I assembled the robogrunts on the edge of Orthodoxland, waiting for the order to come and advance. Technically I would have been well within my rights to attack now, but the Colonel was still trying to bring the local militias onside and a swift invasion of their territory would not do the chances of that happening any good.
I was tempted, all the more so when I saw a woman dragged from a building and carried skywards by one of the winged mutants. I sighted on it and brought up a telescopic image. I saw her screaming face and the bat-wings of the mutant extending from its arms. I saw its face, which had no trace of humanity left in it as it bore her away. I wondered at that. Beecher had seemed so like himself and yet this aspect of Raximander looked more alien than the serpent man.
More of the helldivers swirled overhead. They were carrying people off like winged monsters in a horror vid. If Raximander had been trying to stir up terror he could not have done any better. Of course, this made his followers easy targets for the militia. They sprayed and prayed. Some of the more sensible ones used their anti-aircraft weaponry. It did not do any of the prisoners Raximander had taken any good but it certainly caused mayhem among the Brood’s minions.
I wondered about that. If he was serious about keeping the number of nodes below a certain threshold, it would explain his tactics. He would need to replace casualties after they were taken, not before which was the classic Assimilator strategy. That would take time, anything from hours to days depending on what he was attempting. That might explain his pattern of attacks, waves coming in hours apart.
Of course, he might just want us to think that, before he launched his main thrust. I could not see what he hoped to gain though. If he just wanted to win, he would do it best by the usual mass infection.
“We’ve got the go,” the Colonel said. “Orthodox have just asked for help. Seems that Raximander is making quite an impression.”
I ordered the robogrunts forward and called in the warbirds. A wave of them came in supersonic, sending missiles hurtling at the Assimilated gunships, smashing them from the air. I charged into the rest of the ground forces.
Something bat-winged descended from the sky. I fed it several cycles of reaper pulses and it dropped like a stone. I stamped on its neck as I walked over the corpse. There was a crunch as vertebrae snapped. I kept moving forward. The robogrunts kept firing.
I could tell it was going to be a long day.
I crouched down in the rubble of a building, looking at the Colonel. Her armor was patched and dented and it looked better than mine. Raximander had thrown wave after wave at us. He seemed to have got better at judging the rate of infection he needed. The waves were closer together. Maybe he was going to miscalculate and his progenitor would reemerge. Maybe it already had. I cursed myself for taking his nonsense seriously.
The Colonel looked at me. “Still thinking about Rax’s plan.”
“I am.”
I looked out at the piled corpses of humans and host bodies. At any other time during an Assimilator invasion I would have been worried about them springing to life. As it was, we were lax about the burning. Annoyed by that, I gave my robogrunts instructions to begin cremation.
As the bodies shriveled and burned I considered what was going on. Raximander might not have been accelerating the infection rate but the bodies appearing were more sophisticated and mutated with each cycle, that implied he was holding a certain number of his host bodies in reserve each time.
“What is the maximum number of hosts we’ve had attack so far?” I asked Orbital.
“Two thousand six hundred and ninety-two,” Orbital’s response was almost instantaneous.
“That means if Raximander is trying to keep his hosts under five thousand he’s been doing it pretty well.”
“Maybe he’s allowing margin for error,” the Colonel suggested.
“Almost two for one is a pretty big margin of error.”
“You think he’s up to something else.” I told her about the increasingly sophisticated host forms.
“They take longer lead times to create,” she said, grasping the point at once.
“And even so, he’s still well below the threshold he’s set for himself.”
“He could be lying about it. And he could have a whole lot in reserve, for a big attack.”
“You think that’s what’s coming? You could be right.”
I looked around. Street lights flickered. The city streets were eerily quiet. Clouds of nanites swirled like fog around us.
“We’re doing it again, aren’t we,” the Colonel said. “Taking his claims seriously.”
“Orbital, if Raximander is telling the truth about all of the stuff we have been discussing, what would you predict the earliest possible timing of his next attack would be?”
“Raximander could attack instantly. He is well below the five thousand node point he indicated,” said Orbital.
“Assuming he wanted to maintain a buffer of half of that.”
“Using basic corpse warriors, he could be up to strength within ten minutes. If he wished to attack with the aggregate mix of host types he has been using it would be within an hour, assuming he had already begun, their creation as the last wave of attacks went forward.” Another signal came in.
“We’re picking up even larger seismic disturbances below the city,” said the Colonel.
“Rax’s got his diggers at work?”
“Maybe but some of the shockwaves are on the scale of mining explosives.”
“The militias collapsing the tunnels?”
“Might be, but if they are, they are not telling us.”
“This has a pattern. It’s rolling along and rising up toward the surface. I’m sending a drone to check its projected point of emergence.”
“I think it’s best we assume it’s Raximander, until we learn different,” the Colonel said. “He’s maybe building himself a nest down there. Once we’ve built up a big enough force, we’re going to have to go in and clean it up.”
“I’m sure that will be fun.”
