In the scant shadow of the guardhouse, a greenhorn Border Legionnaire was waiting for the end of his first watch shift, gasping from the heat.
All around the XIX Floating Fortress sandy desert stretched off into the distance as he patrolled those ebon parapets. His only companion, the low and incessant buzz of the managems that powered the Fortress.
In the shadow of the Floating Fortress a small patch of farmland struggled to breathe through the heat. In that marginal strip, there were meager pastures and stretches of scrubby bushes, attacked for miles and miles by a fine sand, like a yellow talcum powder.
"This year the wind has put so much sand down," the marshal told him, biting a gray mustache, one of the last days before the Duty Beginning ceremony. "And behind the sand, the Those arrive".
He was glad he no longer had just a stunner to defend him from the Those, like the guardians of the border in former times, before the Legions. Once, it was thought to direct the Those into reserves to prevent them from doing too much damage with their insatiable hunger, but then they started to run away, to strip the flesh off every head of cattle, to waste fields and orchards, to devour even the people... and more and more came from the desert.
He had been among the first in his leverage class in combat and shooting exercises, but in his heart he was afraid of when he would found himself in front of a real That, and not an illusory image created by the trainers. It took him months to get used to the slouching and snappy movements of those lean and black illusions, all teeth, which he found horrifying.
During that first day of service, however, only an armored convoy had passed, transporting ordered and dull clusters of goleminers to the mysterious and vital mines of managems, on the other side of the desert. The Those did not find goleminers edible, luckily.
The Horn of Danger snatched him cruelly from his thoughts. Intruders in the fortress! How did they get in? How did they pass under our noses?
He grabbed the heavy terminator and ran down the spiral staircase, toward his team's collection point, his heart in his throat.
A scraping noise from a corridor to his right made him stop. Pointing the terminator in the dark, with a trembling grip, he shouted "Who goes there?!?"
The Those came out, completely different from the illusions of the trainers
Those wispy tendrils of night-clad armoured tails curled above toothy maws. Pyramidal heads with pale milky eyes and those broken backs, spines all wrong, seeming to pin them to the earth. He remembered his training. Don't let them move.
Brudada dumdada dummmmmmmmm.... the barrels of the terminator's hundred shot rotary mechanism whirred into action, a low growl in counterpoint to the incessant high pitch buzz of the fortresses mana-engines. He felt a jolt of excitement flash electric up his spine as the trigger vibrated under his thumb like an angry bee.
One of the Those cocked that chitinous head to the side, then everything went supernova. In his failing sight he saw two of the creatures dart back down the corridor as the first leaped at his face. The final thing he saw was that impossibly wide maw, gaping like a scorpion's pincer ready to snap.
Fire enveloped everything in front of him as the passage of the bullets exploded into a thousand molten pieces, white blue air charged through friction of a million ricochets expressed at the speed of sound. The Those disintegrated, black smoke dissipating. He walked behind the terminator, slow deliberate steps as he'd been taught. The ecto-suit bolstering the ailing muscles in his legs and shoulders as he descried languorous arcs filling the corridor with inferno. Bricks exploded around him from the heat, part of the ceiling collapsed around him but still the terminator screamed death enraged for a thousand dead marines.
He walked on, sure of one thing only. He was going to die, it was just a matter of how many bullets left.
Sluice gate open in mind-meld, second of many.
Meld activated, third of many. What is the attenuation?
Slight hum of human blood to left of center. Advise caution, it could be the salivated. Do not devour.
A black robed figure watched the Those emerge from the sand like killer whales in tales of oceans past. He knew what they were thinking, he knew the hunger. A rapacious rapture of constant pain, he drank it in as they approached and the meld became stronger. It almost overwhelmed him before his mind built a tolerance and the pain receded into thrumming waves of endorphin laced serotonin which washed through every synapse. The meld opened up and he experienced a thousand thoughts at once, saw a thousand deep cavernous caves, felt thousands of slick sand washed slivering movements. He shivered and spoke to the second of many through the mind meld.
When will we be one as Those? Transformation time...
He struggled to formulate the thought message. How to communicate time to a hive being. How to express the importance of self. Or in this case, the importance of losing self. A sudden flash of inspiration hit him as he cascaded down the chattering river of thoughts in the meld. He nodded at the third of many, then at the second and then jabbed a bony finger into his chest.
Fourth of many. His thought echoed back at him from the second to the third and into his mind like stone, disconnected from the rest of the meld. He understood that they had understood.
Bring us to the place of stone and cloud fourth of many, then we will devour you. Spittle popped and sizzled in that cavernous mouth as the Those licked long dagger teeth with a prehensile black tongue.
He shivered in rapture and keyed in coordinates to the mana-gloves transportation function. The creatures morphed form into soft sonorous lithe things, wrapping him round and caressing his fleshy folds.
The terminator ground to a halt and silence assaulted him. He waited, eyes closed, to feel spears of needle teeth pierce armour to flesh. To drive specks of mana-metal into his lungs, igniting breath to fire. He remembered training, Sephon had taught him well.
Pain is to be embraced. Learn to conquer association and you will master your mind and ultimately everything external.
He remembered those words before the time of endless silence. Before he had been left as sentinel.
He opened his eyes tentatively. The corridor opened out into blazing sun and the red brick of the fortress courtyard. He stumbled out and was struck numb. He fell to his knees. The black robed form of Sephon stared into his eyes from just inside the gate. Folded on knees in seeming supplication, he stared as the Those devoured his arms in neat chunks of lucid yellowing flesh eliciting bone ruptures. His lips spat words out to the heedless sky.
"Fourth of many."
"Fourth of many."
"Fourth of many."
Fourth of many.
Fourth of many.
The end.
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