| |
Dave de Burgh
––––––––
“Get those fucking Blowers ready!” Ed screamed, buffeted on all sides by screaming, fighting soldiers. “I’m makin’ a hole!” He rose, tossed the last of his S-grenades over the crest of the rise and collapsed to the dirt, throwing an armour-encased hand over his head.
A second later the pressure-wave reached him and his ears popped. The ground rose, then fell a foot below him and he thumped down, his teeth rattling.
Ed paused for breath and then engaged his helmet’s IR-filters before pushing himself to his feet. With the IR activated he could see through the swirling dust, and what he saw was a crater, so smoothly hollowed out that it seemed the landscape had been replaced with some artificial depression. It glowed, the fiery orange of residual heat roiling above the crater like an air-shimmer. The power of singularity-grenades was terrifying. Ed understood why platoon-leaders were the only ones who were supplied with them, and then only five-a-piece.
Ed thanked humanity’s myriad gods that he hadn’t been in the middle of that blast. Somewhere in the air above that crater, a miniature black hole the size of a pinhead was dying away, sucking into compressed oblivion who-knew-how-many of the enemy. He scanned the space behind him and then moved forward. His troops were getting to their feet too, but some, faces slack and eyes staring, didn’t move—casualties of the Angel-advance they had died to halt.
“Come on, let’s move it! Press them! Press the fuckers!”
Ed led his four-thousand and they rushed into the stillness of the grenade’s aftermath. The digits in his HUD kept him updated on how many men he had left in his force. Twelve-thousand men had died already, and that was just in his command. The current front line, which encompassed thirty square kilometres, had been filled with two-hundred-thousand soldiers just this morning. When the HUD’s unit counter reached two-thousand he would abandon the attack, as ordered by High Command. Sometimes it seemed to him that High Command thought massive casualties were somehow sustainable in this war, and that leaving a core of shell-shocked veterans was good for the war’s continuation. Ed didn’t understand it, but it was what he had to work with. He also didn’t understand why this planet, so far from Earth that Earth was just a dim star in the night sky, had been targeted by the Angels. It was well off their invasion vector, so out-of-the-way that it didn’t have a name, only a designation that he had already forgotten.
One of his men, a lieutenant who’d been on the job for precisely forty-five minutes, ran up beside him and shouted, “The Blowers are offline, sir! The Techs were hit!”
“By what?” Ed screamed back, although it was obvious; when someone died in this war, they weren’t hit, they were touched. Caressed.
They had to shout above the distant thunder of surrounding engagements—four groups of similar size hitting the kilometres’ long front-line of advancing Angels. Ed hadn’t even noticed that the Techs had fallen.
He was losing focus.
As one they streamed down the side of the crater, jump-running. Thirty yards ahead Ed could see the sky begin to fill with the radiance of another advancing wave.
More of the Angels were coming. How many people must have died to make so many Angels?
That thought, more than the numbers who had died trying to push the Angels back, staggered Ed.
“Get the Blowers up here! We’ll make-do without the Techs!”
The lieutenant stumbled and Ed’s arm shot out, supporting him until he regained his footing. Ed saw his face reflected in the lieutenant’s face-plate—haggard, red-eyed, in desperate need of a shave, but he no longer saw the face that Lena had loved, once. He had been round-faced, jowly, eyes hardly visible behind folds of skin, but all the fat had burned away. It didn’t matter—Lena was gone, among the millions killed when New Rome fell.
“Right away, Sir!” the lieutenant said.
Ed would have given anything for a moment’s rest himself, but there just wasn’t time right now, not with another wave of Angels coming right at them. They had to advance across the ground they had captured and then hold it.
He scanned the ground ahead. There were small outcroppings of what the Geo-Techs had named organo-regolith, probably what remained of something that had once lived, existed; the landscape was so battered by continuous bombings that nothing, not a tree, nor clump of shrubs, still stood. They could set up the Blowers there, and would probably command a field of fire fifty meters all around with just one Blower. Multiply that by three... They had a slim chance of holding out until support arrived.
