The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWELVE

"Be careful out there... Homeworlders can be a hard bunch to read, especially these days, what with the advent of the Displacement Rip and all," their Downplanet Excursion Leave Officer, a female officer with the rank of Captain named Serap'cela Nix, said as the duo arrived at Annet Galjeshir. Like most Extraplanetary military personnel, she referred to The Wound as the "Displacement Rip", a more technically accurate term for their solar system's unwelcome quantum spatial aberration. "Lately, and on more than one occasion unfortunately, the sight of a Star Legion uniform has sparked violent unrest among the civilian population. It's like they suddenly blame the Emperium's expansion beyond our homeworld's borders for the appearance of the Rip in the sky and for whatever awful, negative effects the Rip has had on the planet. Keep your wits about you."

Crusader-Major Mune'stahr and Crusader-Sergeant Pylott left their sub-orbital landspeeder in the Central Transit Authority's Visitors Garage at Koombari City's Sky Terminal, at the metropolis' southeast perimeter. The Sky Terminal was a seven story-tall building in need of serious repair and general upkeep, a dirty and litter-strewn mess, and the workers, like the parking valets, ticket takers, electricians and janitorial staff were a dull-eyed, over-worked, grizzled group of burnouts who wandered the building's corridors attending to as little as possible without incurring the wrath of their harried supervisors.

A dizzying, ill-tempered, impatient mob of easily two hundred travelers from all parts of the continent milled about the Master Lobby, reading destination boards and scanning map holograms and retrieving luggage and arguing travel rates with local ride-for-pay drivers. The place was a hub of barely controlled chaos. Mune'stahr and Pylott shoved and hustled their way through the anthill of activity with practiced precision. They'd seen dozens of places like this on at least a half dozen different worlds in their travels over the last few orbital heliars. The only thing different about this one was the fact that Koombari City was a place relatively free of fahkirs and beggarmen, which either hinted at a very organized distribution of local wealth or a tyrannical police state.

The duo were suddenly startled by a piercingly loud mechanized wail. They heard the deafening sirens of the Hazard Alert Public Warning System blaring even before they'd reached the street outside.

The siren was a warning to alert the public of an approaching atmospheric event. Since the advent of The Wound, urbanized metropolitan areas had done what they could to quickly address the issue that the suddenly dangerously unstable and violently unpredictable planetary weather posed to the general populace. Those climate changes went far beyond mere high winds or rain storms. The actual underlying physics of normally predictable, but complex, meteorological events had undergone fantastic and frightening mutations. Scientists couldn't tell the public what to expect, only to say that things were bad and getting worse. So when those sirens began their ear-splitting wail, most people dropped whatever they were doing and rapidly scrambled for cover, often not bothering to be very polite or orderly about how they did it.

Mune'stahr and Pylott, who had been briefed their ship's Shore Leave Officer about such things, were startled to see how frenzied the people at and around the Koombari City Sky Terminal immediately became as they slammed into one another or knocked each other down trying to find safety from what was approaching. It presented to them a sad and mean-spirited spectacle that left them with a feeling of disappointment towards the city.

Not that it mattered.

Out on the late evening's uneven horizon, under a sage-colored sky streaked with swirling stripes of aubergine, there was aerial movement as a slate-hued thunderhead cloud swelled in size, propelled by a surging wind. A massive flock of long-necked, bat-winged birds flew noisily ahead of the oncoming stormfront, the flock splitting into two snaking lines that whipsawed across one another and then intertwined in a helix pattern running parallel to the dune covered ground. Sunburst explosions of tangerine-red color periodically erupted, flashing dazzlingly in the shadowy gloom and the air began to vibrate and then quake with the arrival of a growing vibratory thrumming sound.