His blood was up. He would never have suspected this feeling, this enormous rush that for the moment put fear aside because there simply wasn’t time for it. “Gia! What’s keeping the ammo?” he shouted, then saw her, slumped, eyes wide open but seeing nothing, her pretty body bleeding from a dozen wounds.
“Gia!” he shouted in anguish. You didn’t die at that age, that pretty, with that much position and wealth. You didn’t die save perhaps from accident, or you died ancient with your hundreds of descendants around you. People didn’t die like this! People he knew and loved didn’t die like this!
Two of the runners reached up and pulled her body unceremoniously out of the cage, and one of them leaped in and fed the next canister into the gun. “Highness! You must fire!” she screamed at him, but he just stood there, watching Gia’s crumpled body below, like some horrible rag doll.
There were sudden explosions all around him, and one was so close it shook the gun and almost toppled him. He started swinging around, unable to stop or catch his balance. They were all above him, all around him! These—These things!
One of the runners managed to catch the lower ammo feeder and they stopped the merry-go-round, but more and more explosions were shaking them. At the far end, a bomb from one of the dark shapes above struck a gun just like his and he saw it rise into the air, as if in slow motion, and pieces of it and pieces of Ochoans flying all over, all over…
The runner reached up and used a wing to shake him. “Highness! We cannot stand! You must retreat! There is no purpose to your death at this point!” she shouted. Almost immediately something shot from the advancing troops struck her and he saw her chest almost explode as the projectile continued through her and opened a horrible, fatal wound. Her blood splattered all over him, and he screamed and was out of there.
As soon as the few surviving others saw the Baron leap out and glide down almost automatically to the ground, unable to fly well, and literally run right into the Well Gate, they abandoned their positions and followed suit.
An eerie, terrible clicking sound now began all around the Gate, echoing back and magnifying itself as it hit the walls and bounced back again and again. There were still some explosions, and some fire, but it was slowly coming to a halt.
The clicking grew even louder, more rhythmic, coming from the great beetlelike troops of the Jerminians. A cheer of sorts, made with stiff flightless wings and hard mandibles, a terrible, mechanistic cheer…
There was some fighting, apparently fierce fighting, still going on in the room-to-room conquest of the two great buildings on the inside walls, but for the most part it was over.
The forces of the New Empire held the center, and the only escape route, of the Ochoan nation.
At that news, one of the Jerminian officers left his position at the rear and moved quickly up and toward the Well Gate. “We want a basic report from all the units in immediate engagement here,” he told his aides. “As soon as possible, bring in the main supplies and fortify both this area and the four points on the crater rim. Any dead bodies nobody wants to eat, our or theirs, should be thrown into the Gate. Dead, they won’t be transported, they will simply be returned to energy. Move! I want you, Captain, to go through the Gate and report as quickly as possible to our ambassadors, who will be waiting there eagerly for your report.”
“At once, Excellency!” the officer responded, and junior officers were suddenly on all fours, at great speed trying to reach the key battle points.
It took about an hour just to compile the handwritten preliminaries, but the results were quite good. Even so, the losses were far above expectation.
“These creatures fought extremely well and with much bravery,” the General heard over and over. “Not a one surrendered. Some of the ones in the buildings used underground escape routes, and the last detachment here at the Well Gate got some of its survivors back into Zone, but that’s about it. Our casualties, though, were over thirty percent. Much higher, and against what appears to be far lower numbers than we anticipated.”
“That just means they sent off brigades to reinforce the castles under siege as we planned,” the General reassured them. “Even so, I agree. When we completely subdue this place, the survivors—and there will be a surrender sooner or later if only to save the race from extinction—will make up the nucleus of what we’ve lacked up to now—a flying division.” He looked over the reports, initialed them with his own distinctive digestive spit, then handed them back to the Captain. “Go now. Others will be sent as progress reports come in from elsewhere. I’d say that this is probably sufficient, though, to have one of our ambassadors serve a formal demand for unconditional surrender at the Ochoan Embassy.”
The Captain gave a salute with six of its eight limbs, men walked with the dispatches toward the Well Gate, past the ruins of the last gun emplacements. It made him feel proud to see this, the absolute, total victory after only a few hours’ hard fight! He was certain that the whole of his hive would also be proud, and that Her Majesty would have great rewards for the officers, perhaps even taking them into the consort, since only she could bear young. It would be an honor to consummate and then be eaten by the queen; such a one would be reincarnated as a potential queen itself!
Without hesitation, the Captain walked into the Well Gate, passed through the sensation of falling and arrival, and walked out, still going, yelling excitedly for any and all to hear, “The Imperial Army and Navy have won a great victory at O—” He suddenly slowed, looking first to one side of the corridor, then to the other. “—choa,” he completed, the last almost dying in his thorax.
The corridor was lined with Ochoan soldiers looking very healthy and fully armed. They flanked both sides of the corridor and had closed in behind him, and now they seemed to stretch on and on…
He had no choice. Besides, he was on neutral ground, by treaty and by right. He reached the end of the corridor and turned toward the Jerminian Embassy, wishing it were a lot closer, and found his way blocked by, of all things, a Kalindan in some kind of wheelchair. He did not know it was a Kalindan, but he recognized it as a water creature.
“Come ahead, Captain,” the Kalindan said. “Please, go on. We all want to hear your report.”
Ochoan Embassy, South Zone
Nakitti’s heart was breaking as she tended to her Baron, unconscious and still occasionally screaming in his nightmares in the aftermath of being operated on by the Imperial Surgeon herself. She almost had a heart attack just seeing him with all that horrible blood. It turned out that most of it wasn’t his, but he had several serious tears in both wings, a chunk out of his left leg—which might have to be amputated—and a serious wound in his side that had punctured a lung. With the kind of technology and research available at Zone, the Imperial Surgeon had been able to do things they could not have done back in Ochoa, but he’d lost a lot of blood and suffered a lot of damage.