Invasion

Chapter 1
To Fight Phyrexians

White clouds fled through blue skies. The sea chanted fearfully below. Waves crowded shoulder to shoulder and shoved each other. Gray land crouched at the edge of Dominaria, hiding itself in veils of yellow steam.

Evil hung in the heavens. Something was coming, something horrible, and it would emerge without warning from clear air.

It came. The thing carved a sudden line in the sky. The trough it cut deepened. It tore water from the air and hurled it outward in white flames. This was no meteor, no dumb stone from heedless heavens. This thing clove the sky with intent.

Air streamed away from a lancing prow and sawtoothed keel. It drummed gunwales of living wood on its way into roaring intakes and across wide-swept wings. This was a ship, a skyship – the sort that had ruled Thrannish skies. Loose tongues told of new fleets built by Urza and secreted away to fight Phyrexians, but who believed in Urza? Who believed in Urza's bogey men? Who had ever seen even a single skyship?

Until now.

It was a sleek and glorious, horrible thing, this Weatherlight. Nature cringed away from it. Still, it was not the dreamed-of evil. Something else was coming, something far more horrible than Weatherlight.

Tiny figures stood on her wind-ravaged deck-human figures.

Behind a gleaming ray cannon on the forecastle was strapped a man with black hair and angry eyes.

He shouted into a speaking tube, "Coordinates, Hanna!"

A powerstone embedded in the mouth of the tube snatched up his voice and hurled it a hundred feet aft to the glass-enclosed bridge.

The words raked out over a slim, hunched woman. Rules and styluses were clutched in one of her hands. The other jotted slide-rule calculations in a hasty column.

Blowing an errant strand of blonde back from her face, Hanna did her own shouting into the tube, "Working on it, Commander Gerrard!" Across her navigation console, compasses and gyros reeled. Hanna's eyes spun as she watched them settle. "Good luck finding another navigator who can pinpoint longitude without stars."

"I don't want another navigator," Gerrard answered from the forecastle. He threw a grin back toward the bridge. "I just want my favorite navigator to get us to Benalia."

Hanna summed three columns of figures and assigned functions to them. "We're still twelve hundred miles out, this time north by northwest."

"Damn! That's the farthest of the three," Gerrard said. "Where's the problem?"

"Not here," Hanna replied, confirming the calibration of her altimeter.

"Not here, either," reported another woman, standing at the helm. Her corded shoulders and ebony skin seemed part of the ship's wheel she clutched. "Rudder, keel, airfoils-everything's performing perfectly, including me."

"I know, Sisay -" Gerrard answered, quickly adding- "Captain. But something's throwing us off course. Karn, is it an engine problem?"

The call echoed down tubes into steamy darkness-the engine room. A vast drive-core dominated the space. Mana conduits added their green light to the tepid glow of bolted lanterns. Two crewmembers worked a giant torque wrench, closing a valve. They did not pause to answer the commander. A third crewmember, who seemed simply another engine subreactor, spoke. Karn was a massive man made of silver, and his voice was like a waterfall.

"No engine problem yet, but soon."

His silver back was bent toward the machine, his hands embedded in twin operations ports. Micro-fibers extended from the controls into his fingers, linking him to every corner of the ship. All the rest of Weatherlight had endured the planeshifting stresses well, but the engine was beginning to overheat.

"We're having to douse the manifolds to keep them from melting down. Push it too far, Gerrard, and you'll have a puddle where your engine used to be."

Gerrard's laughter answered through the tube. "You know me, Karn. I push everything too far. Sick bay, how are the wounded holding up?"

"We're all fine down here," replied the ship's healer as she tightened a strap over one of her patients. Sweat beaded her forehead, and she raked her turban off. Out spilled dark hair braided with coins. "The second planeshift knocked my patients unconscious. There's been less complaining since then."

"How're you holding up, Orim?" Gerrard asked.

"All this flashing into and out of existence makes meditation sort of redundant," Orim said wryly.

Another laugh came from Gerrard. "That's my crew. Stouthearted comrades and complainers, all. Sisay, let's have another go."

"Aye, Commander," said the woman at the helm.

"Hanna, pinpoint Benalia City, the Capashen Manor." Gerrard reflexively glanced down at the Capashen symbol tattooed on his left forearm. He would not likely be welcomed in his old home.

