The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Classical - Richard Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries - Bing video

The air cavalry had pulled back to their bases, and gotten themselves rearmed and refueled as fast as was superhumanly possible before pulling back into the air. They were now streaming down the long line of the White Road, the vivic dust in the air keeping it totally clear of incorporeals.

Right now, the ground support jets and attack helicopters of the air forces of the world were zooming in, the sounds of their approach completely masked by floating white mist, Light shows, and thunder.

Oh, and I had been feeding them arseloads of targeting data, too.

Sophisticated computer technology that would cease working in a very short amount of time played over the ground, tracked signatures, communicated with one another, and from miles away had already allocated targets among the scores of vehicles pounding their way in.

There were no clouds of incorps to fly through and drag the souls of the pilots out of their bodies, and the tanks could not possibly outrange them. They came in slow and steady, got their target locks, and unloaded everything.

I smirked at the dollar figures flying forth in my head as all the munitions that could be expended were shot forth, and hundreds of tank-killing rockets filled the sky above me in mere seconds.

The fixed-wing Walrus and Mauler aircraft got a lot lighter very quickly as their missile payloads were emptied out, and they knew not to fly much beyond my position, clearly able to see the countless incorps in the air just beyond the vivus. Their instruments ignored the vivus and were operating without visual sight, but that was just fine.

The flights passed overhead, circling up into loops. Those that had completely shot their loads off could only flip their wings and head back at that point... no, they were looping back behind the rest, probably hoping to expend their turret ammo before leaving.

The Sioux-class helicopters had been the first to get back into the air, and were also heavy with the rockets, salvoes ripping out as the thup-thup of their rotors joined the beating of Endure and the falling Thunderbolts.

The undead had almost frozen in paralysis at this development, watching the relatively superfast planes streak by and up and around in the towers of vivified space I’d been building for them to fly in. The copters painted new targets as their payloads ran dry, and hovering in place, began to take out the larger Constructs all around, some Artificers having infused their Gatlings with Bane to Constructs. Tungsten-cored ammunition began to chew into necronstructs from a thousand yards away with murderous accuracy.

The planes came back in on new flight paths, and they had even bigger guns than the copters. The biggest Constructs left intact were ripped open by a hundred burning shells per second, the pilots juking back and forth as they switched from target to target and chewed right through them.

I looked back as the lumbering true bombers came into range.

They weren’t carrying heavy bombs, of course. They’d been fit out with even more missile boxes, mounted to the wings and sides of the great lumbering prop jobs, and the six of those Atlas-class bombers held as many rockets as all the other aircraft put together.

The pilots were blinded when those things started going off, the air too thick with missile and rocket contrails. They were flying on instruments alone, radar and computers painting and acquiring, assigning, talking to one another so there was no overlap, True Seeking spells expended for the really tough shots. The Tanks out there trying to move and dodge and throw off their aim didn’t really have any chance.

It was a burning field of exploding metal and necroic black-green flames, which I moved towards. I rapidly began to add vivus to every single fire, even as the lumbering planes blew past me and arced out wide, their bomb bays opening up as they veered off into the incorporeals.

Some ingenious fuzzball had painted the bombers all up and charged them with Ghost Touch. Hitting the intangible spirits was like the spirits running into a three-hundred-mph brick wall that could hit them, while the incorps had no mass and didn’t actually slow the planes down. POOFPOOFPOOFPOOOF...

The guided bombs, none of them needing to be too big, fell out of the Atlas’ bellies, painted their targets below, and dropped from the sky like mortar rounds.

The Tanks’ armor hadn’t changed since the 40’s, and they had almost no protection from above. Each Atlas wiped out hundreds more Tanks as their bombs fell from the sky, while cutting an impervious ghost-popping path through the incorporeals in the air there as they arced around, spreading out the love and heading for home.

The Maulers, Walruses, and the Sioux copters flew out into the area and began to spend the last of their ammunition chewing through any surviving Tanks, while Shards hissed past the former and made sure they had room to turn and go home. Heavy armor-piercing ammunition pierced through armor plate that didn’t have much protection from above, and the surviving Tanks that remained were being cut apart piecemeal.

When their guns all clicked dry, the last pilots turned and headed off. They had to get out from the Shroud and onto the ground before the Shroud came down, after all... or they might have to bail in midair before their fuel cooked off and killed them!

---

Shvaughn and Legion came winging in after the air cavalry was done playing, and our ground forces blew through the opening I had created, racing across the ground at a hundred mph, the slowest of them riding Disks. The two Warlocks split up and went Tank-hunting, either flipping them over one after another if they were in range, or tossing them at one another, depending on how overly excessively strong they were. Heavy Magic fields cloaked them in spheres of fire, too, making sure those Tanks were all burning vivic.

Not all of the departing pilots were Marked, but those that were got an epic earful for the show, and the vids were being posted up all around the world instantly. The reactions of those watching, which was pretty much most of the population that could, was suitably awesome as well.

They were still receding dots in the distance when the Shroud was abruptly pushed aside a mile above us, and the Maw of Guiogg was suddenly burning above us.

We still had a good fifteen miles to go. I could almost hear the whole world shudder, but all I had on my face was a smile.

We were past the mountain-like inner teeth! We would survive the coming impact. Everybody here had freaking good fire resistance or was immune to the same by one means or another, and our progress didn’t stop at all.

Ahead of us, a great beam of dancing madness speared up into the sky and ‘down’ into the depths of the Maw. In return, the lava-like cracks on the Devouring Moon pulsed, and it was dragged down, down into the Shroud that was trying to divert it, make it forget, and push it away automatically.