“You love bug hunts,” said Ragequit over Grid. “Don’t pretend you don’t.”
“I think that’s yourself you’re talking about,” I said. “I’ve done my quota for one lifetime.”
“Why do you always lie about these things? You’ll be the first in when the time comes?”
“I am glad you think you know me so well, but I am getting too old for this.”
“We have a sweepstake going,” Lopez said. “We’re wondering what forms he’ll manifest next.”
“He’s got a big choice,” I said. “We’ve isolated thousands of Brood bio-forms. Every time they absorb a new species they hybridize it and come up with something new.”
“How do they transfer the information between star-systems? That’s what gets me,” Lopez mused. “I’ve been reading up on this. New bio-forms appear even when the originals have not been within hundreds of light years. You reckon they have telepathy over all that distance?”
The Colonel said, “We don’t know that the Brood nodes haven’t had contact. Maybe they were just never spotted traveling through the wyrmgates.”
“But they can communicate and they do it off-Grid,” Lopez said. “It defies explanation. It’s almost like magic.”
I wondered what books Lopez had been reading. I said as much.
“You can laugh but it’s true,” he said. “Maybe they have access to technology far in advance of ours. Maybe it’s all part of some Forerunner super-tech.”
“Quantum entanglement is what I think,” said Medico Mark. “We know it can happen and we know it happens faster than light. I think nodes of the Overmind are linked on that level. That’s how they communicate.”
Before I could say anything else, the Colonel said, “Take a look at this. It’s from the scout I sent to check out the seismic disturbance.”
A window popped up in my HUD showing a vid feed.
Ragequit said, “Oh wow, I don’t believe it, a centivore
!”
“I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” said the Colonel.
“Not since Gideon,” I said.
I stared at the scout drone pics appearing in my helmet’s video insert. An enormous slug-like thing, bigger than an armored train, lumbered through the streets of the western sector. It left a trail of slime behind it and emitted a cloud of noxious green gas.
Its skin was slick black and shimmering. A massive leech-like maw gaped fifty meters wide. The back end sprayed stuff. Masses of tentacles surrounded both orifices and emerged from the body, clouds of smaller things that I knew would look like a cross between mutated bees and beetles filled the air around it.
I knew the centivore would be close to a thousand meters long and weigh thousands of tons. It was crushing vehicles beneath its weight. It was so huge that it could resist the strafing runs of the warbirds. Reaper fire would score its armored hide but would not penetrate deep enough to damage vital organs. It looked like some demented Lovecraftian deity emerging from the bowels of the earth to devour us all.
Thousands of corpse warriors marched along beside it. Some were elites, others were mutants, some were not even armed. So much for keeping the number of nodes down. It looked like the big attack we had been waiting for had finally arrived.
Flyers leaped up from nearby buildings to attack the warbirds. The drones cartwheeled and looped away from them and then shot them from the skies with clouds of expanding shigawire. The helldivers were just a distraction though.
The real attacks came from those insect swarms. They didn’t rely on teeth or claws or poisonous stings either. Raximander had fitted them with time-fused bombs, and when they got close enough they detonated. The warbirds were fast but the swarms exploded in relays, taking out more and more of the flying drones. I noticed too that the centivore had great blisters in its flesh from which poked out the muzzles of many weapons.
“Well, well, Raximander has been busy,” said the Colonel. “I wonder how long it took him to grow that.”
“I wonder where,” I said. It was easy enough to find out. I sent the drone scout streaking back along the centivore’s trail. The slime led to a massive underground parking lot. The drone flickered down it and found a gaping hole in the concrete. Dropping into the tunnels it saw a massive mineshaft descending into the depths. The centivore had burrowed its way out from well below the surface of Faith, somewhere deep in the tunnels.
“I’ll bet the natives are glad they dug those now,” Ragequit shouted. “Perfect place to incubate one of Raximander’s monsters.”
“That took more than a couple of days to grow,” I said. “He must have had a month down there at least. Access to a lot of biomatter as well.”
The Colonel held up her hand. “The Weapon Ship just took off. Without asking clearance.”
“I am not surprised with that thing on the loose,” Ragequit said. “They know what’s going to happen next.”
“How are we going to stop it?” Lopez asked. “I don’t think a reaper will work against that.”
“We could always ask 13 to carry a tac nuke down its throat,” suggested Ragequit unhelpfully.
“Nukes are weapons of last resort,” the Colonel said. “Orbital bombardment might work.”
Almost as if Raximander were eavesdropping on us, an incoming call came in, highest priority through the Grid. The ident code was Beecher’s. When the Colonel accepted it, the face was Beecher.
“Greetings,” he said. He still did not sound like Raximander. He sounded like himself. There was a beatific smile on his face. He looked as if he were in the throes of religious ecstasy, a man talking directly with his god. I’d seen that look before. He was definitely possessed, but he was also at least partially in possession of his own faculties or believed himself to be so.
