B. Larson - The Empress

That left the sole option of continuing to press the attack. He took that option, but with each passing hour he felt a growing sense of doom. At some point, the aliens would have to realize they were losing and should unleash all their firepower to annihilate his army. What were they waiting for?

Aldo got his answer in the sixth hour. The enemy counterattacked then, with new monsters he’d not seen since he’d battled on the decks of the Zurich, the great Nexus battleship which had stopped the alien assault of Neu Schweitz.

Creatures twice the height of a man charged. They stood on two, powerful hind legs. Their maws were filled with huge teeth like daggers and their bodies and hides were thick in every proportion. Their heads were so massive, they required long tails to balance themselves as they ran.

To a man with a rifle, the juggers did not seem overly dangerous at a distance. They did not have any form of ranged attack. They simply focused on a target and charged on those huge, bulging legs.

When they first came into view, milling and releasing throaty roars, snipers all up and down Aldo’s line began firing at them. They were easy targets, and they winced and shivered when their umber hides were burned and pierced.

Then they gathered themselves into groups of seven to nine beasts, and the charge began. Their muscles shivered and swelled with power. Their pace picked up as they came, and they were soon bounding down the streets toward the human lines, each stride taking them thirty feet or more.

Aldo could feel the cobbles tremor as each massive foot struck down and then pumped up again. Around him, men on the barricades began to show signs of worry. They fired a withering fusilade of laser bolts, but not a single one of the monsters fell. A new reality quickly took hold in everyone’s mind: these creatures were too large, too hearty, to be taken down by rifles.

Aldo was not quite certain what to do.

“Sling rifles!” shouted Baroness Droad as she stepped up beside him. “Draw blades and stand your ground!”

Confused, eyes wide and round, the men did as she said. But when the charging juggers were almost upon them, some finally did break and flee.

The juggers crashed into and bounded over the barricade a moment later. They hooted and cried to one another in excitement, dipping their great heads to snap up those that fled. The knights slashed and roared, but their voices seemed tiny in the face of a swirling mass of giant predators.

“Strike low!” shouted Aldo. His sword blazed with fire, as he had set it to its maximum power. Such was the thickness and weight of the beasts, he found it best to slash at the joints-ankle, knee and hip. His sword could not strike all the way through, but it was able to cripple the one he attacked while the monster busied itself with devouring a man who had been knocked flat by stacked crates. The barricade that the men had built up to defend themselves had now become a pile of falling debris. Crushed down and trapped under the crates, men howled as they were plucked apart by hungry juggers.

Aldo soon learned several techniques he was determined to remember, should he survive this phase of the battle. When facing a charging jugger, one had to keep oneself calm. Turning tail and running meant certain death. It was best, in fact, to stand in the open, motionless until the final moment. Then, by dancing aside even as the monster dipped down to scoop you up in your jaws, a man could avoid the charge. The momentum of the beast was such that it could not stop and turn quickly enough to catch you. As one leapt to the side, a well-placed slash at one of the joints did wonders. By the end of the bloody, terrifying ordeal, he’d personally brought down two juggers and driven his sword home into the brain and chest of a third. This had to be done repeatedly, before it finally died.

Nina came up and clapped him on the back. He flinched and turned to her, eyes narrowed. He panted and rubbed at the gore on his face. There was no telling whose blood it was. He suspected it was a thick mixture of fluids from the juggers and their victims.

“My knights stood their ground!” shouted Nina. She was grinning, and seemed elated, rather than horrified. “Did you see that, Aldo? Only a few cowards broke, and they were run down. In a way, they helped us by distracting them. We were able then to move in while the creatures fed.”

Aldo nodded, eyeing her with concern. He’d once been told by the Duchess that people considered the Droads to be a bloodthirsty lot. Now, for the first time, he thought he understood why.

All told, many men and mechs were lost to the jugger charge, but Aldo’s army was not broken. When a force of killbeasts advanced in the wake of the juggers, they didn’t find a shattered force. The survivors fought back and held their lines.

“Baroness,” Aldo said. “I think we should advance.”

“Of course we should!” she shouted back. “Mount up, man. I can barely hold my knights in place as it is.”

Aldo shrugged and climbed into his saddle. Around him, a hundred more men followed. They were wary now, naturally enough. They’d seen a fresh variety of nightmare today.

What might the aliens throw at them next?

The Parent dragged herself to the nife’s central nexus. Located in one of the observation modules of Gladius, the domed transparent surface overhead provided a panoramic view of Ignis Glace. The desert of Sunside was a bright yellow, striped with rust-colored, spiraling mountain ranges. The glare of Sunside was met with the velvet darkness of Twilight, a thin ragged band where shadow met light. Beyond was the frosted blackness of Nightside.

Directly below the great ship a battle raged, and the Parent knew it was going badly. This troubled her, but also gave her some level of pleasure as well. She tried not to feel guilty about her mixed feelings. The Skaintz, unlike humans, were not individualists. They lived for the betterment of the hive. They did strive and compete-but never purposefully to the detriment of all.

That made today’s mission all the sweeter. The Parent dragged her aching, flopping lobes into the nife’s command module with heaving tentacles. Her suckers were sore from pulling so much weight behind them, and her birth tracts were no longer capable of closing properly. They leaked fluids in a glistening trail behind her all the way down the long corridor. Why had the humans built such a large ship with such long, geometrically precise segments? The design was baffling and irritating to the suffering Parent.

In the command module, the nife was in a defeatist mood. “Ah, I see you have come to gloat,” he said when he saw the Parent drag herself into the command chamber. “Not very sporting of you.”

“And what do I have to gloat about?” asked the Parent.

“Why, my inevitable spacing, of course. You and I shall twist in the void together until our fluids boil out our orbs and freeze solid.”

“Perhaps-and perhaps not.”

The nife perked up. His stalks rose a fraction as he regarded her. “You have a plan?”

“I do.”

“Well, delay no further! Our forces are being swept out of the human concentration. We’ve captured and processed no more than a quarter of the herd, and time is of the essence.”

“The enemy army seems to be the most effective force on the planet, so let’s be rid of it.”

“That is a goal, not a plan.”

“My plan is simplicity itself: burn the city to ash. Three nuclear devices should do the trick.”

The nife expelled gases in disgust. “That’s it? Did you think me such a simpleton that I’ve not already presented precisely that course of action to our Empress? In fact, when I presented it some hours ago, only one device would have been required. Now that they have retaken much of the city, three indeed represent the new minimum. Alas, the Empress has not given her permission to use even a single device to turn the tide. It’s so galling. There they are, all centralized and helpless below us. It is as if we’ve set the perfect trap. The high walls of the trench they reside in would rebound the shockwaves, ensuring total destruction. Not a single human, nor a single one of their cyborgs would survive.”