The Ghost Army

Chapter 5

The cellar reeked of old rot, damp earth, and something else something sharp and metallic. The Ironborn.

Juliana clawed at the air, her feet kicking uselessly inches above the stone floor. The officer's iron fist was wrapped around her throat, and he held her like she weighed nothing at all. His short-sword jagged, vibrating, humming with that low, bone-deep sound pressed against her ribs hard enough to slice through her wool coat. The blade's buzz echoed off the walls, like a swarm of angry hornets.

"Drop your weapon, primitive," the officer said. His voice came out layered, mechanical, grating.

Robbin's knuckles had gone white around his cavalry saber's grip. Elaine stood frozen behind the wine casks, twin short-swords raised, her eyes darting between the three scouts flanking the room. The Ironborn watched them with cold blue eyes, eyes that held nothing. No fear, no pity, no humanity at all. They weren't soldiers. They were weapons. Walking, breathing weapons built to kill.

"Robbin... don't," Juliana managed, her fingers scrabbling uselessly at the crushing metal around her neck. "The machine... don't let them take..."

"Silence." A crack of blue electricity arced across the officer's visor.

Robbin let the point of his saber dip toward the floor but he didn't let go. His mind raced. Ten feet. Elaine was boxed in. If he dropped the sword, they'd all die in the dark.

"You need the scholar," he said, keeping his voice level. "She understands your tech. But you don't know the frontier. Kill her, and you'll never find the rest of the repository."

The officer's head tilted a sharp, mechanical twitch. Just a split second of hesitation.

Then the horror in the room got worse.

From the shadows behind the wine casks, something stepped forward. A colonial soldier, one of the guards who'd fallen at the gate not ten minutes ago. But he wasn't a man anymore. His skin had gone ash-grey, and thick black iron wires had threaded through his eyes and cheeks, holding his jaw open in a silent, frozen scream. His hands had been broken and fused around a broken halberd.

The Ironborn didn't just kill their enemies. They harvested them, turning corpses into puppets within minutes.

Robbin's blood turned to ice.

"Now, Elaine!" he shouted.

He didn't drop his sword. Instead, he threw himself forward, sliding low across the wet stone floor.

Elaine moved like lightning. She didn't go for the scouts; she threw one of her short-swords at the torch mounted on the wall. The blade struck the bracket, and the burning wood clattered into a puddle of spilled wine and water. Darkness swallowed the cellar whole, broken only by the eerie blue glow of the Ironborn's eyes.

The officer swung blindly, his blade cutting through nothing. Robbin was already beneath his guard, rising from the slide, bringing his saber up in a brutal two-handed strike. Not the chest. The elbow joint is the one holding Juliana.

Clang.

The blade bit into softer wiring at the joint. A spray of hot, iridescent black oil hissed into the air, searing Robbin's cheek like acid. The officer screamed a static-filled shriek and his grip faltered. Juliana dropped into the mud.

"Elaine, get her out!" Robbin yelled, parrying a wild counter-strike. The vibration of the enemy's blade numbed his arm and cracked the leather wrapping on his saber's hilt.

In the blue-lit chaos, Elaine grabbed Juliana by the collar and hauled her toward the drainage tunnel at the back of the cellar. The three scouts lunged after them, their arm-blades humming in the dark.

The vault became a war zone. Robbin fought like a man possessed, using the stone pillars to keep the officer away from the women. He parried, ducked, slashed his steel sparking against obsidian plate armor. He knew his blade wouldn't hold up long against that high-frequency technology. But every second he bought was a second of life for Juliana.

Behind him, the mutated corpse lunged at Elaine. She spun with a choked cry of horror and rage, parrying the halberd and driving her boot into its chest. She couldn't look at its face. She went for the glowing blue core forming beneath its torn shirt, driving her blade straight through. The body collapsed, finally still, hardening into a block of rusted metal.

"The tunnel's clear!" Elaine shouted, kicking open the rusted grate that led out into the wilderness. "Captain, we have to go!"

Robbin slammed a kick into the officer's knee, forcing the giant back one step. Then he bolted for the grate, sliding through the narrow opening just as the officer's vibrating blade cleaved a stone pillar in half. Rocks crashed down behind him.

They crawled through the cramped, muddy tunnel, the sounds of the cellar collapsing echoing behind them. Then they burst out onto a snowy, forested hillside half a mile from Fort William.

The sight before them was apocalyptic.

Fort William burned. Ash-grey clouds from the terraforming spires choked the sky, turning midday into a dim, suffocating twilight. A blizzard unnaturally tore through the pine trees, burying everything in deep drifts.

And below, thousands of Ironborn soldiers poured out of the burning fort, forming a massive black column marching east. Toward the cities. Toward the innocent.

"They're going to destroy everything," Juliana whispered, clutching her smoking brass device to her chest.

"Not if we stop them first." Robbin's chest heaved as he stared at the army. "We need a bigger weapon. The Blackwood mine."

But when they turned toward the deep woods, something made them freeze.

Not the sound of boots. Something else is a rhythmic clicking, coming from the branches of the towering pines above.

Robbin raised his torch, his stomach dropping. Crouching on the snow-laden branches directly overhead were a dozen biomechanical horrors unlike anything they'd seen. Quadrupedal. Forged of black iron and bone. Their faces are flat except for a single horizontal slit of blinding blue light.

The beasts let out a synchronized clicking growl, iron claws digging into wood, preparing to spring. They were surrounded and trapped in a freezing wilderness with nowhere left to run.