Wakiza trembled with cold as he huddled under the uncertain shelter of the trees, trying to keep the worst of the sleet from lashing him in the darkness. At fifteen summers, he was one of the youngest warriors of Hook-Beak Clan, a barely blooded hunter without a single raid against enemy clans to his credit.
Three times, he had watched in despair as the war parties were sent to destroy the human nest. And three times, those war parties had been driven back, failing to crush the hated creatures from the stars. When told that he would be assigned to the night watch for the fourth attempt, rather than the attack teams, he pleaded with the war leader for a better assignment, certain the end was near and afraid he might miss the final victory.
"Your time to die gloriously will come, Wakiza," Chesmu told him sternly. "For now, obey orders and keep silent. That is my final word."
Night watch.
Duty barely worthy of a newly hatched nestling.
Wakiza watched bitterly as more fortunate warriors crossed open ground unchallenged, entering the strange nest that lay—insanely—open to the winter sky. He watched with rising jealousy as the attack party blew holes through the defensive wall, all but unopposed by enemy fire. He felt useless—worse than useless—squatting here under a tree while the older warriors took all the glory for themselves. He had spent his entire fifteen summers aching to please the Ones Above, to show his creators that he was brave and swift and worthy, and now others were winning the battle he had so desperately longed to join—
The night split wide open with flame and noise.
A monstrous thing fell from the storm clouds, spitting death and venom.
Wakiza's beak fell open in shock. It was bigger than the entire clan's living cavern. Bigger than anything Wakiza had ever seen. Fire belched from it, lancing down through the sleet-filled darkness to ignite the weird, alien structures of the human nest. Flames roared high into the night skies, leaving Wakiza trembling on his belly against the frozen ground.
"It's a metal ogre!" he whispered.
He had not truly understood, until now.
Their best missiles detonated against it without visible effect. The thing kept coming, dropping down from the clouds, shooting its weapons in a fiery rain of death. It was unbelievably ruthless, destroying virtually the whole human nest in its zeal to kill every member of Hook-Beak Clan's attack parties. Not one of the warriors chosen to enter the enemy's nest came out again.
Wakiza turned and fled into the night, duty-bound to carry home word of the ogre's arrival. By the time he arrived at the living cavern, he was bleeding and dazed, slashed by thorny underbrush and several nasty tumbles down rocky gullies. He was shaking so hard, he could scarcely gasp out his message.
"The thing burned down everything outside the defended wall!" Wakiza chattered the words out through shudders that shook his thin, adolescent shoulders. The grizzled, aging war leader and the clan's akule exchanged dark glances as Wakiza added, "Never have I seen such ruthlessness! Nothing our warriors threw at it even scratched the thing. Please, Honored Chesmu, give me the chance to carry out vengeance for our slain brothers!"
Chesmu gripped Wakiza's shoulder under bruising fingers. "You shall have that chance, gladly. Come, there is much to be done before dawn."
They left the nest again under cover of darkness, although dawn was only an hour or so away. Sleet continued to fall, but the weather wise amongst their clan's warriors agreed that the storm would soon break, leaving clear, cold weather in its wake. That would only make it easier for the hated defenders to see them coming. There was not much time left, if they hoped to destroy the enemy and earn a place with the Ones Above for all eternity.
Wakiza brought up the rear of the war leader's own handpicked band. As they crept down into their chosen ravine, he was shocked at the wide swath of forest leveled during the night, depriving them of useful concealment. It must have been the ogre, he realized, awestruck. What else could have flattened so many trees and ground them into splinters underfoot in so short a time?
After a moment's frightened thought, however, he realized the loss of the forest cover probably mattered very little. Their war parties were spread out through dozens of twisting, narrow gorges that would allow them to creep so close, it would require only a short dash to reach the enemy's nest. Powerful the ogre might be, but it could not patrol every approach to their target.
Besides, the Ones Above had given them weapons capable of crippling and perhaps even killing the huge machine, if they could take the metal beast by surprise. When Wakiza had reported the failure of their missiles against it, Chesmu had ordered the deadliest weapons they possessed brought up from the war caches in the nest's lowest caverns. If all went well, this dawn, the metal ogre would be the one surprised and dismayed.
And shortly after that, dead.
Wakiza's heart thudded at the thought that he would have helped to kill it.
Grey light was just topping the upper edges of the deep ravine when he heard it, the sound of distant missiles igniting. His heart pounded wildly, listening. The attack had begun! He fought a terrible urge to scramble up the steep ravine wall to look as the deadliest of their weapons, two ogre-killing bombs strapped to a pair of missiles, raced toward the metal monster. He gripped his rifle in trembling hands, wanting to see—
The world erupted into a hell of sound and blazing, unearthly light. Wakiza screamed, falling flat against the rocky ground, which shook under his belly. An instant later, flame erupted from the head of the gorge, blasting toward them like an avalanche. Wakiza dropped his rifle and climbed straight up the rocky wall, one terrified eye rolling downward to see the war leader and warrior after warrior swept away, crisped in an instant. He lunged and scrabbled for claw and talon holds, felt the searing heat approaching, whimpered . . .
