Servant of the Dead
Science fiction short story
Hapi’s first mission: River Serpent
The Akolapur Incident: Worthy
Prelude
It hurts to break something you made yourself.
The sensor tech watched the screens in front of him, while the wide, blue-brown expanse of the world spun above him in the viewports. Garenos, it had been called, before the Reaping Years and its loss to the Jahpoori. Now they called it something else, after some politician general from their own history, and the regional star-charts had all dutifully been updated.
It was still Garenos, though.
It was still the same mountains, and the same hills, and the same lands where the Men of Abydos had walked and lived. It was still the same lands that had borne the fruits of the Nile, carried and transplanted across lightyears and countless generations that left Terra Primitiva, and fed the people of the Greater Egypt as they spread amongst the stars.
It was still the same Garenos that had fallen to decadence and corruption, and - ultimately - into enemy hands.
On the technician’s screens, the focused pulse of the radiotronics beams was a bright purple spot on the northern hemisphere’s middle latitudes. The weather model was starting to update and draw in more of the polar vectors, showing the channelling of frozen air from the pole down to the south. Weather indicators were updating on the other screens, showing plummeting temperatures and snowstorms sweeping down from the north.
Hidden and almost unseen under the purple blot, a name marker floated.
Amunarak.
In notation behind it, almost as an afterthought, was the new Jahpoori name: Dhevasterabad. Capital of the north, regional controller for all space traffic, and powered by the vast hydro-electric dams that the Jahpoori had built centuries before, whose waters had pushed up and flooded much of the old land and the old memories of Garenos. Cultural sites, historic monuments, centers of learning - all lost beneath the rising waters, and the reaching tendrils of Jahpoori influence.
Amunarak - lost, replaced, driven out by an alien presence - and yet not forgotten.
The technician adjusted one of the power metrics on his screen, and the purple spot blotting out Amunarak became just a little bit darker. Floating high in orbit around Garenos amidst the debris fields of the preceding three days, vast energies coiled and adjusted themselves accordingly in the bow of the ship. There was a no-fly zone around them, broadcasting on all the standard and emergency frequencies, and the dropship pilots from the Anhur divisions knew well enough to stay clear of the black behemoth where it hung in orbit over the planet. They flew wide detours to the southern hemisphere instead, and whispered silent prayers as they watched the northern hemisphere roil.
Invisible to the naked eye, the radiation pouring out of the ship was a screaming volcano of energy to any sensor pointed in its direction. Debris from the battle, crossing into the orbital lanes between the behemoth and the planet below it, twinkled and evaporated into atomized sparkles before they could even finish the crossing from one side to the other. From the viewpoint of the ships around it, it looked like a constant stream of popping starlight beneath the massive craft - a quaint, almost mesmerising display of fireworks after the brutal energies of the earlier orbital assault.
To the ships screening the behemoth - the corvettes of the Du’at Division, the sharp-nosed starfighters of Marshal Kunru’s interdictor wings, and the bloated, troop-filled barges which the Anhur division dropships were constantly visiting - the black shape in their midst was both saviour and destroyer. Obsidian flanks, tens of kilometers long, cloaked the behemoth in darkness, and only the gleam of its bow arrays - pointing unerringly at Amunarak, far below - gave any indication of life on the vast ship. Compared to the rest of the glittering invasion fleet it was a shadow, cloaked in darkness and drinking starlight, and those who looked at it could not help but feel the fingers of despair fluttering over their souls.
It was Lord Inpu incarnate, and - just like the jackal-headed god it was named for - it had come to lead the soul of Garenos into the afterlife.
Part 1: The Watch
Hapi waited, and watched, as the landscape in front of them slowly disappeared under more and more ice. Torrents of snow - unheard of in this region, even in winter - were lashing from the sky as the polar vortex drew ever closer, and the water surface behind the looming bulwark of the hydroelectric dam was already frozen solid. Snowdrifts were slowly but steadily turning the raw grey ice into fields of white that stretched for kilometres upriver.
From their cliffside vantage point they had watched the dam waters becoming slow and turgid the day before, despite the lashing of the wind, and sometime during the night, during the long vigil and while the snow fell down in unceasing waves, the dam surface had hardened and begun its transformation. Strange auroras had burned above them in the night sky, the atmosphere twisting and coiling under the lashing radiotronics of the unseen fleet far overhead, and Amun - their tech specialist - had shared tales from his childhood and the auroras he had seen on a holiday visit to the north pole of their own world.
Garenos was not like their world, though.
Not any more. The fields of old had been turned into mega-farms, the forests had been stripped and fed into hydrocarbon factories, and the lakes and rivers had become slow, diseased things filled with the offal and debris of the rapacious Jahpoori industrialization programmes. The southern hemisphere, once a gem of recreation in the sector, had fallen into decay and exploitation, and sprawling, towering hive cities - Jhalawar, Jaitaran, Mandsaur, and the space elevator base at New Sojat - dominated the landscape there for miles around. It was a foul place, choked in aerial pollution and chronic dust storms from the top-soil erosion that plagued the mega-farms, and its reeking tendrils spread far and wide over the neighbouring oceans that bound it on every side except to the north.
It was also there that the Anhur divisions were coming down, setting up barricades and battle lines to contain the masses, and it was there that the fate of the civilian population of Dhevasterabad would be decided in the coming weeks and months. Four million Jahpoori troops, their intel had noted, and only half of them had been within range of orbital weapons. The civilian population was impossible to count - not even the Jahpoori knew.
Whoever - whatever - survived, would still have to be dug out with men and blood and sharp iron, and for that, the Anhur divisions were prepared for a long and bloody fight.
The northern hemisphere held a different prize, and Hapi, studying the frozen surface of the dam, wondered what the mood was currently like in the facilities which their intel had identified at the bottom of the dam. Hidden under megatonnes of water, acting as both shield and insulator, the primary AI coordinator of Dhevasterabad lurked in a submerged facility that ran at least two kilometers upriver, and who knows how deep underground. Vast logic banks and quantum engines powered it, and the waters above it - almost two hundred meters, at its deepest point - acted as a slow-moving, ever-circulating coolant system for the relentless heat which the thinking machine generated while it went through its duties of managing the population of the world.
It was a good place to hide a facility. The Thoth priests had studied the collected data during the campaign planning stages, and found no fault in the Jahpoori choice to locate the AI there. The water protected it from any orbital strikes - not by being particularly dense, but because any directed energy or kinetic strike to the surface would evaporate so much water that it would drown the rest of the continent in the subsequent rainstorms. It was the type of mutually assured destruction arrangements that the Jahpoori AIs were fond of. You cannot capture and hold a land if the topmost ten to fifteen meters of soil - and everything on it - had been washed away into the seas, according to their logic.
Likewise for the theta emissions of the quantum banks, and their very unique radiation profiles which made hiding the AI minds so difficult and expensive on other worlds: here, under enough fresh water to count as a small ocean, the radiation became so muted and diffused by the time it reached the surface that nothing about it was strong enough to hint at its buried secret. Where saltwater oceans usually served to amplify the theta emissions, the glacial meltwater captured by the dam seemed to have much the opposite effect.
The cooling effect was a bonus, and the warm water that sluiced out of the dam during normal operations fed into a series of industrial heat exchangers that powered more cities and mining plants further to the south.
It was a perfect system, as far as the Jahpoori administrators had considered it: safe, hidden, and productive. Here, hiding in peace, the AI could bend itself to the running of the world, and to achieving the quotas set upon it by the distant dictates from the Yellow Palaces and the Uurmatti Court.
The priests of Thoth were not so easily fooled though.
They found the clues, and traced the communication nodes, and when everything pointed to the dam - and the mysterious heat source pumping out from its depths - they had accepted the only obvious answer left.
