Chương 9: A New Kind of Portal

The mantises came at them like a tide, their strange bodies glinting metallic in the noon light. All around them, machine guns were opening up, and Malachi thought he heard the mortars and artillery coming down. Explosions ripped through the street.

"Epsilon, gamma, grenades!" Corporal Booth shouted. Malachi pulled his pin and lobbed, then braced again, just in time for the tidal wave of bodies to crash into them. He stabbed again and again as Juan heaved against his shield to hold back the swarm. More explosions ripped through the air, and Malachi's ears started ringing. Together, he and William impaled a mantis that was trying to scramble over the shield wall.

The problem was, the bodies were stacking so fast that now the swarm was attacking them from the top. Others were leaping up on top of the APC. Malachi had to turn to stab one that was clinging to the side, scrambling towards Nicole. If they fought here, the line would be attacked from the rear. It was an untenable position.

"Trey! TREY! Pull the APC back! We need to do a fighting retreat!" Malachi yelled. There was a pause, then he heard Corporal Booth shout, "Do it! Phalanx, fighting retreat!" The APC began to wheel. As Malachi's line took a step back, bug bodies toppled forward. Juan planted his shield again. A scythe arm came slamming down on top of his shield, sending sparks flying, but the shield held. Then there was the horrible sound of the bugs vomiting. Magical acid pooled on the ground. They took another step back.

"Shit! Shit!" he heard. Turning, he saw that two mantises had gotten atop the APC. Nicole had ducked down inside the hatch, but the bugs were now scrambling to get at her with their bladed arms. Malachi checked the line. They needed that machine gun back online. He turned, still holding his spear in one hand, and scrambled up the side of the APC, muscles heaving as he gripped pieces of the armor for purchase. With a shout, he used one arm to heave himself up and used the momentum to carry his spear thrust forward.

He skewered one of the bugs right through the torso, then finished pulling himself up. The second mantis turned, but Malachi's spear was still caught in the first. He ducked a slash from the blade-arm, then slammed his shoulder into the bug. Then he let go of his spear and drew his belt knife. As he stabbed it over and over with one hand, he used his buckler to deflect a slash. When it shivered, he pushed it over the edge into the street, then sheathed his knife and grabbed his spear.

He planted his foot in its center mass so he could yank the spear out.

"You okay?" he shouted at Nicole.

"Peachy!" she shouted and got back on the machine gun. In the moment before he dropped back down to the phalanx line, he got a good look at the swarm that was attacking them. Oh fuck was all he could think. The street was full of them, and they were still pouring in. He glanced east. The column, the one that was supposed to be the four-line highway they would retreat along, had been cut; the small groups left behind had been overwhelmed almost immediately.

Several of the APCs were now driving around in zig-zag patterns, trying to shake off the dozens of bugs that were now vomiting acid all over them. Malachi got back in line and kept stabbing. He and William worked like a well-oiled machine together, covering each other without a word when one of them needed to step back or deal with a bug trying to scramble up the APC.

"I'm almost out!" shouted Nicole above them. The machine gun's barrel was red-hot. A helicopter blitzed by overhead, minigun whirling, but there were just too many of them.

"Corporal, we have to get out of here! Retreat to a better position!" Malachi shouted.

"Command wants us to stay. We only need—""Fuck Command! The corridor's been severed! We're about to get hit from the east!" Already, another of the APCs had wheeled around to try to help block that, but they were getting hit from all over.

"Above! Above!" someone shouted.

"They're on the buildings!" Sure enough, dozens of mantises were crawling across the roofs and moving over the sides of the nearby structures.

"Sir! We can't hold here!" Malachi slammed his spear into another mantis as they retreated again. The bugs were now heaped in the streets in piles, but more were coming. Interspersed with the dead bugs were the bodies of soldiers. The three teams defending this side of the street had already lost at least five.

"All units, all units, orderly retreat to the fortified objective. All units retreat," came a loudspeaker, and Malachi realized that Booth had climbed into the jeep and was giving the command himself. As they moved past the jeep, he could see why: the lieutenant who had been inside had been decapitated.

