J. Robert King - Invasion Cycle 01 - Invasion

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INVASION

INVASION CYCLE • BOOK I

J. Robert King

Chapter 1

To Fight Phyrexians

White clouds fled through blue skies. The sea chanted

fearfully below. Waves crowded shoulder to shoulder and

shoved each other. Gray land crouched at the edge of

Dominaria, hiding itself in veils of yellow steam.

Evil hung in the heavens. Something was coming,

something horrible, and it would emerge without warning

from clear air.

It came. The thing carved a sudden line in the sky. The

trough it cut deepened. It tore water from the air and

hurled it outward in white flames. This was no meteor, no

dumb stone from heedless heavens. This thing clove the

sky with intent.

Air streamed away from a lancing prow and saw-

toothed keel. It drummed gunwales of living wood on its

way into roaring intakes and across wide-swept wings. This

was a ship, a skyship — the sort that had ruled Thrannish

skies. Loose tongues told of new fleets built by Urza and

secreted away to fight Phyrexians, but who believed in

Urza? Who believed in Urza's bogey men? Who had ever

seen even a single skyship?

Until now.

It was a sleek and glorious, horrible thing, this

Weatherlight. Nature cringed away from it. Still, it was not

the dreamed-of evil. Something else was coming,

something far more horrible than Weatherlight.

Invasion

Tiny figures stood on her wind-ravaged deck—human

figures.

Behind a gleaming ray cannon on the forecastle was

strapped a man with black hair and angry eyes.

He shouted into a speaking tube, "Coordinates,

Hanna!"

A powerstone embedded in the mouth of the tube

snatched up his voice and hurled it a hundred feet aft to

the glass-enclosed bridge.

The words raked out over a slim, hunched woman.

Rules and styluses were clutched in one of her hands. The

other jotted slide-rule calculations in a hasty column.

Blowing an errant strand of blonde back from her face,

Hanna did her own shouting into the tube, "Working on it,

Commander Gerrard!" Across her navigation console,

compasses and gyros reeled. Hanna's eyes spun as she

watched them settle. "Good luck finding another navigator

who can pinpoint longitude without stars."

"I don't want another navigator," Gerrard answered

from the forecastle. He threw a grin back toward the

bridge. "I just want my favorite navigator to get us to

Benalia."

Hanna summed three columns of figures and assigned

functions to them. "We're still twelve hundred miles out,

this time north by northwest."

"Damn! That's the farthest of the three," Gerrard said.

"Where's the problem?"

"Not here," Hanna replied, confirming the calibration

of her altimeter.

"Not here, either," reported another woman, standing

at the helm. Her corded shoulders and ebony skin seemed

part of the ship's wheel she clutched. "Rudder, keel,

airfoils—everything's performing perfectly, including me."

J. Robert King

"I know, Sisay —" Gerrard answered, quickly adding—

"Captain. But something's throwing us off course. Karn, is it

an engine problem?"

The call echoed down tubes into steamy darkness—the

engine room. A vast drive-core dominated the space. Mana

conduits added their green light to the tepid glow of bolted

lanterns. Two crewmembers worked a giant torque wrench,

closing a valve. They did not pause to answer the

commander. A third crewmember, who seemed simply

another engine subreactor, spoke. Karn was a massive man

made of silver, and his voice was like a waterfall.

"No engine problem yet, but soon."

His silver back was bent toward the machine, his hands

embedded in twin operations ports. Micro-fibers extended

from the controls into his fingers, linking him to every

corner of the ship. All the rest of Weatherlight had endured

the planeshifting stresses well, but the engine was

beginning to overheat.

"We're having to douse the manifolds to keep them

from melting down. Push it too far, Gerrard, and you'll

have a puddle where your engine used to be."

Gerrard's laughter answered through the tube. "You

know me, Karn. I push everything too far. Sick bay, how

are the wounded holding up?"

"We're all fine down here," replied the ship's healer as

she tightened a strap over one of her patients. Sweat

beaded her forehead, and she raked her turban off. Out

spilled dark hair braided with coins. "The second planeshift

knocked my patients unconscious. There's been less

complaining since then."

"How're you holding up, Orim?" Gerrard asked.

"All this flashing into and out of existence makes

meditation sort of redundant," Orim said wryly.

Invasion

Another laugh came from Gerrard. "That's my crew.

Stouthearted comrades and complainers, all. Sisay, let's

have another go."

"Aye, Commander," said the woman at the helm.

"Hanna, pinpoint Benalia City, the Capashen Manor."

Gerrard reflexively glanced down at the Capashen symbol

tattooed on his left forearm. He would not likely be

welcomed in his old home.

"You got a street address? A house description?" Hanna

teased as she slid longitude and latitude indexes until they

aligned. "Locked in, Commander. Heading three,

seventeen, twenty."

"Aye," Sisay acknowledged. She turned the wheel,

bringing the prow up toward a roiling mass of cloud. "Karn,

initiate jump sequence."

The silver man's voice was drowned out by the engine's

eager surge.

"Hold on, everybody," Sisay called out.