If it ain’t nothing, said the voice of Ed’s long-dead Barracks-instructor, it’s better than fuckall. Yes, it could be done.
Now to find three men who could man the Blowers. They wouldn't be able to sync-link, of course—only Techs could do that, with their enhanced minds—but they could pound the Angels’ advance. Hopefully.
Ed pointed at each of the outcroppings in turn. “There, there, and there! I want three volunteers! Set up the Blowers, ASAP!”
“Yes, Sir! But whoever mans the Blowers-”
“Dies, I know that! Three volunteers!” The Blowers worked amazingly well but they were also prime targets for the Angels.
The soldier hurried away and Ed put all his effort into reaching the section of ground he knew would probably be their last stand. It was flat, marred by rubble, but with a clear line-of-sight all around. It would do. Support would have to come from the regiments that enjoyed at least three-fourths strength, and considering how the day had gone so far, it just seemed more likely that all regiments would be suffering the same casualties he had.
Ed began smiling as he accepted that he was going to die here. It seemed to him that he was now inseparably joined to the thousands throughout history who had found themselves in a similar situation—like Leonidas, that Spartan madman who had been in his sixties when he stood against the Persians at the Hot Gates. Still running, Ed barked a laugh. Me wearing a red cloak and underwear...
Moments later Ed stumbled to a halt, kicking up dust and coughing who-knew-what out of his lungs. Even his suit’s filters were taking strain, their stuttering whine sounding like an air-cab with faulty mag-lev rotors.
Seconds after him the rest of his force arrived.
The three volunteers moved a couple of feet ahead of him and began pulling the sections of each Blower from the carry-cases. Thankfully, as soon as the Techs had gone down, someone had scrambled to disassemble the Blowers. As soon as one part of it touched the ground—Deployment Area, they were taught in the Barracks College—it began to unfurl and unfold itself. Spindly legs that were metal but had the look of some segmented insect-leg lengthened and spread to take the weight, a cylindrical body inflated and rose into view, one end of it telescoping outwards into a small nozzle that glinted with reflected light. Ed imagined these Blowers transported back in time and into a parallel reality where they became monstrous in size and strode through a city, destroying and killing with each three-legged step. He wondered if their designers had read any H.G. Wells.
Ed waited until each Blower was set up and ready, volunteers holding the directing-handles, then called out, “Soldiers! Shield and Box, people! Shield and Box, right now!”
The men obeyed, moving and blending together, becoming a sea of helmets that bobbed and weaved as everyone got into position. Sickly dust-polluted light reflected off their face-plates. When the last soldier had taken up his position Ed heard it.
A humming whine, pitched just high enough that it ached in the teeth and joints, giving birth to an insane mosquito-like BURRRR that couldn't be ignored.
The sound of advancing Angels.
The sound of trillions upon trillions of energetic particles vibrating.
A wave front of advancing, sentient energy, ovoids of achingly bright light haloed by the slow coil-uncoil of hundreds of light-tendrils.
Death.
The nutcases who had called the appearance of the Angels The Great Baptism should have been shot. There was nothing holy or biblical about this war. To Ed it was nothing but an extermination. Seemed like the initial reports of the meteorite strike on Gallimer’s moon—which had destroyed the trans-portal there and effectively closed that section of the wormhole-network—had been forgotten, but Ed would have bet a year’s salary that somehow the trans-portal’s destruction was connected to this ‘invasion’; that and the recently-settled planet that had been the first to go dark: New Rome. Catholics were always warning everyone about the End of Days...
“Get ready!” Ed called out. “Here they come!”
Then they all heard it, swelling into the air as if the largest choir ever assembled was giving voice to the mad genius of an insane composer.
The singing, and otherworldly voices.
