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His mind flashed back to the fall of his own city, before he was taken in here …
one of the few to be offered a place because of his skills.
That creature had been smaller than this, something like a centipede.
That attack, so like this one, drew him back to the moment it all went wrong.
In his memory, he saw his triumph as the World Gate opened …
the passage to the new place, the new world, free of Predators.
He felt the nausea rise as the memories came.
He was back there again, in the pillar above the Gate, completing the complex spells needed to open it, and looking down onto the rank upon rank of low-borns.
Thousands of scrubs, the dregs of society, drafted to be the explorers and the expendable.
They were lined up in neat blocks with their overseers and the equipment needed to conquer and colonize.
His own part, near the master control … his project and his crowning achievement.
He had raised the spells and opened the Gate, drawing the vast powers that would connect this world to the next, and allow the passage that would begin their conquest of their new world.
In his memory he saw the Gate open, the scintillating colors flare from the mouth, and settle into a rainbow of hues.
In the background, behind the Gate, the city’s Shield-wall dimmed.
It faded as the Gate came into its full power.
Something he had not anticipated. Ambient energy was …
ambient! He should have been able to power the Gate while the Shield stood tall and proud.
But the opposite had happened. The Shield failed. The monsters poured through the weakened barrier.
Immediate panic as the city’s wall failed and Monsters flooded in through the breach.
The city’s defenders had initially rallied, as those of Veridian now rallied against the Polycephalus.
Then the retrievable situation collapsed as word spread there was an escape.
The low-borns’ neat ranks collapsed as scrubs did what scrubs do …
panicked and ran. They swarmed the Gate, piling through in a mad rush, crashing priceless equipment into themselves and each other in the mad rush to escape.
Each person, each precious machine, all drawing power from Gate to send them whirling to another world …
a mad rush instead of the neat progression his calculations required.
He remembered looking at the swirling, coruscating colors of the Gate, the flares that signaled the strain and the imminent signs of failure as the overtaxed World Gate tried to compensate.
He vividly remembered considering making a run for the Colony World himself, but became too afraid of the crush.
Many elves lay dead, trampled in the fear that infected the mass.
Still, for a long moment, stuck in indecision, he thought hard about running for the colony.
A short sprint, and a new world, with new opportunities, and no Predators.
He had even looked about him for his pack, supplies for an emergency retreat he always kept with him.
Then, a machine struck the console platform, a piece of debris struck him, and it all went dark.
And without warning, everything went dark again.
He came back to himself, sweating and curled up on the workroom floor.
Another blackout. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been away this time, but the tower hadn’t fallen and the battle still raged.
He pushed himself up off the ground and looked out over the tower window.
He’d been out long enough for more Machina to deploy.
He did a quick count and came up with tem.
About half the Machina had left their sheds.
He felt sick to his stomach. This had been a longer blackout.
Minutes at least. This was the longest blackout of his life, the worst so far.
He reached out and touched the tower wall for reassurance.
Veridian. You are here now. Veridian. Oldest of the old.
Built on rock, and a survivor. The number of cities diminished and Elvendom might fade, but Veridian held fast.
He struggled against the memories, felt himself sliding backward, caught up in the diminishing number of older cities in the slow fade of Elvendom that marked the last hundred years.
He recalled awakening here, in this city, taken in on sufferance, as he had skills.
Once he’d healed he’d learned the cost of the mad panic before the Gate.
The panic had cost irreplaceable machinery, depleted (what had been) twenty cities of critical workers and fighters, exhausted the treasuries and granaries, and set what remained of Elvendom on an unrecoverable downward spiral.
And the only thing that had saved him from retribution had been that someone had pulled him out of the wreckage, and through a smaller Transit Gate to here, before the final convulsion and loss of his home.
His salvation … that he had been lying half-unconscious from the final efforts of creating that Gate.
It had been the job of others to protect it, the job of others to maintain the Shield, a job at which they had failed.
And the consequences of that failure had left them demoted to the status of menials, replacing some of those escaped scrubs, forever stripped of rank, title, and privileges.