As long as that AI lived, the fight for Garenos was going to be a bloody quagmire. Removing it from the equation - the sooner the better - would only help the invasion plans and subsequent pacification plans, when the AI’s influence was no longer spread through the world.
It had to die - and it had to happen in a way that it would have no defense against.
Hapi adjusted the heating setting on his polar suit, and wished - not for the first time that day - that they could have been chosen for another assignment. After Akolapur, and the debacle with the Deva renegades there - as well as the anomalous implant readings, which no amount of diagnostic scraping or cleaning of their Amath-Ra implants could explain - Hapi and his squad had been parked in orbit for weeks before being reassigned to this sector. Garenos was not a cold world, and the Anhur divisions landing to the south were prepared for heat, mud, and torrential rain - but somehow, in all the preparations and planning, no-one had thought to put arctic specialists on a mission that would involve this much ice and snow.
After their assignment, and the realisation of what lay ahead, Amun and Keb had scrounged up training sims from Hyperion and the old Jotun-Jorgensen campaigns of fifty years ago, and Hapi and Psam had joined them in the training halls to work through as much simulation time and training regimes as their bodies could take. The reed fields and black soil of the sim space became a white hellscape that they stumbled through, for days at a time, and slowly but surely they began to get a grip on what was going to be waiting for them on Garenos. By the time their pod launched and dropped them a hundred kilometers due east of the dam - under cover of the orbital battle raging at that time, as the Jahpoori defenders tried to hold back the invasion fleet under Marshal Kunru’s banner - they had collectively consumed close to a thousand hours of Amath-Ra sim time, and knew, in theory, more about ice worlds than anyone else on the Garenos invasion fleet.
No amount of training or sim time could prepare you for the reality of a man-induced ice age though.
The cold was a living thing that wrestled with them for every waking moment of the day and night. It dug at seams and stitches with crystal talons, it clung to metal surfaces and bit at them with needle teeth, and it clogged up their helmet visors despite the anti-freeze layers and the composite weaves that were meant to prevent ice buildup. Hapi could not remember the last time his fingertips had not been cold. Everything had to happen slowly, lest the rocks around them betray them with a sudden slip or loss of traction, and the airborne snow flakes - sporadically turning into icy pellets that rattled like buckshot against the cliffs around them - settled and froze solid within seconds.
Nominally, according to the training specifications, the polar suits could keep them comfortable all the way down to negative fifty Celsius, and functional - albeit cold - down to negative seventy.
Hapi suspected they would either be dead or off-world by the time that happened.
Psam was on duty with Hapi, and the big man was a boulder of icy grey next to Hapi when he glanced over. The support gunner had his macro-sight out and clamped to the front of his helmet visor, and only the occasional shift of an arm or a leg betrayed the fact that he was still alive and not - yet - a part of the mountain. Amun and Keb were ensconced in their sleeping cocoons a few metres further back, plugged into their emplaced sensors and conserving energy for their watch. The cocoons helped against the cold, somewhat, but having to fight your way out from under a metre or more of fresh snow every time your watch segment began stopped being fun rather quickly after the first day.
Psam had scavenged a ream of pale canvas awning from an abandoned building close to their landing site, and they had all fashioned crude capes which they now wore over the fur-lined parkas which covered their polar suits and helped as additional insulation. Hapi thought the baggy garments made them look like desert mystics, if you ignored the weather, the setting, and almost everything else. The parkas had gone into the drop pod as part of their ‘blend in’ kit, to avoid arousing local suspicions when they were spotted in the mountain passes leading to the dam’s eastern edge. With their masks down and the parkas up, they would have been able to pass - at a distance - as locals, should they be spotted.
In reality, the parkas had proven woefully inadequate once they hit the mountain itself, and every single one of them had tears and ripped seams showing at this point. The capes had been a bandaid on top, keeping first the pouring rain and later the first snow off them as they ventured deeper into the rocky lands. No-one had challenged or even met them on the hike in, and the three checkpoints which they had identified from orbit and been prepared to sneak - or fight - through, had all been abandoned and partially submerged in snow by the time they reached them. Now, the passes behind them had long since been snowed shut in a way that Hapi suspected would take months, if not years, to thaw out. No-one was going to see them up close on this mission, unless things went horribly wrong.
Hapi thought back to his first mission, amongst the nomadic tribes of the Nedjenef people, and felt his face twisting into a wry smile under his mask.
One should not tempt the gods with thoughts like that.
“See anything?” Hapi listened to his own voice inside the helmet, and swept his gaze over to the western end of the dam wall again. Snow clumps floated down from the sides of his own macro-sight as he shifted. The device whispered to itself as it worked, the beaked Thoth emblem engraved on the side partially caked with powdery snow. “My sector is a graveyard.”
“Make that two graveyards.” Psam’s gravelly voice was in Hapi’s earpiece a few moments later. With their helmets on and the suits sealed, every conversation had to happen via the squad network. “The lake surface is not changing. Point Blue is shrinking, but very slowly.”
Point Blue was their codename for a surface anomaly in the dam ice which they had noticed around midday. Where the rest of the dam waters had frozen into grey sheets and slowly turned white under the incessant snow, this particular point - about half a kilometre north of the dam wall itself, and right in the centre - was staying stubbornly grey. Ice crystals were climbing up and pulling themselves into odd stalactite shapes before crumbling back into the slushing ice, and only when they focused their thermal sights on the point had the mystery been revealed: there was a heat plume rising to the surface there, from somewhere deep under the water. Rings of orange and red could be seen spreading out under the ice, shockingly bright against the cold blue that the sights painted everywhere else, and Amun - who had spent more time with the Thoth priests during their planning phase - had speculated that when they saw that heat source tapering off, they would be very close to the moment they were all waiting for.
“I wonder what will freeze first: that ice, or us.” Keb’s voice was low over the squad network. Deep inside his cocoon, the specialist was going through sensor data feeds and sharing them in snippets with the rest of the team as the day progressed. Amun, as far as Hapi knew, was still sleeping after his night shift. “I’m looking at the meteorological data, and that polar vortex is stronger than our models showed.”
“Stronger how?” Hapi could feel his frown colouring his voice. “Our original window said we have two days left. What’s the new estimate?”
A fresh flurry of snow struck the side of the cliff, obscuring everything for a moment, and Hapi closed his eyes and waited for it to pass. Open or shut, he would not be able to see anything anyway. The pressure of the snow was a tangible force tugging at and slamming against him, and only his belt anchors, and a fierce grip with both hands and legs, kept him clinging to the rock face.
The silence over the radio stretched out, and the snow flurry was receding before Keb’s voice finally cut into the line again.
“The two-day estimate is obsolete now. The metrics are already well past that point. The orbital sensors are saying that the airborne pollution from the south has skewed the figures, and now…” Keb trailed off, and Hapi’s lips formed a silent curse inside his helmet.
Nothing ever went to plan.
The last of the snow flurry tapered off, gone as quickly as it had arrived, and Hapi felt ice cracking and shifting off his back and arms as he wiggled himself upright again. Curtains of white ice were streaming off the cliffside behind and around them, deposited by the wind one instant only to be shaken loose the next. The ledge they were on was no different, and the tiny campsite with its cocoons was lost under a new coating of fresh white.
“It’s going to be negative fifty before nightfall tonight,” Keb finally finished.
Hapi, one hand across his helmet visor as he scraped at the accumulated ice, stopped when the words hit. It took but a moment for him to place the number against the timelines he had memorized.
“We were expecting negative fifty only by tomorrow night, at the earliest.”
“Everyone was, but the pollution was worse than the numbers we ran.” Keb’s voice was bleak over the line. “The airborne smog is speeding up the precipitation process, which is draining the atmospheric insulation faster, and the thermal currents from the southern factories are bolstering the polar vortex as it develops. It’s being pushed into a feedback loop now, and it’s accelerating faster than anything we modeled.”
