Night came to the towns and cities all around the Korzybski Sea, spreading west across hills, mountains and forests. Beneath its shroud, fighting continued, invaders crushed resistance or were ambushed, the defenceless were slaughtered and the desperate fought back, the cruel refused to extend protection to refugees, and the remorseless plotted their next move.
Through the deep shining darkness of the Forest of Arawn, the Knight of the Legion of Avatars glided on its suspensors, escorted by a group of type-R combat mechs, twenty-two gleaming machines moving among the trees. In nearly five hours they would reach a steep-sided gully down on the southern ramparts of the Kentigern range, and the high, almost inaccessible entrance to the huge cavern where the droid autofactory was waiting. Once there, the Knight would undergo badly needed repairs, even though the materials were inferior, while mustering an army of droids and planning possible tactics for an assault on Giant’s Shoulder.
A glow of fires was visible through the vegetation as the Knight moved along the path cleared for it. It was skirting the site of a violent clash between, in this case, Humans and the invading Spiral fanatics. A transport pod carrying a dozen or more Gomedrans had landed badly, fetching up against a couple of big mossy boulders. This had attracted the attention of a much larger band of Humans who seemed to have attacked them in unison. This was a rash decision – the heavily armed Gomedrans were carrying suicide bombs which, faced with being overrun, they detonated. The Legion Knight noted the proliferation of body parts as it passed. This was not the first such scene it had encountered, nor was it likely to be the last.
Even though it was travelling in a crepuscular gloom, where insects and growths shed bioluminescent radiance, its sensors were receiving datastreams from survey-modified mechs positioned on high peaks and other vantage points. Matched and merged, this multiplicity of viewpoints provided a grand perspective – the night sky above, with far-off stars glowing through the dust clouds of the deepzone, and the Human-settled coast below, a long crescent of bays and inlets, its inky darkness broken by the bright pinpoint-clusters of towns and villages, and by the flash of weaponry, the sudden flare of explosions, the yellow glow of burning houses.
Mid- and long-range scanners were still picking up the heat signatures of ships entering the atmosphere, stragglers from the Spiral Covenant armada. The Knight knew of the church of the Father-Sages and its Spiral Prophecy offshoot, and also knew of the specious claim laid to the old temple on Giant’s Shoulder. And sure enough, by tracking comm transmissions the Knight saw that five sizeable mobs, thousands in each, were fighting their way towards the great promontory. Opposing them were bands of Humans and dislocated units of Brolturan military, who also found time to fight each other with unrestrained ferocity.
Stirring, morale-boosting communications came from Giant’s Shoulder, where the Hegemony ambassador, Kuros, was holed up. From the other side came stirring, morale-boosting exhortations to purge pagans and heathens from the sacred ground, the holy place where the Father-Sage was buried. Allegedly.
All precipitated by the destruction of that Brolturan warship, the Purifier. With it went the centralised comnet that had proved so useful, but the Knight’s survey mechs had been able to pick individual channels out of the chaos, allowing it to observe the huge vessel’s fiery death. It had seen the thermonuclear device explode in the ship’s flank, the blast of incineration, the instant eradication of thousands of lives, and the expanding cloud of debris, most of which later entered the atmosphere, burning trails across the sky.
By a stroke of irony, the destruction of the Purifier saved the Human stronghold at Tusk Mountain from complete annihilation. One of the Knight’s observer mechs had seen the battleship’s first particle beam strike, and he’d been impressed by the way it blasted into the massif and vaporised such a large volume of rock. But the second strike never came, leaving most of the ancient Uvovo mountain complex intact. From the results produced by its age-old sensor circuits, the Knight was certain that several energy flows met there, one of which was linked to the warpwell.
But compared to the Brolturan forces gathered at Giant’s Shoulder, the Humans scarcely presented a genuine threat, while the Uvovo had forgotten the useful parts of their civilisation. In addition, the Forerunners’ vaunted planetary biomass sentience was confined to the forest moon, its consciousness seemingly torpid, possibly degraded. In that context, the Knight’s immediate strategy was to carry out needed repairs while moving about a third of its droids to forward staging posts along the forest’s eastern boundary. Meanwhile, the battle communications of all three sides would be closely monitored, skirmishes and clashes would be analysed, while the planet’s vicinity would be scanned for any signs of ships jumping in from hyperspace.
And once it and its escort reached the hidden cavern, the Knight planned to set aside some time to deal with the cunning and annoying Uvovo who had been following them for nearly two days. It had a special punishment in store for that one.