"Belay that!" someone shouted from the lobby of the building, but both sides of the defense were already moving backwards as fast as they could. Nicole detached the machine gun from the top of the APC and scrambled out. She slammed the hatch shut as Trey cut the gas and leapt out himself. He emptied his pistol at something Malachi didn't see. Five of the APCs were now all parked haphazardly in front of the building, while the sixth was crawling with bugs, abandoned.

The infantry all crowded into the lobby floor, and an impromptu phalanx formed, all of mixed together units. The glass windows of the building were all blown out, so there was about a hundred feet of front for them to defend—way smaller than the intersection. There were some screams outside. Not everyone had made it. Now, though, they had a solid shield wall that stretched around the lobby. The mantis blades continued to strike at the shield wall, but for a moment, they were holding.

"You good?" Malachi asked William. He nodded, though he looked terrified.

"I'm going to go talk to the brass." Malachi strode over towards the huddle of officers.

"—to court martial you!" one of the officers was saying to Booth.

"My command decision just saved the lives of everyone here," Booth snapped. Malachi came and stood by his side.

"Officers, with all due respect, that line was on the brink of collapse. More hostiles were coming in from the east. The corridor was already cut. If you have fortifications up there, we need to retreat to them. This line won't hold either. Why are we—?" But the question died on his lips, because he saw what was coming out of the elevator shaft. The power to the building had been cut at some point, but engineers had jury-rigged it so they could use pulleys to move one of the elevators.

Coming down now was a large device that took up almost the entire elevator, full of beautifully bundled wires, panels with glowing LED lights, and fancy looking dials. There were eight wheels at the bottom of the device so it could be moved around. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. That wasn't what drew Malachi's eye. What he focused in on was the glowing octahedron suspended in the middle of the device.

Each face of the octahedron was dark, but along the edges were hundreds of glowing glyphs—like the ones he'd seen on retrieved spellcasting devices. Only, these were active. Holy fuck. FeNyx's source had not only been right, the project was here. He gaped at the device, as a man he'd only seen on TV before walked out of the elevator, carefully directing the device out via remote. It was Dr. Chavez. He wasn't wearing the labcoat he tended to wear on all his TV appearances.

Instead, he was wearing some sort of light composite armor, but Malachi recognized him immediately. Suddenly, a lot of things made sense.

"…fuck do you think you are?" one of the officers was saying to Booth.

"Sir, just look out there. Please," Malachi said, trying to suppress the flash of anger rising in him. Goddammit, they'd figured out how to use magic somehow, and they'd kept it a secret!? The officer looked toward the battle line, then back at the device with the magic octahedron. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then stormed off to one of the chairs in the lobby, threw his hat down, then sat down in a huff.

One of the other officers gave the second officer a 'what-the-fuck' look, then turned back to the crisis at hand.

"Son—""Don't call me that," Malachi snapped without meaning to.

"Sir," he added belatedly. The man raised an eyebrow.

"Soldier. Get back in line. They need you. Corporal Booth—""Sir, the battle line is exhausting fast. We need to start consolidating to a more defensible position so we can rotate people in and out to rest. I'll leave you to your discussion, but I feel it is my duty to make sure you understand the situation." He started walking away. Maybe they'd dishonorably discharge him after the battle, but they had to live through the battle first. When he glanced back, though, the officer was looking out the window.

He heard a "Oh. Well fuck me sideways." So maybe they wouldn't. He made his way back to the line where William was. Everyone was sweating and tired.

"Take a break," he told William, because that was all he could do. Then they went back to the butchery. There was a long radio conversation that Malachi only half-heard as the brass tried to re-open the escape corridor, but it was clear it was going to take a lot longer than they wanted to assemble the troops and armor they'd need.

While that happened, there was ten more minutes of the ceaseless melee before the officers admitted they could no longer push out, that they really did need to wait for rescue, and they only admitted it when the third soldier collapsed backward in exhaustion. The piles of mantis corpses had started to form a barricade.

