Chapter 149 - Newton’s Vague Suggestions

  It was good to know the null devil wasn’t immune to all of Newton’s laws. Even if it did seem to ignore the ones inconvenient to a massive creature floating in the air. But it still had mass and momentum, and whatever mechanism it used to fly did not completely negate the principle of inertia. As we passed, I could see the spots where the missiles had impacted, digging divots into its flesh. The chitinous armor was strong—maybe stronger than the whistler’s, but not invincible.

  You’re not going to beat me, I promised it.

  A score or so of the drogue chutes trailed the creature, whipping in the air. We’d need more, dozens more, to start having an effect. Armstrong angled the guns almost straight down, so that I was almost dropping the heavy shells into the breeches of the recoilless rifles. The rifles of the other orc fighter impacted as well. But we’d run out of shells before we slowed the creature enough to outmaneuver it. We needed the rest of the fleet.

  Behind us, a hatch on the bottom of the jet opened, spilling out a thick, black jelly that splashed across the creature’s hide. I reached into the magazine and pulled out a special orc shell.

  “Armstrong!”

  “Got it, boss!”

  I shoved the shell into his gun and he aimed for the black jelly and fired. The shell burst with a bright phosphor flare as it spiraled down, impacting maybe a hundred meters behind the target.

  “I shoulda’ hit it!”

  Reaching into the magazine, I pulled out another flare. The creature was starting to turn around.

  “We don’t have time for a full physics lesson, Armstrong. The shell keeps moving the same speed as the jet. Calculate where that momentum will carry it into your target,” I said.

  “Boss, you know I don’t go in for all that maths stuff the noblins keep pushing,” he said.

  “Then use your gut,” I said, slamming the new flare home. “Just hit the damn thing!”

  Armstrong swung his turret to the rear, where the creature had turned into a bank itself, its tail snaking side-to-side as though it were swimming through an invisible ocean. Armstrong stuck his tongue between his teeth, squinted his eyes, and lifted his gun barrels up before firing the second flare.

  This time the flare shell arced up, and the creature turned directly into it. The burning phosphor skipped across its carapace just ahead of the slick oil and then showered it with sparks. Within a second, the fire spread across a surface maybe 20 square meters on its back, and the creature howled. It sounded like a passing tornado combined with shattering glass. Even with the ear cups on, I had to press them to my head to keep the deafening sound out. At least it could feel pain. At least it could be hurt. I had worried we were going up against some sort of immortal, invulnerable life form that we wouldn’t even understand as life. But if it had no love of fire, then even this alien creature must be flesh and blood beneath that armor.

  The null devil twisted again, this time angling upwards. It spiraled up into the sky as the flames trailed from its back. Lura swung us around into an orbit with the other remaining fighter, and the starbursts and smoke trails of their recoilless rifles continued to harry the creature. I spotted the second scout wing as well, swinging in from the north and climbing to match our altitude.

  Eileen’s voice crackled on the radio. “Boss, we’re airborn in the C2 jet. Just gained a pair of Ifrit who jumped over the radio. What’s going on?”

  “We lost… a jet,” I said, huffing and puffing as I continued loading for Armstrong. “Need more … guns on this thing.”

  “Boss, my head feels funny,” said Armstrong.

  My chest heaved with effort, and I looked outside. The sky devil was still climbing, and the flames on its back were starting to gutter and spit as it weaved between the desert clouds. The System’s altitude measurement was still broken, but I figured we must have been passing 6,000 chooms or so. High enough for hypoxia to start affecting goblins, apparently.

  “Bottles!” I called, pressing the microphone to my mouth. “Bottle up!”

  I reached up and grabbed a metal cannister, fixing it to my belt and pressing the mask to my face. Twisting open the valve sent a blast of dry, cold air into my mouth and my head instantly felt clearer. Armstrong repeated my action, and hopefully the rest of the crew was going onto their air.

  I had anticipated the devil might try something like this. It had fallen from space, after all. It could roar, so it must have some sort of respiratory system, but the thin air and frigid temperatures of high altitude were still far gentler than the hard vacuum of the cosmos that spat it down into Rava’s gravity well.

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  All the parts were there. We had compressors, metal tanks, rubber hoses, and desiccants. And survival at high altitude was a critical step on the path to space. Couldn’t well go to the moon if you couldn’t breathe on the trip.

  The null devil continued to climb, heedless of the dropping temperature that started to frost over the glass of the turret. I half expected it to fly all the way to space, but it leveled out above the clouds, smoke trailing from the burnt section of its back.

  One of the orc fighters was too slow to respond to the sudden change in its trajectory, and its claws swiped across the tail of the aircraft, shattering the empennage. The aircraft started to spin, and the orc pilot ejected. In the cabin above us, something squawked and a bright blue flash of sparks illuminated the bulkheads as one of the Ifrit made the jump to our aircraft. I didn’t know where the other one had gone.