Behind his ray cannon, Gerrard hunkered down. He

tightly clutched the handles of the fuselage. The cannon

harness was sufficient to hold him in place on a rolling

deck in the middle of a dogfight, but even those straps were

stressed by a planeshift. Gerrard shot a glance over his

shoulder to the starboard-side cannon. There, a minotaur

gunner clung with equal fury. Tahngarth's teeth were

gritted in determination, the closest he came to smiling.

Gerrard did smile. This was his ship. This was his crew.

They were the best damned fliers and fighters in Dominaria

and Mercadia, in Rath and Phyrexia. For years he'd heard

how he and his friends and this ship were supposed to save

the world. For the first time, he felt like they could.

That wasn't the only reason he smiled. There was no

better place to watch a planeshift than strapped to a

forecastle ray cannon.

J. Robert King

Beyond the rail, Dominaria vaulted suddenly forward.

The sky stretched out. Clouds frayed away to ropy lines of

mist. The heavens began to fold in on themselves. Where

before there was only beaming blue and white, now black

verges appeared in the separating seams of reality. The sky

held together only a moment more. It came to pieces.

Scraps of blue and white tumbled in a black wind.

Were Gerrard beyond the rail, that wind would have

torn him to pieces. It was chaos, pure and simple, the

ocean of potentiality in which all actual worlds floated.

Anything material that touched the chaos wind was

dissolved away into sparking energies and nothing.

Weatherlight and her crew were wrapped in an envelope

of saving air. It died to stillness around them. The roar fell

silent. Beyond the energy envelope, storms of power raged.

Within it, only Weatherlight's engines sounded.

"Command crew to the bridge," Gerrard barked. He

undid the straps of his gunner's harness and strode across

the forecastle toward the stairs leading amidships.

Tahngarth followed. The minotaur leaped the stairs and

landed amidships with a thump. Gerrard joined him at the

bottom, and they marched across the trembling deck. From

the central hatch ahead, Orim emerged. Her feet trod softly

between hoof and boot. The three approached the bridge.

A fourth crewmember scuttled up to join them.

Gerrard arched an eyebrow. "Since when are you part of

the command crew, Squee?"

The goblin winced downward, as though accustomed to

being cuffed. He smiled all the same. "Karn can't make it.

He say Squee go talk for him."

"That'll be the day," Tahngarth rumbled.

The four comrades climbed the stairs from amidships to

the bridge. They opened the hatch and one by one

clambered through. Mana conduits glowed around them.

Invasion

"Here it is!" Hanna declared from the navigator's

console. "Look, here—three loci of topographic

disturbance."

Gerrard stalked toward her and stared down at a map of

Benalia. Hanna was marking Xs in an equilateral triangle

above the nation.

"Three loci of —?"

"I've calculated it all out," Hanna said. Her blue eyes

flicked impatiently as she rapped the back of her hand on a

pile of figures. "There are disturbances here, here, and here.

Geometric disturbances."

"Geometric—"

"Distortions in the fabric of space. Stretched-out

geometry. They shunt us off our target like a drop of rain

off an umbrella. That's why we can't get to Benalia."

Gerrard's eyes were grim beneath stormy brows. "Good

work, Hanna. Any idea what might be causing these

distortions?"

She breathed deeply, pausing for the first time in hours.

"We ourselves make a geometrical disturbance every time

we planeshift. It's a simple fold of space with a localized

effect—two hundred yards or so. These things are warping

space for a thousand miles each."

"That's a heck of a big ship," Squee offered.

Hanna shook her head, hands in sudden motion again

as she dragged a folio of Phyrexian ship designs from

beneath her desk. They were plans she had gleaned from

the wrecked armada base in Mercadia. She spread them

out. The ships depicted there were massive and grotesque.

They bristled with hornlike protrusions. Their hulls seemed

bone or carapace.

"No, even the largest ships we saw in Mercadia could

not make that kind of disturbance."

"Brace for reentry," Sisay warned.

J. Robert King

The crew each grasped handholds and watched as

reality swam up around the ship. Scraps of sky and sea

schooled densely beyond the dissipating energy envelope.

The blackness of chaos was shut out behind bright, sinuous

order. Fleeing cloud, clashing wave, cowering land—it

might have been the exact same spot they left.

"Coordinates," Gerrard asked gently.

"Working on it, Commander," Hanna answered, ship

plans cascading from her desktop as she noted new

magnetic readings.

Squee scrambled to gather the plans.

"They aren't ships," Sisay broke in from the helm. She

guided Weatherlight smoothly through racks of cloud.

"Ships would make only a momentary disturbance. Unless

they were continuously planeshifting in and out of the

same spot, it wouldn't be ships."

"Unless they were portal ships," Gerrard said in sudden

realization. He took the ship schematics from Squee,

unrolled one, and spread it on the console. It showed a

massive ship that seemed a crab claw opened wide. "When

these pincer portions here and here pivot downward, they

create a portal between them." He dragged the schematic

away and pointed at the three spots on the map. "Those are

huge aerial portals opening above Benalia. We're not

talking about three Phyrexian ships. We're talking about

hundreds pouring out of three separate portals."

Despite the flurry of paper on her work space, Hanna

finished her calculations. "We're twelve hundred miles

southwest of Benalia City."

Sisay hissed, "Even at top speed, it would take us nearly

two hours to get there."

Tahngarth pounded his palm with his fist. "The

Phyrexian ships are already coming across."

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