"Alright, organized retreat! Dr. Chavez, get the device back in the elevator. Corporals, start pulling everyone to the second floor. Again. We'll set up choke points at the two stairwells. Again. Then we'll need more men at windows, and help to hold the halls."

Two hours later, the building shook again with the impact of an artillery shell somewhere nearby. From the second floor, they could smell acrid smoke. Command had been lobbing incendiary shells and mortar rounds all around them so that the fires could degrade the enemy swarm. Malachi was resting while William and another soldier held the window at the other end of the apartment. In another few minutes, it would be his turn to hold the window again.

The mantises coming out of the portal had slowed to a trickle, but they still weren't stopping. The longer they stayed here, the more the tight feeling in Malachi's chest grew. The tension had sapped all the usual banter out of the air. Above them, on the fourth floor, the mantises had literally filled up the entire thing. Every apartment on the floor was packed with them. Every hall. Every so often, they'd cast their magic acid spell, and that much more of the concrete floor would get eaten away.

Some woman who said she had an engineering degree had calculated they had another half-hour before that floor collapsed and the bugs started in on the third floor. At least the building was a solid, concrete construction. The first floor was also full of bugs. Phalanxes held the stairwell in two directions. On the second floor, they'd barricaded a bunch of apartments and shut the doors, then set up more soldiers in the halls. The rest of the apartments, they'd taken over so people could rest in shifts.

The problem was, the more apartments they held, the more windows they needed to fight at. By now, the APCs they'd left parked out front were wrecked, completely melted by mantis acid. Every so often, one of those t-rex sized mantises would come out of the portal and stalk by. Usually, artillery or an aircraft gun would smash it, or someone would fly an explosive drone or two into it. Malachi was staring out the window, past Jason's shoulder, looking at the portal.

Jason, in the grand tradition of soldiers throughout history, was sleeping in his armor, next to two other soldiers from other portal response teams. He'd been right. This wasn't a normal portal. It was like it was made of violet lightning and pulsing black shadows. A purple and black portal. Malachi had spent a lot of time in a lot of portal communities. He had written a lot of wiki entries. There was no such thing as a purple portal. What the hell is going on? You might be reading a stolen copy.

Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The door was open, so Malachi could hear the brass's one-sided conversation over comms.

"—well fire the artillery again! What do you mean you're out of shells?" he heard one of them say. There was a pause, then, "If the goddamn civilians haven't evacuated by now, it's because they're bug food. Start the bombing runs." Another pause.

"Start the goddamn bombing runs!" Then, "I don't care how it 'looks politically,' this is now an eight-alarm event, so upgrade it to an eight-alarm event. You know what else will hurt his reelection campaign? If the state of Washington is overrun by fucking acid bugs!!" That was when Dr. Chavez walked in. Malachi wasn't sure why he'd come to this room. Maybe to look at the portal. But as soon as he saw him, he blurted out, "Why did the government keep this a secret?" Dr. Chavez looked at him for a moment.

When he spoke, he sounded incredibly tired, not in a way like he'd missed a night of sleep, but in a way like he'd had the edges of himself eroded year after year.

"Because there's a lot of very highly placed people who think that magic can be used to reestablish US hegemony." Malachi looked at him, slightly stunned. It wasn't the kind of thing top people just said. Chavez sighed and rubbed his eyes.

"Please forget I said that. What I actually said was, 'Because its secrecy is critical to national security.'" He sat down in the chair next to Malachi. His eyes were locked on the portal that was glimmering out the window. Malachi couldn't help himself. Maybe he was about to die—no one wanted to talk about that, but they were all feeling it—but he had to know. He'd always been insatiably curious.

"Can that magic thing be duplicated?"

"With our technology? With only one intact Magical Core to study? Absolutely not."

"Those glyphs on it—I've seen them. Started documenting them on the wiki. But they've never been active. Why is this thing different?"