  I stomped on the pedal for the magazine, but the hatch slid back to reveal an empty chamber.

  “Lura, we ran out of the recoilless rounds!”

  “Aye, empty are my racks as well,” came one of the other orc pilots.

  “The same said for mine, but I’ve still the nose guns!”

  Lura’s voice cut through the chatter. “The beast‘s swiftness has been cut some. Aim for the armor we’ve thinned with the little brothers’ rockets. Elsewise, return to the Lake of China and return with magazines renewed.”

  Lura hauled us around, and we came in from an angle toward the skyborn behemoth.

  “Lura,” I said, “You’ve got 200 cannon rounds. Make ‘em count.”

  “I shall, little brother!”

  As we drew closer, closer than I would have liked, if I’m being honest, I could see the damage the initial wave of missiles had caused. Black, weeping wounds had opened on the creature’s head and arms, trailing black viscous goo that must pass for its blood. I keyed my microphone again. “Lura, the left side of its… erm… face, just above the jaw.”

  “Mine eyes are keen to have seen the same. We fly, o’ king!”

  With the magazine empty, I had little to do but watch as the creature filled the turret dome with its size. Lura began to chip away with her self-cycling guns, spitting rockettes at the wound on the null devil’s head. Part of the salvo hit home, and the bastard flinched, raising a claw to shield itself, but breaking off its pursuit of the other fighter. We were hurting it. And if we could hurt it, we could bring it down. It was just a matter of resources. And we had plenty of reinforcements coming with missiles and guns of their own.

  Lura rolled us to the right, skirting the massive claw and riding the ridges along the creatures back. It brought its barbed tail up to swat at us, but the orc huntress deftly banked away and we sunk down, inverted, and passed beneath its underbelly.

  “Umm, boss?” asked Armstrong. “Is legs supposed to also have legs?” he asked.

  I turned around to stare at him. “What?”

  He pointed above us, at the hundreds of spindly legs tapping away at nothing in the air, running down the creature’s length. They seemed to branch off into thick hairs or silia of their own, and I would have mistaken them for a sensory organ, had I not caught sight of the barbed end of one limb as it whipped through the air. Maybe the law of primacy had blinded me after fighting the millipede-like whistler. Each of what I’d thought was a limb was a tiny version of the null devil. And even as I watched, one of them broke off from the larger one, mouth dripping with black ichor. It caught sight or scent of us and started to move into our shadow, mouth parts clicking with too many prehensile mandibles.

  The legs with legs weren’t legs. They were nursing young. Hundreds of them. And they were getting pissed.

  So much for no reinforcements! I thought. Everything I had thought of, every contingency for taking on a creature the size of an office building, and never had it occurred to me that we would have to fight its young. It had killed all the rest of its kind, but apparently that was a result of running out of resources to feed its brood. Mama wasn’t the only hungry, hungry horror.

  Our tail gun barked to life as the gunner spotted our pursuit, but the self-cycling rear gun cut off with a report of shattering glass. Armstrong and I looked at each other for just a moment before we scrambled from the nose turret, climbing up through the hatch to the main cabin of the heavy orc fighter.

  “What devilry is this?” demanded Lura from the front of the plane.

  “The legs are actually juvenile null devils, hundreds of them!” I said.

  “Spirits! This must I see!”

  The jet banked, and I braced against the hull as I continued to work my way back toward the empennage. Armstrong pulled his double-barreled rifle from where he’d stowed it and checked to make sure it was still loaded before pushing up ahead of me to the tail gunner’s station and climbing the small ladder to the rear dome. Of the goblin who had been manning it, there was no sign except a tuft of blue fur clinging to the broken glass. The tail gun hung limp in its gimbal.

  Outside the broken glass, a black, faceted body smashed at the aircraft, coiled up and attempting to widen the breakage enough to fit through. It was smaller than a night haunt, but denser and with those long, thin slicing pincers and the barbed tail that shrieked as it dragged across the glass.

  Armstrong lifted his rifle and let the thing have it with both barrels. The sound was deafening in the tight confines of the jet, and the plane bucked as its pilot flinched. But the creature recoiled back as well, and I scrambled up, taking hold of the tail gun before it could resume its attack. I hauled the handles around, pointing the barrel at the belly of the null devil’s offspring and thumbed the triggers down. The tail gun shot a volley of rockettes directly into the underside of the creature. The first few only chipped its black chitin, but soon they began to punch all the way through. I didn’t let up until the thing twisted back away from the canopy and slid off the empennage and out of sight.

  “Nice job, boss!” shouted Armstrong from below me. I didn’t answer him. There were at least five more of the creatures fanned out around us and coming up fast. And behind them, the air around the null devil was filled with the swarming creatures and the flash of goblin guns as the devil nymphs gave chase to the rest of the recon wing.