Then hundreds of throats roar: “GAAAANFAAAAGH.”
The Heraklions may have impressed me with the discipline of their evacuation, but the roar flips a switch. In an instant, they disintegrate into a mob of animals. Silent at first, they surge against us, against the battle line of Grays holding the half-filled lift. Then, once the Grays are swamped, do the berserkers attack everywhere all at once. Only the animals begin to bay. Screams and bodies clamor all around. Pressing in on me like a vise.
I can see nothing but flashes of insanity—panic-struck faces, clenched fists, falling bodies, barbarian butchers clad in darkness, children losing the hands of their mothers or fathers, boots on their backs. I clench Cassius’s belt for all I’m worth, terrified I’ll fall and be trampled. He plows through the madness with Sigurd. I can see the transport through them. We’re close. Twenty paces off. Then something slithers overhead. The transport and the Owls guarding it disappear in a flash of white light. Heat washes over me. I fly back like a ragdoll.
My head spins. My brain aches. I gasp. I’m on the stone ground. My ears wail. I retch as I try to stand. A knee knocks me flat. A boot steps on the back of my head. Another presses on my hand. I use a man’s body to crawl to my knees. His elbow glances off my nose but I gain my feet only to be trampled under a trio of back-pedaling Silvers. Two of them spill down and we scramble at one another. Someone else falls on me. Fingernails rake my face. A knee falls on my stomach. A shoe steps on my right breast. I wheeze and punch the Silver. I’m tangled in his balls until he stops squirming and untangles from me. I scramble up.
Cassius is nowhere to be found. I’m too short to see anything through the chaos.
Disoriented, I take cover at the base of a monument to some famous Gold holding a pyramid over his head. My ears ring as I clutch the stone of the statue’s base. I climb up to its waist to see over the havoc. The shuttle is a fiery wreck. Refugees swamp the sealift. Its doors try to close only to be jammed with bodies. Then a ragged cheer goes up.
People turn and point. A flight of shining Golds descends from the acropolis of Heraklion. The cheers die as glowing brands slither up from the sea. Missiles. White light flashes in the sky, and when the light dims, the Golds are twirling debris.
The station is turning into a bloodbath. Horror greets me everywhere I look. I can’t stay here. I don’t know what to do. I search for Cassius and find him twenty paces off fighting a taller berserker. Sparks shower as spear meets razor. Cassius turns the spear up and sticks his razor in the berserker’s chest. Sigurd appears, and slams his axe into the berserker’s back. I climb higher up the statue and wave at Cassius. Cassius raises his razor when he sees me. He levitates over the crowd with his gravBoots to meet me at the base of the statue. Sigurd joins us, shouting into his com.
“Sigurd!” Cassius shouts when he sees the chaos at the lift. “We can’t stay here.”
Sigurd motions him to wait and ducks his head to listen to his com. Cassius is not having it and grabs my hand and drags me after him away from the courtyard. Sigurd rushes after. “My friends. They say they will come to us.”
“Where?” Cassius shouts.
Sigurd points up to the acropolis in the distance, the highest place in the tiered city. Cassius’s expression falls. “Anywhere but here!” I shout.
“I’ll fly you,” he says.
“Did you not see the Golds?” I ask. His face hardens and his eyes settle on the pedestrian bridge that links the sealift station to the city.
He leans down to say over the noise: “I am your shield. Stay in my shadow.” Sigurd fires at something behind us. “Move.”
The two armored men and I set off at a run.
Soon the sounds of the station are lost in the tick tick tick of our loping gait and the panting of my breath in my ears. At first there are others on foot like us but after we clear the bridge, the crowd thins, and we run alone into the low city, bound for the jump pads.
Jupiter stains the glass and stone buildings in bronze light. The meandering stone ways are abandoned but for long-legged cats with bones as thin as birds that watch us from windowsills. One hunts a shadow on the ground. I don’t need to look up to know the shadow belongs to an Ascomanni ship. It roars past overhead firing at something before disappearing behind a great library complex. Two more ships follow it. Armored figures stream out their sides to fall onto the city.
Fear fuels my legs.
We turn right onto a shopping agora and see its pedestrian jump pad is still active. We take it at a run, and I feel myself go light and my stomach lurch a little as I sail up in a parabola maybe eighty meters before arching back down toward another jump pad set in a public water garden. Its gravity field slows me just as I land. I stumble, Cassius steadies me, and we run on to the next, ascending each ring of the city a jump at a time.
Wind whistles past. The sea roils in the distance and emits a deep groan. Only it’s not the sea. I look up. The great shield that protected Heraklion from the sky is gone. A moment later, four molten fists begin their descent from orbit. Ships. Big ones.
A smaller gunship flies past overhead. It catches us in its wake and hurls us off the aerial path. All three of us crash down onto a rooftop garden. The plants below absorb most of my fall but pain jolts through my left shoulder as I hit the turf. Scrambling through flowers to the edge of the garden where Cassius stands, I see the gunship drawing up a half-klick away. Its guns wink as it fires down at the city’s defenders in the high-rise bunkers.
There’s movement in a higher garden on the level above. Cassius jerks his pulseFist upward. Three Grays look down at us. They’re young. Maybe my age. They nod their heads. Two carry long metal rods. The third some sort of launcher. Cassius shouts at them to stop as they aim the launcher at the gunship. I don’t know why.
The Grays fire. The only evidence of the missile leaving their launcher is a faint thread of distortion in the air. They score a hit. The gunship belches fire. Sigurd shouts he’s found a way down. Cassius pulls me along, and we run before the Grays start loading the second missile. I hurl myself off the garden after Cassius and Sigurd, then down to the next, and the next below that. We’re halfway down the block when heat washes through my bones from behind. In the reflection of a carver’s store window, I see a pillar of light tethering the building we just abandoned to a warship so high above it looks like a splinter. Then the light is gone, and the building crumbles.
I’m choking and spitting dust out of my mouth by the time we land in the acropolis of Heraklion. I wipe tears from my eyes and turn to see Sigurd looking down. The lower city has begun to rattle and groan with war machines beneath a shroud of dust and smoke. Anger swells in me, an anger I see on Cassius’s dust-caked face too. “Where are your friends?” I ask Sigurd.
He looks up at the sky. “On their way, they said. They said to meet them in the relic garden.”
Cassius is wary. “Where’s that?” I ask.
“I’ve been here before,” Cassius says. “Follow me.”
The acropolis has been abandoned, mostly. Its high gardens lie untouched by the invasion below. Sigurd watches the sky as we pass through the gardens. Fountains as tall as ten men babble water. Birds chirp on the shoulders of stone tyrants and in the boughs of fat olive trees. And there’s music.