Story 12

Something about the air carrying the faint aromas of fruiting pedals sweeping in from across the valley always brought zella back to her childhood. Smells lingering in her nose, the breeze across her face, recalled afternoons spent hurrying through glades and forests at the outskirts of the village.
Looking off at the ridge, verdant vines creeping up the weathered stone bricks laid centuries ago, a few sparse flowers dotting the otherwise overrun surface, she smiled faintly, her lips a faint quiver thinking of times lost.
A colossal walker shuttered slowly in the vale beneath their binoculars. A titanic hexagon beast of metal and fuel puttered by, spewing plumes of cokey smoke from its butressed exhaust turrets. A clamor of uniforms flowing along it’s three decks as shells were brought to the three artillery canons at every other vertex. The massive legs heaved and sighed as pistons actuated and moaned propelling the fortress forward.
A series of armored vehicles hurried around the base.
Panning her view hundreds of yards ahead of the heaving behemoth, she observed a small house set next to a brook, a mill standing idle besides. Through the sun glinting glass she saw a few figures hurriedly darting inside the sun bleached shack.
“There’s still villagers down there,” she sighed out as she lifted her head from the optical device.
Sun beams fractured and swept through dense leaves covering their position along the ridge.
A man lay prone beside her, arms gripping a laser cannon as he peered through the targeting sights.
“I see them. There’s not much we can do at this point,” he answered solemnly.
Zella looked back through the binoculars at the sprawling fields of flowing amber grain swaying in the peaking afternoon sun staring down from high in the azure cloudless sky above. Craters of dirt and ash dotted the landscape, haggard wrecks of metal and stone lay destitute in their wakes.
A modest blue painted farm house rested at the outskirts of the smouldering remains of a town center, a central domed civic building semi-standing above the ashen ruins scattered haphazardly among the craters of shell impacts. The main gold fleck’d dome indented yet glinting light from it’s still lustrous spire, the bulk of the hemisphere dusty and cracked. The other two domed sections of the building lay crumbled.
“So much for the shelter we set up,” she said into the cool air under the tree line.
“They shelled it last night,” her companion asserted.
Zella’s lips pulled tight and inched down at the sides, her eyes sullen as she pivoted her gaze back to the fortress.
As she scoped the hulking war machine, the smell of burning fuel and ash wafted up in the breeze, the smell of grass and flowers quickly dissipating and the sulfurous cokey aromas dominated.
She pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose as she tipped the brim of her hat down.
A thunderous crack rang out from the vale, the echos bouncing off the other ridge line and the once-great wall stretching along the dammed up side of the valley to make a cacophony of blasts reverberating past her.
Following the smoking trail of an artillery shell from the fore-gun of the beast, she scanned to the small farmhouse, three figures rushing out into the field of head-high wheat.
Suddenly a flash, red and orange ball of fire, black smoke and debris flying out. Stones and fire replaced the once silent house. The mill was impacted by a boulder and began shifting on its century-old foundation and slid into rubble across the brook.
The figures fell forward, disappearing within the overgrown, unharvested field.
Scoping back to the fortress, she saw hurried commotion from the upper deck. A white uniform standing on the observation platform, eye set through a looking glass to inspect the destruction.
“Well,” her companion began, “there doesn’t seem much point in delaying.”
“Wait, we don’t know if those villagers are dead yet.”
“They will be,” he said, pointing to the armored vehicles sliding through the fields towards the ruins of the farm house.
“Can’t we intervene?” Zella protested.
“We get one shot, maybe two if we chose not to make it out of here; we still have a mission. Look we evacuated as many as we could yesterday.”
“No. We have to do something for them. What was the point of the mission if not to save them.”
“We need to cripple their walking fortress. That will save more lives in the long run. Plus Grand Hierarch Sundala is on that fortress. Our spies sacrificed a lot to get us that intel and we can’t let him get away.”
“I guess you’re right. And they’re on the war path to the holy city,” Zella conceded.
She looked back down at the valley, a shuffling in the grass, figures hurriedly scrambling through the field.
“They’re alive!” she corrected, adjusting the zoom level of the binoculars.
Two men and a child ran blindly through the wheat away from the smoking ruins of their old home.
“It’s unfortunate they didn’t leave when they had a chance, but we have a directive to disable the fortress,” he retorted.
“Arnan, we can’t let them die.”
“We have to.”
“I’m not gonna let them. I’m taking the sleigh down to get them,” she asserted as she pushed her self up into a crouching position, her hat blocking the slant ray of sun casting down on her face.
Arnan turned to look at her, his face pulled tightly.
“We have a mission, Zella.”
She looked down at him unmoved.
“Fine. Just get in and get out fast because you won’t only have cannons and tanks to watch out for. I’m blowing the dam. Either when you get captured or make it out.”
She nodded with a slight smile as she walked to the clunky sleigh resting on its skis behind them.
“You’re making this more difficult then it needs to be,” Arnan muttered to himself as he looked back down his targeting scope and swept across the field to the vine encrusted stone of the old dam.
Zella clamored into the driving seat of the sleigh and flicked switches as the craft began humming softly. The reactor spooled up and the gravpulsors set into the skis began actuating the craft a foot into the air.
“I’ll fire off a round when I pick them up. Then give me a few minutes to get out of there,” Zella said over the loud hum of the sleigh.
Arnan turned and said something back to her that was lost to the drone of the engine.
Pitching the yoke and throwing the throttle, Zella did the sleigh back into the dense tree cover and began sailing through the trunks over the underbrush. After getting a hundred yards from Arnan’s position she popped out of the tree line and swept down from the ridge into the valley.
A deafening groan from the vibrating crystals and reactor coils mixed with the rushing air flowing over her. Pulling brass goggles over her eyes, she grimaced beneath her scarf.
Ash fluttered down across the landscape, the caustic smell of heavy fuels penetrated through the thick fabric over her nose.
Skis puttering just above the ground, the craft cut through the wheat as it careened towards the three people rushing towards her.