Psam, not two metres distant from Hapi, breached from under the ice like a whale rising for fresh air. Snow and ice chunks scattered off the man as he shook himself, lost in the surrounding deluge of snow already flowing off the mountain.
“I am not dying on this mountain,” the big man growled. His tattered cape flapped around him as he brushed furiously at the snow clinging to him. “I am not walking into the afterlife, and the Field of Reeds, with my balls frozen off! My ancestors will never stop laughing!”
Hapi, shaking out his own cape, managed only half a grin. The levity had a dark truth beneath it.
“We might not be walking anywhere, at this rate.” Keb’s quip drew a glare from Psam, back in the direction of the camp. The tech specialist, inside his cocoon and under metres of snow, was blissfully unaware. “If this atmospheric decline keeps up, we’re going to be a part of this mountain for a long, long time.”
“My balls are not staying on this mountain.” Psam reached through the snow, grasping for something unseen, and pulled out his repeater cannon moments later. Their weapons had been wrapped in thermal insulation layers, to keep the worst of the cold and wet at bay, and the commando unwrapped and checked the bulky weapon even as he spoke again. “I will walk down to that blasted dam and knock on the front door myself, if I have to.”
“It might come to that, if this cold keeps up and the machine stays put.” Hapi felt through the snow for his own weapon, but left it wrapped in its shroud once his gloved fingers found the long bundle. “Keb, if we hit negative fifty tonight, then what are we looking at by tomorrow night?”
“You might want to sit down for this.”
Hapi thought the specialist was joking, at first, but the line stayed silent, and when he looked up, Psam was watching him too, his weapon suddenly stilled in his hands. The wind whistling past dipped and keened over the rocks around them, singing a reedy song of cold and ice as it coiled down the mountain, and for a long moment it was the only thing that Hapi heard.
“Okay, we’re sitting down.” Hapi sank down onto his haunches, making sure his belt anchors were still attached to the pitons beside him, and motioned for Psam to follow suit. The snow around them came up almost to their necks once they had settled.
“Twenty-four hours after we hit negative fifty, we will be seeing something between negative eighty and negative one hundred.” Keb’s voice was soft. “That’s on the valley floor. If we are not off the mountain by then, we are never leaving.”
Hapi felt the words wash over him, soaking into his suit along with the needle fangs of the cold, and slowly looked upward to regard the mountain peak towering above them. Its tip was lost in the dark, black clouds grinding together overhead and squeezing ever more snow and cold out into the air, and the longer Hapi looked at it, the more it began to look like the childhood images he had seen of what the afterlife would look like for those who failed the judgement of Thoth and Inpu.
Ammit - the demon of the Du’at, the eater of unworthy souls, with its crocodile jaws and endless appetite - Hapi looked up, into the darkness, and saw the demon grinning back at him with a jaw full of ice and splintered rock.
Part 2: The Wake
They waited.
They had no choice.
The temperature kept falling, and around sunset - a notional concept, given the darkness and falling snow - their suits began to give the temperature warnings that they had only been expecting the next day.
Night’s darkness settled in, driving away the paltry gloom of the day and replacing it with boiling greens and blues from the skies. The auroras were angry now, magnetic fields lashing and coiling under the stream of radiation that unerringly bombarded Amunarak from above, and their suits began to blink warning icons whenever they looked up at the colours above them. Hapi and Amun, on the evening watch, kept their gazes low and saw the dam’s frozen white surface turn into a haunted land of dancing emerald and sapphire hues. Reflected light warped and slid over the frozen surface, and Hapi found his thoughts drifting to the legends of lost Terra Primitiva, and the stories of the restless dead that haunted it after the sins of their forefathers.
There was death in the air, and it was a hungry, voracious beast that night.
South of the hydroelectric dam, the lights of Dhevesterabad were winking off in blocks and segments. The streets had overflowed with snow the day before already, and the commandos had watched with only cursory interest - the city was in their area of interest, after all, but not in their area of operations - as the distant city slowly succumbed to the same cold that was enveloping the dam. The city had not been built with snow in mind, and things went wrong almost from the first flake that fell from the skies. Aircars fled south in droves, the maglev lines choked up and stopped running within hours, the countless chimneys spouted more smoke and then gradually less, and soon even the perpetual smog of burning hydrocarbons had disappeared over the sprawling districts.
The aurora lights danced over these districts as they went dark, and Hapi forced himself to not look back too often. If their suits and augmented Amath-Ra physiology barely allowed them to survive up here on the mountain, then there was no hope for the Jahpoori masses below them.
Wherever they went after death, Hapi only wished the best for them. Their world, their way of life - it had ended when Marshal Kunru’s fleet first deployed into the system a week before, and every single one of them had been on borrowed time since. The black behemoth in orbit was an hourglass that was relentlessly and inexorably running out, and they were all caught in its grasp now.
Hapi remembered the last time he had held a handful of sand and watched it slip through his fingers, and wondered if there was any difference between them and those falling grains of sand.
An hour after midnight, the snow finally stopped falling. There was simply no moisture left in the atmosphere over Amunarak any longer. Point Blue had shrunk to barely a handful of metres across at this time, and Hapi tunnelled his way through several metres of snow to get to his own sleeping cocoon when his watch ended. Ensconced in the coffin-like space, he fell asleep to the quiet murmur of the sensor monitors and the muted words of Amun and Psam as they took up the next shift.
He woke, several hours later, to the temperature alarm from his suit.
It was negative sixty-five Celsius inside the cocoon, despite the metres of surrounding snow and insulated walls panels. Chills wracked through his limbs the moment he was conscious again, and he could feel the nano-wire implants in his arms and legs jittering and jumping as his muscles contracted and protested at the cold. The scattered snow he had brought with him into the cocoon the night before had frozen solid in brittle spikes along the edges of the cocoon, and a thin haze of frozen vapour had collected across his helmet visor as he slept. It complained bitterly as he slowly scraped his hands back and forth across the visor, although the motions seemed to help to bring some warmth back into his limbs.
“This is Hapi. I’m awake and regretting it,” he muttered into the helmet mic once he could see again. His metabolism was slowly cycling up as his Amath-Ra implants did their work, and the nano-wire jittering finally began to calm down. The implants made him faster and stronger than any baseline human - but they had their limits too, it seemed.
The thermal wrap around his rifle crackled and complained like tearing wood when he leaned over to unwrap the weapon. The carbine cycled when he tested it, but he could feel that the weapon was unhappy. The diagnostic display on the side of the receiver was dull and muted, and the weapon’s interface link with his suit gloves complained about low temperature tolerances the moment it finally connected. Even the near-field networks were slowing down in the cold.
“I say again, this is Hapi. Am I the only one awake?”
The line stayed silent, and Hapi felt his heart-rate picking up in a way that had nothing to do with his implants.
Tunneling out of the cocoon, with his weapon once again wrapped and strapped to his pack, took far longer than expected. His previous tunnel, to the cocoon, had been filled up with snow - kicked in by Psam, to act as extra insulation while he slept - and breaking apart the compacted snow took twice the effort that it had the day before.
Hapi finally breached to the sight of a black landscape and writhing lights far overhead. Their mountainside ledge was much the same as when he had gone to sleep, except that the snow no longer shifted when he crawled out of the tunnel and finally got to his feet. Everything was frozen solid, and he could feel the suit deploying extra cleats along the boot soles as he took his first step and almost ended up flat on his ass.
A quick scan of the ledge showed no-one else outside, and he was about to turn and break open the other cocoon tunnels when one of the grey boulders shifted and turned back to regard him. Psam, in his tattered parka and makeshift cape, crackled audibly as frozen snow rattled off his frame. To Hapi’s thermal sights, the man was completely indiscernible from the surrounding ice and rock. The big man made a series of gestures with both hands, using their battle language, and Hapi changed his communication channel accordingly.