It was coming down at a thousand feet a minute, which meant we blew through another eight miles towards our goal as that furnace of annihilation came down, down, and finally made contact with Terra.

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There was a massive earthquake, naturally, and the gravitational chaos and frenzied winds meant staying close to the ground or getting hurled about like a leaf, even with a maxed-out Stormbound Pact. I found myself down low and on Disk, riding behind Sama with a lot of others as her lightfoot danced over the breaking fissures on the ground, blithely ignoring the wonky gravitics as all the Stormbound who could enter a Heavy Magic Sphere worked together to assist the mages in diverting the tornado-class winds past us.

Guiogg drove in a long way, at least half a klik as the mass of the moon met the planet, measured by how the landscape came up to its ‘teeth’. We made more progress towards the Pattern ahead of us as the undead were completely knocked out of our way, anything smaller than half a ton getting sucked helplessly into the air by the vortex of winds that was sliding past our teams.

I passed off the air control spells to the Stormbound, who found themselves juggling the most powerful Control Winds they’d ever imagined to resist the draw from above, while I concentrated on making a telekinetic road of debris and Ward Walls for The Mick, Briggs, Sama, and Amaretta, whose lightfoot had rapidly made them the tow-trains for the Disk Train the rest of us were now on, along with Shvaughn and Legion, who were Stormbound and powerful enough to bull through it using flight.

The Mick and Amaretta still had their hats on, too, I noticed.

Our link with the outside world was totally cut off right now. The Shroud was being blown back, and everyone could see the Devouring Moon that had come down to do something, setting off a wave of panic in those watching through other eyes than our own.

But we weren’t dead. We couldn’t communicate, but the Allegiances weren’t down. Those outside shouted down those panicking and wondering what to do, repeating that we weren’t dead, we weren’t dead, and it wasn’t over until we were.

The ley lines moaned, and every Caster in the whole world felt them bend and shift this time. The vortex above ignited, and the life energy of the world began to pull away and up, into the Devouring Moon.

The Shroud was down, so the Greyfield was as well. Death Wards prevented the lifedrain from sucking us up for the moment, and we drew closer and closer to our goals.

“There.” The Shadow and the Knife had moved up onto my Disk, leaning over my shoulders, and I sensed the attention flitting across us a moment later.

We were still moving, still alive, and the Formation that was keeping the Devouring Moon here was still vulnerable.

The Aberrant saw us, it measured the time and the distance, and the fact we weren’t dying and weren’t dead.

Ahead of us, the fractured earth had stopped splitting into canyons and chasms, and the unholy light of the Formation had spilled beyond the earth and stone moved aside to form it. All we had to do was make it there, disrupt any important part of the Formation, and the Shroud would do the rest of the job for us.

It would wipe away the very memory of our world and why Guiogg was here, sending it back into the void with only a vague dissatisfaction at having wasted its time on something. The Devouring Moon was gathering in life energy, but focused first on elemental power, radiating out from here, and wouldn’t even reach past the Shroud in the time it would take us to reach the outer part of the Formation.

The Aberrant was trying to Timesight us, looking at all the probabilities spinning off the incoming river of destiny headed up by the big lunk in the lead, and realized that it had to act.

It was looking at the wrong place, as it tried to tie off the incoming knots of possibility that were us.

I felt the sub-Formation activate. Power was diverted from the Pattern ahead to that isolated control node offset, which not at all coincidentally was where the attention directed at us had come from.

The tap I’d made into that node went right down into the ground, and to a fold in space down there where a Pyramid sat in the darkness, slowly powering up... and it suddenly lit up like a light bulb.

The Aberrant thing over there exulted as another pillar of light lit off from within the greater one, this one black, crimson, purple, and yellow-green. The entire Shroud writhed as a massive wave of attention swept past and over us and fixed on the Aberrant, realizing it had been betrayed.

Guiogg was being told to eat the negative energy, too!

The Devouring Moon, trapped in a semi-lucid state of being lured to feed and getting mindwiped by the Shroud, obeyed mindlessly. The nature of the energy being drawn in all around us rippled, and the undead circling in the winds above suddenly became streaks of darkness as they instantly corroded away, and their essence was fed into the world-eating Moon above.

And then... all that energy going back up, started to come back down.

Lights and energies pulsed over the inside of the Maw, perhaps struggling with the dreams it was caught in, but the energies going up were turned around and fed back into the Formation... and they all converged on that one little Node over there.

For just a moment, there was an explosion of overwhelming alien exultation, a terrifying inhuman familiarity with a sensation long-desired: the will and appetite to feast on worlds, a Thing that could eat even the Devouring Moon... and planned to do so here, to satisfy an appetite that had no limit.

It was really bad, a hefty blow to morale, a moment of Doom, the River of Fate coming to an end as we were too late, we’d been held back just long enough. The Pattern wasn’t in range and we couldn’t stop what was coming...

“Gotcha, fucktard,” Briggs murmured, his Voice clearly audible over the howl of the winds, the shattering of the ground, and the reverberating groans of the killer moon over our heads... and the breaking of hearts that faltered and looked at him in shock.

The Pyramid I’d put in place months ago broke the surface, shining white with vivus, and everything ignited with Light. It was a thread of Fate that didn’t matter until the Aberrant itself pulled it into place with its actions, as opposed to the big bright diversion riding in with horns blowing and possibilities flaring right over here.

Timesight was all well and good, but sleight of hand principles were the rule here, and this thing wasn’t playing the game too well.