Much has been made of the seemingly miraculous survival of Dimitra against invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong. Among some of the more fanciful commentators, the events are given an explicit spiritual significance — since the world has been acknowledged as one of the few Cradles of Life in all the galaxy, some claim Dimitra is somehow special, protected from obliteration by some unidentified supernatural force. A closer examination of the record, however, clearly demonstrates that there was nothing supernatural about Dimitra's success. In fact, the diverse peoples of the world came perilously close to catastrophe, saved from annihilation by only the most fortuitous of circumstances.
To start, one must keep the timing in mind. The Invasion of Dimitra began on 63:5:16, the opening engagements continuing until at least 5:19 — this four-day period is (somewhat idiosyncratically) referred to as "Zero Day" by the locals, which has since been made an official public holiday in Dimitran space. Observant readers may note that this situates the invasion well after General Wedge Antilles's stunning four-month-long stand at Borleias — ultimately 'losing' the battle, but delivering humiliating losses to Yuuzhan Vong forces in the process — and only a month before the Battle of Ebaq, where the Yuuzhan Vong lost a full quarter of their fleet alongside their highest military officer.
The depth of our ignorance of the Yuuzhan Vong's internal affairs throughout most of the war is something that is sometimes overlooked in retrospective scholarship, thanks to the testimony of heretics and prisoners of war made available in the aftermath. It hadn't seemed so at the time — the Yuuzhan Vong had conquered Coruscant and destroyed the New Republic in less than two years after the greater galaxy had even learned of their existence, their domination of all the galaxy all but inevitable — but the Yuuzhan Vong were in a terribly precarious position after General Antilles's 'defeat' at Borleias. The Yuuzhan Vong had left their home galaxy in incalculable numbers, surely representing the greatest fleet ever assembled in known history — but, as is well known, their propulsion systems are no more effective than our own. The journey through the empty, cold blackness of interstellar space endured generations upon generations. For hundreds of years they travelled, spent their lives from birth to death crowded into their great worldships, with terribly few resources not brought with them by previous generations. And they were, of course, a warlike people — even as their living spacecraft aged and deteriorated and died around them, they fought among each other, over old feuds or their dwindling resources or seemingly out of boredom and isolation. Invading the first galaxy they came across had been a necessity, for they wouldn't have survived long enough to reach the next.
And their difficulties did not end upon their arrival. Early attempts to establish a light foothold in the less 'developed' regions of space had been unanticipated failures, due to the combined efforts of the Chiss Ascendency and the Empire of the Hand, delaying the invasion considerably and forcing the Yuuzhan Vong to directly confront the New Republic. For all that the indecisive, feuding government had been unable to prevent the invaders from swallowing up large portions of the galaxy in a terrifyingly short span of time, the casualties suffered by the Yuuzhan Vong in the process had been crippling. According to their own estimates, the they had lost roughly a third of all adult members of the warrior caste and nearly a half of all military vessels and equipment between their early engagements on the Rim and Supreme Overlord Shimrra Jamaane's arrival on Coruscant.
That estimate was made before the conclusion of the Battle of Borleias. And so, by the time of their attack on Dimitra, the Yuuzhan Vong were already greatly diminished.
2nd September 1995 (63:5:16)
— Contact plus 00.00.00:02.15
Beth banked around, threw an overpowered banishing charm at the descending fireball, the air seeming to scream from the heat — the force sent her skidding, but the fireball was nudged out of its course. A couple seconds later, it plunged into the river in a fifty-foot-tall burst of steam, the crackling of boiling water audible from here.
She glanced down to the street below, and grimaced. It made sense to huddle down during the bombing run, but if they could get moving down there, that'd be great...
The evacuation of the muggle government in Westminster was going rather more slowly than Beth would like. The armoured trucks and shite they'd need to move everyone had been being kept on military bases outside the city — once they'd abandoned their original plan to lift everyone important out by helicopter, they'd needed to wait at least another hour for the trucks to start coming in. And then they had to wait longer for more trucks, and more, and, just...
This was maybe shitty, but did they have to bring this many people? They were bringing the Prime Minister, obviously, along with several Department Secretaries and a bunch of military leadership types (Beth didn't know who all was here, she hadn't asked), and of course the Queen's family — Prince Kenneth and the kids had already been moved from wherever they'd been when the attack hit, were waiting down there in a basement somewhere with the PM and whoever else. But on top of them, they were also bringing a whole bunch of Undersecretaries and ministers and all kinds of officials, Beth didn't even know who.