“Enemy comm probe, two hours ago,” Psam began by way of explanation once their line was reestablished, and turned back to resume his vigil. The moment he stopped moving, his outline became part of the nighted terrain again. “We hopped over to a new channel. Someone out there was scanning for signals.”
Hapi cursed inwardly at his previous broadcasts, but Psam allayed his concerns a moment later when he continued.
“They scanned for about an hour, and then went silent again. There’s too much noise from above at this point.”
Hapi looked up, finally taking in the light show overhead, and found himself struck mute at the sight of the heavens above.
The night sky was on fire.
Blues and greens dominated, as before, but now there were crackling serpents of orange and yellow as well, running north to south and ploughing through the banks of green and blue with violent shudders. Ghostly tendrils of light were reaching down to the horizon all around them, anchoring the fury overhead to the dark, snow-shrouded firmament, and eerie upwells of blue that verged on the purple were rising from the horizon in turn. The purple twisted and weaved as it rose, fading into the blues above them in slow gradients, and when Hapi squinted at the closest ones - rising over the silent, shrouded towers of Dhevasterabad - the helmet visor obliged and increased the magnification accordingly.
There were faces in the light.
Faces that screamed with hollow mouths and gaping eyes, long faces that distorted and stretched as they shrieked upwards - and Hapi shook his head, and the faces were gone. The helmet magnification reset, and when Hapi looked again, he saw only lights dancing and capering above the slumped outline that had been Dhevasterabad.
Hapi thought of the afterlife, and the vision he had had of the ever-hungry Ammit looking down at them, and the chill that raced through him had absolutely no connection to the falling temperature.
Psam’s voice broke his reverie a moment later.
“Also, don’t look up for too long,” the big man’s voice grumbled over the line. “Between the radiation and the cold, the helmets are showing some strange things up there.”
“I thought I saw faces now, over the city.” Hapi carefully paced over to his previous observation spot beside Psam, and began to search for the pitons and anchor lines under the snow. “It looked so…”
“Don’t look up,” Psam repeated, and ice crackled off his hunched shape as he shook his head. There was a dark edge under his voice, something that lurked under the usual gruff tone like a crocodile waiting in the shallows. “Just don’t look up.”
Hapi wondered what the other man had seen - solid, phlegmatic Psam, who had beaten a Deva to death with a crowbar on Akolapur after the creature tried to hack his implants, and had never seen a shadow he was not convinced he could kill - and decided to drop the topic.
Perhaps it was best to just not look up from that point onwards.
Keb, the second man on watch, reappeared a few moments later from a neighbouring ledge. Long climbing hooks had deployed from the wrists and ankles of his suit, and he made a precarious imitation of a snow spider as he slowly shuffled across the near-vertical cliff surface. The snow around him had frozen so hard that not even powder or flakes trailed behind him as he punched holes into the glassy surface and hauled himself along.
“The equipment cache is still secure,” he offered by way of explanation once he finally dropped onto the ledge beside Psam. “None of the diagnostics are happy about the cold, but the energy crystals and the capacitors are apparently loving it.”
“I’m glad to hear something is at least appreciating the cold.” Hapi slowly fumbled his macro-sight out of its belt pouch, and clipped the device to his helmet again. The distant dam wall leapt into sharp focus moments later as the two devices interfaced and began to share telemetry. “What is the weather model saying for the rest of the day?”
“It’s actually on track now, it seems. The snow has cleared out most of the residual particulate that was skewing the results before, and the temperature modelling is working as expected now.” Keb anchored himself into position on Psam’s other side, and Hapi had a dim, corner-of-the-eye view from inside his helmet of the tech specialist working with some of the sensor packs that were laid out on the snow in front of his position. “We’re going to be losing about two degrees per hour for the next ten or twelve hours, and after that…”
Keb trailed off, and Hapi knew what they were all thinking.
There had been a brief debate earlier that night about using some of the energy packs to keep their personal heating running for a bit longer, but ultimately they had decided against it. Whenever the AI at the bottom of the dam made its move, they would need every joule of energy they could muster to take it down. Heated asses would mean nothing if they could not stop the machine.
The dam surface looked unchanged from the last time Hapi had studied it, and he slowly and methodically checked and rechecked all the salient points that fell in his watch area.
Monitoring bunker, on the far west bank - still no movement, and still no light.
Pedestrian walkway from the bunker along the top of the dam wall, heading east - no movement, no light.
The two bodies that they had watched struggling up the western access ladders the day before only to collapse a few paces from the bunker doors - still dead, and almost indistinguishable now under a thick mantle of snow.
The snowfields of the frozen dam surface itself - no movement.
The aurora lights changed everything, casting eerie, directionless light over the landscape and diffusing the edges between shadows and light in a way that made the entire scene look unnatural. It reminded Hapi of a flat, unfinished simulation space - similar to what they could access with their own implants - where reality was no longer as real or as defined as one expected it. What they saw no longer matched perfectly with what their experience knew was real, and so the mind - fatigued, stressed, and bitterly aware of the ever-pressing cold - began to scratch and pick at what it thought was wrong.
The colours.
The shapes.
The utter lack of movement.
Even Point Blue, with its slowly writhing icicles, had slowed down, and was barely a metre across by now.
Hapi watched, and waited, and forced himself to not look up at the parts of the aurora where the faces were looking down on him with their gaping black eyes and screaming mouths.
In time, he began to pray for the end to come.
Part 3: The Requiem
The dam wall began to crack just after their temperature gauges hit negative eighty. Hapi had been dozing in place, hands tucked into his groin and with his cape pulled over his helmet to keep the aurora lights away, and woke in an instant when Amun nudged his shoulder.
“Code Orange - it’s happening.” The tech specialist’s voice was vibrating, and it took Hapi a moment to wake up enough to realise that it was the cold chattering through the man’s voice. “The first cracks are showing up. Lower western and central regions.”
Hapi tossed the cape back, clearing his helmet, and took a moment to take in the rest of the space while his thoughts thawed. Psam was still in his usual space, with Keb on the far side. Amun, beside Hapi, had his climbing hooks out and deployed. His carbine was strapped to his chest, and his scarab pack was already mounted on his back.
Hapi tried to answer, and found his own jaw chattering so much that it took him two tries before he could get the words out.
“F-f-finally. Are you good to go with the stinger?” Hapi waited for Amun’s nod before continuing. “Take Psam, and start setting up. Hopefully we can get this over and done with now.”
Ice cracked and joints complained as Hapi stumbled to his feet, and he went through a quick stretching and warmup routine to encourage his bloodflow to speed up. He could feel his hormone implants working, a dull pressure along his kidneys that signalled their heightened tempo, and the inside of his helmet smelled rank as he caught a whiff of his own breath. The implant-induced ketosis was well under way at this point, burning fat reserves wherever it could find them in his body - and despite it all, he still felt cold. Their technology, as advanced as it was, was being pushed far beyond what it had been designed for - and they were starting to pay a human toll for it.
Ammit was near now.
Hapi could feel her grinning behind him, lurking in the shadows that clung to his form.
They were stepping onto the scales, and the weighing was about to commence.
Amun gathered Psam while Hapi stretched, and the two men spidered away across the frozen cliff face after Psam grabbed his scarab pack from his cocoon. The ledge was dark around them, white snow glowing with the spectral aurora reflections without managing to drive the night away, and Hapi gathered and strapped on his own scarab pack before joining Keb on the ledge where their observation equipment was stacked.
“The central section started first,” Keb began without preamble once Hapi was crouched beside him. He pointed down at the dam wall below, fine ice flaking off his arm, and it took Hapi only a moment to see the dark lines in the distant concrete. “It’s spreading to the west now, and there’s a new seam running upwards as well. That’s the one we want to see.”
Hapi could see the cracks without even needing his macro-sight, and as his gaze ran over the creeping black lines spreading across the dam wall, the briefing from the Thoth priests - had it been weeks before, already? - replayed in his mind’s eye.
