HEART OF THE WORLD
MACKENZIE COUNTY, AB
11 NOV 2011, 01:37 MST
Six towers rose from the tundra, bristling with weapons. Most of them were various calibers of flechette launchers. Plasma launchers had been considered, but the recoil would cause vibrations that would throw off the accuracy of the other weapons. Nestled in among the launchers were some new toys – each tower had an ion accelerator running up its middle, with a magnetic deflector at the top to aim it. Duncan hoped that relativistic beams of cobalt-60 ions would do nasty things to their foes.
The drone factories were still growing in size, and running full tilt to produce hundreds of the new Type-XIV drones. Each had multiple short-range cobalt pellet turrets arranged with full coverage around them. The fragmentation warhead was clad in a thin layer of cobalt-60 to ensure it maximized the damage to the demons. They were fast and maneuverable, and had a limited AI to hunt for clusters of mites without oversaturating any given area.
As Duncan was watching their creation in satisfaction, Dia spoke up for the first time in several minutes. “Can we talk about it now?” Their voice was soft, uncharacteristically hesitant.
“We got hit. It hurt. What’s to talk about?”
“We’re not even real any more. This crystal isn’t really our body, we are a creature of magic. How did it hurt us?”
Duncan sighed, and gave an answer that they knew would be the wrong one. “Their magic is antithetical to ours. Burns right through it. I’m just glad Vanessa helped patch the hole, or we’d still be bleeding. But that’s not what you’re actually asking.”
“It hurt.”
“And the next one will, too. Deal with it.”
“How?”
Duncan wished they had eyes to close. “We don’t have time for this. The wave will be in range of the ion beams shortly, and I’ll need to tune them.”
Dia dragged the triad’s time-sense to a much higher rate than they’d been using. “There. Now we have all the time in the world.”
“Fine. Let’s talk. Donna?”
Donna chimed in. “Duncan is right. The stakes are too high to let pain get in the way.”
“For all it’s ludicrous that it should be us here, in this position... We’re it. There’s nobody else who can do this job.”
“Can’t you feel it?” asked Dia desperately. “There’s a hole, even after Vanessa healed us.”
“We carved a bigger and more painful hole in ourselves to leave our soul with Gwen. We will survive.”
“But...”
“The duty to put our bodies between our loved ones and war’s desolation is not a new one. It merely falls to us now. We will not go home unscathed. We can never forget the slaughter we are about to commit. They must die, and die by the millions, so that our loved ones may live. That is all that matters now.”
It was Dia’s turn to sigh – from them it sounded like glass on glass. “Then we’d best begin.”
The ion cannons opened up, and as expected they required their full attention to get the focus tight enough to reach out to the oncoming wave. Once they got the focus and aim right, the beams cut through the wave like a plasma cutter, leaving flaming wreckage in their wake.
The plasma launchers opened up next, but the demons seemed to have prepared for them – there was a screening force in front of the main mass, and demonic anti-magic destabilized the magic that bound the plasma together, detonating them outside useful range.
Combining the two proved far more effective. The beams weren’t killing the monkey-things swiftly enough to thin out the wave significantly before it arrived. When targeted at the screening force as a plasma warhead arrived, they cleared the way and let it drive deep into the main mass before detonating.
Duncan launched a wave of the new drones as a followup strike while the plasma launchers cycled for the next volley. As that volley approached, the demons shuddered and churned... and as it landed, something dark emerged.
A great dark cloud raced away from the dying demons, moving much faster than they had. “Impact in two minutes,” called Dia once they’d estimated the speed.
“Did they just... throw rocks at us?” asked Duncan in astonishment as they scanned the cloud. Plasma detonated among it, but didn’t seem to do much more than jostle the rocks, scattering them but not greatly affecting their trajectory.
“Pick a rock and burn it,” suggested Dia. “I’ve got a bad feeling...”
In addition to the ion cannons, the towers had a scattering of lasers and masers for old time’s sake. All the beams focussed on the one rock, and after just under a second of exposure, it evaporated. The mites inside it died under the hail of cobalt from the ion cannons, leaving characteristic puffs of demonic energy behind.
Duncan focussed on another rock with just the lasers, and brought some of their telescopes to bear as well. When it went to ash, they counted the mites. Seventeen per rock.
Dia counted the rocks in the cloud. “Just under five million mites. We had trouble with two orders of magnitude less swarming us.”
Duncan’s answer was to volley more plasma at the cloud of rocks. As before, the warheads detonated as they encountered the mites, washing the leading edge in fire.
“Sterilizing the front of the wave won’t do enough,” offered Donna. “We need something bigger.”