Like, of course all the lower-level people shouldn't just be left to die, but couldn't they evacuate most of them through the Underground like everyone else? If they were necessary for whatever government reason, it wasn't like they wouldn't know where they were going, they could all meet up later, right? Seemed like it was more important to get the PM and the Prince and Princess out of here — the Queen was in Egypt, and they had no idea whether she was even still alive, so it was double important to get the kids out, since one of them might be getting a promotion soon — and the Underground should be mostly safe for everyone else. Really, they could have left already.
And apparently part of the delay was because they were moving a bunch of documents and stuff too. They had mages helping that go faster, summoning everything and stuffing it all into expanded cases, but still, just... This just seemed really silly, that was all.
They did realise this was kind of an emergency, right? Beth would like to get moving now, thank you...
The last of the fireballs crashed down to the ground, further pummelling the already half-ruined city, but then there was a lull, the ship they were coming from having moved on once again. Beth had been told a little bit since coming here (not that anyone knew much), and it seemed the big fireballs were all being dropped by a single ship far overhead — a fucking huge ship, their best guess was it was a third of a kilometre long. As far as they could tell, this single stupidly massive space ship was covering all of Europe and maybe the Mediterranean. It was on a kind of clockwise loop, firing indiscriminately down at cities as it went...although London actually got hit twice in quick succession every time around the loop. It would come up from the south (probably after bombing Paris), fire a couple volleys on London as it continued north, hitting Birmingham on the way to Manchester, then looping by Leeds and Sheffield, and then take another run at London (just a couple minutes after the first) before turning east toward Rotterdam. They didn't know where all it hit, their communications with other countries were still pretty spotty (someone was already working on that), but since its whole loop through Britain only took maybe five minutes and there was about an hour between bombing runs, that thing could well be flying over all the big cities in Europe.
The RAF had tried to fly up there to blow the fucker up, before realising it was actually in space, if only barely — their planes couldn't fly that high. The pass before this last one had just finished around when she and Sirius had first arrived, and Beth had overheard one of the military people suggesting they might be able to hit it with a fucking ballistic missile — apparently those technically shot up into space for a little bit at the peak of their flight, before arcing back down to the ground — but aiming that would be a crapshoot, especially with how fast the ship was moving...and if they missed they might hit something important halfway around the world, could easily kill thousands of people on accident. They were gonna call that Plan B.
Unfortunately for them, Plan A was just hunkering down and waiting for the ship to move on. They hoped that, if they abandoned the cities and spread their people out enough, eventually they'd get to a point that constantly shooting at them wasn't worth spending the ammo anymore, and the bastards up there would give up.
In the meanwhile, they'd found that shooting the fireballs with guns or destructive spells, or even conjuring something for them to run into in mid air, could blow them up, popping like a balloon...specifically, like a water balloon — if you popped one, it didn't explode when it hit the ground, but the lava would still get down there eventually. Colder, from all the wind along the way, but it could still melt things, and still killed people who got hit with it just fine. Better than not doing it, but still not great. During the pass north just a few minutes ago, Beth had realised you could redirect them a little bit with banishing and summoning spells, without popping them — which didn't stop them from hitting the ground, of course, but there was a convenient river right there. The few fighter jets they had left and various anti-aircraft guns or whatever else kept shooting down the ones aimed for other areas of the city, but the handful of mages covering this part of Westminster with her and Sirius had quickly copied the trick.
So, at least they'd stop fucking lava from falling on the head of anyone important.
(Honestly, Beth thought it was fucking stupid that they were putting so much into protecting comparatively few people. She guessed she understood it was important, for like organisational reasons or whatever, but she still kind of hated it. Hopefully she and Sirius would go help normal people after they were done here...)
Of course, there were a bunch of little fighter ships that were following along behind the big ship, sweeping in to shoot at the city some more with smaller but equally deadly fireballs, more precisely. The RAF's fighter jets were mostly quick enough to dodge around the big fireballs, but Sirius had mentioned they'd still lost a bunch of the ones flying over London, mostly shot down by these little ships. Beth hadn't seen any of them yet — they hadn't come by last time around, for whatever reason, maybe preoccupied with something going on at another city in the loop. (If they were very lucky, some other country had managed to take them all out, but Beth wouldn't bet on it.) Sirius had already given her advice for dealing with them, apparently they were a bitch, could fly really fast and at funny angles and change directions in a blink (rather like a broom, actually), spat out fireballs from multiple spots, and, somehow, could pluck missiles and bullets and sometimes even spells out of the air, got through most clashes without getting a scratch. It was actually easier to kill them with spells than muggle weapons, you just had to do big, area-effect stuff...which Beth hardly even had the power to do yet anyway, so, yeah, not looking forward to those bastards showing up.
