The sun rose bleaker over the glaciers and tundras.

  That was not just imagination though it would have been believed to have been. The phenomenon was a real manifestation of physical reality.

  The long arctic day of arctic summer would have given those near the pole a long arctic ponder as to the dimming light of the sun.

  It didn’t seem as “healthy” as it used to. Nothing did. Indeed the reds of the day were losing brilliance.

  Photographers and the oddest of analysts were documenting fewer red wavelengths in the world today. It wasn’t a computer virus, and it wasn’t a hardware issue. Some initially said it was mass psychosis. Someone on the planet was checking old school color film along with the weights of printer film cartridges in a dark room. As if such a failure of reality was even possible.

  It didn’t eliminate the digital layer, but it provided the illusion of an analog account. A crucial step in verifying what happened in the real world.

  Surely a hacker hellbent on removing the color red would have forgotten to catch printers.

  But as the day bore on orange muted into yellow, yellow to green, green to blue.

  And down the wheel of vibrant light color retreated into ultraviolet. The phenomenon had been imagined but never witnessed. At least not by those who spoke today among the living.

  Radar operators detected a hole in background radiation, where the sun still was.

  About five hours ago emissions from the sun had started blinking out of existence. New ones, little signals that indicated that the suns light was being refracted.

  The RF soup above the atmosphere disabled any good read. But multiple small groups of listeners around the planet had reached independently the same conclusion.

  There was a disk of fine powdered dirty ice and water filling the void between the planet and it's light. A giant lens, perhaps multiple. Perhaps lens was the wrong word, the energy was being reflected more than diffused. At least according to the most newly modern models.

  To "Reclaim your birth right" was a vague phrase. "We shall be as numberless as the stars." Was not so uninterpretable.

  The message seems a little less genuine but a little more true when the sun would not rise tomorrow.

  The knights could not know this all, they were not following the scientific panic that cloistered itself away in online communities. A damning projection of reality muffled under the weight of so many good mornings and clickbait. Some deranged fools even printed news articles claiming that the dimming of the sun was a seasonal activity. That a loss of red was in fact, entirely normal and scientifically documented. They were half right, which is probably worse than completely wrong.

  The knights would agree that the sun was bleak today. Almost supernaturally so.

  “That little lizard is late. It sounded like they were coming but they are not here yet.”

  “Our listener says the ZRM is in a bind, they are acting like something is going seriously wrong.”

  “Well it is going seriously wrong, the sun is fading, their solar is going to give out at this rate.”

  This was true, the few solar panels around had been reported to be defective due to low power generation.

  The two knights stood, as best they could in armor, discussing. Half wishing action to find them, half wishing it was all a bad dream. Both were plugged into ports in the corners of the church. Data and power feeds that would automatically disconnect if the machine was brought into action.

  Cameras from around the church fed directly into their suits. The anemic little computers of their old armors refusing to save any of the data. In this way the armored men looked without looking at the physical world outside their semi-fortified hole.

  The panic of last night had faded. Their Allies were on the road, likely only ten hours away. The lizard was supposed to have taken off in an aircraft four hours ago. The ZRM source had confirmed the flight number. Why wasn’t it here yet?”

  “What if it already landed?”

  “No new aircraft have landed.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Mistakes have been made in the past.”

  “This is not the time for doubt. We are under siege for the Bram occupy the roads outside. We are under siege for our own employers who wish to terminate us. We are under siege again for an alien that seeks to destroy us.”

  The sun had dimmed to an opaque white blue. Not brilliant and not a convincing disk anymore, more of an amorphous fuzzy cotton ball. The narrow slit window up the church bell tower let a narrow beam of light in. But knights could not fit their bulky armor and weapons up the service stairwell to observe raw sunlight more closely.

  Even in normal circumstances that sunlight was considered to possibly be one’s last

  “It’s almost lunchtime.”

  The military base chapel did not seek to pierce the heavens. Just offer a gentle reminder to all that it was a church. But also a military structure. Modern concrete crenellated walls surrounded the “steeple” platform up there. A plainclothes monk sat up there watching from within their heavy arctic coat.

  The knights themselves were warm. The inside of the suit acted as at least two layers of clothing. In fact it was a little hot in an armored suit. No matter the circumstances. Most were not equipped with air conditioning unless you counted emergency coolant. All but the most interesting were equipped with a power source, and therefore a heater. Heat management was less important in atmosphere but couldn’t be ignored.

  The normally natural light of the church was dim, a red light had been lit among the common speaking and meeting area. There were no pews. Nor an altar, The ludic church disliked stages.

  But there were various objects in the chapel. Mostly crudely sculpted wooden recreations of interstellarly local do-gooders now dead.

