The northern sky turned the color of bruised copper.
Emerging from the churning sulfur clouds at a height of twelve hundred meters were over three hundred Winged Chimeric Wyverns and Corpse-Gargoyles. Their leathery wings, spanning six to eight meters across, beat the freezing air with an unnatural, wet flapping that sounded like thousands of wet canvas sheets snapping in a gale.
Hanging beneath the chest ribcages of each flying monstrosity were clusters of bloated, semi-clear living pods. Each pod filled with twenty liters of viral pathogen sludge, designed to rupture upon ground impact and saturate the civilian staging shelters behind Gate Seven with necrotizing aerosols.
“Air raid!” Valerie Koslov shouted, her voice competing with the rising wail of Gate Seven’s outer edge sirens. “Flak crews, cross thirty degrees north-northwest! Set closeness fuses to eight hundred meters!”
The self-running anti-aircraft turrets atop the high towers opened fire. It sent streams of red tracer fire into the sky. But the wyverns were unnaturally agile. Grafted with the nervous systems of hungry hawks and the man-made bat-hard shell engineered by the Sovereign Chimera Order, the swarm banked wildly, slipping between the flak bursts with uneven, evasive rolls.
“Flak is too slow,” Arthur Vance said. He stood calmly on the highest watching overhead frame of the gatehouse. “Their chest neural rings are compensating for high-speed lead times. If even ten of those pathogen pods strike the main airlock pool, the air-flow system will circulate the contagion through the lower arcologies in under four minutes.”