"That is the question, isn't it? If we could solve that, maybe we could save Earth." He glanced over at Malachi.

"You work on the wiki? The big portal wiki?"

"MalFeSense," he said.

"Based on my name. Malachi."

"No shit," Dr. Chavez muttered.

"Big fan of your work. Don't tell the DoD, but we use that wiki a lot more than their shit," he said.

"Huh. Really? Well, thanks." Malachi's feeling of pride was muted a bit by the dread that had been wrapping around him like vines for the past few hours. More mantises streamed out of the portal in a group before the stream became a trickle again.

"What the hell happened here?"

"It's my fault," Dr. Chavez said bitterly.

"My team thought we'd cracked it. We tried to use the Magical Core to close down a portal. Imagine if it had worked! An end to the lingering portals. The ability to cut off invaders, just like they cut off us. Only, something went wrong. It shifted from a gray portal to—this. Now the Magical Core won't shut off." Malachi wasn't a particularly forgiving person. But looking at Chavez, he couldn't find it in himself to blame him. He'd been trying to save lives, just like the rest of them.

They were all in over their heads.

"There's got to be some sort of caster on the other side." The ground rumbled. More artillery nearby.

"Not always," Chavez said.

"They sent a lot of robots through that portal before you arrived. A lot of bombs. There's no summoner. Our next hope was if we could get the Magical Core far enough away from the portal, we could save it and close the portal. Now, the discussion is on destroying it."

"Shit. Is that going to work?"

"We don't know. It's never been tested. There's another fourth option that's never been tested. An option of last resort. The theoretical physicists say it will work, but I stopped trusting physicists after they kept yammering on about String Theory. Just because you can make a pretty math equation doesn't mean that's how reality works." Chavez sighed.

"I just wish…" he started, but he never said what he wished. The other soldier on break was still sleeping. The radio was still crackling in the other room. Malachi lowered his voice.

"Can I get a closer look at it?" Chavez looked around the corner, then gestured for him to follow. As they approached the machine, he said, "Don't tell Colonel Martin. Not that he has authority over me, but he can be a real pain in my ass." The machine was being kept next to the elevator, though Malachi wasn't sure they could get it down that way anymore, not with how many corpses were covering the first floor.

"Probably best someone knows what to do if I get gutted anyways," Chavez said.

"Emergency release is this lever, then this button to move the panel, then turn the key. Colonel Martin and I both have one. There's no need to do anything with the liquid nitrogen system or the bioreactor. Those aren't really portable anyways." The plexiglass panel opened as he turned the key. Malachi stepped closer, heart hammering. The octahedron reminded him of an eight-sided die, only larger.

Rob had a fancy set for table top games that had little runic engravings on the sides, and that's what this had, only Rob's dice didn't glow, nor did they levitate under their own power. He reached forward, then looked at Chavez questioningly. Chavez glanced down the hall again, then nodded slightly. Malachi's fingers brushed the Core. Suddenly, it was like there were symbols swimming in his head. They twisted and reformed until suddenly they looked like words. System Initialization Failed.

Insufficient potential detected given Core quality. Attempting resolution. Failed - Ambient mana insufficient for Environment generation. Attempting correction protocols. TERMINAL ERROR - Severe space-mana distortions detected. Malachi jerked his hand back. He'd seen those symbols once before: On the night this had all started. Chavez was looking at him quizzically.

"Uh, did anyone touch it and get, like, a message in their brain?"

"No," the man said, glancing between the Core and Malachi. He reached out and touched it, then withdrew his hand, shaking his head.

"Nothing. But you got…?"

"Symbols. Like the ones that spread across the sky on the first day of portals. The ones that no recording picked up. Do any of the secret studies know anything about that, by the way?"

"No. Nothing picked up the atmospheric event, not even the neutrino detectors." Chavez started tapping his chin.

"Maybe—""Breach!" someone shouted down the hallway.