Beth was scanning the southern sky when Sirius flew up close to her. She heard him before she saw him, the overlong reddish flag tied to his waist flapping in the breeze — Beth had one too, all the mages with them did, they didn't want the muggles on the ground accidentally shooting them. "They're finishing loading up down there. We're gonna move fast, hopefully we'll be out of the city before the bombing comes around again."
...She would say that didn't sound likely, but she guessed they didn't really have to worry about traffic at the moment.
One of the other mages — in unfamiliar black and red uniforms, supposedly they were actually with the muggle government (Beth hadn't even realised you could do that) — suggested they get low. Let the anti-aircraft guns and whatever fighter jets were left deal with any aliens that buzzed through, they didn't want to attract attention of they could help it. Looking for a landing spot, Beth's eye was caught by a shallow glass dome, she touched down on a narrow roof between the dome and the street — it wasn't a high building, she was only a few metres up, barely any taller than the statue of some bloke on a horse in the middle of the street. (A WWI memorial, she was pretty sure.) The street in front of her was filled with dozens of vehicles, mostly big armoured trucks and shite, soldiers and harried-looking people in suits running around. Though, now that she was closer, she could see the activity had settled down some, fewer people on the street, doors slamming closed one after another after another. Beth could see the north end of the convoy from here, but not the south end, too many vehicles and buildings and bloody statues in the way.
If she leaned over the railing — there was a staircase leading to the roof from a courtyard behind her, apparently people were supposed to be able to get up here — she could see, just barely, a streak of red and yellow that she knew was the Queen's flag (or whatever the proper name was, Beth didn't pay attention to that stuff). Someone had tracked one down and attached it to one of the trucks somehow — Prince Kenneth, the kids, and the Prime Minister would all be in that one. So the people in the air and whoever else would be able tell at a glance which one they really wanted to make sure didn't get hit, she guessed.
As much as Beth didn't really give a damn about the royal family, personally, Princess Mary and Prince William were just kids — Mary was maybe two years younger than Beth, and William was, like, seven or eight? She didn't know exactly. So, she'd keep an eye on that one, she guessed.
(Beth realised it was kind of silly to think of them as just kids, since the Princess wasn't really that much younger than her, but Beth was willing to bet she could handle herself better in a fight.)
For all that it looked like they were getting close to ready, Beth still ended up waiting on the roof for what had to be a few more minutes. Jesus, this was ridiculous, didn't they get they were kind of in a rush? She was just wondering if it would be worth it to fish her water bottle out of her bag — when she'd shown up, one of the blokes in the unfamiliar uniforms had handed her a bag with water, some packages she assumed were, like, military ration bars or something, plus a few emergency healing potions — when she noticed movement in her peripheral vision. It hadn't gotten back here yet, but it definitely looked like the trucks were moving.
Finally, fuck's sake. Beth hopped up onto the railing, got a leg over her broom before leaning over the street, lazily drifted along a couple metres over the tops of the trucks. With all their engines going, they were seriously fucking loud — and she was a fair distance away from any of the literal tanks trundling around, she'd had no idea how much noise those bloody things made. She kind of wished she could fly higher, away from the noise and the exhaust, but if aliens flew by she didn't want to accidentally lead them here, so, she just got to deal with it. The other mages flying cover lifted off at more or less the same time she did, drifting along the street and hugging close to the convoy. Sirius was the only one she recognised, sidling over to fly only a couple metres away, just to her left. Moody was still with them — he'd gotten multiple patrōnī from multiple different Order people asking him to come help with one thing or another, but he'd told them all to call someone else — but he wasn't in the air, he'd be down in one of the trucks. Beth didn't know which one, but it hardly mattered, he could take care of himself.
