Invasion

Chapter 26

They did not expect us to penetrate this far, Thaddeus told himself.

He climbed a dust embankment and crashed against a new wave of Phyrexians. His sword rammed deep into the jowls of one beast. The blade sliced upward alongside a four-foot fang and to the root. With a violent, wet lurch, the tooth was pulled from its socket and fell into Thaddeus's grasp. Flipping the thing over, he clutched the root like the hilt of a sword.

The Phyrexian bowled into Thaddeus. Rolling onto his back, Thaddeus set sword and tooth side by side on the creature's thorax. It impaled itself on the twin spikes. Amid a gush of glistening-oil, Thaddeus kicked out and flipped the monster over. The corpse tumbled down the hillside. Thaddeus rose, sword in one hand and tooth in the other.

They had not expected us to penetrate this far. No trench works, no palisades, no defensive batteries. All they have are these suicide squads, hurling their bones on top of us. It will not be enough.

"Forward!" Thaddeus commanded, tooth lifted high. His sword lanced into the olfactory cavity of another monster, hewing into brain. The stuff sluiced like gray pudding down the nasal shaft and poured over Thaddeus. The beast slumped. Beyond hackled shoulders, the cave appeared. "Into the caves!"

Striding up the fallen hulk, Thaddeus hacked the head from a snakelike Phyrexian and ran down its twitching body. His corps followed, perhaps fifty fighters. He had lost half his troops in the mad, mile-long charge to the caves. The Phyrexians had lost hundreds. The Metathran that remained were the best fighters Thaddeus had. They would carve their way to the command core and down to the portal and set off enough bombs to seal it. Victory at Koilos was almost in hand.

Thaddeus and his strike force were but glinting helms in the distant fighting. They couldn't have penetrated so far. Something was amiss.

Agnate peered at the scene from atop a mound of dead. More died each moment, adding to the cairn of flesh. Phyrexians and Metathran fought ferociously, spilled each others' blood, and lay down side by side like brothers- huge and twisted brothers. The adversaries this day seemed descendants of the first feuding brothers who had battled over this same dirt clod six thousand years before.

A Phyrexian foot soldier scrambled up the mound of dead. It was humanlike, its torso shot through with metal struts that reinforced its biological spine. Gray muscles torqued among gears. It smiled as it came, teeth like a line of bones.

With a yell, Agnate brought his axe down on the soldier's head. It had expected the attack. It turned an armored shoulder to the blade. Steel met steel instead of flesh. Agnate's blade clung to the magnetized shoulderpiece. The soldier lunged back, ripping the axe from Agnate's grasp.

It clutched the hilt and brandished the blade with a yell.

The Metathran commander drew a dagger and hurled it. The knife clanged against magnetic struts and clung there, shuddering.

"More weapons?" the beast taunted, clutching the dagger.

Agnate stepped backward down the hill of death and stared incredulously. "It speaks."

"It thinks too. It plans. It uses your weapons against you." The four-armed thing hurled itself at him, swinging axe and dagger in a dual attack.

Agnate ducked under the axe-the worse of the two blades- but took the dagger in the shoulder. Clasping his hand atop the weapon's hilt and the beast's claw, Agnate ran beneath the Phyrexian's arm and rushed up the hill. The dagger anchored the monster's arm, forcing its joints into unnatural alignments. The wrist popped first, then the twin bones of the forearm broke, the elbow yanked out of joint, and the shoulder separated from the metal framework. One final surge, and the arm came off altogether.

Agnate wheeled, pulling the dagger from his shoulder and flinging the severed arm away.

The Phyrexian crouched atop the dead pile, its life streaming from the amputation. Still, bonelike teeth gleamed with a smile.

"Commander Thaddeus is doomed. Tsabo Tavoc wants him. Tsabo Tavoc gets him."

Agnate coldly approached the creature and drove his dagger into the thing's skull. Fingers eased from Agnate's axe, and he retrieved it.

It thinks… it plans… it uses your weapons against you…

Agnate hissed, standing. The whole thing was a trap. Thaddeus was being drawn in, his strike force decimated and he…

Tsabo Tavoc wants him… Tsabo Tavoc gets him…

Taking a moment to chop his axe into the flank of another Phyrexian, Agnate flung his mind out across the battlefield. He reached for Thaddeus, an instinct since the moment of their creation. Twins, identical in body and mind, they had forever fought in tandem. Always, they had known each other's mind-

Not in this battle. A greater mind interposed itself between them. Agnate could only batter his thoughts against that solid and seamless presence.

Tsabo Tavoc wants him… Tsabo Tavoc gets him…

He fights beautifully, magnificently. He fights like a lion.

Tsabo Tavoc took a deep, satisfied breath. Lids closed over compound eyes. She had no desire to see the cave that ensconced her. It was the battle beyond that she watched with inner eyes. Distally, she experienced the slaughter of thousands of Metathran and felt the murder of thousands of her own children. Proximally, she sensed armies of warriors arriving even then through the portal, red-robed vat priests among them. In the middle distance, she felt Thaddeus.

He kills with such grim pleasure.

Tsabo Tavoc shifted her legs. A tremor of ecstasy moved through the mechanisms as Thaddeus clove the head of a gargantua. She had not intended to sacrifice that one. Gargantuas were hunched things of gray muscle, their feet as wide and rooted as trees. Flesh like rhino hide plated their torsos. Scythe claws could divide a man into five sections. Grotesque swells of bone covered their bulbous heads. Within lurked brains built for bloodlust and obedience. It took a century to grow a gargantua-a century and implants from ten separate species. Thaddeus had killed it in a moment. That was a costly loss-and yet all the more piquant because of it.

