Chapter 143 The White March
Apostasy to wait till the end is worse than the end itself. It is the quietness that kills you.
Hour seventy-one.
The blizzard had not broken. However, even more the temperature had dropped, making the Iron City a grave of white and black. All the rusty beams and glass and cement were covered to their very tip by the rime ice.
I was on the main barricade, a huge wall of fused shipping containers that we had pulled out onto the Northern Expressway. Three layers of thermal Purist kept me warm, however, the cold still got into my bones.
Check your weapon batteries, answer Ryker. He walked as long as the barricade was long in the snow, like a phantom. The plasma cells are drained two times as rapidly by the cold. Keep them in your coats till the time you have to fire.
Next to me Ferrous was inspecting the loading of a heavy Purist repeater rifle. The ex-warlord had lost the appearance of strength without his huge iron plating, and he was moving with a strange, frightening velocity. He was no longer pulling a hydraulic piston--he was a mountain of scarred muscle that shivered, but was determined.
My choice, Ferrous grunted, my choice, and I like an axe. "Plasma... has no weight."
You will find it nice not to have weight when there is a thousand targets, said Kaelen dryly. The sniper was sitting on a ruined overpass that was 30 feet above us, and his rifle had been wrapped in white thermal tape.
Freaking seismics, Ryker, Vane said through the earpiece of the comms. He was posted again at the Command Center on the 50th floor where he was monitoring the blind radar. "It's not localized. It's a wide-front advance. The entire ice shelf is shaking."
"Distance?" Ryker, who had halted beside me and was looking into the whiteout, asked.
"Two miles," Vane said. "Wait. One mile. They're moving fast, boss. Three feet of snow should not take faster than tanks to go through it.
I touched the fractured Original Stone on my finger. The magic was slow, and covered with the suffocating cold, but it was not necessary to me to cast a spell. I just needed it to feel.
I shut my eyes and drew my consciousness to the wind.
Thump... Thump... Thump...
It was not the wild, noisy tumult of the Rot-monsters of which we were now accustomed. It was a rhythm. Utopian, mechanical, clockwork.
They are marching, I said to myself, graining my eyes. "All of them. In perfect step."
"Stand to!" Jaxon roared down the line. The Exodus militia and the Iron Guard stood to arms and a mixed line of scavenged assault rifles and high-tech energy weapons lay on the icy steel of the barricade.
Hour seventy-two.
The wind suddenly dropped. It had not gone away, it had simply ceased, as though even the atmosphere itself was in suspense. The driving snow in its curtain thinness, disclosed the great, frozen expanse of the Northern Expressway which led away westward into the Deadlands.
Headlights occurred through the haze.
These, however, were not the violent white of the ancient Coalition, or the pure blue of the Purists. The pulsating violet of them was sickly.
By the Moon, Baron grumbled on the far flank, and he stood on end. What have they done to themselves?
The storm saw the birth of the White March.
It was the 4 th Coalition Armored Division but they had not come through the decade unscathed. They had become a nightmare.
In the front of the pack came Striders thebipedal Coalition walkers that were originally intended to be used to pacify urban areas. They were twenty feet high, and had been torn to pieces by steel. In places where engines and hydraulic lines ought to have been, there were fleshy veins of Rot-biomass with veins of violet energy pulsing within them. The machines were breathing, indeed, and giving out plumes of poison, purple steam, into the cold air.
Kaelen said, over the comms, with horror in his voice, Bio-mechanical integration. "They aren't running on diesel. They are stumbling on the infection. They have made the Rot an engine.
The heavy armor followed behind the Striders. Great Mammoth tanks bumped across the ice, and their treads were coated with petrified bone which made them stick in the snow. The turrets turned with horrible organic fluidity.
And then came the infantry.
Thousands of them.
They were clothed in rags of white Coalition winter outfits, frozen to death. But they weren't men anymore. Their helmets had cables of biomass of glowing violet which directly connected to the power packs on their backs and supplied them with the same corrupted energy that supplied the tanks. They wore rebreather masks to cover their faces and their eyes had the collective, hive-mind light of the Rot.
The marching was in complete silence, excepting the concerted crunch of ice-boots.
they are like a hive, said Ryker to himself, holding on to the hilt of his Star-Metal sword. "Vance didn't beat the Rot. He merged with it. He weaponized the Hive Mind."
The huge army stopped within half a mile of our barricade. The accuracy was death-threatening. None of the shouted commands, none of the radio talk. They just ceased to be as a single organism.
A vehicle was pulled on out of the middle of the formation. It was a gigantic command crawler, twice the length of the Valkyrie, and he went on four huge treads. A reinforced glass bridge prevailed in the front armor.
The external speakers on the crawler screeched to a final feedback.
"Your time has expired."
General Vance was heard with ear-shattering voice reverberating between the skyscrapers of the Iron City. It possessed a weird, stratification to it, as though an entire thousand voices were murmuring but a little bit beneath his.
The purist technology in you is under the Coalition. You are usurpers in a world of death. Lower your weapons. Open the barricade. Surrender the Origin Asset."
Ryker scrambled up to the shipping container. He was bare against the grey sky with his coat fluttering in the blowing wind.
I am General Ryker of the Exodus! he called, his Alpha voice vibrating across the frozen space, and as mechanical as Vance. The Coalition perished a decade ago! and by the appearance of your army you perished with it!
There was a silence over the frozen no-man-land.
The window of the command crawler had a shadow behind it.
We did not die, Ryker: that was the voice of Vance, with neither anger nor coldness. "We adapted. We discovered the remedy of human weakness. We found unity."
"You found a parasite!" Ryker roared back. And you want this city, you must dig through us, to get it!
"So be it."
Vance did not issue an order to fire. He didn't have to. The hive mind immediately responded to his will.
The primary gun of the first Mammoth tank was glowing in a vile, concentrated violet light. It wasn't an explosive shell. It was a plasma-rot cannon.
"Incoming!" Kaelen yelled.
"Brace!" Ryker screaming jumped off the container.
BOOM.
The tank fired. We were struck with a shattering in a huge ball of violet energy that flashed across the ice and struck us full at the middle of our barricade.
The impact was devastating. The cast-iron shipping container made of stiffened steel did not merely break, it melted. The metal was consumed by the biological plasma in a moment, and a hole was made in our main line of attack twenty feet long. Two of the militiamen had fallen into the blast area and their screams were cut short as they were vaporized to grey ash.
"Return fire!" Ash on his visor cleaned Jaxon screaming.
The barricade erupted. Solid kinetic and Blue Purist plasma bolts and slugs ripped through the snow, drilling holes in the front line of the mutated Coalition army.
"Hold the breach!" Ferrous roared.
The Iron Guard rushed to fall over the smouldering aperture in the wall, lifting up their heavy scrap-metal shields as the Striders started their rush. The giant, twenty-foot biomechanical walkers were now rushing down upon us, the heavy treads of the giant shaking the ice.
"Vane!" Ryker screamed into his communicator, and his burning orange sword was drawn. And say tho me that thou hast these great batteries on line!
"Bringing them up now!" Vane shouted.
Anti-aircraft guns, huge, scravened, swung down on the roofs of the buildings along the expressway, and fired at the rushing Striders.
The Iron City siege had commenced.