It was going exactly as the priests had predicted.
The polar vortex, moving north to south, had pushed a wall of cold and ice before it the way a broom pushes dry leaves across a courtyard. As the upriver, northern parts of the dam froze - and it was a big dam, stretching north for several tens of kilometres between the peaks and mountains that hemmed it in - it pushed the remaining waters southwards and higher, where, over the past two days, the remaining bulk of the dam surface had frozen flush against the interior dam wall.
Under the surface ice, however, it was a different story. Expanding ice from the north, coupled with creeping ice roots pushing down from the dam surface into its depths, resulted in a slowly increasing pressure wave along the bottom of the dam.
Going upwards was not an option. The surface ice had grown tight, unbreaking roots into the jagged rocks and peaks that formed the western and eastern shorelines of the dam, and the addition of tonnes of falling snow had served to keep the lid on the pressure-pot as it stewed.
What water remained liquid was pushed down and south, away from the approaching cold, in the only direction that was left to it: the base of the dam wall.
The AI facility, located north of the dam wall and right in the path of this thermodynamic abomination, had nowhere to go.
Nowhere - except out.
“Any change on Point Blue?” Hapi asked, and got a head-shake from Keb. “Are we still expecting it to stop completely at some point?”
“We had a look at the data, and the models are… murky at this point.” Keb waggled his one hand side to side, a common gesture from his region. “I think it will, Amun says it won’t. We decided to let the gods decide.”
“The gods, eh?” Hapi grinned under his helmet, and got up to go collect his carbine from where he had been napping. “How much did you bet?”
“Whoever loses is paying the bill the next time we visit Samunet’s.” Keb was silent for a few moments before giving a low chuckle. The helmet audio barely caught it.
“It was a good dream.”
The wind was busy picking up, howling and keening around them, and Hapi took some time to collect his thoughts as he uncovered and began to check his carbine. The tortured air around the men seemed to shift and moan in some macabre dance with the aurora lights pulsing overhead, and the weapon in his hands felt small and insignificant compared to the forces of nature - unnatural as their origins were - arrayed against them.
They still had a mission to complete.
No matter the challenges.
“It will be a good dream. We’re going to get off this mountain.” Hapi crumpled and tossed the thermal insulating wrap that had covered his carbine once he was done. The time for waiting was past now. “We are going to finish the mission, we are going to extract, and we are going to be telling stories about this to our children one day. We just need to get through the next few hours.”
Hapi thought he saw Keb nodding, but the net stayed silent until Psam reported in a few minutes later.
“The stinger is ready. We’re holding at minus one for now.”
“Good. When you have a clear shot, take it. Code Red is in your hands now.” Hapi could not see the ledge where the other two commandos waited with their assembled weapon, but he could imagine it. The almost six metres of hyper-rail barrel, the massive capacitors along the back, the spidery brace that held it all up, and the tiny control yoke right at the front that pointed down the mountain and right at the cracking base of the dam wall. “Amun, let me know if the sensors pick up anything.”
“Just cold air and empty airwaves at this point.” Amun’s voice was still chattering from the cold. “I was expecting them to call for reinforcements, but there’s been nothing yet.”
“I don’t think their battlesuits or juggernauts are going to help them with this cold.” Hapi looked back at where Dhevasterabad lay, but the city had effectively disappeared under the ice. No lights shone from it, and only the tallest of its towers still showed under a thick mantle of smothering snow. “When the machine runs, it’s going to be on its own.”
The commandos waited in silence after that, each man with his own thoughts, and the cracks below them slowly crept further and further across the dam’s concrete face. A faint grinding sound reached them, carried by the wind streaming in from the north, and Hapi looked on in fascination as what appeared to be icebergs began to buckle and twist deep in the interior of the dam to the north. Something was shifting out on the ice, something vast and tectonic, and a slow wave of buckling ice slabs and jutting peaks began to roll south, towards the dam wall itself.
Hapi was watching Point Blue, wondering if it would freeze over before the iceberg eruptions reached it - and realising that he could not remember which of the two tech specialists would end up paying at Samunet’s if it did - when the bottom of the dam wall finally exploded.
There was a loud crack first, piercing and sharp like a vast bronze bell, and a long spurt of dust and debris blew out from the base of the dam wall. The wind swept it away even as it was forming, and then there was another crack and another plume, and another, until the whole base of the wall was almost obscured. The crack that had been running up the wall to the top of the dam accelerated in a heartbeat, throwing metres-long branches out as it clawed its way upwards, and an entire section of concrete - easily ten or more metres on a side - sloughed away, revealing milky ice cataracts behind it. The slab tore itself apart as it slid down the wall, shattering into boulders as it struck the bottom - and from the dust and chaos of tumbling concrete, the AI finally emerged.
“Code Red, Code Red. Firing one.” Psam’s voice grumbled on the audio channel even as Hapi was trying to make sense of the chaos, and the shriek of the railgun momentarily drowned out even the crash and roar of the collapsing dam. “One away. Standby for two.”
Hapi first thought it was a scorpion, black machine legs churning at the rubble and claws held high, until it cleared the breach and straightened, revealing something closer to a centaur layout. Six legs churned below a long, flat body, while a torso rose from the front with manipulator arms and a flat, triangular head mounted on top. The machine was tens of metres long, as black as the sky above them, and a wash of steaming liquid spilled out from behind it as it tore its way free of the collapsing dam. Unbidden, Hapi’s mind filled with the image of a diseased cow giving birth, pushing out something sickly and ill in a wash of amniotic fluid, and bile rose in his throat to match the image.
The machine was still pulling itself clear of the breach when the first railgun slug hit it. The bau rounds were milk-bottles of ferro-tungsten and lead, each one infused with a signature pattern of exotic radiations, and the first slug splattered itself across the machine’s left flank in a spray of sparks and coruscating energy crackles.
It hardly seemed to notice.
Black claws ground and snapped at the concrete around it, cutting through mangled girder remnants and pulverizing car-sized boulders as it pushed forward, and it had just crested a particularly large chunk of fallen wall when Psam’s bark filled the channel again.
“Firing two.” The shriek and snap of firing and impact came virtually at the same time, and the air - between the distant machine and the ledge where Psam and Amun crouched - steamed and glowed in the aftermath of the strike. “Two away. Three charging.”
The second round took the machine on the chest, striking the upright torso where it melded into the lower body with its churning legs, and Hapi shook his head in disbelief as the machine just ignored it and continued its escape. Droplets of molten lead and tungsten blurred into the air behind it from the strike, disappearing into the clouds of concrete dust.
“Everyone, get ready to move out after the last round,” Hapi snapped over the net, and gave his scarab pack one last check. The pack diagnostics in the corner of his helmet blinked greens and blues across the board. “Keb, burn the sensors. Amun, give us a timer on the jackals.”
“Jackal One and Two are inbound, time to impact…”
“Firing three.” The railgun shrieked again, and more molten lead splattered off the black machine.
“...is six minutes. The shuttle is right behind them, T plus thirty.”
Vapour erupted from the snow in front of Keb as his sensor packs self-destructed, and Hapi felt a brief flare of envy at the flames that crackled and spat over the devices for an instant before being torn apart by the raging wind. His own fingers were numb from the cold, even inside the suit. Keb donned his scarab pack even as his tools burned, and joined Hapi at his observation point.
“Firing four.” The shriek-snap struck higher this time, plastering a silver crater across the left cheek of the triangular head below them, and this time the machine noticed. Hapi had a brief glimpse of mechanical claws raised in their direction, made small by the distance - and then the machine disappeared behind the backblast of a missile salvo that erupted from its outstretched limbs.
