ăLocationălandow: harbor
ăTimeăsunday, 7:30 am
ăInteractionsăn/a
Red......stars?......
Beth leapt down onto the damp sands, scrabbled up the sloping dunes; unsure of where she was going, who she sought. Even what could be done for such a circumstance, only that there had to be something. Anything. The day had come. It had come and people were dying and they had prepared her tirelessly for this moment andâ......no. No, .ENE's prophecy was clear: "While the Red Star of the Morning hast not yet ris'n."
The star, it said. A star. She'd said so. And though Beth had had her doubts about some of Ultima's "wisdoms," in this singular matter the Lady of Light had not yet erred. That same prophecy had led the Resplendency straight to Beth; even given them a way whereby to identify the prodigal child they sought. But thisâinterpretation be damned, this was no singular star but dozens of them, hundreds, and themselves reproducing!âeach striking off into showers of sparks and plasma as it burned up. Only the very widest pieces landing in the harbor in great geysers of mist and steam and smoke.
Had the prophecy been wrong, or was thisâsomething else?
Another meteor broke through the troposphere, dragging behind it a swirl of clouds, a tail of ionized flames; another fizzle through Beth's artificial eyes, another spurt of blood from her tortured sockets. Screaming, she fell to jellied knees, and with trembling hands clawed ineffectually at the loose, loamy beach; the sand pushing up between her fingers, drinking the crimson drops which pattered its surface. Looking back toward the shimmering, morning-encrusted waters, that charter boat banked hard to starboard, seeking whatever shoreline or sandbar would allow those dozens of passengers and crewmen safe evacuation from the roiling waters. Sprayed and heaved by the falling detritus, some didn't wait for the grinding of sand against the keel, or the shoving of the bow into a crumpled wharf; those with life vests affixed them to their wives and children. Those who didn't, took their chances in freefall.
Beth was expecting the meteorites to get them; their bodies crushed, or carried away by the agitated surf, or buried beneath wave after wave after brutal, exhausting wave as more and more heavenfall churned the harbor. She had just begun to make her peace with her own uselessness. That she would have to stay not as a rescuer, not a hero, but as a presider over what followed. The silence, the rummaging through soggy pockets for ID. A mass grave for the unidentified, and the memorial service to the unrecovered.
She was not expecting legs, claws, and mouths.
The first chitinous jaws breached the water, snatching at treaders and butterfliers and doggy-paddlers alike regardless of their speed, regardless of all the athleticism in the world, and her scanlining, jittering eyes did not accept what she'd just seen. And her brain scrambled to rationalize it, filling in details which she most assuredly had not; constructing sharks and sailfish and Humboldt squids where there were none. Then she saw it again, carapace glittering in the wet, mandibles slick with blood and seawater. No. Something else had infested Landow harbor, and it feasted.
Beth struggled to her feet. By then some of the men with pulseguns and crystal harnesses were performing target acquisitions fifty, a hundred meters up the banks, those more confident shooters taking their first potshots, the projectiles producing their little splashes (dwarfed by the meteors' spouts, still bursting all over the bay). She didn't see shots connecting; or, more worrying yet, maybe she did, and against these things' shells their pulseguns were useless.
And Odin be good: if firearms didn't work, what use would a damned sword be?!
Flee with the others and maybe help evacuate the civs? Or stand and die like the stupid, ineffectual hero the Archlictor had always wanted? Before Beth could make her choice, the question pounding in her chest, pounding in her ears to the rhythm of her fear, the distress signal went out; the Knights-Penitent arrived.
......And their vertibird, without firing a single shot, crossed over the harbor, over Beth, over the beach; and hovering somewhere above Landow proper, ascertaining their target, they touched down.
"Cassiel," Beth realized, with a shake of her head and a vengeful hiss between her teeth. Was he just abandoning these people? Could he not even muster the pluck to pretend he gave a shit? "You wormâyou sack of goat's gutsâDominants damn you!"
Forsaken by her countrymen, and very nearly trampled by the panicked massesâand no sign of the other Regalia, of course, the useless shitsâBeth, vision still jittering, and filling up with blood besides, turned back toward the waterline, where those carnivorous beetle-things had not only mopped up what remained of the stranded boats but also mounted an assault toward the town. As the first rows scuttled forward, more filled in behind, emerging from the froth and the foam, more and more and more seemingly without end.
And worst of all, she'd gone through all that irritation and trouble getting that damned duelist to leave her be. He was probably nearby somewhere, watching her. Waiting to see what she was made of. Getting exactly what he wanted.
Beth could only laugh. An envenomed rasp of a laugh, dripping with bitter glee.
"This is bullshit," she seethed, reaching up toward the clouds, the first scraps of divine armor already materializing at her extremities, swathing them. Gauntlets and greaves and sabatons, rattling with the terrored shake of her hands, the quake in her knees. The sword already loosing from her back, escaping upward from its scabbard although she herself made no gesture to draw it. He heard; He arrived. "SUPPLICIUM!"