“What do you want, Raximander?” the Colonel asked. She was not delaying the orbital strike. Orbital was already running the calculations.
“You are wrong, Colonel. I am still Beecher and I am so much more. Raximander is also allowing me free will within his system.”
“You may think that but it is not true.”
“I won’t debate my experience with you, Colonel. If you have not undergone it, you can never understand it. I have a message for you.”
“Fire away.”
“You are planning an orbital strike against the node you call a centivore. It is the logical thing for you to do under the circumstances. We recommend that you do not do so.”
“You don’t get to vote in the matter,” said the Colonel. “You ceased to be a citizen the moment Raximander assimilated you.”
“Indeed, and it is a trade I would gladly make again. It is not I who you should be worrying about however. It is them.”
The point of view shifted as Beecher added a video feed. I saw a close-up of some of the figures marching at the centivore’s side. They were humans, men, women and children. There were Aryans, Temperance Legionaries, Orthodox. They looked tired and scared under the guns of the corpse warriors.
“Those are just more of Raximander’s minions,” said the Colonel.
“No. They are not,” said Beecher. “They are completely uncontaminated by the Assimilation.”
“You would claim that,” said the Colonel. I noticed though that she had already paused the imminent strike.
Beecher said, “I invite you to send over a medical drone if you wish to test this.”
The picture zoomed in on the faces of the captives. They were terrified. Of course, it might have been Raximander acting but I doubted it. I remembered what the militiaman with the Ishtarian weapons had said earlier about hostages. I suddenly understood why Raximander had let him fall into our hands. He wanted us to know he had them.
“I’ll do that,” said the Colonel. “If you will halt the centivore.”
“I can’t do that. It needs to proceed with its mission.”
“Then why should I believe you.”
“You already do, Colonel. Otherwise you would have ordered the strike to proceed.”
“I am sending over the drone.”
“Please do.” The line was cut. Beecher’s image vanished.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Bastard,” said the Colonel.
“But a very clever bastard,” I said. “We might risk an orbital bombardment if we had cleared the area, but if those are citizens we won’t until things are totally out of hand. We might as well nuke the whole city then.”
“The Assimilators have never done this before,” said Ragequit.
That was true. This was not the way the Brood operated. They got in, assimilated as many people as possible, and either triumphed or died. This felt wrong. It was not like a Brood invasion at all.
Or maybe the Overmind had assessed our weaknesses correctly. But what would doing this gain it? It must know that if we had to, we would blow the city to Kingdom Come.
The drone set down on the side of the centivore. It scanned one of the visible hostages, extruded a force tube and took a blood sample then began to probe saliva. Medico Mark confirmed what we could all see from the readouts. These people were not infected. At least not as far as our probe could tell.
“Looks like Beecher was not lying,” Medico Mark said.
“That’s not Beecher,” the Colonel said. “It’s Raximander or whatever controlled him.”
She looked at me as if expecting me to confirm this. I did not know what to say but the first faint glimmer of an idea was passing through my mind.
“Let’s get out there and deal with this,” the Colonel said. “We need to start separating the hostages from the centivore.”
“Raximander will just shoot them, if we try that.”
“Set up snipers along the projected route. We’ll start by taking out the guards on the flanks and free the hostages. We can distract Rax with a frontal attack, Goliaths and cybertanks aimed at the head.”
She gestured and three-dimensional images of the plan swirled in the
air around us, superimposed on our helmets’ field of vision. The same thing would be happening to every unengaged trooper. We were all on the general Grid link now. All company locations close enough to engage were green. Hostages were yellow. Rax’s forces were red. I withdrew my point of view high above the map of the city and looked down at the projected field of conflict.
Under normal circumstances, the battle would have been fairly balanced between what we had on the ground and Rax’s forces. The hostages made all the difference, unless we were prepared to sacrifice them. If they had been infected we would have done it in a minute. But they were not.
“Rax is sweeping North West through Jihad territory,” the Colonel said. “Looks like he’s heading for the central ring where the Loyalists are. We’ll intercept him on route and spring the ambush when the centivore’s head hits the North Street intersection.”
There was quiet as people studied the maps and their own dispositions. They were seeking out any weaknesses.
Before anybody could say anything, the centivore changing direction, turning south, heading toward the spaceport.
“That don’t look good,” said Ragequit. “He’s coming for us.”
“Right into our defenses,” Lopez said. “That does not make sense.”
“He’s counting on us not shooting the hostages.” I said.
“And if he gets into the port itself we won’t be able to nuke him without nuking ourselves and the refugee camps,” Mark added. “He can drive us out or take over the spaceport at his leisure.”
“He can also take over any of the ships still on the field.” I said. “Swarm off planet. If he can get enough we won’t be able to chase them all down before one of them hits the wyrmgate.”
“Orbital, how long do we have until he gets here?” the Colonel asked.
“Nine minutes and twenty seconds,” Orbital said. “Then he’ll be too close for bombardment. He’s already too close for nukes unless you begin withdrawal now.”