils. "He has mustered his people."

"A boon, yes," said Urza, "but they will not be enough." He pointed beneath the ships.

Dragons, mantled in black goo, plunged from the skies. Some struggled all the way down before crashing on lakes of fire. Others were dead even before they fell, ripped in half by ray-cannon blasts or eaten away by corruptionmachines. Alone, these dragons could not destroy the ships. They would be slain, every last one.