“Code Black, Code Black!” Hapi roared out the last command and grabbed Keb at the same time, throwing the smaller commando off the ledge and charging after him without a further thought. The wind grabbed him and swept him sideways the moment his feet left the ledge, ripping him away from the mountainside, and he tumbled wildly for a long instant before the scarab pack deployed its wings and steadied him in a blur of nano-mesh membranes. The landscape was rushing past in a blur, the missile plumes becoming rapidly brighter-
“Firing five. Five away.”
Hapi glanced back, seeing two black shapes throwing themselves off the mountain behind him, and then the missiles struck the ledge where they had been moments before. Fire and light bloomed in the dark, throwing ice and splintered rock in a wide spray into the night, and one of the black shapes - which Hapi could barely follow through the spinning chaos - suddenly dropped and disappeared straight down into the snow.
Ahead of him, rushing up, the surface of the valley was fast approaching, and Hapi tore his gaze away from the unfolding inferno behind him to pick a landing site. Keb was a blurred oval some distance in front of and below him, his wings beating frantically as he navigated down, and Hapi saw him alighting on a low hill at the base of the mountain a handful of seconds later. He chose a spot not far from Keb’s, and barreled into the snow moments later with a crunch and a grunt.
He had almost forgotten how hard the snow had become.
“Psam, Amun, talk to me. What’s your status?” Wind tugged and pushed at Hapi as he struggled to his feet, and the roiling clouds of fire and smoke behind him, where their little camp had been, cast dim orange lights over the surroundings even as the glacial wind tore the explosion’s aftermath apart.
Keb, nearby, raised a thumbs-up as Hapi trotted over to him. The scarab pack was giving off a pleasant buzz of heat on his back, which he knew would not last. The wings only gave them around five minutes of flight time, after which they became just so much decorative weight.
The hill gave them a clear sight of the dam wall - which was still slowly crumbling apart, revealing more and more ice behind it - as well as the snowed-out fields which led from its base, down the valley, and into the outskirts of Dhevasterabad.
It also gave them a clear view of the escaping AI as it scampered away from the dam. The snow glowed in pulsing blues and greens around the machine as it fought its way through the snow, and it was immediately clear to the commandos that whatever intelligence had designed the mechanical centaur body had not been anticipating snow. Needle-like legs - perfect for running on hard surfaces - sank hip-deep into the snow with every move, and the machine had adopted an awkward, goose-stepping gait as it tried to find a way to move through the snow without losing speed.
In another time and place, Hapi would have found it comical.
The sight of those pincers, and the knowledge of the weapons that lurked in them, banished the thought.
“Psam, Amun - talk to me, brothers. Are you still alive?”
“I’m on my way.” Amun’s voice crackled back at them after a few heartbeats. “My boots might be on fire though, that last shot was a bit close.”
A darker shadow blurred out of the night towards them, riding the last vestiges of the explosions, and Amun thumped down into the snow next to them a moment later. His wings contracted with a hiss, black layers folding back and disappearing into the pack’s shell, and Hapi could not help but notice how ragged some of the wing membranes looked after the missile blast.
“Did Psam not…?” was as far as Amun got before Hapi was shaking his head.
“He went straight down. I think his pack failed.” Hapi deliberated for a moment, focus torn between the escaping AI and the lost support gunner, and then snapped to a decision. “Keb, head back and find Psam. Stabilize him if you can; rejoin us after that. Amun, you’re with me. We need to stop that thing so the jackals can take it.”
Keb, looking between the AI, the collapsing dam, and the spot where Psam had gone down, shook his head in resignation.
“Needle in a haystack, eh?”
“He’s big, he would have made a big hole in whatever he hit.” Hapi nodded off towards the mountain. “And he’s probably swearing at everything right now. Just keep an ear open for that.”
Wings buzzed, and the tech specialist was gone, blurring off through the dark back towards the base of the cliffs. Amun had been checking his suit integrity while the others talked, and held up a scrap of suit fabric when Hapi turned to him.
“Looks like my outer layer got wrecked in that blast. I’m losing heat on my legs.” Hapi spotted the ragged patches as the other man turned, revealing ripped fabric all the way down his legs. Even without his thermal sights he could see the heat steaming out of the suit. “We need to get this done, and we need to get it done soon.”
“What’s the shuttle time now? Twenty-seven?” Hapi checked his own indicators, and swore softly.
Twenty-seven minutes in this temperature was a death sentence.
“Let’s get that monster and get this over with.”
They set off down the hill, Hapi in the lead, and managed a fast but cautious descent all the way to the bottom, where Hapi tripped, fell on his ass, and slid the remainder of the way down in a whirl of powdery snow and curses. He was barely back on his feet when Amun reached him, and the two set off at a fast clip deeper into the valley, angling to cut off the escaping machine as it floundered through the deeper snow.
The valley had been wide and shallow, once, before the man-made ice age arrived, and aside from an access road leading to the dam and a raised viaduct carrying piping, heated water and digital traffic south to the city, little else had filled it. Snow filled it now, hiding the road under metres of frozen ice, while the viaduct itself was barely visible as a slightly darker, slightly elevated ridgeline that snaked south parallel to the now-covered road.
Hapi and Amun, running across the top of the snow dunes, felt each ridge and depression as they scrambled over the frozen landscape, and the ice around them crackled and cackled as their footsteps reverberated through it all. Hapi glanced up at one point, trying to get his bearings against the horizon, and almost lost his footing in shock at the sight. The shifting auroras above them were close enough to touch now, and it seemed like the ghostly greens were brushing right up against their heads as they ran.
The long, screaming faces were also there, twisting and leering upwards in the ethereal light, and this time Hapi was sure it was not just his imagination.
Ammit was with them, hounding the faces across the sky, and her crocodile maw crashed through the air above the commandos even as they ran. Hapi heard screaming and crying, voices raised in terror, even as his helmet audio showed no input aside from the crunch of their boots on the ice.
Lord Inpu, watch over thy servant! Protect me and guide me, and keep me ever under your gaze!
The commandos ran, prayers on their lips, and the distance between them and the AI began to shrink.
Part 4: The Jackal’s Dance
The machine was seemingly unharmed by the railgun bau rounds that had smeared against its shell, silvery splatters marking the impact points, and it was leaving a long trail of churned-up ice behind it as it wriggled its way southward. The machine itself was not the AI - instead, much like the Amath-Ra commandos wore suits to help them achieve more, so too the Jahpoori AI entities could climb into specially-built machines and use them to move around outside of their usual logic banks.
The design ahead of them, with its centaur arrangement and scorpion claws, was not one that the commandos had seen before, but the design philosophy was usually the same: somewhere inside the machine, buried under layers of armour and shielding, would be a quantum-theorex pearl that carried the core consciousness and primary computing circuits of the AI. It acted as the brain of the machine, transplantable from body to logic bank to drone vehicle in easy, simple steps - and if that pearl could be taken to safety, the AI would be able to flee the Amunarak region simply by transmitting itself across the remaining Jahpoori infrastructure on the world.
Once that happened, it would be gone, out of reach of the commandos, and the invasion force would have to spend years digging up every comm line and fibre network on the planet to try and find it again.
“Three minutes on the first jackal,” Amun panted behind Hapi, and his thoughts snapped back to the here and now. “We have to slow that thing down, it’s going to outrange the jackals at this speed.”
“Are your wings good for a few more minutes?” Hapi glanced at his own indicators as he ran, and saw that he had just under four minutes left. “We need to buzz it, but I can’t do it alone.”
“I can manage… two minutes, max.” Amun laughed, the sound coarse as they fought their way up a particularly steep slope. “After that you’ll have it all to yourself.”
A curse, a final check at his diagnostics, and Hapi threw himself into the air when they reached the top of the hill. His legs were burning from where the nano-wire implants had been pumping his muscles at breakneck speeds, and he was airborne for almost two full seconds before the scarab pack deployed and kicked him higher into the air. Wings blurred out in a halo around him, catching the wind and threatening to take him off course, but he fought the current and kept himself aimed at the machine ahead of them. Behind him, caught from the corner of his eye, he saw Amun buzzing along as well, and the two men barreled across the ice at the monster ahead of them.