  The cozy red and yellow incandescent bulb nearby them magnified and made powerful and warm the misshapen wooden statues.

  Without that little light they would have seemed demonic gargoyles trapped in some lonely plane of hell.

  Though it was noon the temperature was falling. Outside it was snowing. It had snowed off and on the last week or so. Only a day ago the snow had been melting. Soon a layer of ice would have formed under new snow.

  The knights could tell by a little weather station readout near the front double doors of the chapel that this was not a normal blizzard.

  Both the knight and squire were forbidden from going outside. That job had been reserved for the others. Jason and Squire had been picked to negotiate with those who would besiege the church. Notably also to defend the entrance to this chapel heaven forbid.

  The others, Ambrose, Cotton, Ralph, Oscar, Gabriel, Joseph the Magus… They all had equipped armor with jumpers and were waiting for any sign of that specific approaching aircraft.

  That old magus had pull somehow. He had convinced one of the Zephyr Republic Military commanders to run a full inspection of any aircraft that arrived today.

  If the alien was spotted the craft would be ordered away. The knights would down the craft as it fled.

  The only problem was, it required the alien they suspected was in cargo to land and then fail to disembark.

  If there was one thing humans were good at it was installing cameras on every corner of a transport vessel, the inspection would be completely remote. Hopefully the alien would only detect routine unloading protocols and fail to react until the craft began to move.

  Cruelly the pilot was not going to be informed, just told to idle for a little longer while another craft landed.

  Which again, was another possible point of failure. If the pilot had little reserve fuel, they obviously wouldn’t be willing or able to take off again.

  A grim calculus for a sad and pathetic solution.

  But the alternative was letting the little skink rack up another tally of kills. One to five dead with only one aircraft lost was looking like a best case scenario.

  Jason and Squire sat armed, Squire with the engine block stopper. A massive recoilless tube born and loaded by the exoskeleton. Jason with the terrible automatic grenade launcher and a backpack full of shells. Together they would offer a soft and hard target “stinger” for attackers.

  But they were but two, a determined assault would only be enraged by their presence

  They stood ready to blow a door of the church away and level any threats they detected.

  But so far it was all quiet. The magus had assumed action today and it wasn’t coming. A worst case scenario for if action never came sleep and exhaustion would force the knights to yield having ever fought.

  Other militaries would offer stimulants and chemicals to keep their operators working for extended periods of time.

  The church, for better or worse, refused to systematically alienate their members from body chemistry the way the syndicate sometimes did.

  The Bram were settling down. The ZRM was willing to negotiate. Perhaps if the alien was spotted on the other side of the planet things could return to normal. At least here.

  But then the craft was spotted. An ekranoplane coming from an unexpected angle, the north. The craft was requesting an emergency landing. Or so ZRM reported.

  The alien didn’t take off on that machine did they? Those things belong in marinas not in airports.

  Nevertheless, the ZRM summoned the knights for the “inspection” and all five, magus included, ignited their disposable hopper jets and hopped in response to the call for aid. Suits and men alike falling off the church communications channels. They only had two jumps before the tube of explosives was jettisoned as little more than a crude cylinder for recyclers.

  Jason hated using those things. Too stressful, squire was too green to be ready for the practice. Which is why this knight and his squire stood guard duty while the others had populated an open garage with man sized rockets under their armpits.

  “How old is the magus JJ?” The squire asked.

  “In his fifties.”

  “And still participating in combat?”

  “These are not normal situations, normally his reaction time is considered a liability. Once you get that old you stop being slick and start being slow.”

  “When was the last time he was in combat?”

  “More than a decade ago, he was a half pilot, plugged into spaceships not exoskeleton armor.”

  “Is he qualified?”

  “For civilian models for sure. He’s pretty handy with the machines too. I trust he’s going to do well.”

  Jason didn’t worry too much about the people, he was concerned with the firepower, they had procured some interesting equipment for putting down the lizard’s mech.

  Two disposable lasers, the exceptionally dangerous personal napalm countermeasure, they were all armed with the marine killing submachine-guns. Church Specialty slug throwers.

  Except for Magus and Oscar, who both carried the long rifles and the backpack ground to air missiles.

  The plainclothes spotter reported the flight number a match.

  “I did not believe we would see the number until too late!” Jason exclaimed only to the squire.

  About two miles away, under a glacier, the ZRM sanctioned radar missile was primed for signal but the ground effect aircraft would defeat most radars.

  Jason imagined that to the squire, this all must seem so impromptu. They had only been briefed on the mission only an hour ago. Barely a lick of sleep in the last fourteen, no sixteen hours.

  Performance decreased as exhaustion set in. But if they could nip this alien in the bud, they could sleep even if hell began to freeze over.

  Indeed there was already an inch of fresh snow accumulating even as the sun still shone.