Exiles at the Well of Souls

Djukasis

There was a storm coming. They could see it in the billowing black clouds, hear the distant thunder, and almost feel the glow of approaching lightning.

The Agitar commander looked at the scene and nodded approvingly. “A fine day to end this mess,” she said to the field officers, the men who would lead. “There is much charging potential there.”

“Enough to knock the mounts out from under us,” muttered one officer glumly, wondering why commanders who never had to go into battle themselves were always so cheerfully optimistic when explaining what other lives should buy.

She sniffed. “No defeatism today, Captain! You know as well as I do that the tast and your own bodies will absorb the force. The saddles are insulated. The beast is used to mild shocks. No, conditions favor us. The siege of the Djukasis Zone Gate complex is well along; knock out the rest of their aerial defenses today, and the froggies will easily take it over in the rain.”

They went back to tell their men.

Renard, too, was watching the storm approach, with far different thoughts in mind. Over the past week he’d become a good fighter, but electrocuting those bees sickened him. He did it only because, if he did not, they would kill him with their projectile weapons and stingers, suicidally if need be. But, those bees were people defending their homes.

He was also scared. Those bees weren’t fools; they had learned, too, that they could turn more quickly than a pegasus; hit the mount in the rear, out of reach of the Agitar rider, and the beast plunged to its own and its rider’s death. That had almost happened to him twice now; it had happened to most of his friends already.

Captain Bir was sarcastic but professional. “The final assault this time, for sure, boys,” he told them without any conviction whatsoever. “Same deal. We’re supposed to go in just ahead of the storm. When it hits, you’ll draw additional charges. Try and get in to the hive itself, give them all the juice you’ve got. Fry it. As soon as the storm hits, clear out when you’ve shot your wad. The froggies will drive in with the rain.”

“But that’ll leave them with no air support, sir,” one of the men pointed out.

He shook his head. “That’s D-Company’s job. No, we get the easy part. Just go in ahead and kill everything we can, then get out of there.” They chuckled mirthlessly, knowing that their job was the deadly part. “No,” he concluded, “just remember that you’ll have an easy retreat. They can’t fly in the rain as we can. If it’s good and hard, just let your mount bring you home.”

Renard nodded with the rest, a plan forming in his mind. He’d seen earlier in the day at the captain’s tent a map of the overall route of march. He’d remembered from the moment he’d heard it the official’s statement that Mavra Chang was in a place called Lata. The captain had been arguing with another officer, and he’d pointed to the map on his tent wall, saying, “We can’t flank that far north, Suo! That’s Lata, neutral territory!”

And it had been northeast of their present position, about a day’s flight. The pegasus wouldn’t mind rain. It liked rain and storms, with the Agitar to draw the lightning from it. Water rolled off the animal with ease, not weighing it down at all. If that storm were fierce enough, and he had guts enough, he told himself, he was going to desert.

“Okay, boys! Let’s mount up!” the captain called. One last battle, one more battle.

Here we go, all right.Renard thought grimly.

To the Makiem on the ground, and to the great, red-eyed flying triangles that were the Cebu, it was an awesome sight, even taking into account their different concepts of what was grand. The storm was close now; the sky was filled with great black-and-orange billowing clouds that rumbled and flashed, like lights flashing briefly, across the panorama.

Against that came the Agitar, tiny specks at first, then growing until they could be individually distinguished across the storm-tossed sky. Great horses of many colors, broad swanlike wings flapping gently in the rough air, in V-shaped formations—dozens of them in the leading wave, then dozens more behind, protecting the flanks.

They came in fairly low; the maximum altitude of the pegasus was between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred meters, and they generally stayed lower than that as a safety margin—in this case much lower, due to the upper-air turbulence, perhaps no more than three hundred meters above the ground troops.

Pterodactyllike Cebu, red eyes blazing, moved off behind the Makiem ground troops to provide additional cover for the incoming Agitar. Each of the great giant reptiles wore a harness with twin harpoon tubes that could be aimed and triggered by a flick of the head, then dropped down to be reloaded from quivers strapped to their undersides.

The Makiem could almost feel the great beating of those wings as they passed just overhead, and some of the giant frogs cheered both in optimism and to release the tension from their own impending jump-off.

The enemy, its forces depleted by near-continuous battle, its reserves pulled in from North and South, waited until the last moment before challenging. Their only hope was to get inside the Cebu defensive screen and strike the great pegasi down by bullet or stinger, even though the latter method would mean their own deaths as well.

The Agitar were in sight of the objective now; the monstrous hive half above ground rose over thirty meters in the air. It had been badly damaged by cannon fire and past aerial attacks, but it had stood, torn though it was by great gaping holes and scars.

From its thousands of tiny black pockmarks there appeared to be some sort of reflection of the storm flashes, and it was—from the great, huge, multifaceted eyes of the defenders, who now rose in highly organized, tight-knit swarms to meet the coming foe. The two sides were joined in less than a minute.

The bees were huge, over a meter long, with menacing stingers to match. But the stingers were also an integral part of their backbone; to use it was to break it off—thus breaking its back and causing death. They depended first on their weapons—projectile-types, since theirs was a semitech hex, contained in the large boxes located under the thorax, operated by one of the eight flexible, clawlike legs that the furred black-and-gold creatures possessed. Spring-wound, they could fire ten rounds a second, with a two-hundred-shot cartridge.

Actually, the bees’ greatest problem in aerial combat was their semi-automatic weapons; they had to be careful in the increasingly rough air to keep from shooting one another down as well.

