Callan
Alarms started going off the instant he exited the barracks building.
“I didn’t do it,” he said, spinning around, looking to see how he’d screwed up this time.
When nobody seemed to be paying attention to him, he breathed a sigh of relief. It must have been a coincidence then, an act of perfect timing. Considering he’d made more than a few mistakes since being awoken a few weeks earlier, it wouldn’t have surprised Callan if he had been the one who’d messed up.
“What’s going on?” he asked one particularly wide-eyed soldier as he rushed past in the khaki-colored uniforms that were the base norm.
The young man looked up at him, as if he couldn’t believe that Callan had no idea what was going on. “It’s the portal! Something’s going on. They might be coming through!”
He was gone in a rush before any follow-up questions could be asked, leaving behind a plethora of questions and very few answers. Wanting to get some of those elusive answers, he headed off at a jog toward the only place he suspected he would find them: the portal itself.
Although it was the last place he wanted to go if something were acting up with it, Callan knew he had no choice. If it were a drill of some sort, it was the only place he’d get the information he needed. His situation was unique on the base, and he didn’t report to any of the units there, so none of them would be of help to him. Only Colonel Mara would be able to help him, and if the portal were acting strange, she would be down there monitoring the situation from the front line.
It made finding her easy, which was appreciated. What he wasn’t anywhere as near fond about was that by heading toward the portal, he was quite literally putting himself amongst the front rows of defenders if the creatures on the far side finally did manage to put another soldier through.
An Outsider.
He’d seen all the video, heard the testimony, and if it weren’t for the portal, he still would have had a hard time believing any of it. Creatures with armor as black as night and the strength of a dragon. It was nonsense! And yet…they were real.
Jogging up to the tunnel that led down to the portal, he bypassed a group of metal-armored giants assembled in front of the opening, loaded for bear. Muzzles slung beneath both arms, over one shoulder, and probably elsewhere as well. They were one-person wrecking machines, and there were twelve of them just right there.
“Hey! Don’t go down there!” someone shouted after him as he approached the mouth.
“I’ll be fine,” he promised, casting both hands out wide.
The sun was beating at his back, and he used it to help aid him as he cast a huge winged shadow across the tunnel entrance, his arms representing the wings. A long curved neck jutted away from the shadow's body, the unmistakable form of a dragon.
Everyone cheered at that, but he ignored it. The truth was, if anything came through that portal in strength, they were all dead. It was the one reason he was willing to head back down there to find out what was going on. If it were a single Outsider, he stood a chance of stopping it, or even holding it off until Thorne or Garath—the other two onyx dragons at Fort Banner—returned from their excursions off-base.
If they were here in force, he wasn’t going to survive for long anyway, so again, he may as well see what was up. It was a rather morbid decision, but one he made anyway. He jogged down the smooth, perfectly angled tunnel. It had been altered that way so that the massive iron plugs weighing hundreds of tons and perched atop rollers near the entrance could slide down the depths of the tunnel until the passage narrowed enough that they came to a halt, effectively sealing the passageway.
Callan desperately hoped they wouldn’t do that with him down there. That would be unpleasant.
Reaching the bottom, he scanned the banks of consoles to the left until he spotted Colonel Mara. In the center of the room, a massive rent in the fabric of the cavern hung. It wasn’t silent however; cracks and snaps of energy shot across the nearly hundred-foot-high opening. The borders glowed a bright neon-purple and everything about the murky interior just screamed “something is happening”. No wonder they rang the alarm.
“What’s going on?” he asked, striding up behind Colonel Mara.
“Ah, Callan. Good, I wasn’t sure any of you were around.”
He shrugged, but the colonel had already turned back to the viewscreen and was pointing something out. “Tell me, what does this look like to you?”
Callan leaned forward, peering easily over the head of the tech seated there, his bulk outweighing the other man to the point of intimidation, the technician slinking lower into his seat to try and get out of the way.
On the screen itself were the grainy pictures he’d seen of the far side of the portal, where rank upon rank of Outsiders always seemed to just be waiting, statuesque in their stillness, unmoving. From what he’d learned they just waited there like that, like robots that had powered down, waiting for the command to invade his planet.
Eerie. That was the only word that truly described the pictures and short videos he’d seen. Now, however, something had clearly changed. Two large Outsiders, taller and thicker than any he’d spotted before, stood in front of the others perhaps thirty or forty feet apart from one another. They were larger than the ones the other dragons had apparently fought, though they were not as big as the Walkers, four-legged constructs that rivaled his own dragon in size.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked in surprise, looking between the two pillar-like creatures.
Colonel Mara snorted. “If you think that looks like an Outsider-sized slingshot, then I would say yes, we’re pretty sure that’s exactly what it is.”
“Is this live?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes. We finally have some robots hardened enough to withstand the far side long enough. They only last perhaps thirty seconds to a minute though.”
“Right. But why would—OH SHIT!” he yelped as the massive band of material that had been stretched around the two suddenly snapped together.
Without warning he flipped himself over the bank of consoles, accidentally wrecking one by gripping too hard as he launched himself at the portal. Inky black liquid flowed up his forearms and coated his hands, forming into long, slender, curved blades, their surfaces glossy and liquid-looking. Several droplets of the black substance dropped from the blades to the ground, and bare rock hissed and popped as the acid ate away at it.
“GET READY!” he bellowed at the ten soldiers in armored combat suits who guarded the way back up. They were from the ready squadron, the tubes that housed their battlesuits placed back against the far wall.
A split second later something came crashing through the portal. It landed, then bounced and rolled several times before coming to a halt, steaming and broken, bits of its matte-black outer shell covering the ground in a spray of debris. It was bigger than he’d been led to expect, but as he approached carefully something inside moved, and he realized what he was looking at was just a protective shell, not the actual creature.
That thing burst up and out, orienting itself first on Callan, then the portal.
“Oh no you don’t!” he roared as it took off for the portal at a—what the hell? Why was it moving so slow?
The Outsider was not anything like what he’d expected. It was slow, ungainly, and awkward-looking as it ripple-humped its way over the ground. Its armor looked melted and unhealthy, full of cracks. Did the radiation on the other side from the nuke really have that much of an effect on it?
He glanced over his shoulder while he ran, catching a glimpse of the transport pod it had emerged in. The carcass continued to spew steam and melt into an unrecognizable pile of slag on its own. It provided him no answers, but he knew that he needed to stop the creature before it went back through the portal. If it could report that it survived the trip through the radiation zone, more would join it in rapid order, of that he was sure.
Closing on the creature, he leapt through the air, his acid blades pointed forward as he drove them deep into armor on the Outsider’s back. It wailed in the high-pitched tone he’d been warned to expect as he bore it to the ground, the “head” of it hitting the ground with a thunderous crack.
Callan withdrew his knives and prepared to strike the head from the body.