The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Four

The waiting was putting to test even his inhuman, logic-driven patience. Even though it was widely accepted that, on occasion, the flow of Time abroad the surface of Teshiwahur was fitful and only marginally linear, the perception of its passing to a sentient mind still remained a prisoner to personal frame of reference. To the impatient, waiting was painful. Still, he supposed that it wasn't considered particularly good form to be in a hurry to spill the blood of others.

That particular personality trait was a flaw and one he was always working to correct. It irritated him that he had been intentionally designed to have flaws. It made him like Them ... like the humans. And that was something he would not tolerate.

It was quiet, strangely so, and The City wasn't so much descending slowly into evening as it was tensing before the onset of trauma. One could hear the sigh of the sluggish breezes stirring the sands, creating faint whispers as the coarse granules shifted, tumbling over one another. The soft, ever-present crackle and hum from the ion wave field played with the audio-perceptions of anyone listening, creating a collective noise that vaguely resembled the echoes of muttered conversation. The sage-colored sky was deepening to the color of viridian ash and the light from the planet's suns was splayed, like the ribs of an opened handheld fan, across the undulating horizon of sand dunes, reaching towards the walls of Niyaddour.

For just a moment, the scene reminded him of the early days of his Awakening, back on the moon Pex'Insava, within the cold confines of the Forge-Enclave in the fortress-spaceport city of Abyssium. His world inside that supra-technologic communal bee-hive, so new to him then, had been an invigorating cavalcade of miracles that had challenged his intellect and his perceptions -- his eyes had beheld wonders everywhere he'd looked. But that quickly changed, his wonder souring to cynicism, then to anger, and then nihilism as he'd realized that his environment inside the automated and mechanized, isolated neuro-networked incubatorium had been simultaneously a factory, a prison and a stockyard.

Emaris Staurqe stopped himself even as nostalgia began its hypnotic pull. Such memories were a distraction. It would do him no good to think back on that. The Past was dead. Concentrate on The Now.

Outside The City he floated in shadow, hovering a trio of meters above the ground, under the wind-sculpted, rocky overhang of low-lying mesa arch as dusk's first moments were birthed. From his position, he could see light gleaming off the battered armor of aerial troop carriers and mag-lev assault tanks at the Centaurius Emperii Primilion encampment.

The armored troops were billeted in long, linear, collapsible, honeycomb-walled quonset huts arranged in a semi-circular formation in four sets of eight huts around a central equipment and munitions distribution hub. The huts, set along directional lines of the compass, were further divided by troop divisions which were identified by colorful neon lightbars serving as flag-standards, raised above the huts, glowing dully in the evening shadows. Several stories above the beige-colored quonsets, casting deep shadows across the combat outpost's gunnery placements, the huge aerial troop carriers hovered, relaying electrical power to the battlefield mobile computer-tech serving the encampment by way of wireless-feed transmission.

Staurqe recognized the insignia on the holo-projected military standard flying above the camp. So, naturally, wherever the Emperii Primilion were, so, too, Supreme Battle-Marshal of the Armor-Guard Prime, Manduryus Ha'akmar, would be. The fortuitous synergy of recent events was both gratifying and unsettling.

Manduryus Ha'akmar, as a young Officers' Corp Journeyman in the Emperium's elite Territorial Expanse Star Legion, had been responsible for leading a small contingent of anthropoid cybernetic weapons systems, soldiers with organic metal flesh, progression-evolved and mass-imaged by a top secret Emperium program, to the ruins of the Forge-Enclave. Once there, the soldiers, who were architected to supplant the so-called "failure" of the Kodespawn program, hunted down and eliminated all the survivors of the anti-human rebellion.