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[h1]AIHTARAQ[/h1][/center]

The last despairing wail of the air raid siren died away to nothing, leaving Lieutenant Adrias Wiyyan and the rest of the Rieyks garrison in Forward Base Delta staring out over an ocean of sand that still shimmered with the days heat. A final scout plane roared overhead, waggling its wings at the waving infantrymen below; that pilot was one lucky bastard. Already long shadows were beginning to creep over the sand as the tallest dunes hid the sinking sun. The night was growing cold and he knew that it would soon be time to find a jacket.

"Do you think they'll come tonight?" Wiyyans company sergeant, Licas Torenas, asked from where he stood nearby, hands clasped behind his back. A rifle was slung over his right shoulder and bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossed the chest of his khaki desert uniform. 

How many times had someone asked that question in the past weeks? Wiyyan could have been rich if he had a coin for every time he had heard it. For the past three days the desert had been quiet, utterly still. That, he knew, was a trap if ever he had seen one. All his studies in the military academy had trained him to adopt tactics to an enemy who could be driven to ground, bombed from the air, sunk from beneath the waves. None of his instructors had talked about fighting an enemy ancient as the land it inhabited, whose cities were buried in caverns he could only imagine, and who fought with a savagery that brokered no prisoners.

The shadows marched steadily onward, reaching out like long fingers toward the concrete platforms that housed the garrison. He was still in awe of the complete darkness that seemed to lie beneath those ominous appendages of the drawing night. It always struck him as though the landscape was being painted black by some crazed artist, one piece at a time. 

"I don't know," He said finally. "Aerial recon found nothing, as they always do, and even the supply column hasn't reported a single attack. Command thinks our show of force might have worked. Driving a desk must qualify them as experts." The sergeant snorted in laughter.

The sun sank so rapidly that even as they spoke the first of the shadows touched the edge of the garrison and seemed to ooze its way through the rows of barbed wire. The ranks of vehicles parked in the centre of the compound were next and he marvelled at the variety he could see. It was clear that high command wasn't entirely sure what they were facing out here, neither did he if he was honest, but that was nowhere better exemplified than in the motor pool. Several tanks, both medium and light, anti-aircraft guns, armoured cars, half-tracks, even a number of small staff cars that were utterly useless on anything but a packed roadway. A complete mishmash of equipment no one else wanted. He wasn’t even sure any of it was from this war. 

"They're waiting." Torenas said, a bleak statement in the gathering gloom. "They're fucking waiting. They’ve fought this war for a lot longer than we have."

Wiyyan couldn't argue. The utter stillness was unnerving, especially when you knew that somewhere out there, an army was gathering. The Sahalia risen to meet every invader and he had no illusion that they had failed to note the presence of the Reiyk in the desert. He turned to look East and could see the very tops of the oil derricks, still clattering away, bathed for a brief moment in brilliant red sunshine before they to faded to black, just tall branchless trees against the rapidly darkening blue sky. 

"Activate the perimeter." Wiyyan said, and Torenas echoed his order in a crashing bark across the garrison. Floodlights burst on, illuminating the ground all around the garrison while specialized sensors sunk into the sand listened for any sound of tunnelling beneath them. Soldiers everywhere checked their weapons and settled in for another long night of staring into the artificial daylight. None of them had seen the night sky in almost a month now.

In the darkness beyond the, the other forward bases and the oil drilling camps similarly lit the desert like glowing hives of activity among a land otherwise blanketed an inky blackness. Wiyyan waited until he was satisfied before turning and starting to walk back across the compound; his duty officer rotation was done and he was ready to get some sleep. 

He was almost at the steps of the headquarters building, a fancy term for a series of metal shacks on a concrete platform, when he became aware of a sound he had not heard before. At first he thought it might be the wind but a glance at the flag slumped above his head told him that no breeze blew. Around him every face was turning toward the wire and the light drenched dunes beyond; faces pinched with worry and, for many, fear. Not a single man here was ignorant of the staggering numbers of dead that already lay beneath the shifting sands.

"It could be... maybe... someone, or something, is whispering..." Torenas, not far behind Wiyyan, was now in front of him and had cupped both hands around his ears like a parabolic sound mirror. "Oh Saints above... They must be coming."

Soldiers were already running from the huts that served as their barracks toward firing positions, sandbagged fortifications built on top of more concrete. Hard lessons had taught the Reiyk that digging down into the sand was a sure fire way to lose thousands of soldiers. 

"Alarm!" Wiyyan roared and the air raid siren shattered the evening air, rising in a furious pitch until it screamed its sound all across the desert; beyond it the other installations took up the cry. Everyone not already at the firing line came tumbling out into the open and made for their assigned positions, rifles in hand. He couldn't help but feel a sense of pride as they did so. No soldier was going to die because he had failed to train them properly. 

The siren died away, echoing back from the distant dunes and Ridgeback Mountains, and beneath it the whispering sound continued unabated. Nothing was moving that Wiyyan could see but all at once his seismic operators clapped hands to their ears. Eyes bulging from their heads as they frantically gestured at the machinery stacked neatly around them. 

"Holy shit! We've got sign! It's fucking everywhere!" The whispering had grown slowly now until it was a rushing sound, like the wind through the leaves of a spring forest. 

"Sign to the West!" More shouts, and then the cracks of rifles. Wiyyan turned toward the West and began to run, ripping his pistol from his belt as he did so. 

More shouts, the clatter of a machine gun somewhere else in the garrison, it didn't matter now. His responsibility once the alarm had been sounded shrank to the Western perimeter only. He could see soldiers firing rapidly into the light beyond the barbed wire and then the heavy "thunk" of a mortar firing a parachute flare into the night sky.

It burst high above, illuminating the desert in a bizarre blue glow far beyond the edge of the floodlights. Wiyyan felt his blood go cold and he stopped dead in disbelief. The desert was [i]moving[/i], the surface of the sand look as if it were alive and it moving East, directly toward him. 

An explosion shook the night and he risked a glance over his shoulder to see a distant oil derrick going up in flames. The flash of gunfire around it rapidly dwindled to nothing and the banks of floodlights went dark one by one. Firelight flickered across the sand now as the oil derrick collapsed, and black smoke billowed across the sand toward Wiyyan.

"Gas masks!" He shouted, pulling his own from his waist pouch and dragging it over his face. It wouldn't be much, but it might keep the men from inhaling the fumes; a man who couldn’t breath couldn’t fight and they needed every rifle they could get right now. He tugged the straps tight, took his pistol from beneath his legs, and hurried to his fighting position. The night had barely begun.