Blaze of Glory: Ch 2 (Archemi Online #7)

The plan to retake Lovi wasn’t rocket science, though like all strategies, luck was a factor. Me and my crew had met up with the Vlachian 2nd Fleet at the border of Revala, bringing with us the dragons and two Destroyers carrying some of my own crack troops from Myszno: a hundred Knights of the Black Star, a heavy melee combat unit, fifty veteran Nightstalkers Assassins, and fifty of Taethawn’s parachute-trained commandos. They were my own personal backup in case shit went south. In the lounge of the 2nd Fleet capital ship, the Dreadnaught Dracul, me, Suri and our advisors had a virtual meeting with the Ilian Kingsmen and the head of the Revalan resistance, Lord Helgi Torquist. Torquist had been nervous and chattery; Jamal, the war leader of the Kingsmen under the exiled Ilian prince Illandi, had been calm and agreeable to work with. Or so I’d thought.

Jamal and Torquist’s role were to capture the city up to the gates of the Lovi’s Inner Ward, then secure and hold the position without attempting to enter. The reason? The Inner Ward was full of Phaedran Mercurion mercenaries, who were dug in like ticks around Lovi Palace. I happened to know that the Phaedra had a worshipful reverence for dragonkind – which was how Baldr had probably recruited them to begin with. The plan we’d banged out was to basically surround the Lion Palace on the ground and by air, and convince the Mercurions to surrender under the pressure of four hundred dragons. The goal had been to minimize casualties as well as destruction to the city.

So what did Jamal and Torquist do?

They breached the fucking Inner Ward.

I hissed with frustration as another explosion went off. "Those fucking idiots!”

“Can’t say I’m surprised they fucked it up. You know, now I think about it, Nethres has been real quiet,” Gar remarked.

Fuming, I tried to open a PM with Nethres and got a short error message: [Player killed. Waiting for respawn.]

"Fuck!" I cursed again, this time with feeling. "The Revalans are jumping the gun, Suri. Nethres died in the fighting and our comms with the Royalists have fallen silent. Do you have Jamal on the line?"

Suri tutted. "He hasn’t responded to repeated pings over the last fifteen minutes. Are they trying for the Palace?”

I zoomed my vision in on the East Palace Gate. By the flickering lights of the burning city seven hundred feet below, Mercurion foot soldiers and insectoid walking tanks pour through the damaged gate. They didn't assault the rebel forces so much as engulf them. The Mercurions were outnumbered three to one, but the rebels barely had time to put up a fight as they were mowed down by guns superior to anything I'd ever seen in Archemi before... and Sangheti’tak war machines. Mercurion magitech powered armor, which simply carved paths into the suddenly chaotic mass of rebel foot soldiers below. Revalan resistance fighters dressed in gambesons with pikes and one-shot rifles, versus ten-ton machines with machine guns and five-foot scythe arms. There was no contest.

Nethres’ name went from dull grey to bright blue on the voice channel listing. "I'm sorry, Hector!" she blurted. For the first time I could remember, she sounded borderline panicked. "I died in the fighting and Jamal jumped the gun! Nothing I can do now except follow in. I called for a retreat, but he and Torquist overrode me."

“Those fucking idiots.” I cursed with feeling. Jamal was an admin, one of the artificial intelligence programmers who'd worked alongside my brother and the man who'd become Ororgael. I'd never met him, and he'd refused to have anything to directly do with me. I'd gotten a weird vibe from that - and an even weirder one now that he had overridden the battle plan and was getting hundreds of his people killed. "Right. Vlachia is coming in with reinforcements and air support. We'll see if we can ground-pound the Mercurions from above and get them to pull back, but no guarantees. You guys might be stuck in the blender. If you see Jamal, punch him in the face for me."

"I’ll take two shots. One for you, one for me," Nethres affirmed grimly. She muted herself to concentrate on the fight.

