The Ghost Army

Chapter 7

The air now not merely cold, but animate, heavy and wrong. Robbin’s boot came off the muddy floor, and he was lifting inches into the air along with shattered pine branches, clumps of frozen earth, and the heavy iron hulls of dead hounds. General Thorne’s immense great-sword gave a low, bass hum that vibrated right through Robbin’s skull.

His vision swam, and his teeth began to ache as the localised gravity field began ripping the surroundings apart, pulling the survivors to the lip of the one-hundred-foot, vertical cliff face.

"Hold onto something!" Robbin roared over the weightless suck.

He lunged through the air and grabbed onto a huge, exposed tree root jutting from the cliff face, then caught Juliana around the middle of her coat, tethering her as her feet lifted from the ground. Juliana whimpered, holding the steaming brass device in her arms like a shield. Elaine and Cedric, meanwhile, struggled against the weightless horror next to them, Elaine driving her short sword deep into a frozen rock crevice, clinging to the hilt with both hands, Cedric-pride all but gone-hugging a massive boulder and leaving his silver-plated rapier dangling uselessly from his wrist. High up on the ridge above, General Thorne watched like a god of rusted iron; the hundreds of Ironborn soldiers arrayed behind him unaffected by the anomaly, their iron boots magnetically glued to the ground.

"Resistance is illogical, Vance. Surrender the scholar, or the ground collapses." Thorne’s metallic, layered voice boomed over the howling blizzard.

"Never!" Cedric spat, though the words cracked as a chunk of ice drifted lazily past his face and nicked his cheek.

The General ignored him. He slowly brought the glowing point of his great-sword down. The tip hummed through the air above the snow, sending electric arcs across its surface and causing the gravity field to surge again. This time the force slammed the four down, their full weight crushing them back into the frozen muck with bone-jarring intensity. The breath left Robbin's lungs in a whoosh and his cavalry saber slipped through his fingers, sliding towards the cliff edge.

"They're advancing!" Elaine yelled, wiping frozen blood from her eyes.

The gravity shift was the trigger. In a precise, mechanical shriek the Ironborn vanguard charged down the ridge, their cybernetic legs carrying them effortlessly over the ice, their arm-fused blades vibrating at impossibly high frequencies. War had just come down to a claustrophobic patch of frozen mud at the end of the world.

"Form a wall!" Robbin bellowed, scrambling back to his feet and lunging for his saber. He snatched the leather hilt just as the first scout came hurtling down through the air, its curved executioner blade aiming for his neck. Robbin parried on his knees. CLANG! The blow was brutally heavy, and his frontier steel saber shrieked and groaned under the immense pressure. A thin crack appeared near his hilt. Robbin used his momentum to roll away from the first, kicking the scouts unarmoured knee. Cedric was already in the breach, his thin rapier flashing twice in the twilight and driving straight through the scouts visor and into its central wiring. The blue light flickered and died.

"We can't hold this position, Vance!" Cedric shouted, his immaculate uniform tattered and black with machine oil. He parried another blow, his thin blade bending to an alarming degree against the obsidian armor. "There are too many of them!"

"We fight 'til we can't!" Robbin barked. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Cedric and Elaine, Robbin formed the first line of defence, protecting the vulnerable Juliana as the Ironborn Legion flooded down. A brutal, lightning-fast bloodbath erupted around them. Elaine was a blur, weaving under immense swung axes and stabbing her sword into the glowing blue chest cores of her opponents as sparks lit the darkened woods. For every monster they downed, another appeared out of the blinding snow. Things turned far worse when one of the huge machine-soldiers came through, a giant metallic drill whirling on the end of its right arm. Elaine dodged, but her boot snagged on something in the snow and she fell backwards, her short sword flying from her grip.

"Elaine!" Robbin screamed. He sprang forward to intercept the blade, but another soldier lunged into his path, its vibrating blade locking against his saber. The cracked steel of Robbin’s sword finally snapped. Disarmed, Robbin watched helplessly as the drill whined and descended towards Elaine’s chest.

BZZZZZZT! A white explosion of electricity blasted from behind them, throwing the Ironborn soldier and its whirring drill to the side. The creature shuddered and sparked wildly, the blue light of its core flaring before it crashed heavily into the snow. Robbin spun to see Juliana standing on a rock, her teeth chattering and her face impossibly pale. She was clutching her damaged brass device, but had wound a thick coil of raw, glowing blue cable -- ripped directly from a dead hound’s neck -- around the machine's central core. The device whined a high-frequency tone, making Robbin's ears bleed.

"I reversed the frequency! But it’s overloading! It's going to blow!" Juliana screamed, her voice barely audible over the hum.

The soundwave rolled over the hillside, stopping dozens of advancing Ironborn troops mid-stride. Their bodies jerked and short-circuited as their neural net disrupted and even General Thorne on the ridge took a heavy step back. Juliana's device glowed white hot. The brass casing was melting and dripping into the snow below.

"Drop it, Juliana!" Robbin yelled, racing towards her. But before she could react, the device exploded with a concussive wave of blue energy that shattered the very rock ledge they stood on, a deafening roar as a vast fissure tore through the mountainside beneath them. The edge of the cliff completely collapsed in a cascade of rock and ice. Robbin lunged forward, his fingertips brushing Juliana’s coat as the ground vanished from beneath them. A split second later, Robbin, Juliana, Elaine and Cedric were falling into the roaring, black void of the canyon, surrounded by a crushing avalanche of rock and snow, whilst up on the ridge General Thorne's glowing blue eyes watched them descend.