Beth slipped more forward, Sirius pacing her, closer to the truck with the flag — there were too many fliers over there to actually fly over it, but she didn't need to be that close, just wanted to keep an eye on it. It was pretty slow going at first, vehicles picking out of the knot they'd made of themselves to drive double-file down the road — the single-file trucks back here splitting up into two rows as they went, so at least the convoy wouldn't be so stupid long — not helped by the slow-moving bloody tanks and whatever else, some of them seeming to have a little trouble getting around a corner. Beth was pretty sure that was Parliament up there, she'd seen it coming in, she drifted toward the right-hand side of the street so she could see around the buildings to the left, and...
Well, it had been Parliament, but it was only barely recognisable. Big holes smashed into it in multiple spots, the sprawling building sagging here and there, some of the towers were missing. It'd taken a couple hits before Beth had gotten here, but it looked much worse now — it must have gotten hit badly in the last bombing run, she'd been so focussed on covering the government people that she hadn't noticed.
...The building had been mostly empty, right? Hermione had said Parliament wasn't sitting today... Oh well, if there were, like, clerks and shite there, they'd probably evacuated ages ago by now...
They didn't actually go past Parliament, hanging a right, starting to pick up speed as they got everything straightened out — not fast by any means, but she assumed they'd speed up as they hit more open streets. The street did end up narrowing down to two lanes pretty soon, a wider street splitting off to the left but they continued straight on. As damn big as these trucks were, they didn't fit on the road, barely fit between the long stone buildings toward either side...and it looked like the fliers further ahead were cutting down trees and barrier posts as they went, levitating or vanishing them out of the way, Beth saw one truck bump into a lamppost and just keep going, the metal bending and then finally tipping over, glass shattering against the pavement. Maybe unnecessary, but the city was being bombed by aliens, Beth guessed a little extra damage probably didn't make a difference.
Before too long the buildings pulled away, and there were lines of trees on either side of the street instead. The road was narrow enough, trees leaning over far enough, that Beth was forced to hug even closer over the roofs of the truck, could reach out and tap them with a foot, weaving back and forth around stray branches. Beth wasn't sure which park this was — wasn't Buckingham Palace this way somewhere? — but the columns of smoke she saw through the trees, she was pretty sure big parts of it were on fire, a few stray lava-bomb-things must have landed back there somewhere. Nowhere near the street, though, the convoy kept moving without a hitch.
After a few minutes coasting along, there was another slowdown — Beth didn't notice, almost kneed a bloke on top of one of the trucks, waiting at a big damn gun sticking out of the roof, in the back of the head before she jerked aside. The trees on the left side had thinned out, showing a big open yard over there, on the other side a plain white building Beth thought was vaguely familiar (probably caught a glimpse of it on television at some point). But they were taking a right, the convoy speeding up a little as they got through the corner, the road opening up some, she darted ahead and—
Oh. Hello, Buckingham Palace. She'd thought it was over here somewhere...
They crossed over a low, wide bridge, before coming to a wide roundabout around a big damn statue. (Multiple statues on and around a big damn column, really.) The open space in front of the Palace completely deserted, the convoy was able to pick up a bit of speed, spilling around both sides of the monument in the middle, an occasional clanging and crunching as they rolled right over little movable barriers in the way. Lazily circling the shining gold-coloured bronze statue at the top of the absurdly oversized monument — a female figure wearing a Roman-looking robe with feathery wings spread wide, a laurel around her head (if she had her silly pseudo-Classical symbolism straight, maybe Victory?) — Beth took a look around the big open area.
There was absolutely nobody around, everyone presumably having fled toward the edges of the city or underground, probably the emptiest this place had ever been. (Beth had never been to Buckingham Palace before, but she assumed there'd always be tourists and security and shite around.) She was pretty sure that was the Mall stretching out to the right, she vaguely recognised that from shite on television, the big white stone facade of the Palace with its imitation Classical columns and the familiar balcony over the entrance and all on her left. From this angle, Beth could see there was a courtyard inside the Palace, on the other side of the front-facing wing (the only part she recognised), the stone of the back and side -wings way more beige, with more columns and stuff, one part of the roof obviously imitating an old Roman/Greek-style temple, she didn't think she'd seen any of that before.
There was some damage around, but not really that much — it seemed like the aliens were aiming to kill people, this area very open without a bunch of dense buildings around not an obvious target, assuming they were completely ignorant of the significance of the Palace. (They seemed to be shooting randomly, so Beth thought that wasn't a bad guess.) There had been a few hits in the area, though. Parts of the gardens around were in fire, the air thick with smoke — Beth barely noticed, she'd had a bubblehead charm going for a while now — and the Palace had been hit at least once, in one of the side wings, stone as easily smashed to pieces as anything else, the top floor along half of that wing collapsed, a thick cloud of smoke pouring out of the hole mostly hiding the flickering of fire within. Looked like that was going to be a pain to fix — Beth guessed it was only fair that some of the Queen's shite got wrecked, since the city was practically half-ruined at this point.