"Are ALL the Architects other than Rin giant gaping assholes?" Karalti bristled with indignation as she swooped toward the hill that seated the crown jewel of Lovi, the Lion Palace. The beautiful gilt palace and the white castle on the hill behind it were like something out of an elvish fairytale. They were currently both on fire. The glorious gardens and the preserved old-growth forest separating the palace from the castle gatehouse burned even under the haze of snow, belching plumes of sick bluish smoke into the air, Mana haze.

"It really fucking seems like it." I zoomed my vision in to see a team of Revalan skirmishers battling the amalgamated corpse of a deer and a hookwing. A [Stranged Abomination] that had already made its way from the palace grounds to where the Phaedra and Kingsmen battled. "Jamal is going to have to account for this."

What I really wanted Jamal to do was throw himself nose-first onto my fist for fucking up a perfectly good plan and throwing the Revalan ground assault force into a meat grinder. But there were only two constants in war: an army was only as good as its commanders, and shit happens. In a good army, a winning army, the leaders took responsibility no matter what. Realistically, there were a hundred reasons why Jamal had screwed this, but I could still lead. I was still in charge of Vlachian air forces, the dragons, and the special forces.

"Change of plan. Suri, Gar, switch out with your next in command, then meet me and Karalti at the Cathedral in five minutes," I said, grimly swiping open the KMS. "I'm taking two companies of our best door-to-door fighters and redirecting them to that same location."

Gar sputtered over the line. “Abandon my crew? Are you serious?”

"Yes, and I'll explain why in a second. Do you have any riggers on board the Strelitzia?"

"Riggers as in-"

"Sappers. People who make things go boom good."

"Well... yeah." The man paused to hawk in his throat. "Me for one. Ambrose for another."

“Then don’t abandon your crew: bring them. We’ll make room for the Strelitzia and you can park her. And bring all the silly putty you can make or find.” I activated all hundred of the Knights of the Black Star, the Meewfolk commandos and Mercurion Nightstalkers Assassins into action, and ordered they collect armor piercing ammunition from our depot enroute, an airship that had landed near the center of the city as we drove the Ilian airships to the west. Suri would be leading the Knights; Gar would be leading the Nightstalkers. The third unit, the one Karalti and I would be leading, was entirely made up of hardened Meewfolk brawlers from the Orphans Company.

"Care to tell me what's going on?" Suri asked sharply.

“You, me, Karalti, Gar and his people, plus two hundred troops are going to assault the Palace via the tunnels that connect the Auri Katedraali to the Lion Palace," I replied briskly. "We're piercing the heart of the royal complex and digging out whoever or whatever it is they're protecting in there. If we can’t encircle them and force a surrender, we pin them from both sides so it feels like they can’t win."

"You're crazy." Suri laughed appreciatively. "Let's fuckin' go."

“You ARE crazy!” Gar’s Tex-Mex accent thickened as he got louder. “The place is full of goddamned clickers!”

"Not any more, it’s not. The Phaedra are all out on the streets and the gatehouse fighting back Jamal's cannon fodder. There's going to be a small reserve in the palace and the commander of the Mercurion forces; either a Mercurion NPC we fight as a boss, or Lucien, Violetta or Nicolas. They’re guarding the Revalan throne – that’s our flag on top of the hill. If we can get in there and take the throne, a Global Alert goes out and we behead the Ilian-Mercurion forces. After that, we let nature take its course."

"Fuck." Gar could curse all he wanted, but he knew I was right. "RV in five at the cathedral, got it."

"But what about the other dragons?" Karalti bellowed in agitation, even as she obeyed, winging toward the cathedral complex.

"We put our faith in the wing commanders, Tidbit. This eyrie flew and fought without a queen in the sky before, and they can do it again." I was still in the KMS, rapidly issuing orders to my four known wing commanders and making sure that everyone who needed to know the change of plan was in on it. "Our captains know their units better than we do, Tidbit. Trust them to do their jobs."

Karalti's emotions were helplessly frantic with fear for her kin, but her mind was disciplined: I had seen to that. She roared defiantly at the distant castle, oriented on the cathedral, and dived.

