J. Robert King

INVASION

Chapter 1

To Fight Phyrexians

White clouds fled through blue skies. The sea chanted fearfully below. Waves crowded shoulder to shoulder and shoved each other. Gray land crouched at the edge of Dominaria, hiding itself in veils of yellow steam.

Evil hung in the heavens. Something was coming, something horrible, and it would emerge without warning from clear air.

It came. The thing carved a sudden line in the sky. The trough it cut deepened. It tore water from the air and hurled it outward in white flames. This was no meteor, no dumb stone from heedless heavens. This thing clove the sky with intent.

Air streamed away from a lancing prow and sawtoothed keel. It drummed gunwales of living wood on its way into roaring intakes and across wide-swept wings. This was a ship, a skyship – the sort that had ruled Thrannish skies. Loose tongues told of new fleets built by Urza and secreted away to fight Phyrexians, but who believed in Urza? Who believed in Urza's bogey men? Who had ever seen even a single skyship?

Until now.

It was a sleek and glorious, horrible thing, this Weatherlight. Nature cringed away from it. Still, it was not the dreamed-of evil. Something else was coming, something far more horrible than Weatherlight.

Tiny figures stood on her wind-ravaged deck-human figures.

Behind a gleaming ray cannon on the forecastle was strapped a man with black hair and angry eyes.

He shouted into a speaking tube, "Coordinates, Hanna!"

A powerstone embedded in the mouth of the tube snatched up his voice and hurled it a hundred feet aft to the glass-enclosed bridge.

The words raked out over a slim, hunched woman. Rules and styluses were clutched in one of her hands. The other jotted slide-rule calculations in a hasty column.

Blowing an errant strand of blonde back from her face, Hanna did her own shouting into the tube, "Working on it, Commander Gerrard!" Across her navigation console, compasses and gyros reeled. Hanna's eyes spun as she watched them settle. "Good luck finding another navigator who can pinpoint longitude without stars."

"I don't want another navigator," Gerrard answered from the forecastle. He threw a grin back toward the bridge. "I just want my favorite navigator to get us to Benalia."

Hanna summed three columns of figures and assigned functions to them. "We're still twelve hundred miles out, this time north by northwest."

"Damn! That's the farthest of the three," Gerrard said. "Where's the problem?"

"Not here," Hanna replied, confirming the calibration of her altimeter.

"Not here, either," reported another woman, standing at the helm. Her corded shoulders and ebony skin seemed part of the ship's wheel she clutched. "Rudder, keel, airfoils-everything's performing perfectly, including me."

"I know, Sisay -" Gerrard answered, quickly adding- "Captain. But something's throwing us off course. Karn, is it an engine problem?"

The call echoed down tubes into steamy darkness-the engine room. A vast drive-core dominated the space. Mana conduits added their green light to the tepid glow of bolted lanterns. Two crewmembers worked a giant torque wrench, closing a valve. They did not pause to answer the commander. A third crewmember, who seemed simply another engine subreactor, spoke. Karn was a massive man made of silver, and his voice was like a waterfall.

"No engine problem yet, but soon."

His silver back was bent toward the machine, his hands embedded in twin operations ports. Micro-fibers extended from the controls into his fingers, linking him to every corner of the ship. All the rest of Weatherlight had endured the planeshifting stresses well, but the engine was beginning to overheat.

"We're having to douse the manifolds to keep them from melting down. Push it too far, Gerrard, and you'll have a puddle where your engine used to be."

Gerrard's laughter answered through the tube. "You know me, Karn. I push everything too far. Sick bay, how are the wounded holding up?"

"We're all fine down here," replied the ship's healer as she tightened a strap over one of her patients. Sweat beaded her forehead, and she raked her turban off. Out spilled dark hair braided with coins. "The second planeshift knocked my patients unconscious. There's been less complaining since then."

"How're you holding up, Orim?" Gerrard asked.

"All this flashing into and out of existence makes meditation sort of redundant," Orim said wryly.

Another laugh came from Gerrard. "That's my crew. Stouthearted comrades and complainers, all. Sisay, let's have another go."

"Aye, Commander," said the woman at the helm.

"Hanna, pinpoint Benalia City, the Capashen Manor." Gerrard reflexively glanced down at the Capashen symbol tattooed on his left forearm. He would not likely be welcomed in his old home.

"You got a street address? A house description?" Hanna teased as she slid longitude and latitude indexes until they aligned. "Locked in, Commander. Heading three, seventeen, twenty."

"Aye," Sisay acknowledged. She turned the wheel, bringing the prow up toward a roiling mass of cloud. "Karn, initiate jump sequence."

The silver man's voice was drowned out by the engine's eager surge.

"Hold on, everybody," Sisay called out.

Behind his ray cannon, Gerrard hunkered down. He tightly clutched the handles of the fuselage. The cannon harness was sufficient to hold him in place on a rolling deck in the middle of a dogfight, but even those straps were stressed by a planeshift. Gerrard shot a glance over his shoulder to the starboard-side cannon. There, a minotaur gunner clung with equal fury. Tahngarth's teeth were gritted in determination, the closest he came to smiling.

Gerrard did smile. This was his ship. This was his crew. They were the best damned fliers and fighters in Dominaria and Mercadia, in Rath and Phyrexia. For years he'd heard how he and his friends and this ship were supposed to save the world. For the first time, he felt like they could.

That wasn't the only reason he smiled. There was no better place to watch a planeshift than strapped to a forecastle ray cannon.

Beyond the rail, Dominaria vaulted suddenly forward. The sky stretched out. Clouds frayed away to ropy lines of mist. The heavens began to fold in on themselves. Where before there was only beaming blue and white, now black verges appeared in the separating seams of reality. The sky held together only a moment more. It came to pieces. Scraps of blue and white tumbled in a black wind.

Were Gerrard beyond the rail, that wind would have torn him to pieces. It was chaos, pure and simple, the ocean of potentiality in which all actual worlds floated. Anything material that touched the chaos wind was dissolved away into sparking energies and nothing.

Weatherlight and her crew were wrapped in an envelope of saving air. It died to stillness around them. The roar fell silent. Beyond the energy envelope, storms of power raged. Within it, only Weatherlight's engines sounded.

"Command crew to the bridge," Gerrard barked. He undid the straps of his gunner's harness and strode across the forecastle toward the stairs leading amidships.

Tahngarth followed. The minotaur leaped the stairs and landed amidships with a thump. Gerrard joined him at the bottom, and they marched across the trembling deck. From the central hatch ahead, Orim emerged. Her feet trod softly between hoof and boot. The three approached the bridge. A fourth crewmember scuttled up to join them.

Gerrard arched an eyebrow. "Since when are you part of the command crew, Squee?"