They didn't follow the Mall — if they did, they'd practically be going right back where they'd started — instead taking a street across the roundabout from where they'd come in, going past the right side of the Palace. The passengers would get a pretty good look at the damage, then...or at least she thought so, before she noticed there was a wall and a bunch of trees over there that'd be in the way. This street was pretty narrow too, though still wide enough for the convoy to move two-by-two, trees stretching over from either side, there'd barely be enough room to fly again. The first trucks were just reaching the trees when, over the noise of the engines and countless fires throughout the city, Beth heard a deep, sharp whistling roar, coming from behind her. She turned in place, drifting lazily to a halt, looked back for the source.
Approaching from the south were at least eight objects, at this distance still too small to be much more than dark pricks low in the sky, barely visible through the smoke. They swiftly grew, resolving into rounded oblong shapes, thickest in the middle and tapering toward the edges, almost like a seed. As they got closer, Beth noticed the edges were oddly knobby, none of the hard smooth lines she'd expect from an aircraft — though the vaguely teardrop profile was aerodynamic enough, she guessed — looking kind of random and almost organic. Still south of the river, she thought they swooped down closer to the ground as they neared, she could barely see little flashes of orange light spitting out of the fronts, springing down out of sight...probably punching into buildings, roasting alive anyone unlucky enough to be caught out.
An amplified voice wormed its way into Beth's ears — a rich tenor with an overly precise posh accent (putting Beth in mind of period dramas or something), recognisable as a bloke called Langley, the leader of the government mages. "Contact to the south. Under the trees, quickly." The trucks toward the front of the convoy jolted forward as the drivers stepped on it, those further behind accelerating in a wave as space opened up in front of them, gradually slipping under the cover of the leaves. They definitely weren't going to get into hiding quickly enough — and that was assuming the things up there hadn't already seen them — but she guessed getting under cover wasn't a terrible idea...
She didn't hear it at first, covered by the fires, her attention on the south, was startled by a screaming of engines coming from the north, seconds afterward a trio of fighter jets streaking by overhead — not close, far enough she couldn't make out any details, but still shockingly loud. Despite being outnumbered nearly three to one, the fighters curled in a slow turn, diving closer to the ground, Beth's seeker-trained instincts instantly recognising they'd meet the weird seed-shaped alien craft somewhere to the east. From what she'd heard, the RAF had already lost a tonne of planes and helicopters and whatever else to these things, and they were still flying right at them as soon as they showed up. Brave bastards.
Pacing the convoy as it rushed on, Beth kept glancing over her shoulder, watching the three fighters and eight alien ships approach each other. The aliens seemingly weren't reacting, still firing randomly down at the city, the fighters coming in from the side — and started shooting once they got close enough, the sharp ringing of machinegun fire once again on the air. It didn't look like they were hitting anything, though, the alien ships hardly even twitching, the fighters breaking off as they neared, wheeling around...and then the aliens reacted, the little ships swirling in different directions — gracefully and at impossible angles, as though unaffected by gravity or even momentum — zeroing in on the planes, specks of orange light shooting out of the front tips. Curling back in around on them, the British pilots actually managed to avoid the shots for a little bit, slashing through the tangled knot of manoeuvring ships — they even got one, an alien ship wobbling as it was hit from two sides at once, before tilting and dropping out of sight — but then one burst into flames, scattered debris raining down on the streets below, and then a second one. The second pilot managed to bail, a little dark shape streaking out of the fighter before it blew up. The third fighter, realising he was fucked, made a break for it, diving out of Beth's sight — she guessed hugging close to the ground and weaving between buildings and under bridges, trying to evade the three aliens ships that turned to follow him.
The second pilot was falling toward the ground, a white smear of a parachute appearing to slow his descent. One of the alien ships twirled around, and shot him out of the air, the tiny speck of a person just completely vanishing, incinerated from the heat.
Of the five ships not chasing the last remaining fighter, three turned to the east, presumably following the lead of the big ship floating over Europe. But the other two curled in a lazy little circle, firing again and again into the city below them, seemingly just for the hell of it.
