Champion of Mars Read Online Free PDF Page A

ninety-eight per cent certainty that Olm will fall. A two per cent chance that the Kemmeans will be repulsed; enough for hope, little else.
    Yoechakenon will be first to the wall. I watch his silver form flicker across the landscape, impossibly quick, darting through the fire coming from the city. There are no men of Olm left alive outside the city.
    He gains the breach, leaving footprints in its cooling slag. Several shield cannon hurry across the gap, heavy frontal plates and energy shields interlocking to form an impromptu wall. They fire at Yoechakenon, knowing that to bring him down is their only hope; that there is a small margin for error in the algorithms of the future, and their realisation lies in the destruction of his gleaming form. Fell the champion of Kemiímseet, and the Twin Emperor loses the war now . Yoechakenon is more than the greatest weapon in the armoury of Kemiímseet; he is the soul of the army. Destroy him, and the heart will go from the Twin Emperor’s forces. Spirits and men on both sides watch intently.
    In the depths of the Second World, the five Quinarchs wager upon the fate of a civilisation.
    Yoechakenon runs up the debris to the cannon. A spearpoint of Kemmeans trails behind him, their own, lesser armours struggling to match the speed given to Yoechakenon by the Armour Prime. The weapons of the shield cannon swivel on ball joints, long tracers of disintegrated quanta chattering from them, searing stitches onto the fabric of reality. They weave destruction. They are the warp, Yoechakenon the weft, his silver body flowing under and around and over the converging sprays of energy.
    Every machine is manned by two men, sat on saddles athwart the gun behind their shields of matter and energy. Each one is keen to fell the hero. Every one has the right to further life. But now, in this time of ending, the genelooms dwindle in number, and fewer men are made every year. The certainty has become opportunity, and the living fight fiercely to catch the notice of tallymen such as I. Some may go into the stacks of the Library and slumber for ten thousand years before being selected again. Many others will never come back, their souls left to the slow degradation of data. Glory in war is the sole guarantor of eternity in these dark times. To defy fate is to defy death.
    Few can manage such a feat.
    I pause in my reporting. Time slows around my Yoechakenon. He arcs over ribbons of light. Bright wounds are scored upon the cooling wall-stuff and the red soils outside the city, yet he is never hit. He spins with superhuman alacrity. It is both glorious and beautiful. I have no heart in this incarnation, but had I one it would beat faster. He is untouched, my love, but can draw no closer to the wall. A clever spirit indeed must be in command of the wall of shield cannons, for I can feel the skeins of the future bend and alter under the will of a powerful mind.
    The probability of victory for Olm is growing. Falteringly at first, mere tenths of a hundredth of a per cent, but these first stumbles become more assured and regular the longer Yoechakenon is held at bay.
    He will not tire, I tell myself. He cannot. The army at his back slows, apprehensive as time approaches a fork in its road.
    Then it is over, and determined fate reasserts itself. The pattern of fire fails, for all of its complexity, and Yoechakenon slips under its destructive loops. He lands lightly on the ruins of the wall, pushes hard, somersaults over a frantic triple-burst tracking him through the air. He holds his glaive forward, one disc down. The linked energy shields spark brightly as the disc hits, oily patterns sliding across their surface. For a fraction of a second, Yoechakenon hangs in the air, and then there is a bright flash, a crack of brittle thunder, and an energy shield winks out. He is falling toward a cannon barrel. He steps lightly along it; the glaive sweeps behind him to slice the barrel from its mount, then up over his head to