"Talk later," Malachi said, then took off down the hall. As he ran, his pocket alarm started beeping. Shit. The wall of the far room had collapsed and the room was quickly filling with mantises. Malachi helped hold them off while the soldiers retreated, then moved to the interior doorway to hold them there. Jessica and another woman dragged a smashed-up dresser from another room in front of the door to act as a barricade. With the new position secure, Malachi took his leave to go get William his break.

Before he entered his assigned room, he glanced down the hall. Doctor Chavez was busy talking to two of the brass, including Colonel Martin. The colonel was waving his arms about animatedly. Chavez had a grim look about him. In the adjacent room, he heard indistinct voices buzzing over the radio. The operator replied, sounding annoyed.

"Yes. I am pre-authorizing all bombing runs and artillery strikes near this area. All danger-close missions are authorized. Just don't cave in the damn roof." Somehow, Jason had slept through all of that. Malachi knocked on his helmet.

"Jason! Wake up."

"Wha—? I'm up, I'm up," he grumbled.

"Give me a moment."

"You've got a moment. Get the others up then join me." Malachi went to the window, spear in hand.

"William. Other guys. My turn," he said.

"Thank God," William said. His arms were trembling. Malachi began stabbing. Outside the window, the mantises continued to scramble for the opening. Yet another one dove for the window Malachi was guarding, and he pushed it off with his buckler, then rammed his spear through its torso. It fell to the ground, only to be replaced with another one. There wasn't any particular skill needed, just strength and accuracy. Again and again, he cut down the crawling terrors until Jason joined him, and then they took turns.

Time blurred, both moving incredibly slowly and incredibly quickly. Malachi didn't know how long it was, but he did notice the pile of dead mantises was getting high. Very high. Would-reach-the-second-story-window-soon high. Every so often, the ground would shake. Sometimes he saw a helicopter flying by, sometimes a jet. His ears were ringing. One of the buildings across the street was burning. There was suddenly a rumble that shook the entire building.

"Fourth floor just collapsed!" someone shouted. Malachi took a moment. Another soldier came behind him.

"Our turn," he said, and Malachi gave him a nod. He had trained endlessly for strength and endurance, but no one had prepared for something like this. Is this what Malia felt, when she realized there was no escape? he wondered. Then came a voice over comms.

"HQ-22, you've got a relief force coming your way," crackled Mason's voice. Relief washed over Malachi. He headed toward one of the east facing windows so he could see. He borrowed binoculars off some corporal, but he couldn't see where the assembly point was. That was strange. They'd only had to march about a mile to extraction. That means… A chill washed over him. How far had their reinforcements been pushed back?

"It's two army brigades, packed to the gills with Marshall tanks from every HQ plus those heavy army tanks. Abrams, I think? They've outfitted them all with extra machine guns and those anti-drone cages to keep away the bugs. They're rolling out in a moment."

"Mason, how far out is the incursion now?"

"Uhh, pretty far, Mal."

"Give me a radius." There was a pause, then his ear piece crackled again.

"Three miles." The relief he'd felt finished evaporating. God damn, he thought. How many of those things have come through that portal? He hoped the evacuation of the city was going well. One of the brass pulled out a megaphone and started yelling in the hallway.

"You all should have just heard from your comms teams. That relief force is on its way now. Prepare to evacuate the building! The ETA they're giving us is a half hour, but I want us ready ten minutes earlier and to be able to roll out at the drop of a pin!" Another officer came through and started pointing out which rooms they were closing up.

"Gonna get a little tight in here, boys," he said.

"But that'll mean we can get out of here faster." Malachi kept looking down the street out east. It was hard to see because a bug would block his vision every few seconds. There was the roar of jet engines in the sky above, then several seconds, then cluster bombs rained down over the eastern streets. Then, another plane roared by, and more cluster bombs came raining down. All over the streets and buildings, bugs were torn apart. There was a crashing sound.

"Breach! Breach!" someone shouted, then a scream. Malachi dropped the binoculars and headed out into the hallway. A part of the ceiling had collapsed, and mantises were trying to squeeze through. One of them had dug one of its blade arms into the gap in a soldier's armor, then spat acid on him. Malachi ran up. Two men were jabbing at the ceiling with their spears.