Thaddeus and his forty stormed the cave mouth. The gate guard lined up before them, claws and teeth at the ready. She would not thin their blood. If Thaddeus were to gain his way within, he would need to gain it honestly.

Tsabo Tavoc propelled another gargantua up before Thaddeus.

It raked its claws outward and caught Thaddeus as though he were a grasshopper. One simple squeeze and-

Tsabo Tavoc took a shuddering breath as she felt Thaddeus's sword slice the tendons of the beasts wrist. Flexors balled up beneath the elbow and extensors, splaying the claws uselessly back. It was a glorious strike. The pain was exquisite.

Thaddeus dropped to the ground.

The gargantua had another arm. It grabbed Thaddeus. It clenched its fist. There would be a brief spray and the gurgle of meat between claws-

Except that two of those claws were lopped off by the Metathran. He vaulted through the bloody space and ran up the gargantua's scaly arm.

Tsabo Tavoc smiled. He was good. What would it be next? Heart? Spine? Throat? Brain?

The gargantua's dead claws flailed at Thaddeus. They cut shallowly into him.

He reached the beast's shoulder. There was something in his hand-long, white, and curved. It shone point-on for a moment before the tooth plunged into the gargantua's eye. It sank through cornea and humors, up the optic nerve. The tooth bit into brain, cracking out the top of the skull.

Tsabo Tavoc did not withdraw from the gargantua as it slumped down in death. She wanted to feel that tooth through her mind, that black welling tide of death in every tissue. She wanted to suffer Thaddeus's victory. It would make her own triumph all the more sweet.

Thaddeus was inside the cave. He and twenty of his warriors had fought their way in. They would strike for the command core. They would all die but one. Thaddeus would be hers.

Ah, war is a glorious enterprise.

Tsabo Tavoc opened her compound eyes. She stood on eager legs and ambled out into the cavern beyond.

The gargantuas were fearsome beasts, but they died as had the sand worms, spinal centipedes, Metathran zombies, scuta, blood-stocks, and shock troops. Thaddeus's hundred had been winnowed to a simple score, but they had carved their way into the Phyrexian fortress. Now it was only a matter of discovering the fortress's heart, and tearing it out, and feasting on it.

"Gather up!" he shouted. The Caves of Koilos picked up his voice and hollered it back at him. Thaddeus smiled. The sound was good.

As they advanced, the twenty warriors converged on Thaddeus. "We drive for the portal. Once it is closed, we'll clear out the command center. How many pikes remain?" Four of the warriors lifted high their pikes. "Good. Take the vanguard. Axes take the rear. Swords take the flanks. Slay only those beasts who give battle. This is their beachhead. They will defend it furiously. Don't be drawn away from the main group and the main objective-the portal. How many grenades?"

Eighteen of the twenty had bandoleers.

"Excellent. That will bury the mirror podium in a halfmile of rock. Downward."

The final word was not spoken before pikes bristled across the vanguard and axes gleamed at the rear. Thaddeus himself took to the right flank, knowing the first turn would cast him in a blind corner. Muscular and vicious, the strike force rushed to the gap. Pikes rounded the corner, intent on whatever lay beyond.

Flesh lay beyond-flesh and horns and fangs. Pikes sank into the shrieking wall of monsters. Impaled, they came on.

Jaws as large as a bear trap clamped the head of one pikeman. Triangular teeth converged, closing in an inescapable bite. With a crunch, they severed the man's spine. His body dropped away, hands yet holding the haft.

A man in the vanguard released his pike, drew his sword, and stabbed. The blade buried itself in a beast's belly. It sliced through scales and muscles and plunged into some black organ beneath. The Phyrexian shrieked. Acids sprayed from its stomach. They ate away the man's hand and arm to the elbow. He died beneath his falling foe.

The tumbling monster dropped sideways, crushing the third pikeman.

The fourth vaulted up the beast and drove his sword into the head of another. Steel cracked bone and brain. The monster- what seemed a giant ground sloth but could have been almost anything in that murk-was unimpressed. Its fist pounded its own head, crushing the pikeman and driving the sword deeper.

The vanguard was gone, and only ten feet gained into the cave.

"Forward!" Thaddeus commanded, taking the van.

His sword cut between two huge eyes. They peeled back on opposite sides of a split visage. Thaddeus kicked a foothold in the bisected sinus cavities and vaulted atop the hissing beast. He climbed the thing.

"Forward!"

Thaddeus's sword hewed a path through beasts. Slick with glistening-oil, his boots reached ground. He advanced into the dark.

Battle sounds suddenly hushed. Thaddeus whirled. Even the light of the entrance was lost. It was as though a door had slid silently closed behind him.

Thaddeus kept his sword at the ready. He reached to his belt, grabbed a flare, and broke the thing in half. A red flame shot from each edge. The light gleamed dimly off walls of smooth stone.

How did I get separated?

He spun, glimpsing movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning fully around, he watched for shadows against the dark wall. No one was there.

He should have looked up.

A metallic spider leg knocked his sword away. Crushing weight flung him to his back. His flare skipped angrily across the floor. Thaddeus struggled to grab a grenade. It was no good. His hands were pinned. He was trapped.

In the sulfuric half-light, a voice spoke. It was as omnipresent and alien as a cicada chorus: "Tsabo Tavoc wants you. Tsabo Tavoc will have you."