“Heads up,” a chocolaty voice in my ear ordered. The horizon hummed behind an orange purple yellow glow. It looked like a poorly patched wound. I spotted fly spots. “11 o’clock,” I called, then “3 o’clock”. Then “arc 12 thru 3,” as more and more tiny black dots speckled the sky.
“Hold fire,” ordered the voice. The humming intensified, even from all the way over here. I blinked. The closest dots shimmered as sunset refracted through lumpy air.
“Echo, Steve, Twisty, go in three…” I gripped the barrel of my anti-drone device; my addy. There were a million like it, but this one was mine, to have and to hold, until death do we part. I touched the side of the trigger just… so. My addy awoke. I gripped its gripper. I yanked, hard. The apparatus—wand, stock, and guard-panel—detached and aligned with a quiet cascade of clicks. A dozen more clicks echoed around me like mechanical cicadas. The whine of powerups harmonised with the incoming hum of a hundred thousand kamikaze drones. The first day I ever saw those I actually did shit myself. I didn’t hear the end of that for a week. The sound droned on around us. We drowned them out with deft tap on our earplugs. The delivery lead’s voice came through above the din, “Two.”
I could make out the drones now. Each one the size of a fat wasp. Each one carrying a payload of fire, micron-scale shrapnel, and pain. Each one piloted by an enslaved human soul whose tether to this world would be snapped when I did what I, horribly, had no choice but to do.
“One.”
Oh my sweet addy; once unsheathed it can’t be re-sheathed until it’s drunk on the souls of the drones’ pilots. And by drunk, I mean drunk to the point of recklessness. It’d be okay if it was just, say, me and a few others with them, instead of thousands of us. But then they wouldn’t work would they. Critical mass and all that.
“Fire,” the order came. I squeezed. The soldier beside me squeezed. Everyone squeezed. No one aimed. We didn’t even look. The first rule of firing an addy; avert your eyes. But no one did because no one could. There was no purpose to our even being here except as a catalyst for the spell. Something about our life force being the enabler. But we were perfectly safe. Lol.
The barrels discharged violent thrashing hot gobs of colour into the sky; a thousand angry auroras. White-hot tips astride rainbow tentacles ripped through the wasps, consuming them in their yawing mouths. The tentacles gulped and engorged themselves, sucking down the wasp pilots’ spiritual essence. The tentacles got sloppy with mana. They writhed blindly like hallucinating eels. They impaled each other and hundreds of our own troops. That’s price of doing business with the occult. Your chances of surviving out here were around one in ten. You only had to be unlucky once, but lucky every time. There was no coming back from the hell they’d drag you do.
“Next wave,” the voice intoned. The thrashing ribbons of colour dissipated like rainbows in a dying fountain, spurting little fountain tops of regurgitated mana. My addy’s barrel purred; happy; full. Its terrible thirst sated, for now. Two fresh-faced solders began unpacking their addys beside me. They looked far too young for this. Needs-must I suppose. My addy folded back into itself with a quiet clatter. I lugged it onto my back. I moved aside to give the boys some space. I trudged back through the mud and gore, past bodies in pieces, past line after line of new recruits. My part in this fight was done for the next few days. My addy needed to be bathed.
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