"You got a street address? A house description?" Hanna teased as she slid longitude and latitude indexes until they aligned. "Locked in, Commander. Heading three, seventeen, twenty."

"Aye," Sisay acknowledged. She turned the wheel, bringing the prow up toward a roiling mass of cloud. "Karn, initiate jump sequence."

The silver man's voice was drowned out by the engine's eager surge.

"Hold on, everybody," Sisay called out.

Behind his ray cannon, Gerrard hunkered down. He tightly clutched the handles of the fuselage. The cannon harness was sufficient to hold him in place on a rolling deck in the middle of a dogfight, but even those straps were stressed by a planeshift. Gerrard shot a glance over his shoulder to the starboard-side cannon. There, a minotaur gunner clung with equal fury. Tahngarth's teeth were gritted in determination, the closest he came to smiling.

Gerrard did smile. This was his ship. This was his crew. They were the best damned fliers and fighters in Dominaria and Mercadia, in Rath and Phyrexia. For years he'd heard how he and his friends and this ship were supposed to save the world. For the first time, he felt like they could.

That wasn't the only reason he smiled. There was no better place to watch a planeshift than strapped to a forecastle ray cannon.

Beyond the rail, Dominaria vaulted suddenly forward. The sky stretched out. Clouds frayed away to ropy lines of mist. The heavens began to fold in on themselves. Where before there was only beaming blue and white, now black verges appeared in the separating seams of reality. The sky held together only a moment more. It came to pieces. Scraps of blue and white tumbled in a black wind.

Were Gerrard beyond the rail, that wind would have torn him to pieces. It was chaos, pure and simple, the ocean of potentiality in which all actual worlds floated. Anything material that touched the chaos wind was dissolved away into sparking energies and nothing.

Weatherlight and her crew were wrapped in an envelope of saving air. It died to stillness around them. The roar fell silent. Beyond the energy envelope, storms of power raged. Within it, only Weatherlight's engines sounded.

"Command crew to the bridge," Gerrard barked. He undid the straps of his gunner's harness and strode across the forecastle toward the stairs leading amidships.

Tahngarth followed. The minotaur leaped the stairs and landed amidships with a thump. Gerrard joined him at the bottom, and they marched across the trembling deck. From the central hatch ahead, Orim emerged. Her feet trod softly between hoof and boot. The three approached the bridge. A fourth crewmember scuttled up to join them.

Gerrard arched an eyebrow. "Since when are you part of the command crew, Squee?"

The goblin winced downward, as though accustomed to being cuffed. He smiled all the same. "Karn can't make it. He say Squee go talk for him."

"That'll be the day," Tahngarth rumbled.

The four comrades climbed the stairs from amidships to the bridge. They opened the hatch and one by one clambered through. Mana conduits glowed around them.

"Here it is!" Hanna declared from the navigator's console. "Look, here-three loci of topographic disturbance."

Gerrard stalked toward her and stared down at a map of Benalia. Hanna was marking Xs in an equilateral triangle above the nation.

"Three loci of -?"

"I've calculated it all out," Hanna said. Her blue eyes flicked impatiently as she rapped the back of her hand on a pile of figures. "There are disturbances here, here, and here. Geometric disturbances."

"Geometric-"

"Distortions in the fabric of space. Stretched-out geometry. They shunt us off our target like a drop of rain off an umbrella. That's why we can't get to Benalia."

Gerrard's eyes were grim beneath stormy brows. "Good work, Hanna. Any idea what might be causing these distortions?"

She breathed deeply, pausing for the first time in hours. "We ourselves make a geometrical disturbance every time we planeshift. It's a simple fold of space with a localized effect-two hundred yards or so. These things are warping space for a thousand miles each."

"That's a heck of a big ship," Squee offered.

Hanna shook her head, hands in sudden motion again as she dragged a folio of Phyrexian ship designs from beneath her desk. They were plans she had gleaned from the wrecked armada base in Mercadia. She spread them out. The ships depicted there were massive and grotesque. They bristled with hornlike protrusions. Their hulls seemed bone or carapace.

"No, even the largest ships we saw in Mercadia could not make that kind of disturbance."

"Brace for reentry," Sisay warned.

The crew each grasped handholds and watched as reality swam up around the ship. Scraps of sky and sea schooled densely beyond the dissipating energy envelope. The blackness of chaos was shut out behind bright, sinuous order. Fleeing cloud, clashing wave, cowering land-it might have been the exact same spot they left.