And then, rapidly growing bigger by the second, they started moving straight this way.
Langley barely had time to warn anyone — most of the trucks with the bug guns on them halting and turning around to aim up at the sky, mages wheeling around to meet them — before they were already here. (Sirius hadn't been kidding when he'd said they could move fast, they must have been a kilometre or two away but then they were here, in seconds.) The things were surprisingly big, easily longer than two of the trucks end-to-end, made out of what almost looked like rock, but not polished down, craggy and mottled, an orange-ish creamy colour with patches of a darker reddish orange and deep violet, a transparent part in the thick, rounded middle that was definitely a cockpit. Beth wasn't flying straight at them, sticking low and to the sides with the rest of the mages — so the gunners could easily shoot past them, she assumed — they still weren't in spell range when the pair of odd-looking things started spitting out fireballs with a sort of wet gulping noise. About as wide across as the length of her forearm, hissing as they zipped through the air, they were aimed at the trucks, easily burning through the metal, Beth heard yelling for a second but it was quickly covered by the booming of the big damn guns, some deeper and slower and others higher and quicker, overlapping each other into an indecipherable mess, Beth's head ringing from the noise.
Turning to climb with the pack of mages she'd ended up with, hard enough she smacked herself in the chest with her broom handle, they arced up at the ships from below, "Cumigne lacera!" a spread of curses leaping up at them more or less at the same time. The ships jumped and jittered, managed to dodge most of the curses, others seeming to get sucked away and disappear, barely a foot from the surface — the spellglows smearing and curling around a single point, the mottled pattern of the ship behind distorted, as though bending the light as well. A couple curses got through, but at shallow angles, little chips of whatever the hell these things were made of blasted off to clatter down through the trees below. Swerving to fly past the things, Beth heard some thunking and plinking, bullets getting through, but only for a couple seconds before the ships went eerily quiet again (there wasn't any engine noise or anything, how the hell did these things fly?), the continuing gunfire not actually hitting anything.
Twitching with a flash of clarity, her breath caught in her throat for a second. "Vocem vecta, their shields are directional, box them in." However they were plucking bullets and spells out of the air, it was like a directional shield charm: they had to consciously put it up, and they could only block so many angles at once. They might not be able to shoot through their shields, but Beth was betting they could shoot around them.
Now above them, Beth wheeled around to throw down another curse, but the things weren't where she expected them to be, had zipped over to the trucks, dropping more fireballs on the muggle soldiers. Hissing through her teeth, Beth scrambled to catch up, the wind tearing at her hair and the flag tied to her waist flapping in the breeze. "Distona!" Skipping a few metres to the side (different angles, keep moving), "Sectumsempra!" dragging her arm through the air as she moved to broaden the band of the curse, "Fixam iaculor, distona, mutila!"
As fast as he was moving, she was coming up on the ships already, she kicked her broom around and pushed hard the opposite direction, the foot pegs kicking against her boots, her hand squeaked on the handle, she scrambled to hold on, the wood of her wand and the broom clacking against each other. Bullets whizzing through the air around her, she was over one of the ships now, Sirius and a few of the government mages in a tight pack around her, the ship shielding them from the guns. Beth had cast mutila without thinking — it only worked on living things — but to her surprise the piercing white spellglow managed to slip past the ship's shield and burst against the side, little flecks of stuff blown off to tumble away.
...Huh. Were these things alive? Their weird bug-grenades and snake-sword-whip things seemed to be, but their bloody fighter planes too?
But Beth didn't have time to mull over that, throwing a Lance of Modestus down at the ship, lost among the streaks of spellglows cast from the other mages around her. The ship saw it coming, jumping to the side shockingly quickly, avoiding the spells...and also putting the mages and muggles in each other's line of fire. Her entire body thrumming, Beth kicked her broom around, "Aigída!" the shield charm angled below her, and darted after the ship, bullets whistling around her or pinging off her shield while the spells slammed against the ground (and probably hitting a couple trucks, damn it). There were shouts of pain from behind her, she thought at least one of the mages had been hit, but she could feel magic thick on the air, most of them were flying with her, a rain of spells leaping out at the ship, one and another and another, Beth not really thinking about what she was casting, whatever she could—
The ship wheeled around, bringing its guns to bear on them — at least Beth assumed that's what those tubes clustered toward the front were — the mages broke, swirling around like a school of fish avoiding a rock. (Beth nearly ran into another flyer, barely jinked out of the way.) A fireball streaked through where they'd been a second ago, angled down toward the muggles, one of the mages ahead of her got too close to the ship, must have ran into the shield and—
He disappeared — the light bending around him, his body twisting and curling, the broom snapping with the force, a blast of numbing heat prickling at Beth's skin, sparks dancing in her eyes. (Radiation, she'd learn, later.) And he was, just, gone.