The Ilians knew about the tunnels that led between the grand church and the Lion Palace, and the Cathedral had been fortified - against ground forces. The dragons had been on their side less than an hour before, and they were wildly unprepared for Karalti as she strafed the barricades with a brilliant plume of white fire hot enough to burn wood and melt metal and stone. Above us, two Vlachian Destroyers, flanked by a cloud of dragoons and one-man fighter craft - veered from the battle in the sky and steamed toward us. But so did the Phaedran fighters. The squadron of ten ships flew like stingray-shaped jets, shooting through the air with uncanny grace and speed. They were too fast for our ships' cannons to track. Even as I watched, they cut through our comparatively primitive fighters like a scythe through wheat, harrying the big airship carrying our troops.

“Fuck, they know exactly what we’re doing!” I snarled. “Karalti! Call reinforcements! Everyone else, whatever you do, protect the Salamander!”

Karalti let out a piercing trumpet cry, and a squad of six silvers veered out of the melee and turned toward us. Artillery boomed out overhead, providing covering fire for the dragons who began to chase one of the small, deadly ships. I saw a silver dragon take successive bursts of high-velocity fire to the chest, and he swooned out of the sky. The Mercurion stingray harried him down: right into the path of the Symphonic Array as the Campbell let loose. The seemingly invincible little fighter tore apart inside the cone of magically-enhanced sonic energy, the pieces ripped back through the air, then exploding into debris that rained down on the fighting below. Another of them fell to a blast of lightning that surged its engines and sent careening into the Ilian barricade around the cathedral like a bomb.

We joined the fighting before we even touched ground. Karalti blasted a knot of Mercurion gunners with a stream of liquid white fire, igniting them and the corpses to either side. The Phaedra flailed to try and put the flames out, but the sticky, napalm-like stuff clung to them, slagging their armor. Mercurions themselves were highly resistant to heat, a byproduct of their silicon and metal bodies, but their armor still melted under the sheer intensity of dragonfire. Several of them stumbled to their knees, melting, as others fled to spread the flames to their comrades.

“We have to clear space for the airships!” Karalti called to her four remaining siblings as she touched ground. “Wings and tails, wings and tails!”

I held on as Karalti’s back suddenly became a climbing wall. She reared up onto her longer hind legs and began to flap her wings quickly, sending huge clouds of debris – and bodies – tumbling across the cracked and broken stones. Other dragons shrilled in reply joining their queen and doing the exact same thing. No matter how tough they were, there was not enough cover to prevent the soldiers on the ground from being picked up and blown back by the resulting tempest. Most of the stragglers did the smart thing and fled through holes in the twenty-foot walls surrounding the huge cathedral and its grounds. A few stood their ground, only to be driven away by hot blasts of air from the Campbell’s engines as the ship came in to hover. They threw the gangplanks down, and the Knights of the Black Star began to pour out, Suri already in the lead.

“Keep it up, Tidbit! We have to hold these walls!” I twisted around and let go of the saddle, sliding down Karalti’s back to the base of her tail, which flung me into the air. I carried it up into a somersault, and Shadow Danced about ten feet from hitting dirt. The brief teleport cut my velocity and let me land lightly on the pavement. “Hoi! Suri!”

In full plate armor, her greatsword resting over one shoulder, Suri was just as massive as the knights that swarmed out through the cathedral grounds behind her. She pulled up in front of me and crashed her helmeted forehead against mine, clapping me on the shoulder as I squeezed her waist.

“Hey, lover!” Her voice was a little tinny behind layers of padding and metal, but I could see the dim flash of sharp white teeth from behind the vents in her visor. “Where to from here?”

Anything I might have said was cut by the overpowering roar of airship engines as the Campbell pulled away, making room for the smaller, nimbler Strelitzia now that its troop cargo had been unloaded. Gar’s custom ship was like no other on Archemi – half seaplane, half magitech cutter, she was low-profile and as sleek as a gull. She also had a combination glass bridge and cockpit – an unusual configuration for airships, which tended to avoid glass for artillery-related reasons.

“From here we go underground to do the funnest and most enjoyable thing in the world.” I replied to her and Gar through our voicechat, unable to hear myself think, let alone talk. “Tunnel fighting.”