"Coordinates," Gerrard asked gently.

"Working on it, Commander," Hanna answered, ship plans cascading from her desktop as she noted new magnetic readings.

Squee scrambled to gather the plans.

"They aren't ships," Sisay broke in from the helm. She guided Weatherlight smoothly through racks of cloud. "Ships would make only a momentary disturbance. Unless they were continuously planeshifting in and out of the same spot, it wouldn't be ships."

"Unless they were portal ships," Gerrard said in sudden realization. He took the ship schematics from Squee, unrolled one, and spread it on the console. It showed a massive ship that seemed a crab claw opened wide. "When these pincer portions here and here pivot downward, they create a portal between them." He dragged the schematic away and pointed at the three spots on the map. "Those are huge aerial portals opening above Benalia. We're not talking about three Phyrexian ships. We're talking about hundreds pouring out of three separate portals."

Despite the flurry of paper on her work space, Hanna finished her calculations. "We're twelve hundred miles southwest of Benalia City."

Sisay hissed, "Even at top speed, it would take us nearly two hours to get there."

Tahngarth pounded his palm with his fist. "The Phyrexian ships are already coming across."

"Pinpoint the center of one of the disturbances," Sisay ordered. "If we strike the umbrella in the exact center, maybe we won't be shunted aside. Maybe we can break through."

Eyebrows furrowing, Gerrard said, "You think Weatherlight's got it in her?"

"I know she does," Sisay replied.

Gerrard shrugged. "She's your ship."

Leaning to the speaking tube, Sisay said, "Karn, what do you think? One more planeshift, down the center of one of those things?"

The response seemed to come from the ship herself. "One more. We can do one more."

"Coordinates locked, Captain," Hanna reported as she tightened the bolts on the longitude and latitude levers.

The engines barked once and then droned with fierce life.

"Brace for planeshift!" Sisay called.

The planks bucked. Beyond the bridge, air wavered as if from heat stress. An envelope of calm rose around Weatherlight. It pushed back the shimmering sky and sea. Once again, reality stretched beyond its breaking point. Black seams snaked across the sky. The heavens unraveled. Scraps of the world fled away. Then there was only the vast blackness.

This planeshift was different, though. Instead of gliding through emptiness, the ship seemed to be plunging forward through muck. The power envelope rattled. The engines whined. Everything felt sluggish and hot. A wall of energy appeared ahead. Supercharged chaos slowed to take on momentary form. In seconds, Weatherlight struck that endless barrier.

Despite their handholds, the crew pitched forward. Sisay and Tahngarth kept their feet. Gerrard staggered to one knee. Squee scampered up beneath the navigational consoles and clutched Hanna's legs.

Then they were through. Reality coalesced again out of chaos.

Below, the plains and woodlands of Benalia spread to the horizons. Above, the sky was cluttered with clouds. In their steamy midst hung a vast black hole, a hole in the heavens.

"There's your Phyrexian portal," Sisay noted quietly. "But where's the portal ship?"

Through gritted teeth, Gerrard growled, "On the other side- in Rath, or Phyrexia, or wherever. Makes it impossible to destroy from here."

"That hole is big enough to admit three ships abreast," Tahngarth whispered.

Gerrard nodded. "And there they are, coming through."

Light failed beyond the lip of the portal; though within it, in murky crimson, huge and horrible figures appeared. They were ships-dragon ships the size of Weatherlight, cruisers thrice her displacement, and some larger still, massive things covered with holes.

Here was the long-dreamed evil.

"Plague ships," Orim growled.

"They've seen us," Sisay said, pointing. "Look."

Two of the cruisers nosed through the gap. The sunlight of Dominaria broke upon them. Spiky rams led their prows, and behind them were rank on rank of scabrous ribs. Black shadows became black realities. The central hulls of the ships seemed cancerous carbuncles piled atop each other. Next came flaring spines, razor wings, and clouds of oil soot. They were huge ships, the size of floating cities.

Swarming antlike across them were Phyrexians.

"Evasive action?" Sisay asked.

"Take us to them, Sisay. Battle stations," Gerrard responded. He repeated the order into the tube. "Battle stations!"