Numbers released to the general public six months earlier had put Angel-strength at upwards of seventeen-billion, spread across ten now-dark planets and six sectors. At the beginning of the war, no-one had reported anything about the singing. Back then, those who had heard the singing had put it down to battle stress and the effects of trauma.
After a while, though, when the hundreds of thousands of witnesses became millions, and every single one of them reported the same thing, only then had humanity realised that what they were hearing was a weapon.
Ed couldn’t help but focus on one voice among the cacophony—it called out to him, so familiar that it broke his heart. It sounded like her, but he refused to believe that is was her—his sister calling out to him, the tone and timbre he had known so well spreading through his brain like the touch of gentle fingers.
She told him how wonderful it was in the Light, how it wasn’t what he thought, that this was indeed the Angelic Host of the Lord God come to take His Flock up to Heaven. She told him that he didn’t have to fight it. The Light was bliss, love, happiness, trust and peace, and it was painless. The Light was everyone who had ever died, and all were singing of God’s glory and love.
His mother began calling too, as she did every time he stood against the Angels. His mother who had died ten years ago from a double-bang, simultaneous heart failure and stroke, back when he’d been one of the accountants at Virgin-Micro’s Trans-Hub lunar headquarters. She was saying all the same things, with love and understanding and sympathy. His father chimed in, too, and then his little brother, then his aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, every dead member of his family, even the ones he hadn't met before they had died.
Their voices blended, merging into a song that rose and rose in volume until it drowned everything else out.
Ed realised that he was screaming, spittle flying from his mouth, eyes bulging, but he couldn’t hear his voice, or any of the voices of the men who surrounded him.
Light blossomed as the Blowers ignited and began singing in their own way. Ed aimed and opened up with his AM-rifle, already shaking off the effects of the singing, of the voices.
A Blower’s ‘song’ was the emission of pressurised air from its nozzle, created when it sucked in the surrounding oxygen/nitrogen mix at a high rate before shunting it into a chamber that put the gases under immense pressure, and then released that pressure in an incredibly tight beam of air that cut through anything in its path.
Ed had seen the carnage that resulted when Blower-Techs fell in battle.
Two months ago, the second month of the war, a misaimed Anti-Matter shell hit the Tech team and in seconds, thousands of men literally lost their heads when the Blower’s nozzle had swung in the wrong direction. The air had been full of dust that day, but the dust suddenly turned crimson as over three-thousand carotid arteries were instantly severed. The beam was so strong and so narrow that nothing could stand up to it—not armour, not rock, not diamond, and not even the strange unstable, kinetic-and-plasma mix energy that was an Angel.
Because when a Blower’s beam struck Angel-energy, something strange happened. In hindsight, it should have been obvious, but it was still the only pleasant surprise of the war.
When the air-beam hit a flame, for instance, it created an explosion three times the collective size of the fire that birthed the flame. The Sci-Techs later figured out that the compressed air added fuel to the energy that caused combustion, and thought that the same result would occur if the Blower was used on an Angel; they were correct. The explosions of liberated energy were greater though, by quite a big margin.
The blossoming of light that Ed now witnessed was the Blower’s beam cutting a swathe of pure annihilation through the advancing Angels.
Where the beam touched, Angels died. Their radiant forms obliterated on contact, releasing a firestorm of blinding white light that travelled outwards on the heels of a buffeting shockwave, jostling the closest Angels before dissipating. Ed had been told that the Angels seemed capable of absorbing the liberated energies of their fellows and that’s why he was grimly pleased that the soldiers manning the Blowers were hitting as many Angels with each beam-pass as they could. The air itself recoiled at the explosions, shoving the soldiers backwards so that their boots dug small trenches in the ground.
Ed’s light-shield dropped over his eyes as soon as the Angels began dying, and he now saw their deaths with the colours reversed—the explosions expanding black flowers against a lighter background. The energy released was equivalent to that of a mini-nuke in the one to two megaton range, but their suits could withstand any blast up to fifteen megatons.