The tactics were simple. The bees formed a solid wave; the front line waiting until it was in easy range of the Cebu screen and the first line of Agitar, then opening fire. When they were spent, they would drop down and slow, letting the oncoming swarm pass over them, so the next row was clear for a shot. If the progression went well, they could drop back to the hive for additional cartridges and rejoin the back row. But their forces were badly depleted; once the line had fired, it then became a series of free agent aerial soldiers, coming up from below.

The Cebu’s harpoons were not as efficient as the Djukasis’ machine guns; but, facing a swarm, they could hardly miss. Their objective was to knock holes in the formation, then get into the midst of the swarm, where great, sharp, teeth-filled beaks could rend and tear in quarters too close for the machine guns to do any good.

The rumble of the quickly oncoming storm and the tremendous air turbulence it created started to tell on both sides as they struggled for balance.

The bees’ leading line of machine guns started, and some of the attackers were hit, falling from the sky, to be replaced by those from the second and third waves so the formations were maintained. The Djukasis’ aim was off; they were having real problems remaining stable in the storm-tossed air, and some were partially spun around still firing, knocking holes in some of their own numbers.

The Cebu took advantage of this, rushing up into the holes, firing their harpoons into soft Djukasis bodies, then spearing, ripping, and tearing through the ranks while trying to avoid the lethal stingers. Of the eighty-four Agitar in the leading combination, only seventeen still flew, yet the formations were tight and steady as the places of the fallen were taken by those behind. Despite the Cebu’s effectiveness, some of the Djukasis were penetrating now.

Renard had just moved up into second wave position behind the leaders, and he didn’t have time to think. A great black-and-gold body suddenly swept up into his view on his left, and he swung his own harpoon projector over and fired without thinking. The missile struck the giant bee, and it went down without a sound.

There were more of them now; they were flying directly into the swarm, now too close for the Djukasis to use their machine guns but close enough for close-quarter combat.

Suddenly the Agitar drew their tasts and energized them. They did not have to spear the enemy, only touch him; that seemed easy to do; everywhere you swung the rods there seemed to be Djukasis.

But not enough Djukasis, not any more.

In past attacks over the previous three days, a new swarm had popped out of that hive at the last minute, and they had been unable to get directly into or on it. Now the situation had changed. On either side of the saddle sat canisters of a highly flammable liquid; now, for the first time, they were able to dump it onto the hive.

They made their passes and dumps; going back up into the still fierce aerial combat, then looped again. More horses, men, and pterodactyls fell from the sky, but ten suicidal defenders fell for every one of the attackers, and, unlike the attackers, they had no more reserves. The leading edge of the Agitar then moved in again, very low this time, so close they could see the impassive faces of the flightless workers peering out at the grim battle from the cells and doorways of the hive.

The Agitar tied thin copper wire to the hilts of their tasts and prepared to throw, being careful that they didn’t get tangled as they moved away.

Firing was coming from the hive, but it was intermittent after the fuel dump; the burning smell and feel of the liquid had driven them back under where it had hit, and the stuff now pretty well saturated the top of the hive.

The copper wire unreeled, ten meters, twenty, as the leading second wave was covered by, but not followed in by, its backups. The Agitar were nearing the limits of the wire reel, and, when the mark was reached on the reel, they energized the wire with their hands.

Energy flowed along the wires; electricity followed its natural pathway in this semitech hex. Though only the Agitar would hold a charge here, it was enough.

Where the tasts had stuck in the hive in places that had been wetted down by the flammable liquids, and despite Djukasis efforts to get the tasts out and throw them to the ground, the energy charge struck.

It only took one.

The liquid burst into flame with a roar; a chemical fire that even the oncoming storm would be hard-pressed to slow.

The Makiem on the ground cheered as the blue-white flame and billowing smoke showed success, and they grasped their own weapons and prepared to charge, rain or no.

With sudden explosive fury, the storm hit, turning the field in front of the hive to a low-visibility quagmire in seconds. The Makiem, who liked rain and muddy weather, leaped for all they were worth.

As Renard turned from the hive, amazed at the fact that he and Doma were still untouched as it was, he felt the storm hit. For the first time he started to think, instead of act on instinct. If he just relaxed, he knew that Doma would fly back to the base camp; the horse had an unerring instinct for getting back to where she had started from. Looking around in the driving rain, he was just barely able to make out the Djukasis trying to get back to the hive but being knocked out of the air by the force of the rain. A Cebu almost panicked him, flying across directly in front, but it was on a different errand. The great flying reptiles weren’t much better in the rain than the Djukasis, and were going to ground fast.

The water beaded and rolled off Doma’s back. Yet there were severe updrafts and downdrafts that the great horse could not avoid, so it was a rocky ride, smoothed only slightly by the horse’s apparent ability to see changes in air pressure. When Renard saw the direction Doma was taking, a million doubts assailed him. If he deserted, he would have to fly through the teeth of the storm, perhaps battle isolated back-country Djukasis on his way. And, once in Lata, he’d be a castout, a man who could never go home again.

But he felt little loyalty for the Agitar, although he liked them as individuals. He could not get away from the fact that, behind all of the terrible carnage he had witnessed and had been a part of, there was the grinning, self-satisfied egomania of Antor Trelig.

And Mavra Chang. Somehow, he knew, she had saved him, somehow her unwillingness to be defeated had kept him alive. For what? To be killed in the next battle, in the next hex, in Antor Trelig’s cause?

No!his mind shouted to him. Never! He owed her, and, in a different way, he owed Antor Trelig something, too.

So he gently pulled and turned the great green pegasus to the right, far to the right, and headed into the fury about him.