Olivia looked into Ethan’s face and suddenly drew back, her own face tightening, but to the credit of her courage she kept her hand fixed to his shoulder.
“What is it?” he asked her, because he sensed that something about himself had further changed.
She said, as matter-of-factly as she could, “Your left eye has turned silver.”
Twenty.
In the holocaust that the world had become, in the battle between star-faring races that had begun before memory and might last into eternity, the city of Chicago had been reduced to ruins nearly two years ago but the battle lines were always shifting, and it was not ruins that the warring races fought over but territory. They had burned Chicago and most of its suburbs to ash and melted wreckage, the great buildings fallen, the streets pocked with blackened craters and covered with the stones and shattered glass of man’s creations, now lost to the constant warfare. It was the same all over this world, one of many that lay on the line of dispute. It would so forever be, the ravaging of planet after planet, some populated by higher forms of life and others just awakening to life in whatever bizarre form it might take to crawl from the slime of beginnings.
The wreckage of Chicago lay under pouring rain from a low sky of ugly yellow, and on this grim morning the Gorgon and the Cypher ships battled in the turbulent air and their soldiers fought amid the fallen buildings, crushed cars, human skeletons, and the few remaining mutants hiding in their holes. Whatever there was to burn had already burned, in this city that had long ago known the tragedy of fire, and yet now the flames were red and blue and created by alien minds devoted to the study of destruction. Hundreds of Cypher soldiers moved through the gloom firing their fleshy blasters at furtive, sliding shapes, and then hundreds of small blue spheres emitting piercing shrieks came flying from an unknown source and with flaming whips tore the Cyphers into pieces that gushed brown fluid and oozed black intestines streaked with yellow and red. Above the battlefield, explosions flashed in the clouds. Burning Cypher ships came crashing down, some to explode themselves in the rubble and others to sink, hissing with heat, into the fetid, lifeless water of Lake Michigan.
After one of the shrieking spheres had passed, five Cypher soldiers climbed from a crater near where the Willis Tower had stood before it was blasted to pieces by a Gorgon energy beam on the first day of their arrival. They drifted through the rain-swept ruins, ghosting in and out, their black and featureless heads swiveling back and forth in search of the quick reptilian movements of the enemy. The human kind could not understand the communication signals sent to these soldiers, or from where, or what these creatures truly were; it was beyond human knowledge, and thus as much magic as it was technology far advanced.
The five soldiers were identified by a small red glyph on the lower right slope of their faceplates:
It was a symbol of great honor and equally great prowess in battle, and though no human could fully understand its meaning the closest human language could decipher it would be First Born Of The Blessed Machine. The soldier who led them had one more addition to its glyph, a second crescent beneath the first, and the nearest meaning in the human language would be: Bringer Of Ignoble Death.
Neither male nor female, neither truly born nor wholly constructed in the weapon pods, the First Born moved through the wet rubble with the careful stealth of ancient warriors. Behind their faceplates worked calculations, soundlessly and rapidly, in no mathematics that could be fathomed on Earth. Distant sensors sparked pinpoints of light on floating grids, marking the proximity of kindred forces and the despised enemy of all that was correct and true. Above them a huge battleship of that enemy emerged from the clouds and began to fire its destructive beams at another target on the ground. Explosions, dust, and debris plumed into the dirty air some leagues distant. The First Born moved on, seeking enemy contact and fully aware that their foes were masters of camouflage, had learned the art of becoming one with any surface that afforded a hiding place, and that this foe had also learned to trick the spatial sensors by projecting a multitude of false images.
Through the rubble they went, silently calculating in their alien mathematics built on the geometrics of the tenth dimension. The First Born entered the dark hulk of a fallen building, where sheets of gold-colored glass had shattered on the stones. Human bones, skulls and ribcages lay scattered about, some bearing teeth marks. The First Born recognized them as the interior foundations of the denizens of this world. They did not know they were walking in what used to be an international bank, and underfoot were hundreds of pieces of paper currency from many nations of the world, now moldering in puddles of diseased rain.
Deathbringer suddenly stood still. The creature was receiving a message from the high command. The other First Born stopped as well, standing motionless on a floor of broken tiles.
The language was also mathematics. Behind the faceplate it pieced together an image of a burning blue giant throwing spheres of enemy fire at crawler weapons as seen through the viewpoint of a podmate…and then a denizen of this world attacking other podmates and destroying them with what seemed impossible ease.
The orders came. The nearest proximation of human understanding would have been: Capture this specimen. High altitude tracker on station. Begin immediate deployment.
This was surely a task to heighten the honor of the First Born of the Blessed Machine.
Deathbringer’s faceplate grid showed a concentration of enemies at a measure of what would have been two hundred yards in human distance. The count of enemy soldiers might have had different root structures, but there appeared to be twenty of them.
Therefore when the monsters erupted from the cracked gray walls all around the First Born, exposing themselves as having been disguised by the stonework, Deathbringer was not caught unaware because this creature had seen the pulsing, wet red oval of the camouflage organ in many field dissections. It was a mystery yet to be conquered.
They knew no fear, neither First Born nor the reptilian attackers with their scaly flesh of yellow banded with black or brown, or black banded with yellow and red, or brown banded with black and yellow, no two exactly alike. To an inhabitant of the earth this would have been a hypnotic beauty, as God might have created the serpent before cursing it to crawl on its belly after the Fall of Man. Yet their quick and slithering movements and the visage that was too close to that of a king cobra was terror beyond terror, and to be caught by the slitted red pupils in narrow eyes that never blinked was more than enough to paralyze a human being.
The weapons of these soldiers were simple. They had been bred for this war. Beyond the claws, fangs, and speed to tear their enemy apart at close range, at long range some could spit spears of acid that would eat through any earthly material short of tungsten steel. Six of the twenty had been bred as creations that could extend their upper appendages a length of seven feet in human distance, and their claws would transmutate into any number of deadly implements according to the creature’s braincore.
Instantly the First Born pressed back-to-back. They began to fire their double-barreled weapons as they spun in a rapid wheeling motion. They turned so fast they were ghostly imprints, nothing solid about them but the white-hot gouts of energy streaking out across what used to be a refined lobby of commerce, now a battleground where reptilian forms exploded into burning pieces.
Still the enemy darted forward, diminished now by half their force. The spears of acid came sizzling through the air at the First Born. They blurred out almost as one, and yet acid hit a faceplate before all had displaced themselves. The one struck lost its distortion and vibrated back into focus, its faceplate being melted away and beneath it a sparking of red schematics. An elongated yellow-and-black arm with a spinning yellow spearhead for a hand pierced the chest and a black-and-brown-banded arm that ended in a dozen crimson spikes drove into the lower body and tore loose a slide of glistening black intestines. As the dying creature crumpled to its knees, its acid-burned head was ripped from the neck by the brute strength of a reptilian commander with a growth of three thorny spikes on each shoulder. The remaining four First Born blurred back in across the chamber behind their enemy. Their weapons cut apart another six of the hated foe. Four enemy soldiers were left, among them their commander. There was no retreat; all knew this was a battle to the death.