The Predator screamed again, wiping away the cobwebs of memory. He struggled, his mind disordered, trapped between the images of the past and present.
“Face it,” he said to himself. “Get up and face it.”
He stood and went to observe. The Machina had come into play from their sheds along the wall, stepping in neat, ordered ranks, until they deployed.
Two by two, then peeled off, moving with the peculiar matched precision that marked a single controlling mind.
Two turned as one, aligned with two more, then four more, stepping as one as they moved into position.
Watching their movements, Haldeen realized that reinforcements hadn’t yet arrived, and that a single Manipulator had brought the dormant machines out of their sheds.
The Machina moved as a single unit, their steps in unison, until they stood in a single row.
They made small sideways adjustments along the top of the wall, keeping so close to the battlements that they scraped stone.
Haldeen watched as they pivoted, turning their chests towards the Monster.
He heard the whining as their copper shot furnaces spun up, rotating as they heated the shot and shaped it for release.
He closed his eyes against the bright light as they ripple-fired from right to left, each Machina releasing its main weapon at close range into the monster’s side.
Once the main weapons had fired, Haldeen watched as the dozen-odd Machina took a step to the left, pivoted, and launched their firelances.
They opened fire all at once, discharging weapons as they continued to move to their right and along the Monster’s side.
Haldeen nodded approvingly. It took a good Manipulator to fire the Machina as they moved, a better one to divide their mind, and work multiple Machina independently, and to spin out their personal magic in small refinements as each weapon engaged.
It took a fine magician to handle more than one Machina moving.
It took an extraordinary Manipulator to move twenty Machina, all firing, into battle position.
He hoped this Manipulator survived long enough to collect the medal and his reward, though.
More than one had overstrained themselves, and when that happened, there usually wasn’t enough left for the pyre.
A distant movement caught his eye, and he glanced up, then locked on the horizon.
He had a clear view of what else was going on out there from the top of his tower.
In the distance, he saw more of the great Predators, large and small, with no two alike, moving through the forest.
They were just at the edge of the clearing surrounding the city, with other larger ones crossing the forested ridge that had formerly held the preserve …
until that had been lost. He counted a dozen large enough to shift the trees when they moved, and likely thousands more of the little ones …
things his size with too many (or too few) legs.
His earlier fears were ghosts from the past, but the one that rooted in his belly now came from the Predators that stayed in the distance, waiting … watching? as this one attacked.
These creatures watched from the safety of the trees, safely out of the fight, and apparently content to let this bolder one attack the city on its own.
He glanced up at the city’s shield, and saw the wavy green sky above.
For all the stress down below, the Shield appeared sound.
Thank the Seven Kings. If it went down, then he had no doubt that those waiting just outside of long-range weapons would be over and through the wall in a trice.
This was not where he wanted to be, but at this point, with guards and Machina moving through the hall, it was almost as dangerous to try and go down to safety.
The smells of the burned creature, the acrid odor of the expended firelances, even the hot-metal smell from the Machina as they charged their mass launchers, overwhelmed the usually crisp, controlled air of his tower.
The sound roared up and washed over him, a mix of thunder, the screams of the injured and the dying from below, and the roars of the creature, metallic screeches as its heads gave voice to whatever it was feeling had no difficulty in making a mockery of the “soundproofing.”
Haldeen felt the sweating and shakes rising up in him again, and he feared another blackout.
He’d been careful to make his excuses when called to the King’s Chamber to observe and comment on tactics and responses.
He’d been able to sit apart as the others crowded close, and to be alone with his miseries and memories.
This battle, enough like the one before to throw him into memory without warning, brought all of it back.
He felt as he had the century before when the Colonization had failed, the scrubs had panicked and rushed through, and the city had fallen.
It had been a hundred years since he had last witnessed, or fought in, a battle in person.
The darkness threatened to sweep over him again.
His last thought: The Predators have never come this close to my tower before.
This time, he controlled the fear, turned it back.
He steadied his breathing, taking the slow and deep cycles, and letting the fear out with each exhalation.