Blaze of Glory: Ch 1 (Archemi Online #7)

Five thousand feet below my position, the city of Lovi burned.

Pillars of flame boiled unchecked into the sky from the once-white towers of the Revalan royal palace. Muzzle flash from artillery lit up the streets in waves of twinkling lights, the rolling boom of mortars reduced to pops and bangs by distance. The simmering carcass of Ilia's defeated flagship, the Sol Invictus, still smoldered where it had fallen. Its magitech engines belched clouds of toxic smoke into the haze that hung over the city like a mourner's veil. Ilian airships encircled the walls, raining death down on the rebels fighting house-to-house in the streets. We had arrived in the nick of time.

"Second Fleet is in position, all commanders reporting in." Suri's voice, as calm and disciplined as always, purred over group audio link. "Wind holding steady, no signs of interception. Ilian airwave traffic is going crazy now the ground forces have rolled in. Waiting for your signal, chief."

A mixture of ash and snow slithered over the smooth face of my helmet, my armor, and over the scales of my dragon as Karalti glided toward those burning city walls. Behind us, another two hundred dragons trailed us in the gloom. White, blue, green and silver, they glided behind us in disciplined, arrow-shaped formation.

"We’re closing on the city now. Get Rutha on the radio; tell Ilia their 'reinforcements' are arriving T-minus five minutes from the eastern front." I squeezed the grips of Karalti's saddle, venting the pre-combat tension through my hands.

"10-4. Stay on the line. All officers copy." Suri muted herself, no doubt to start the flooding of hijacked Ilian communications channels. Those channels were magical in nature, spell-based 'radios' pioneered by Rutha of Vasteau, the former Court Sorceress of Ilia. Rutha was now on our side, currently in the belly of the Second Fleet capital ship - where she was coordinating the hacking of those same channels.

A giddy feeling was building inside me as I focused on our distant target: the three hundred or so warships encircling Lovi. As we came within spotting range, my dragon spat a small gout of white fire into the air, a signal to the flights behind us, and then backwinged over like a hunting swallow with Split Turn. Supernaturally nimble, Karalti pulled above and slightly behind her brothers and sisters. The fire and our change of position was the cue for the officers leading each color-sorted wing. As one, they put dragon's horn trumpets to their lips, and began to blast an eerie, mournful wailing note across the battlefield - the sound played by the Knights of St. Grigori to announce incoming reinforcements.

"Look! Hector! They're rushing to the decks!" Karalti's entire back flexed as she strove up into the thin, frigid air. From underneath, she was invisible against the dark sky. I grasped the saddle straps and weaved my head, opening my eyes as wide as they could go to zoom in on the distant Ilian ships. Sure enough, small knots of soldiers had formed - soldiers with telescopes, who signaled to their comrades. Some of them cheered, throwing their arms up in victory. Others rushed off to report the good news belowdecks. The Knights were here! Victory was certain!

I smiled thinly. It sure was. "Get into range. Suri, Gar, advise the captains to start moving.”

All four commanders of what had been Ilia's greatest weapon - the dragons of the Eyrie - flew towards their old banners like a flight of arrows, bugling war cries the entire time. Even knowing the dragons were now hive-bonded to their queen, MY queen, I felt a lump of doubt rise in my throat. They had been asked to betray their own nation, their own ruler, and there was still the faintest possibility that all two hundred and four of them would somehow break that tentative instinctual loyalty to Karalti and I, and side with their older, trained loyalty toward Ilia. But as we watched, the formations took their planned routes, heading for the Ilian command vessels. My chest swelled as the Rose One and Silver Two wings – led by Skyra Tanghe on Kivrakh, and Skyr Delmonte on Ishilteth – closed in to either side of the Ilian capital ship.

“Rose One and Silver Two in position, Green and Blue following in.” I broadcast over the VC. “We’re lining up, and then its hammer time.”

"Yeah! Hammer time! Hold onto your panties, Hector: We’re going doooooown!"  Karalti, now nearly hundred feet of sleek muscle and aerodynamic black opal scales, tilted her wings and pulled herself into a parabolic dive: intentionally stalling, swinging her legs forward and arching her spine to plunge backwards, almost vertically, from the sky.

Gravity crushed me down and smeared me back like the hand of God himself; the wind ripped at my body, every seam in my suit and every port in my helmet shrieking musically as the mingled smells of sulphur, slagged metal and ozone forced in. I clung to the saddle grips with hands and feet, laughing until my voice broke. The pre-combat high was so intense that my hands and feet felt hot.

“Ten seconds… five…” Karalti plummeted, wings tightly folded to her body. Faster and faster, until she suddenly twisted into a swift horizontal glide toward the Ilian fleet. The ships had taken their typical formations around the dragons, spacing out to give the nimbler fliers room to maneuver between aircraft. That spacing was exactly what we wanted.

"GO GO GO!" I yelled over the VC, bowing to the saddle and bracing myself into it. “GET IN THERE AND START SLAMMING!”