Tahngarth yanked back the forward hatch and descended amidships on his way to the forecastle guns. Sisay meanwhile hauled hard on the wheel. Weatherlight banked and climbed. Behind her, Hanna nearly bit a stylus in two as she worked out new calibrations. She spared a moment to swat Squee out from under her desk. The goblin retreated toward the poop deck door and huddled there.

"Get to the aft gun. You're not as craven as all that," Gerrard said.

"Who? Squee?" whimpered the little green man.

"Yes, Squee. You're the one who shot Volrath out of the sky, right?"

A glad light came to the goblin's eyes, and he hurried out the aft door.

"What, if I might ask, is your plan, Commander Gerrard?" Sisay shot over one shoulder.

He smiled winningly, "To fight Phyrexians."

Then he too swung down through the hatch. It was his last chance for bravado. The ships were closing fast. Gerrard sprinted across the amidships planks, vaulted up the forecastle stairs, and rushed to his gunner's rig. Even as he fastened straps about him, he pumped the foot pedal that charged the gun. A moan began in the metal. It shivered and grew warm. The powerstone arrays in the center of the gun's housing glowed to life.

Across the forecastle, Tahngarth swung the massive barrel of his ray cannon about. He spat on the shaft, watching the white glob hiss away on impact.

"Fore starboard gun ready!" he shouted.

Gerrard likewise spun his weapon to fore and spat on it. "Fore port gun ready!"

From amidships, Dabis and Fewsteem reported in from their gun encasements.

"Squee, too," came a squeal through the speaking tube. "Squee, too."

The belly gunner and top gunners reported in.

Gerrard shouted to them all. "They look awful, sure, but they've never been in battle. They've never tested their ships in combat. Shoot for the power conduits. Shoot for intakes and stabilizers, anything that'll make one shot count for two."

Weatherlight mounted up the sky. Her engines screamed in the ascent. The cruisers didn't seem to get any nearer, only bigger.

"They've got to have fifty guns per ship," Dabis gasped. "How do we stand against fifty guns?"

"We'll stand, and they'll fall," Gerrard said. "Sisay, take us between the ships."

Her voice was shrill in the tube. "Between them?"

"You heard me. Thread the needle."

"You mean run the gauntlet," Sisay growled. "Threading the needle, Commander."

After the stress of shifting, this kind of tooth-and-nail ascent was like poetry. Never before had Weatherlight been so powerful. Skyshaper, Juju Bubble, Bones of Ramos, Power Matrix-the engine had almost doubled in size since leaving Dominaria for Rath. It showed. Weatherlight rose with a vengeance.

Ahead the two Phyrexian cruisers formed the cliff walls of an aerial canyon.

Weatherlight was still accelerating as she drove between them.

"Fire at will!" Gerrard roared.

He squeezed the cannon handles. A great bolt of radiance roared out of the flaming end. It struck clear air, melting it to red plasma. A hissing comet, the flare arced across the racing sky. It smashed fistlike into the starboard intakes of one cruiser. Sparks and great shreds of metal danced in the engine. A black plume belched out the rear of the ship. Tahngarth scored a similar strike on the cruiser on his side. Dabis and Fewsteem squeezed off a few shots.

Then black bolts answered. They shot out like sooty spider webs from ports along the ships' baselines. These were no webs. They were mana beams, their touch bringing death. They reached out toward Weatherlight.

"Cut those lines!" Gerrard shouted. His cannon unloaded three rounds in quick succession. The bolts grabbed Phyrexian flack from the air and obliterated it.

Tahngarth's cannon shouted. It ate away a pair of webs just before they lashed Weatherlight's hull. He shot a third time. This beam sliced through the air to punch into a set of mana conduits on the starboard cruiser's flank.

Already, the air was black with fire from the cruisers.

"What have you done?" Tahngarth roared even as he loosed a new volley. "We'll never survive the crossfire!"

"They'll never survive the crossfire," Gerrard shouted back.

Black bolts filled the air between the cruisers. Most of the shots went wide of Weatherlight. They continued on, slamming into the opposite vessel. The Phyrexian cruisers were slaying each other.

A black blast struck Weatherlight's hull just below Fewsteem's gun.

"Forget the ships!" Gerrard shouted. "They're already done for. Defensive fire!"

Over the tube came Sisay's voice. "Shall I take us out of here, Commander?"

"Sure, Sisay. Straight forward. Take us up, through the portal!"