Ed and his men were still pummelled by the force of the explosions. As more and more Angels died, the soldiers were shoved back further because there were just so many of the damned Angels, dying in their thousands as the Blowers ‘sang’.
But there were too many of the things; they just kept advancing, filling the empty spaces among their ‘ranks’. Soon, the volunteers manning the Blowers would be cut off, surrounded.
Ed knew that not many men would be able to stand there and fight. It took someone who had nothing, or someone who had everything and was bored to the point of death, to stand their ground in the face what advanced upon them. He hadn’t always been one of those men—men like that only came into being if they had the luck, or lack thereof, to survive engagement after engagement. Sometimes fear fell away and the gibbering thing that was the soul crept into a corner and the animal, that life-greedy thing inside every human being, took over. His awakening had occurred on the carnal fields outside the sprawling, stinking slums that were New Mumbai, and his awakening had kept him alive while sixteen-billion souls had died, over a three-week period, further swelling the ranks of the Angels.
Fear would kill you, and if it didn’t, it crept away into that same corner and gibbered.
Techs, being AIs, felt no fear. As soon as they ‘died’ their electronic ‘souls’ were shunted into a new body. No one knew where they began or ended, or cared. And Techs never made mistakes—their targeting was always tactically perfect, and not one beam-swathe was wasted. The soldiers, however, were men like any other—shitting their pants, thinking of family, ignoring hunger and ever-encroaching exhaustion, even as they screamed defiance at the Angels.
The first Blower-volunteer ‘died’, an Angel reached him and caressed him with a languid coil of pure light, and he dropped, his body now an empty shell. It would still breathe and shit and piss, but the essence, the soul, was gone, the mind wiped clean. The soldier crumpled onto the ground and then just lay there, as if sleeping.
Now Ed could hear that soldier’s voice, too. Don’t be afraid, Sir. This is wonderful! This is Heaven! I’m with the Angels now!
Ed blocked out the voice, screamed, “Get ready! Time to make our stand!”
This was where the singing of the Angels became such a potent weapon. All around Ed, the soldiers were realising the same thing.
The only way to escape an Angel was to kill yourself before it reached you, and even then, there wasn’t any guarantee that your soul would escape. The Baptists said that it was futile, that your soul would go to the Angels regardless of how you died, because they came from God, they had been sent by God to take everyone to Heaven. They urged everyone to release themselves to the Angels, to stop fighting. You could not, they said, fight the might of God and the Transubstantiation—the name they had given to this war against humanity. Those same Baptists who probably decided that since the Catholics were out of the game they might as well try and steal the spotlight.
Ed’s answer was the same now as it had been then, though he knew that many of his men would choose to let the Angels reach them.
Some were afraid of nothing except being forced to take their own lives.
It would be easy, he knew, to follow those men, to just release himself. He was so tired and weary, exhausted from having to fight on three planets in three weeks. He had to think to remember the names of the combat theatres, and the details of the battles had become a blur of explosions and soldiers and Angels. His path to this place seemed a dream, as if he was an outsider peering into a room through dirty, opaque glass. It had been Lena’s death on New Rome that had sucked him to the offices of the newly-created and incredibly-named Human Defence Force to get a speed-course in handling AR-rifles, S-grenades, Blowers, working with Techs... The first engagement—he pissed himself that day but didn’t even notice—had shaken him badly, and it was only in his second battle that he had heard his mother’s voice.
It hadn’t been long after that that he had begun hearing the stories people were telling about him; that he was nuts, that he kept on calling out to his mom, but that he seemed to carry some crazy kind of good luck along with him because no matter how many battles he walked into, he always walked back out.
Every place looked the same to him. Even the thousands of soldiers under his command had taken on one collective face—the only difference being the light, or lack thereof, in the eyes.
He knew what he would do, if it came down to it. One S-grenade could do the trick.
The numbers in his HUD were running down at such a speed that when he focused on them they were nothing but a blur. In seconds, four-thousand odd retreated into the three-thousands.