Karalti banked and yawed, zooming over one of the confused rear-guard destroyers. Her jaws gaped, and wordless, rumbling roar boomed through the air as she engaged a special organ in her throat – a sound suddenly overlaid with a second brilliant, piercing note that burst through the airships like a lance of pure sound. It rocked the aircraft in front of us and sent three scouters careening out of the air as the pilots were blinded with the sudden terror and nausea. But Karalti’s Queensong didn't have that effect on the dragons... not the ones that had come with us, and not the ones who had still been fighting alongside the Ilians. Every dragon the Queensong touched activated like Manchurian candidates, and as one, they relayed her will to their riders - who acted on their orders. The result was that two hundred, then three hundred dragons fell on the stunned airships like locusts. As Karalti winged by like a giant scaled Valkyrie, singing like a siren to her kin, a squad of four dragons turned on the nearest Destroyer and blasted it with gouts of blue-white lightning. The Light element damage rended their magical shields apart like spider webs, leaving the metal-clad vessel completely open to the artillery that opened on it from above.

Cannons blazed from overhead as four hundred Vlachian ships, their hulls painted a dark, dull blue-gray, descended from cloud cover and unloaded on the stripped and confused Ilian Eastern flank. Karalti frantically teleported a short distance away to avoid getting caught in the crossfire. She shrieked in alarm, broadcasting an imperative to every dragon within telepathy range. “Everyone! Burst Flight, now!”

The order scythed through the ranks of dragon knights – those we had brought with us, and those who suddenly yielded to the will of their Queen. Confused riders yelled at their dragons, beating on their backs to no effect as their mounts twisted away from their targets and flashed away from the melee. Usta's brood had an innate ability, Burst Flight, that allowed them to briefly vanish and reappear at supernaturally-high speeds. The rolling rapport of their sonic booms tore over the deafening drumfire of the Vlachian assault - but half a dozen dragons, struggling with rebellious riders, didn't obey Karalti fast enough. Artillery fire tore through wings and limbs and sent them spiraling toward the earth like broken kites.

"No! Hector, please call off the assault! They're dying!" Karalti keened, abruptly cutting off her Queensong. Terror and grief both slashed through the Bond. “I can’t control them fast enough!”

"Hold it together, girl." I laid my will, my focus over hers. We weren't close enough to help them. Or at least, not all of them. "Teleport in and brace that blue's port flank, now! We both cast healing magic on him at the same time!"

Karalti didn't argue: her focus intensified on her stricken brother, and there was a brief pause of darkness and cold before she materialized under him. The terrified blue let out a high, whistling screech as we practically collided with him in the air - and joined him in falling, briefly, until Karalti braced his destroyed wing with her body and snapped her left wing out to straighten them out into a proper dive. The blue’s huge leathery membrane nearly pinned me flat to my saddle, close enough for me to slap a hand against it.

"Pan'cinles cinxir allar cial!" We chanted together.

Pale green light pulsed from us and through the dragon's body - and he cried out again, this time in surprise, as his shattered bones seemed to liquify and flow back together, plumes of glowing blue blood sucked back in and transmuted by magic into newly healed flesh. Even the most powerful herbal or alchemical healing potions couldn't have done this - or given the dragon the strength to push off Karalti and back out into the air. The blue head and the wild-eyed dragon knight on the blue's back twisted toward as Karalti, panting with effort, frantically beat her wings and veered to avoid crashing into the city walls.

"We did it!" She sounded exultant and exhausted both, climbing back into the air with determination. "But the others-"

"We can't save everyone. We have to focus on the battle." I hated every second of it, every scream of every fallen dragon, but there was no stopping what we’d started. The overwhelming force of the Vlachian 2nd Fleet thundered toward Lovi like a fast-moving storm, wreaking havoc on the ambushed Ilian ships. Weakened by magically-charged blasts of lightning, the inferior Ilian ships stood little chance against Vlachian firepower. Mortar fire pounded shells of blue light until they shattered; engines whined and belched smoke as airships veered off course and sunk toward the earth. Ilia's fighter craft - small, truck-sized two-man skirmishers the size of fighter jets but much slower - were no match for the maneuverability of Vlachian Dragoons. Fighters disappeared under clouds of shrieking quazi, who tore their guns off the ships and flung them away. The mages on their backs disenchanted their defenses - and their engines. The great golden rings that powered them ceased floating, turning the skirmishers into bombs that struck other ships as they fell from the sky.

"Illuminata closing in within symphonic array range on the Illian command ship. How's it lookin' out there, Hector? Gar?" Suri's voice, breathy as if she'd been running, broke through the deafening roar.

"Still alive, dragons taking hits, but the Ilian ones heard the call and they're out of harm's way." I was about to keep going when a brilliant flash from the city caught my eye. My head swiveled in time to catch a second explosion, and a flotilla of smaller aircraft rising from the fortressed hill around Lovi palace... aircraft that made the armor-clad Vlachian warships look like medieval relics.

"Taking losses but holding steady," Gar grunted over the line. "Something’s happening at the Palace.”

With no visible engines, no obvious weaknesses, these sleek, silvery Mercurion ships - they had to be Mercurion ships - split into three squads and pulsed across the city at supersonic speeds, circling back to strafe the army pouring through the streets of the city. The Lion Palace began to boil like an ant hill, spilling streams of dark shapes out into the open.

My eyes narrowed. “Hector to all commanders: it appears the Kingsmen have screwed the pooch.”

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It begins!