Then fell forward onto sleet-covered ground.
He snatched his feet up as the killing wave of fire passed beneath him. He didn't dare look down into the ravine, where their best had just died horrible deaths without striking a single blow against the enemy. He looked up, instead, and saw gouts of flame spurting up from the edges of other deep ravines. Screams carried on the wind, screams that cut off with hideous abruptness. A distant movement caught his eye and he craned around to look.
Across the open ground between himself and the enemy's nest, beyond the wall the humans had put up, he could see something like a gigantic dark thorn. It rose up with shocking speed, flinging something across the wall, then it dipped again and vanished beneath the wall before reappearing to fling another something, which flew in a slightly different direction. Wakiza watched, hypnotized, as the nearer of the two things soared out toward a deep crack in the earth. A strange cloth of some kind bellied out abruptly from the top of it, halting its flight. It dropped with seeming gentleness into a ravine perhaps five seconds' fast sprint away—
A massive explosion ripped the dawn. Chips of stone and searing heat hurled their way skyward. Wakiza screamed again, cowering and hiding his head. When he lifted his shaken gaze again, trying to nerve himself to climb to his feet and run, he saw warriors pouring up over the lips of gullies and ravines which had not yet been torched by the enemy. They were racing across the open, rubble-strewn ground, shooting missiles at the distant walls or gripping rifles in the hopes of getting close enough to fire. They raced forward in three-second bursts, moving fast in relays across the open ground, shooting missiles and rifles to cover one another as they ran for the alien wall.
And as Wakiza stared in horrified fascination, those who shot missiles toward the enemy nest drew murderous fire from the wall, going down in a spray of blood and fur. Those who shot their rifles earned the same fate—but those who simply ran forward without shooting seemed invulnerable. Wakiza gulped and started to rise, thinking he would scavenge a rifle from one of the warriors already killed and carry it close to the wall before firing. Then he noticed a buzzing noise, like a thousand mound-stingers roused to homicidal fury.
Startled, he looked around for the telltale mounds and spotted a whole line of them, which he hadn't noticed in the darkness of the previous night. Surely the humans couldn't have found a way to turn the mindless mound-stingers into a weapon they could use at will? Despite the angry buzzing, he didn't see anything like the stinging cloud of insects which were often the last thing an unlucky hunter heard, if deep water to jump into was not close at hand when the mound-stingers' ire was roused.
The buzzing rose in crescendo—then one of the six warriors in the team running toward the nearest buzzing mound went down, struck by something Wakiza couldn't even see. The warrior screamed, writhing in agony where something had cut literally all the way through his body. Three more warriors went down within seconds, struck by the invisible mound-stinger weapon. The remaining two stared in such wild terror, trying to determine where the invisible weapon was coming from, distant rifle fire from the defended wall blew straight through their skulls. Wakiza froze in place, too horrified to move, convinced that if he rose from the icy ground, he, too, would go down, dying a shameful death without so much as a single weapon in his hands.
Overhead, a stiff-winged bird soared past with a high-pitched whine.
An instant later, the metal ogre's enormous bulk appeared from around the curve of the wall. An instant after that, explosions shook the ground all around him. Wakiza screamed and flung himself down into the ravine behind him, falling and scrabbling for handholds, then he landed with a bone-wrenching jar. The stink of cooked flesh was foul in his throat. Burned shapes huddled everywhere, charred lumps of flesh that still smoked in the grey dawnlight.
Wakiza fled, running wildly toward the end of the gully they'd entered so jovially just minutes previously. It was worse than suicide to fight the metal ogre, it was utter madness. He had to warn the nest, warn the akule, who could at least plead for help from the Ones Above. They needed help and stronger weapons and food for their little ones, who would surely go hungry in the deep winter snows, now that most of their skilled hunters had died on the battlefield. He ran until his breath was a raw, bleeding rasp in his lungs, skidded and slid and climbed across fallen timber and pounded as fast as his legs could carry him toward the uncertain safety of home. Once there, he burst into the clan's living cavern and gasped out his tortured message, collapsing into the akule's horrified arms.
"Dead . . . all dead . . . Chesmu and the others . . . please, akule, beg the Ones Above for help . . . nothing can stand against the metal ogre, nothing . . . without help, we shall all surely die . . ."
Under the akule's careful questioning, he gasped out everything he'd seen, described it in as much detail as he could recall through a numb haze of horror: the giant thorn that threw the massive bombs, the waves of fire in the gullies, the invisible mound-stingers, all of it. When he'd finished, the akule said gently, "You have done well, Wakiza. Very well. Rest now. Rest and recover your strength, for you will be sorely needed."
Wakiza closed his eyes, shuddering violently. Dimly, through the thundering in his ears, he heard the akule's voice in the Oracle chamber, begging their creators for help, for weapons to destroy the metal ogre, for anything the Ones Above could send. He relaxed, at last, no longer fighting the blackness of a dead faint as he realized he'd done it, he'd brought the warning in time.
For now, at least, the clan was safe.