“If we do it right, it’ll bunch them up tighter.” Duncan set the plasma launchers to autofire, then turned to the drone inventory. A dozen more launched at the wave, and as they flew they started growing. They were not as fast as the rocks, but they would be fast enough.
Plasma shaped the cloud of rocks, driving it into a tighter and tighter bunch as the drones winged their way closer. The drones were nowhere near as fast as the rocks, so the team was forced to watch and wait as the cloud grew closer and smaller.
When the cloud was thirty seconds from impact with the towers, the drones reached their target and detonated. Each by then was nearly the size of a 747, and the warheads had grown to twenty tons. The shockwave created by their coordinated detonation slowed the onrushing stones enough that they would fall well short of the defensive perimeter.
Once the shockwave had passed, and the bulk of the cobalt scattered, a cloud of mites emerged from the stones. Their numbers had been greatly thinned, but there were still enough to darken the sky.
The mites rushed forward as a wave. Ion beams scythed through them repeatedly, plasma burst among them, and then the outer edge of the flechette array opened up, and this time the flechettes did not miss their targets. The mites died by the tens of thousands, buy the hundreds of thousands... but there were still millions of them left.
Dozens more drones surged forth, cutting through the mass and carving great tunnels of death with their close-in turrets then detonating cobalt-laced warheads to mark their end. Millions died, but the survivors learned to scatter away from the drones as individuals rather than as groups. The second wave of drones still scythed them by the thousands, darting through the swarm like sharks flashing after schools of fish.
The mites dove for the ground then, tearing up the launcher array and raising dust much as the monkeys had before them. The drones swarmed above them, but the dust and dirt made their targeting fail. Duncan ordered them to dive into the mass and detonate, thinning it further.
When the mite swarm reached the base of the nearest tower, they ripped it to shreds and the tower toppled toward the core. They tried to use it as cover, but Duncan surged power across the broken lines, re-enabling the flechette launchers and forcing the mites away from it.
The cloud that emerged was far smaller than the one that had gone in, but it still numbered in the tens of thousands. More were scythed by the six drones Duncan had reserved for close-quarters defence, and then the swarm was upon them.
A thousand swirling blades of cobalt provided an almost impenetrable defence. Almost. One mite slipped through while there were thousands more trying, and died as it touched their crystalline core. A shroud of faith-magic shimmered into existence a moment before it landed, and the blow was blunted, muted, not nearly as painful as before.
Back at the Blue Vixen, the choir winced as one, feeling the pain shared among them.
Duncan steeled their minds for the fray, and moved the blades ever faster than before. Within moments it was over, though not before they were tagged twice more, each more painful than the last as the choir staggered and weakened.
They surveyed the wreckage. Three of the towers were down, but the crystal spire over the main shaft itself still stood. No mites glowed to their senses, and their view from the US satellites confirmed it. No demon signature within a hundred miles – the monkeys had pulled back to their usual rally point, where still more demons were streaming in.
The Cobalt-60 signature, on the other hand... The entire area was glowing brightly in the gamma spectrum. Nothing mortal could survive within the blasted wasteland around the core, and Duncan wondered if even the demons could tolerate it.
They waited. Nothing happened. No surprises, no hidden foes. A terrible thought crossed Dia’s mind. “Did they burrow?”
A quick check showed that there was no activity underground, but they still warned Gwen of the concern.
“So... now what?”
*** *** ***
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO
11 NOV 2011, 01:42 MST
“Duncan is asking if we can figure out what their next step will be,” reported Agent Brown. “General?”
General Shepard studied the displays. “Gathering forces. If they have the time, they’ll want everything they can put into one more try. Do they have the time?”
Agent Brown asked Duncan, and reported that it would still be at least two more hours before the worldstone was done.
“If they know that, they may wait until it is nearly done, to maximize their advantage.”
“Duncan is rebuilding his defenses, and adding to them. They may not get another shot at it.”
“So what else are they going to try?” mused the General.
“I have an anomaly, sir,” announced one of the soldiers at the monitoring station. “The group from China has split up, and half are changing course.”
“Toward?”
“They’re headed toward... Victoria, British Columbia.”
“Oh hell,” breathed Agent Brown. “That’s where the Blue Vixen is.”
“Which is?”
“Duncan’s base of power. I don’t know what they have in mind, but we have to warn them.”
*** *** ***
THE BLUE VIXEN
VICTORIA, BC
11 NOV 2011, 00:43 PST
“Thank you for the warning,” replied Ray. “We’ll do what we can.”
He looked around at the worried faces of the girls. “Demons are headed this way. Tawny, Carmen... I have an idea how you can help.”
“Anything,” they replied in unison.
“How do you feel about becoming giant, plasma-spewing dragons?”
They both grinned. “Wicked.”