Chapter 45:
Millipede

Jack and his four alien companions traveled north, from the dusty beige of the Mideast to the green hills and roiling mountains of Eastern Turkey. Jack had never seen the Turkish landscape before, and the mountains there spiked out of the ground defiantly as if the Earth itself were invading the sky. The intensity of the steep mountains and gorges took his breath away, and he badly wanted to stop and explore.

There wasn’t any time for that, though, and they flew on. Turkey gave way to green Georgia, followed by the Caucasus Mountains, a line of snow capped peaks which stood in a row like jagged teeth. On the other side, they found themselves in the remains of Russia, whose abandoned farmland stretched out in all directions like a patchwork quilt, so large that Jack thought he’d never see the end of it.

The colder climate and high altitudes slowed their progress, but they finally caught up with the Oikeyan legion after nearly three days of travel. The legion wasn’t difficult to find, like a insanely large herd of buffalo lumbering across the land, stretching more than fifty kilometers from beginning to end. It was populated by strange creatures, some as large as container ships, and attended by swarms of flyers darting from one part of the pack to the next, like flocks of birds before a storm. The multitude of stomping feet kicked up a dust cloud that billowed out toward the horizon and covered the ground in a dense and impenetrable haze.

Jack, joined to the flyer he named Felix, approached the herd cautiously from behind, nipping at their heels. “Holy crap,” his disembodied voice said once he was close enough to really appreciate the scale of it.

A rumble filled the air like endless thunder.

“You see,” Kai said, “we can’t fight this. Even the Nefrem would have trouble standing before this kind of force.”

Jack and Felix surged forward, weaving into and through the formation. He flew up alongside one of the great grey walkers, and marveled at the locomotive-sized cannon mounted atop it. He imagined a weapon that big could crack a mountain in two.

“We could talk to them, maybe convince them to stop.”

“Come on, Jack… do they look like they’re in a talking mood?” Kai shouted over the roar.

“There’s gotta be someone in charge who could put a stop to this. Some leadership.”

“There is,” Kai said, “The ones you call pilots are in control. The Alarhya. But they won’t listen to anyone anymore.”

“What changed?”

“Your tactics. Your kind left Yuon Kwon mangled and broken in the field, and that infuriated the Alarhya. They consider the vehicles sacred. When the suicide bombings began, it was the final straw.”

“Suicide bombings! What suicide bombings?”

“It started after your capture. Generators were too difficult to reach, so the terrorists went after population centers. Markets, parks and the like. I don’t blame your people, but you see how these things escalate?”

Jack peeled away from the walker and continued on through the herd, sliding between a pair of smaller creatures and then under the long legs of another massive walking cannon. His skills in darting through traffic had been honed to a razor’s edge through years of navigating highway 101 at rush hour, and the comparatively sparse and evenly spaced vehicles in the Oikeyan herd posed little challenge.

The legion inspired awe and terror in the same breath, and for the life of him, Jack couldn’t imagine anything he could do about it. He was watching an avalanche roll down a mountain in slow motion.

He couldn’t stop the avalanche, but there was still a chance to warn the village in its path. They couldn’t fight it, but they might be able to get out of the way. Where could a couple hundred million refugees go, though? Where could they hide that the legion wouldn’t hunt them down and slaughter them?

Jack’s disembodied voice asked, “Do you know their game plan?”

“They’re still using my organization and tactics. Did you see the long-necked Yuon Kwon at the back of the pack?”

“With lots of legs?”

“Those are the ones. Constructors. They’ll build fortresses and gun emplacements in a wide circle around the Ark to isolate it. Then the siege cannons move into place and beat the enemy into dust. Power comes from a young city Yuon Kwon that will hang back away from the fight.”

“I don’t see it.”

“He won’t come until the battle lines are secured.”

Kai’s description generally agreed with what Jack had seen at Al Saif. There were deep indentations in the ground where the temporary fortifications had sat, and Al Saif itself looked to have been blasted from multiple directions at once.

Jack and Felix continued on through the pack, studying all the many new types of Yuon Kwon he’d never seen before. There were walkers in all shapes and sizes, covered in weapons both familiar and not. The vast majority of flyers were the cuttlefish type Jack had often seen since the invasion began, but there were also groups of heavier flyers weighted down with payloads of seed-shaped bombs.

Jack felt a strange kinship with the Yuon Kwon all around him, and he started to wonder what the long term effects of piloting Felix might be.

“So the young city… that’s the legion’s weak spot?”

“If it has a weak spot, then yes. The city is the lynch-pin of whole organization, but don’t think it’s defenseless. It’ll be bristling with weaponry and have a large population of Sey Chen covering it in defensive membranes.”

“Sey Chen?”

“You call them monks. They have peculiar abilities.”

“And the defensive membranes? You mean like force fields or something?”

“What’s a force field?”

“Never mind.”

The two jackrabbits said something in the common language, quickly and tensely. Whatever they were talking about was worrying them.

“Ferash and Niko said we’re picking up unwanted attention. If you’ve seen what you need to see, we should leave, Jack.”

Jack hadn’t seen what he wanted. He was hoping for the impossible; a weak underbelly that he could stab at to stop the attack before it started. He’d learned as much as he could, though, and he allowed himself to drift to the back of the pack. When he’d fallen sufficiently behind the Oikeyan legion, he pulled away and headed for the hills to rest and think about his next move.

Whatever that would be.