Ed tongued the amplifier-bud that had been drilled into a molar and screamed, “Retreat! RETREAT!” but it was too late. There was light all around them. He couldn’t even see a single working Blower, and as he scanned around himself he saw how men were dropping, some soundlessly, others screaming wordlessly.
The singing of the Angels was a roar now, without words, huge and sustained, and as men died and became new Angels the radiance increased around the beleaguered force. Ed closed his eyes and then raised his hand, clamping it across his face, seeing for a second the shadows of bones.
He knew he was dead. Choose the Hour, one of the catechisms of the College went, but now even that choice had been taken from him. His armour could stand up to the explosive bolts of his AM-rifle, as if the tiny anti-matter particles were nothing but a caress of silk, and by the time he got his helmet off to send a bolt through his head it would be too late, anyway. The only way you survived Angels was if you were at the rear of the battle—front-siders, as they were fondly called, always carried one-way tickets.
Keeping his eyes closed, Ed dropped his rifle and lowered his hand. He stood, buffeted on all sides by jostling men as they fought and died or stood still and died. His life didn’t flash before his eyes—they did, in their billions, waves and tendrils of light advancing and spreading everywhere. Soon, he knew, there would never be darkness again.
Moments passed that became one long instant of time, and when the light surrounded him on all sides—devoid of the shadows of even one soldier—Ed nodded and said, “Alright, fuckers. What are you waiting for?”
Voices rose—his mother’s, his father’s, his sister’s, those of the men who had died here with him—and they spoke, they spoke together, using one supreme Voice.
You are beloved of the Lord God Almighty, Edward. Take comfort in this certainty.
“You,” he spat, “are nothing of God! Do it! End it!”
The light of His love has no end, Edward, neither did it have a beginning. Accept this and come into it, it said, with such calmness and such a depth of empathy.
Ed grimaced as doubt, finally, closed in on him. Was it even possible? Were they real Angels?
No. Real Angels wouldn’t cause the destruction and death these ‘Angels’ had caused. God wouldn’t let His Angels do that.
But what about Sodom and Gomorrah, whispered his own traitorous heart. Hundreds of thousands were killed when God set loose one of His Angels. Those cities were wiped from the face of the world.
But we’ve done nothing wrong! He railed at himself, hands contracting into fists. Those cities were punished.
Oh, and fathers don’t punish their children? Fathers don’t take children back home after they’ve been lost and alone?
“No, no, no, no,” Ed muttered, shaking his head. “This is war. War. War is not from God.”
You poor, poor pitiful thing, they said. You don’t deserve the Light. The Angels moved in, pressing in around him, their song now one of thunder and insistence and futility. He thought they would just burn him, now, not take him, and as they surrounded him, he realised: I don’t know what I want anymore. He stood rigid; jaws clamped shut, waiting for the feather-light touch of death. But instead he heard a voice.
LEAVE HIM. THIS ONE MUST YET COME TO UNDERSTAND. HIS SACRIFICE MUST BE SOMETHING CHOSEN, NOT ENFORCED.
Ed’s eyes widened and his lips moved soundlessly. Lena’s voice.
Then the Angels flowed around and away from him, retreating ever so slowly across the ground they had won. Ed could feel it, the sensation of being touched by light that had no heat; his body betrayed him, his knees unlocked and he sank to the ground.
When he opened his eyes the radiance was dimming, the Angels now a mass of distant, pulsing light. Silence hung heavy around him. Everywhere, it seemed, the Angels were retreating.
Ed’s body began to shake, a tremor he couldn’t control, and finally he dropped his head into his hands and began to sob.
––––––––
Dave de Burgh is a bookseller and SFF fanatic from Pretoria, South Africa. He participated in the Random House Struik/Get Smarter Creative Writing Course, is revising his first Epic Fantasy novel for Mercury Retrograde Press, and wouldn’t mind writing for the rest of his life. He is on Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger, and Twitter.
