The entire crew of the engine, from gunners to coal-throwers to the navigator on the bridge, had crept out onto the decks or pivoted their turrets to watch the display.
It felt to all of them as if there should have been some nightmare sound accompanying the untoward air. But there was nothing. Just the cold and the quiet. The atmosphere burst with slippery invisible grotesque modulation. It flexed. Rolled. Then suddenly it stopped.
The shadow evaporated as if the cloud casting it had dried up. The darkness dwindled. The strange convolutions of atmosphere smoothed without a trace.
“Fuck thunder!” whispered the commander.
Saergaeth’s engines had disappeared. Fallow Down, the entire mile-and-a-half-wide sprawl of town—everything north of the river, was gone!
Roric remembered his father and screamed.
After fifteen minutes of heated debate and speculation over whether the phenomenon had indeed reached terminus, Garen and the commander agreed over Roric’s insistent wail that they might as well throw dice. Nothing either one of them could say made any sense in the face of such an aberration. So they decided to take pity on Roric Feldman and risk an investigation.
The light engine smashed down the north face of Dürm
th Hill at top speed, crashing through bracken, spitting out flinders and destruction in its wake. When it hit level ground the gears shifted and the treads gouged fresh earth, flinging clods as the machine barreled toward the bridge.
Roric wiped tears from his eyes as he clutched a gas-powered crossbow to his chest. He was shaking with horror, disbelief and utter confusion. Garen stood behind him on the deck, holding a bow of his own. The howling pound of the engines made any kind of conversation impossible.
As they reached the bridge, the treads clattered dolorously and maniacally over the stone, creating such a racket that Roric hung his bow on a steel strut and plugged his ears. It took little less than a minute to cross the half-mile bridge.
What greeted them on the other side would go down as one of the strangest discoveries of the fifth century. And the strangest part was that there was nothing there. Nothing to catalogue. Nothing coherent to sift through.
Roric clambered down the two sets of rungs and leapt to the ground. He scoured the area with his eyes, looking for remains.
Remains?
What remains? he thought brokenly. There was nothing! The ground in every direction had been pulverized to fine gray powder. Granules actually. Tiny hollow nuggets like blistered pewter. Miniscule ball bearings. Some were fused in clumps. Some were slightly larger, the size of a sparrow’s eye. Roric lifted a handful and let them trickle through his fingers, ugly leaden beads, freezing to the touch. His fingers ached immediately.
There were still traces of snow, melting rapidly as the summer wind swept in, displacing the anomalous front.
Roric searched for anything. A filament of blackened straw, a splinter of wood or the blasted fragments of bricks poking out of the sweepings. But there was nothing. Not a grain of wheat. Not a beetle wing.
As he disturbed the tiny spheres with his hand Roric had noticed the awful withering stench seeping from the ground. It nearly gagged him and he stumbled backward, dropping the bubbled pellets in disgust. He perceived a trace of diversity in the destruction. Here and there the scrap of widespread disintegration had hardened into a grisly yellowish-gray-green and purple crust. It looked like molten slag had cooled into thin metallic plates, pocked and cratered and ugly.
Roric wept and cursed and kicked about, sending up large clouds of noxious invisible fume. The swath of obliteration centered on the former town and swept its ruin west along the rivage. It had encompassed Saergaeth’s war engines and left nothing behind. Even the zeppelin was gone, dissolved instantly in air.
Roric kicked in the dust, heedless of the choking stench. His rage did not diminish when the vapors overcame him, and he began to gag and heave. He crouched, gasping, spewing vomit from his nose and mouth.
Garen and the commander had donned their gas masks. They seized Roric and dragged him, despite his spastic kicking, from the field of dull glittering beads.
Back near the relative safety of the idling machine where the air was less toxic and infused only with engine smoke, they laid Roric out on the deck. His eyes were weeping clear mucosa and slimy bile dribbled from his chin and nose—but he was breathing.
“You dumb fuck!” whispered the commander. He turned his attention to Garen. “Next time he tries a stunt like that, I leave both of you behind.”
Garen nodded and snapped his fingers in front of Roric’s clouded eyes. The commander went inside and ordered the engine to back up and head for the bridge.
When Garen looked at Roric, his face took on a barely discernable expression of compassion.
Back on the other side of the bridge, the commander joined the other two engine crews at the HQ pavilion and met the lieutenant colonel of the battalion overseeing the bridge, the five-man demolition team that had wired it and the two knights serving mostly as military advisors.
By the time Roric was breathing well enough to sit up and look around, a fierce argument was already underway.
“We do not, repeat, do not blow the bridge without imminent threat,” the lieutenant colonel was saying. His face flushed and strained and his eyes flashed from one man to another as he tried to bring the others under control. All of them were formidable professionals.
“That’s not imminent enough for you?” One of the knights threw his arm in the direction of the disturbance. That’s what they were calling it. A disturbance.
“Imminent threat of enemy crossing,” finished the lieutenant colonel. “We have orders. And that wasn’t the enemy. We don’t know what that was!”
He was shouting in the knight’s face, a brave and rash thing to do. Spittle was flying. He flung his hand toward the sky. “You think blowing the bridge will stop that if it comes back?”
The knight did not back down. “Do I look like I give a fuck? We have mass casualties. You’ve got less than a thousand men left. Our zeppelin’s gone. Most of our supplies were in that town. This just became an indefensible, tactically dead position. What good is the bridge without Fallow Down?”
“You’re not authorized to make that decision!”
“Whore-shit!” fired the knight. “Decisions like this are why I’m fucking here. We aren’t FNG. Our orders were to protect Fallow Down which—by the fucking way—is gone!”
Knight was a throwback term to the days when there was no such thing as chemiostatic power. They were outfitted for the severest kind of contingencies, trained to deal with being cut off, outnumbered and surrounded in hostile territory. Knights were more than one-man war engines. They were seasoned veterans and this one’s name was Stroud; he impressed Roric Feldman. He wore heavy brown armor that lifted from his shoulders, arms and back in gracile stingray spines. Despite being made of heavy metal, the armor looked anatomically like plates of bone.
Roric had never seen a suit of it up close. Holomorphically tempered glass bulbs filled with luminescent green liquid squeezed between disks in a virtual spinal column of chor
tium. He knew the metal was tough as steel but slightly lighter in weight. It oxidized like aluminum; the film that covered it protected it from further corrosion even though it looked identical to iron rust.
Roric’s eyes followed flexible metal hoses with glass couplings. Chemiostatic fluid flowed to certain regions of the armor: powering shoulder joints, heating or cooling abdominal plates below the cuirass and the fauld.
Stroud towered over the lieutenant colonel as he argued about the bridge. Roric held his tongue. He knew the lieutenant colonel’s rank still gave him the edge.