A cluster of javelins burst from the basket. One of the escorts fell gurgling, impaled through the neck. Bullets plucked two of the squat, brown-skinned creatures shrieking out of the basket. More rounds tore into the bird.
It just kept coming. Britton could feel the wind swept toward them by its massive wings.
Rampart threw his shoulder into Britton, setting his legs moving again as the two ran for the helo.
A funnel of wind drilled horizontally through the air, focusing all the gathered dust into a gritty corkscrew. The tornado slammed into the bird’s back, rolling it over and sending it tumbling across the track until it slammed against the concrete barrier wall. Gold-flecked feathers, each as long as a sword, exploded from the impact and showered down around them. The small creatures tumbled from the basket, pitching across the ground. A few stirred. Blasts of sizzling electricity turned them into piles of smoking meat before they could rise.
Harlequin swooped low over them, the remains of the dust devil swirling about his fists. “Damn it, Rampart! How hard is it to get him in a damned helo?” He kicked off in the air and shot skyward, making for two more of the birds, distant but closing fast.
Rampart cursed and hurled Britton forward. The helo gunner had reloaded his minigun but checked his fire as Harlequin swerved in front of the spinning muzzles.
A hammerblow threw Britton on his back, his body armor digging a trough in the rough ground, his nose filled with a burning stink.
He blinked, struggling to rise onto his elbows, weighed down by his gear. His carbine was gone. His magazine pouches smoldered in his vest. The magazines inside must have ab-sorbed the blast. They were melted, the bullets fused with their containers.
One of the brown creatures rose some fifty feet over the concrete barrier wall, its body wreathed in blue electricity. Its eyes were long and yellow, catlike. Its long nose hooked over a snarling mouth, showing tiny pointed teeth. Its skin was crusted with thick white paint.
“Christ!” Rampart said. “Don’t you run!” Britton felt the magic tide return as the Suppression fell away. The flow came gently, controlled by the Dampener in his blood. Rampart dropped his carbine to dangle from its sling and raced forward, hands outstretched.
The creature flew forward, the halo of electricity pulsing for another strike. Britton scrambled backward on his hands, palms scraping the shattered earth.
And then the electricity winked out, the tendrils flickering off with tiny popping sounds and puffs of black smoke. The creature hung in the air for a moment, eyes wide, then plummeted, shrieking, to the ground. It struck hard and bounced, its huge head flopping on a scrawny neck, the white-painted surface turning red. It lay, stirring weakly.
Rampart hauled Britton to his feet and propelled him the last few feet to the helo. The gunner left his weapon and helped them into the bay. A crew chief, head invisible in his flight helmet, knelt over him, clipped a carabiner to Britton’s belt and secured the other end to a metal ring in the center of the Blackhawk’s floor.
“He’s in!” the chief called to the pilots. “Let’s go!”
The escorts were left to scramble back to the Stryker’s relative safety as the Blackhawk lurched skyward. The Suppression took hold again as Rampart settled himself beside the crew chief. Only then did Britton realize that he hadn’t even thought to use his magic to escape when he had that brief chance. Even if he had thought of it, how could he have made it work? The Dampener protected him from the overwhelming power of the current, but he still lacked the control to call it to his will. He cursed himself, his heart pounding. He still imagined he could feel the tight pressure of the bomb within it.
Britton gripped the metal ring as the Blackhawk banked, watching out the open door past the gunner’s hip. Harlequin arced through the air toward one of the giant birds. The creatures on its back fired guns at him, the bullets flying wide.
That far above the ground, Britton could see the land outside the concrete barrier wall that ringed the LZ. It was dotted with small groups of the brown, squat humanoids, each surrounding one of the white-painted ones that had nearly fried him a moment ago. One of the white-painted creatures burst into a fireball, which shot upward, missing Harlequin by several feet. Britton recalled the words of the SOC Pyromancer who’d assaulted the school.
That adage was being proved on the ground. Britton could make out army fire teams, moving and covering in perfect order. The troops poured fire and took cover behind the broken fragments of concrete barriers and the few Strykers that rolled with them, working with the near-perfect efficiency that had always made him so proud to be a soldier, man as machine. The creatures took the worst of it, falling back.
A piercing shriek dragged Britton’s gaze to Harlequin, who had conjured a thick gray cloud. It draped one of the birds. Britton could see its wingtip as it struggled to stay aloft, the feathers sopping from the cloud’s innards. The Aeromancer somersaulted upward, allowing the bird to pass beneath him and alongside the Blackhawk, waving to the gunner as he went. The bird shrieked again, shaking free of the cloud — bursting out broadside of the helo.
The gunner grinned as he opened up with the minigun. The barrels spun hot as the weapon pumped one thousand rounds each second into the passing bird and its crew. Britton looked away, but not before he saw much of it dissolve in red mist, screaming as it hurtled earthward.
Harlequin turned to the second bird as it banked away from him. He shook his head and flew to the helo, matching its speed.
The bird shrieked as something impacted with its shoulder, exploding in a cloud of burning feathers. It rolled onto its side, flapping uselessly with the remaining wing. The massive talons flexed, grasping empty air as it fell.
Over its back roared two Apache attack helicopters. They buzzed along, vicious horned insects, metal thoraxes gleaming with armament — twenty-millimeter cannons, laser-guided Hellfire missiles, Hydra rocket pods. They spiraled over the fallen birds before taking up escort positions behind the Blackhawk. Britton’s throat tightened. He’d hoped to pilot one of those agile gunships long ago, before magic had carried him far from such dreams.
The fighting raged beneath them, but the creatures were falling back, helpless without air support. Erupting balls of fire and brief flashes of lightning spoke of magic on the ground, but it came less and less frequently, and, at last, they swept beyond it.
“What the hell are they?” Britton asked.
He could imagine the crew chief’s eyebrows arching behind his tinted visor. “Really big birds, sir.”
“No, I mean the things on their backs,” Britton said.
The chief shrugged. “Goblins.”
“Goblins? Is that what they really are?” Britton asked Rampart.
“Nobody knows what they are,” Rampart answered. “They’re the indigenous around here. Until somebody comes up with something better — they’re Goblins.”
Britton’s mind reeled. Goblins. Real, live Goblins. The storybook legends come to life. Were other creatures from fantasy stories living here? Dragons? Unicorns? The Limbic Dampener kept his emotions from overwhelming him.
“They have guns?” Britton asked, his voice cracking with wonder.
“Every once in a while, they get lucky and take out a supply truck”—Rampart shrugged—“or one of the indig workers at the FOB smuggles one out. I’m not worried, though. They don’t know how to zero them, and their bodies are too small to handle the recoil. Half of them don’t bother to use the sights. It’s not stolen weapons you need to worry about with these bastards, it’s the magic. They live in the Source all their lives and come up Latent at around twice the rate we do.”
“Indig,” Britton breathed.
Rampart nodded. “A lot like the Mujahidin back in the old War on Terror. Bunch of broken-up tribes fighting themselves. The only thing they hate more than each other is us. They lay off somewhat in the winter, but they go on the warpath something fierce once the weather gets warm.”
Britton shook his head and rubbed his temples. Why not Goblins? They didn’t fit the description he’d come to know from his days of role-playing games and fantasy books. But the birds did — massive creatures with black beaks and talons, large enough to threaten a ship at sea? Britton had read of them in Persian mythology and comic books. They were Rocs.
The battle below him surged around a creature he couldn’t identify. A towering black figure, vaguely man-
