“Not a chance,” said Ledger. “We’re falling back—”
“No! You have to tell me what you can see through the gateway.”
There was a heavy rattle of gunfire, screams, shouts and curses. Through it all, Ledger managed to spit out some words. “Use the… fucking… drone—”
Lizzie wanted to smack herself upside the head. Of course!
She took the controls again and went to work.
12
I SAW THE drone go sweeping overhead, moving in a straight line toward the cleft, which seemed to be swelling as more of the intense red light pushed through from the other side.
And I realized what I was seeing. This wasn’t just the priests and spiders trying to break through from the pit — something over there, on the other side of the wall, was fighting to get out. To break free.
To come here.
I shifted to my left to get a better view, but had to shoot my way there, killing a priest and three more of the tripodal spiders. Smaller spiders were climbing all over me, and I could hear them scratching at the fabric of my Dragon suit. The material would stop a bullet, but, like most fabric body armor, it wouldn’t necessarily stop a blade. Or a claw.
I paused to slap at the little bastards, squashing several and brushing dozens to the ground, but they immediately swarmed back up my legs. Top and Bunny were likewise covered with the little monsters.
A big one — much bigger than the others, nearly as large as a baby elephant — came scuttling toward me, with two priests flanking it. I switched to full auto and burned through the rest of my magazine to cut them down. As I swapped in a new one I crabbed sideways to try and get a better look at the cleft. The light was blinding, making it difficult to see anything clearly, but I thought I saw shadows. Small and large. There were more of the tripodal spiders, but also larger shapes. And stranger ones, but none that I could identify. They crowded the entrance and I knew that if they broke through, we were lost. Me and my guys. Maybe more than that.
Maybe the world.
Every fiber of who I was, and all of my instincts told me that was not an exaggeration.
Top and Bunny had backed all the way to where we’d first come down the slope. There was nowhere else to go. I was separated from them by a running sea of spiders. No matter how many of the little freaks I killed, there were always more. Were they somehow squeezing through the cleft? Or had Mercer conjured them from some nightmare reality? I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I wanted that answer.
The priests tried to swat the drone out of the air. They jumped up and swung their weapons at it, but Lizzie was sharp. Damn, she was sharp. The pigeon wings flapped, and the little machine tilted and dipped and swooped and even though the axes and mauls and waving arms came close, they could not not tear it down.
The opening was still narrow, though. A few inches, though the spill of light created the illusion of it being larger.
“The drone won’t fit,” I warned.
“I know,” she snapped. “I’m going to try something.”
The drone accelerated, the wings becoming blurs as it shot forward toward the wall. A priest climbed onto the shoulders of two others and leapt at it, trying to grab it and pull the machine down.
He missed, but only just.
The drone smashed into the wall.
No. It smashed into the cleft. The head buried itself into the narrow opening and lodged there. The wings snapped and the body sagged down.
“Shit,” cried Bunny, but I understood what Lizzie was trying to do. She needed to see what was on the other side. The cameras were in the drone’s small head.
I heard a sound, though. From Lizzie.
She cried out as if in physical pain.
At the same time, Bunny glanced up, probably to judge how far above them the ends of our rappelling ropes were, and I saw him stagger. Actually stagger, as if someone had hit him. His knees began to buckle and he had to visibly fight to keep standing.
“Jesus Fucking Christ on the cross,” he breathed.
I looked up, too.
I wanted to scream.
No, I wanted to lay down my weapons and sit down and cry. And let the monsters get me, because there was no reason to keep fighting. The world was broken. Everything was broken.
Above us should have been the slopes of the pit. Above us should have been the ropes and the smoke rising into the air over the Turkmenistan desert. Above us should have been the world.
That’s not what Bunny saw. It’s not what I saw.
Above us there was darkness.
Above us there were stars.
It was like looking up from the surface of the moon.
The sky was gone. And the world was gone and where in Heaven or Hell were we?
“Joe,” came Lizzie’s voice. “Look at your computer screen.”
“Not now,” I said, firing and firing.
“Joe… you have to see this.”
I backpedaled and took a grenade from my belt. “Frag out!” I bellowed and rolled it like a bocce ball beneath the closest of the giant spiders; then I spun, crouched and covered my head with my arms. The blast, even muffled, was like thunder, and I was splashed with green ichor. I cut a look to see that everything in the blast radius was dead and it gave me a few seconds to check the screen.
If I thought it was going to be as bad as seeing the stars above us on a clear afternoon, I was wrong.
It was worse.
So much worse.
The computer screens we wore were small, but they were ultra-high-definition and the colors were accurate to an incredible degree. I gaped down at the image fed to me from Lizzie. The image of what the drone was seeing through the cleft.
There were thousands upon thousands of figures on the other side of that wall. But it was not a cave or cavern over there. It was not anything on Earth at all.
Through the proxy of the drone’s video camera eyes, I looked onto the landscape of another world. I saw vast stretches of sandy, rocky ground and towering mountains. It was all painted a lurid red. Sand and rocks and blowing grit. All red.
Filling much of that landscape was an army.
It was the only way to describe it. An army. An invasion force. Countless thousands of them. I saw hundreds of the three-legged spiders, some of them as small as the ones I’d been killing, but most many times bigger. Bigger than full grown bison. And people. If they were people. Bipedal, with round, erect heads and large eyes in dark sockets; their bodies fitted out with armor like exoskeletons, as if their limbs were unable to support themselves. They marched forward like slaves being forced into battle.
Behind them were other creatures and it was instantly clear that they were the masters of these combat slaves. They rode in devices like a kind of chariot, with flat bases and lots of devices whose nature I could not begin to guess. These chariots moved nimbly on mechanical legs. Three legs.
Worse still were the things that towered above them.
Monsters made of glittering metal that stood a hundred feet tall and walked on three titanic legs, many flexible metal tentacles whipping with furious agitation in the air. Behind each, bolted to its body, was a massive steel net, and with each step jets of green gas erupted from its joints. Each tripod had a clear dome and inside I could see the masters of this ungodly army. They were hideous, with octopoidal bodies, and massive heads with bulging eyes and v-shaped beaks. Smaller tentacles framed their mouths, twitching and obscene.
My mind felt like it was cracking, breaking apart, and taking the last of my sanity with it. I knew these things. These metal monsters. I’d read about them as a kid, saw them in movies. They weren’t real. They were the creations of a British science fiction writer from more than a century ago. They were fiction.