The Jahpoori machine was neither blind nor stupid, and the moment the commandos were airborne the machine began to twist at the waist to confront them, even as its body continued struggling through the packed snow. It was heading unerringly for the distant, snowed-in Dhevasterabad, and Hapi had a terrible feeling in the back of his mind that there was a backup plan waiting for the machine, somewhere in the city, which they had not been aware of.
That thought lasted only for as long as it took for the machine’s upper body to turn and face back towards them. Hapi threw himself down into the lee between two snow dunes just as he saw the flashing stutter engulf the machine’s claws, and something hot and fast shrieked through the air where he had been a heartbeat before. Amun split the other way, looping first higher and then downwards, and Hapi resurfaced behind the one dune just in time to see a cloud of hyper-velocity projectiles chewing up the top of the other snow dune behind which the second commando had disappeared. Ice chipped and sprayed through the dark air, followed by a hissing steam column as a laser swept through the same space, and Hapi managed to snap off barely two shots with his carbine - ineffective as it was against such an armoured monster - before he had to dive for the surface again.
Ice and steam exploded behind him as he blurred across the ground, black wings barely keeping him ahead of the hyper-velocity pellets that shrieked past overhead, and when the dune shielding him suddenly ran out, Hapi threw himself sideways and over to the next dune without a conscious thought. Ice slammed against his shoulder as he struck the frozen surface, and he felt something flare in his arm as he bounced and tumbled across the iron-hard snow. He was in the lee of the next dune a moment later, and the searing laser was searching for him where his feet had disappeared an instant before, carving divots through the ice and raising steam geysers from the surface wherever it touched.
“I’m losing scarab power, I can’t keep this up.” Amun’s voice panted over the net, and Hapi heard the crashing of a carbine before the audio cut out and reestablished. “This thing is not-”
Howling static erupted across the audio channel, and Hapi was alone with his pain. Something in his upper arm had torn when he hit the ice, and raising his left arm hurt in ways that even his implants and his over-worked hormone generators could not quite dull. Hidden from sight, sprawled flat on his stomach on the ice, Hapi took a moment to collect his thoughts.
They were not winning this fight.
His fingers probed at his upper arm, feeling the injury, and came away with shreds of suit material dangling from the tips. Thin lines of steam were escaping from the suit all along the upper arm segment as the heating circuits there met the super-cooled air around him, and his helmet was starting to blare a cold-exposure alarm on top of the ticking indicator that showed the ambient temperature was exactly ninety-three degrees Celsius below zero.
Lord Inpu, give me strength…
The laser chewing into the dune-top in front of him had stopped at some point, and when Hapi looked up again he was just in time to see two fat beads of orange light travel over him towards the distant machine. A garbled voice surfaced in the comm network, shouting nonsense sounds, and then the static wash from the machine’s jamming drowned it out again.
Had Keb managed to get to Psam?
Two more orange beads buzzed overhead, followed by a whole string stacked nose-to-tail behind each other, and Hapi realised that he was looking up at fat tracers burning in the back of repeater cannon rounds.
The repeater cannon which Psam carried with him everywhere.
Something in the new assault must have caught the machine’s attention, and a few seconds later a blur of smoke and fire flew overhead as another missile volley crossed the valley. Hapi waited for a few heartbeats before crawling forward and peeking his head up over the dune, and was rewarded with the sight of the black machine halted in the snow.
Its legs were sunk almost all the way into the white field which it had stopped in, and its torso was facing back the way it had come. Claws snapped and weapon pods crackled as the machine blasted waves of ordnance back at where the repeater cannon shells had come from, and Hapi found himself grinning despite the pain in his arm and the pulsing alarms inside his helmet.
If there was anyone who could piss this thing off, it was Psam.
The helmet ping was so small that he almost missed it.
Jackal One - thirty seconds.
“Amun, talk to me.” The audio channel howled, but nothing came through. Hapi tried again. “Amun, Keb, anyone - come in.”
An arm twitched on the distant machine, swinging towards Hapi, and he dove back behind the dune-top. More hyper-velocity pellets tore up the space where he had been seconds before, and as he rolled and crashed into the brittle valley between the two dunes, Hapi knew what he had to do.
Twenty seconds.
Wings blurred, and Hapi was in the air, firing from the hip as he flew at an angle away from the black machine. He shouted and cursed as he flew, filling the airwaves with a constant transmission stream, and whenever the machine shot at him, he dipped down and disappeared behind a dune. An endless procession of hyper-velocity pellets and the steaming, probing touch of the laser followed him, but Hapi threw himself through the air with reckless abandon at this point.
He had to make himself as loud and as distracting as possible.
He spotted Amun at one point, the dark shape of the other commando blurring and bouncing between the dune-tops as well, but no shouted message could pass between the two commandos. Gunfire rattled from them whenever they got a chance, tearing up ice and snow as often as they actually managed to hit the machine, and the fat bursts of autocannon rounds kept reappearing and splattering into the machine no matter how many volleys of missiles it sent towards the distant cliffs.
All the time, they were slowly drawing away from the machine, spreading out into the valley and splitting its attention between more and more targets.
Ten seconds.
“Amun, you better be clear of that machine.” Hapi was panting from the exertion, muscles quivering under the stresses of the punishing flight acrobatics and the razor-sharp cold alike. His left arm was going numb in stages, whether from shock or cold he could not tell, and the only consolation during it all was the warm glow emanating from the scarab back where it buzzed on his back. Steam tendrils enveloped it every time he came to a halt, and he knew he was dangerously close to the limit that the device could handle.
Five seconds.
Hapi looked up, seeing the auroras still twisting above them, and squinted at where he thought the jackals would be coming from. The green and blue lights overhead were as angry as ever, tearing at the atmosphere’s magnetic fields in a constant barrage, and the sky beyond it was a blackness that could barely be seen at this point.
Hapi finally spotted the star above them, growing larger with every heartbeat, and threw himself flat into the gulley between two of the dunes. Ice crunched underneath him as he bounced, hands covering his helmet and pressing it down into the ice, and then the first jackal struck.
Four tonnes of ultra-dense tungsten carbide, compacted down into a four-metre rod and wrapped in stealth sheathing, fell from orbit at a speed so fast that it ignited the atmosphere behind it in glowing red and purple rings. Hapi caught a momentary flash of light as the munition crossed kilometres of altitude in the blink of an eye, and then it ripped into the Jahpoori machine exactly where the first bau round had struck. Radiation-sniffing sensors in its nose, coupled with micro-gravity adjusters in its tail, kept the jackal unerringly on target as it fell from space, and in that final moment, as the Jahpoori machine registered it, it was already too late.
The tungsten spear ripped through the middle left leg of the machine - and kept going, disappearing into the earth below the machine in a flash of exploding ice. A steam plume, tens of metres high, erupted into the air as the snow under the machine transformed from solid state to gas in a fraction of a second, and Hapi managed to raise his head and see the expanding cloud just as the second star above them blinked into view.
The second jackal missed, hissing past the upright torso turret with millimetres to spare as the machine staggered from the first strike. The metal rod buried itself underground in a second volcano of steam, and Hapi felt the ground shudder around him, ice cracking and complaining at the sudden massive shocks spreading through the valley floor.
A trio of fat repeater rounds arced overhead, bouncing off the reeling machine’s head, and when it spun around to face the distant shooter, the third jackal blurred down and took the back third of its abdomen and both back legs clean off. Molten metal fountained into the air, hissing and steaming madly in the frozen air, and the eruption of earth and super-heated steam that followed the third strike unbalanced the machine and sent it plowing face-first into the snow.
