Arm the gun, safety off. I raise the muzzle, ready to fire the second the target is sighted. Then I move forward, swiftly, silently, my senses soaring into overdrive.
I count every pace I take. Balancing the need for stealth with the requirement for speed. Kye told me twenty paces to target from the arch-like trees. One pace . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. A vivid splash of lightning. It reveals twisted tree limbs. They close in, forming something that could be the bars of a cage, hemming me in at both sides. I notice the bark. It's a supple black that resembles the skin of a reptile rather than the covering of a tree. A scaly appearance where drops of water stand proud of its surface.
More lightning sends sudden shafts of blue light through the canopy of branches. Then a crash of thunder.
And all the time I'm counting paces, weapon ready, its 'armed' light flashing red in the scope. Eight . . . nine . . . ten.
Ten paces to target.
Eleven...
Twelve...
I engage the trigger to first position. The gunstock throbs throughhe material of my gloves. The red light pulses faster.
Count paces. Thirteen... fourteen... fifteen...
Engage trigger in firing position. Energies of huge destructive power throb in the magazine cyst beneath the gun barrel. The red light screws itself into a frenzied flickering.
Sixteen... seventeen...
Where's the target...
Where's the target? My heart pounds against my ribs. Thunder roars down at me with all the sound and fury of heaven breaking in two. Instinct drives me into attack mode. Moving faster, gun raised to my shoulder I peer down the shadowed tunnel through the tangled limbs of trees. Roots lie in looping tangles on the ground. It's like negotiating a path full of snakes.
Counting paces: eighteen, nineteen.
Uh.
My toe catches in one of the root loops. I plunge forward, arms outstretched to save myself from serious injury. My gun falls into the infestation of plant growth. When lightning strikes again I'm on my hands and knees.
The gloomy void beneath the tree canopy explodes into a flash of blue light. Thirty paces in front of me a tree blazes as lightning tears down through the trunk, exploding its core to pulp and sending out cascades of dazzling sparks.
Only I don't really see the destruction of the tree. That's not important. Because when I look up, I realise I have reached my target. Rearing up before me, towering there in a cone of metal so dark that it seems to devour the brilliance of the lightning bolt itself, is a sinister conjunction of shapes, angles, vertical planes, glittering limbs and an uncompromising hardness. Its size extends beyond mere physical dimensions. My response to confronting the evil presence shortcuts any intellectual understanding of what I see lit by a million volts of storm power. I respond to it, not with mind, but with instinct, with gut and heart. This body of metal and lines of symmetry shatters dispassionate observation. My eyes fix on it as flashes of the most vivid lightning illuminate its presence. And
yet I see it represented by symbols that are thrust into my brain. I look at hemispheres bulging from smooth metal flanks. But I see the lens of a dark and terrible god that has the ability to concentrate evil into a singularity of focus. I see a slender, silvered limb projecting from the front. But I see acid burning a child's face. I see the flattened dome at the apex. And I see a billion graves. I see the witch-fire glint of a lens cover,
but it is Death blinking at me. Death knowing me. Death anticipating me. And the rush of a sudden breeze across that steel shell is the ghosting cry of all its victims from countless worlds without end.
For the name of what I see in front of me isn't dark enough, brutal enough, nor terrible enough to convey the sheer power and horror of that configuration of metal.