"We've got this. Get him to a medic!" the soldier shouted.

"Got it," Malachi said. He squeezed past them, then heaved the man over his shoulder and hurried towards the medic station.

"Shoulder laceration and acid burns, some facial," he said to the medics as he lay the man down on a bed. Ten more soldiers were crammed into the room each with their own wounds. Evacuating them wouldn't be easy, but it was a miracle they didn't have more wounded.

"Affirmative. Nurse, bandages," one of the men called.

"Help me with his armor." Malachi unbuckled the pauldron and the breastplate while the medic cut open the man's shirt. Meanwhile, another medic prepared a salve.

"There they are! They're coming!" someone shouted from another room. With the casualty secured, Malachi dashed back to the window. He could see it—tanks coming in, guns blazing. Then, there was a bright flash. Malachi whirled, looking through the door toward the window looking out the west side of the building, at the portal. No, he thought. No, no, no.

"Another wave," he said, and an involuntary shiver passed over him.

"Fortress to Rescue Two, Fortress to Rescue Two, another wave just erupted from the portal!" he heard an officer say. The problem was, Malachi realized, that the second wave that had come out had never been dealt with. Sure, they'd bombed it to hell and back, but there were still mantises clinging to buildings, scurrying around roofs, moving through the streets in droves. He turned back to the tanks.

They were moving fast, machine guns blazing, running over the mantises that clogged the streets, the treads grinding them into paste. Come on. Come on, you can do it, he thought. His alarm went off. He needed to go back to relieve William, but he was frozen in place.

"ETA, five minutes! Rooms seven and five, clear out. Get those wounded moving toward the elevator," a lieutenant barked. Then the ceiling in the room he was in caved.

"Breach!" he called as he thrust up into the hole. The bugs kept coming. Bits of ceiling were starting to rain down as the third floor was dissolved by the hundreds and hundreds of mantises above. Another soldier came to assist him, but one of the men by the window collapsed.

"I can't, I can't," he said, arms trembling. Malachi kept stabbing upward as corpses began to drop down. He glanced back through the eastern window. Three blocks away. Come on. The gunfire echoed through the streets like constant thunder. A tank revved its engine and smashed through a pile of corpses. Two blocks. Then the swarm hit them. They came like an avalanche, covering every visible surface. Malachi heard the screams of gunners as acid rained down through the protective cages on the tanks.

The tanks kept coming, but so did the bugs.

"Fuck me," one of the soldiers by the window said. Gradually, the machine guns stopped. Malachi's arms ached, but he kept stabbing.

"Back away from the window. Get everyone out, we'll hold the door," he said. One man grabbed the soldier who'd collapsed and dragged him out, while Malachi and three others staggered their retreat. As they abandoned the room, Malachi took one last glance out the window. Most of the tanks had been completely covered in bugs. He could hear the whir of treads, but the bugs were so dense they'd become mired in the corpses like they were mud. One tank had lost visuals and smashed into a building.

As the mantises climbed away, he could see one of the tanks again. It was melted to hell. The anti-drone cage had been torn open and the soldiers on top of it were gutted and covered in burns.

"Breach!" someone else called. The ceiling had collapsed in three more places. Everyone was getting crammed into the hall. Dr. Chavez was talking to two of the officers. One of them had gone white in the face.

"Colonel Martin! Did they upgrade the damn response? Is it nine-alarm? We need the army, the whole damn army," one of the officers was saying.

"Ten-alarm," the white-faced colonel said, hoarsely.

"What!? There is no ten-alarm," the other officer said.

"Yes there is," Dr. Chavez said.

"Well, hell. Isn't that good? How many more bombers are they going to send?" Colonel Martin swallowed hard. His arm was trembling so hard the hand-held radio he was holding slipped and smashed on the ground. The room had grown silent.

"One. And it's on its way."