It scrabbled madly to right itself, with only three legs left, and launched a final, defiant missile salvo back at the repeater team just as the fourth jackal came down and eviscerated it from head to navel. Sparks and coruscating blue-white lightning blew out in a cloud from the hole which had suddenly appeared on its crown, and the backblast of steam from below - as the fourth jackal disappeared underground - tossed the machine backwards into the cratered, steaming ground where the third jackal had struck.
“Amun, talk to me.” Hapi was transmitting the moment he heard the jamming static fade away. “What is your status?”
“Very cold, and very tired.” Teeth chattered over the line as the connection to Amun cleared. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be much help with this last part, but I can’t feel my legs any more.”
“Sit tight, I’m on my way.” Hapi had no idea what Amun was talking about, but shock made men do and say strange things. “Keb, Psam - give me a sign, brothers.”
Hapi got up and began to run towards the last place he had seen Amun’s shape go down just before the first jackal strike, and the icy dunes flashed by all too slowly as he pushed himself through the cold. The numbness in his left arm was spreading into his chest, and his left hand was completely numb at this stage.
They were so close to the end now.
“We’re alive, mostly. Psam says he wants a trophy from that thing.” Keb’s voice was faint, and Hapi could not keep the grin off his face when he heard it. “He says he was the last person to hit it before it died, so technically the kill belongs to him.”
“Tell him to take it up with Marshal Kunru when we get back into orbit.” Hapi crested the last dune where he was expecting Amun to be, only to find himself looking down at glistening ice and thick shadows. The commando was nowhere in sight.
“Amun, I’m at your last location. Where are you, brother?”
The fifth jackal - trailing Psam’s final bau shot - lanced down and blurred into the wreckage of the AI machine somewhere behind Hapi, but he barely noticed. Where was the other commando?
“I’m… still where I… stopped,” Amun stammered back, voice thick with cold, and Hapi spun in a circle to scan the snowscape around him. Aside from the steam rising from the jackal impact points, nothing-
He spotted the waving flare light a moment later, and set off again as fast as his legs could manage. The light came from much deeper in the valley, along the route they had taken to confront the machine, and Hapi realised that Amun’s location made no sense.
He had seen the commando flying with him as they baited the Jahpoori machine, had seen him dancing and skittering over the dunes to stay away from the enemy fire - so how had Amun gotten back almost to their starting point?
He stumbled down a final dune and found Amun curled up at the bottom, wrapped in an emergency poncho with only his head and one arm showing. The signal flare dangled limply from his wrist, and he barely acknowledged Hapi as he collapsed to his knees next to him.
“I’m sorry. My suit… failed just as the… jamming kicked in,” Amun muttered, and Hapi remembered the suit layers that had been shredded off Amun’s leg by the first missile salvo. “I couldn’t… tell you, and you were… off before I could reach you.”
Hapi was at a loss for words.
Who had been out there with him, in those last minutes?
“We got the job done. That’s all that matters now.” Hapi dug through his belt pouches, looking for extra heating pads, and fumbled out a pair that he passed to Amun. The extraction shuttles had launched at the same time as the jackals, but moved considerably slower - which meant that the next twenty minutes were going to come down to the wire. They were in their final race against time now, as injuries and damaged equipment began to take their toll.
“Hapi, I can see your position. We’re a few minutes out on foot.” Keb’s line was still faint, but growing stronger. “Who’s moving at the machine’s position?”
Hapi screwed his eyes shut, bowed his head, and cursed every Jahpoori god and AI that he could name.
“We’re not at the machine site,” he ground out between clenched teeth when he finally ran out of steam. “I’m with Amun, his suit is wrecked. What do you see at the site?”
The answer was a long stutter from the repeater cannon, close enough to hear by now, and Hapi caught sight of the fat tracer blurs looping past and disappearing into the torn-up site where the machine carcass lay.
“It’s small, and it’s moving south.” Keb’s voice was breathless, and Hapi spotted a dark blur climbing into the air some distance north of him as the other commando picked up his pace. “I don’t think I can catch it, my scarab reserves are too low.”
Hapi swore, stuffed the last of his heating packs into Amun’s poncho, and staggered to his feet again. The depleted scarab pack clattered to the ground behind him as he released its attachment points. The carbine stayed in his right hand - his left was fully numb now, and totally unresponsive.
“I’m on my way. Give me an intercept course.” Hapi forced his legs into action, muscles straining against the cold, and picked a starting heading that was roughly midway between the machine carcass and the outskirts of Dhevasterabad. If his suspicion was correct, this last gasp of the AI - in whatever shape or state it was - would try to get it into the city, where evading the Amath-Ra would be infinitely easier than out in the open valley.
“I can see it now. Looks man-sized. Stay on your course, you should intercept it in about a kilometre.” Keb’s voice cut through the haze as Hapi ran, and more instructions flowed down from the airborne commando to Psam as well, who sent burst after burst of tracers tracking past overhead.
They were almost at the low, humped sprawls of the snow-buried outer districts of the city when Hapi finally spotted his quarry. It was a spindly shape, a fat body with skinny limbs sprouting off it, and it moved fast over the snow now that it was no longer encumbered by the larger centaur body and its crushing weight. It ran on all fours, a pot-bellied mule with spider legs, and it must have noticed Hapi at some point too, because it put on a burst of speed when the commando crested a dune next to it. He caught a glimpse of sensor turrets pivoting back and studying him, and the next moment a string of tracers came past overhead, dipped down, and tore the construct’s rear right leg off at the knee.
Hapi, running at full tilt to keep up, almost went past the machine as it stumbled, but it righted itself and spun around to face him just as he drew up short. Sparks bled from the leg stump, and Hapi had an instant’s impression of sharp limbs rising before the creature lunged at him. He dove sideways, landing hard on his injured arm - which, suspiciously, gave no pain signals - and then he was up into a crouch again with the carbine clamped under his right arm.
Flame flared between him and the creature, strobing and sharp in the darkness, and its second attack turned into a sprawling collapse as the rounds tore into it, sending it rolling sideways off the snow dune. Legs flailed as the construct tried to right itself, but something in its core was no longer cooperating, and it was still on its side, legs fluttering aimlessly, when Hapi stabbed his carbine muzzle right up against the body and pulled the trigger.
Flame turned into shrapnel turned into steam as the rounds chewed apart the machine body, gutting it to the core, and Hapi’s magazine cycled its last round just as the construct finally stopped twitching. One of the camera turrets spun wildly, trying to lock on to something - anything - and then it abruptly stopped.
Hapi collapsed next to the ruined machine, flat on his back, and looked up at the lights that whirled overhead. Everything felt slow and far away, and the warning signs in his helmet were all red by now. His heart was slowing down as well, each beat booming slower than the one before. Keb’s voice was in his ear, urgent and insistent, but the words no longer made any sense, and they were coming from far, far away.
There was a motion at his side, something shifting, and when Hapi finally managed to roll his head to the side - away from the ruined machine body - Ammit was sitting on her haunches next to him. Her lion forepaws were stretched out in front of her, the very picture of ease, and her hippopotamus hindquarters were a dark boulder against the snow that surrounded them.
Not on this day, Ushabti. Her crocodile maw nudged at his wounded arm, and Hapi tried to pull away, but even his terror had no strength left. The cold had taken everything from him.
Not today. You still have much work to do in my name.
Her crocodile jaws opened wide, showing teeth and light, and the light showed ice and dead faces and hands reaching for him. Hapi tried, one last time, to pull away, but the light followed him, and when he cried out, the hands fell upon him, and pulled him away, and the rescue team from the shuttle were shouting at him and at each other as they hauled him onto a gurney.
Ammit smiled at him, unseen in their midst, and the darkness came and finally took Hapi away.
A great novella. It really captures the sense of cold (and the boredom for waiting for war) and the tactics were easy to follow. I am glad I read it.