Fuck, just...fuck.
The ships had split up, she saw at a glance — the other moving to follow the rest of the convoy, mages on broomsticks and muggles in armoured trucks chasing after it — but Beth wheeled around to stay on this one. The ship jittering around and weaving to avoid spells and bullets, Beth had to adjust course multiple times, firing piercing curses as she went, flinging down another sectumsempra as she darted over it. One of the mages she was flying with was suddenly wrenched downward, as though snatched with a summoning charm, yanked down toward the ship — he didn't hit it, the ship skipping around to dodge more hits, the out of control mage tumbling toward the ground, Beth didn't stick around to see what happened to him, wheeling around again.
Another run on the ship, she saw the guns were steadily blowing off chips of the stuff, one of her spells got through again, taking off another chunk — they were definitely doing damage, but the fucking thing wouldn't just go down. Wheeling around again, Beth found herself suddenly being yanked forward, hard, was nearly pulled right off her broom. "Depelle!" The banishing charm slowed her down, but she was still being pulled toward the ship, she turned her broom around, leaned into the flight spells and the banishing charm as hard as she could, her arm burning from the magic and her legs aching from the pressure. Occasionally wrenched around as the ship kept dodging hits, bobbing this way and that (forcibly reminding her of that time Quirrell nearly threw her off her own broom), she was still, slowly, being drawn in, inch by inch.
Yanked around again, her hands painfully tight on her broom and her wand, she grit her teeth, glaring over her shoulder at the alien ship — fuck, just let go, already!
"Beth!" Sirius said, swooping around behind her. "What's wrong?"
"Bastard's grabbed onto me, trying to pull me in." She could feel something holding on to her, almost felt like a spell of some kind. (Did their shite work on magic somehow?) Even while being shot at by other people, it was still stubbornly holding onto her, but she had managed to hit it a couple times, she must have cheesed it off...
"Hold on, I'll try to—" Sirius cut himself off, probably noticing the same thing she had: the ship spinning on its axis, the guns at the front swinging around to point toward them.
...This was a terrible idea.
Her heart throbbing through her head to toe, Beth cut off the flight spell and kicked her broom around, turning back toward the ship, dragged faster forward. Leaning over her broom, yanking her arm back, "Accio!" and she flew, the sudden acceleration jolting her against the foot pegs, straight at the thing, the tubes at the front glowing orange—
—and she dove, straight down. Whatever was holding onto her kept pulling, yanking her dive into a curve, picking up a dangerous amount of speed, her eyes stinging and the flag behind her rattling, the ground coming up quickly, she twitched to the side to slip between a pair of trucks, the grass a blur beneath her—
With an uncomfortable tearing feeling, like ripping off a plaster, she was released. Her broom jolting under her, she nearly slammed straight into the ground, she pulled up, the Firebolt shivering in her hands, the enchantments burning off so much magic she could almost see it pouring through the wood. Beth arced up, up, until the broom was perpendicular to the ground, and then angled back and upside down, pushing against the speed she'd picked up in the dive. As she finally slowed — the wind softening against her face, her hair starting to droop — she rolled back right-side-up.
Right, that was close. Let's not do that again.
Beth was higher than she'd expected, easily fifty metres off the ground, and further away, the little battle spread out below her — the annoyingly tough alien ship dancing over the line of trucks, dodging fire from mages and muggles alike, the other harrying the convoy further ahead. As she got her bearings, she saw their ship somehow pluck one of the trucks off the ground, sending it spinning through the air, a muggle caught in it tumbling out, the truck clipping a mage and snapping his broom, both of them plummeting.
And Beth was getting a second crazy idea. Leaning forward, firming her grip on her broom, forcing magic hot and crackling down her arm, Beth hissed, "Hostīs damnātōs millanceīs flagrantibus ulcīscere." The spell built through the overlong incantation, dense and sharp until she thought her hand might explode, finally releasing as it resolved — not as a single burst, but as a constant flow, burning through her, gritting her teeth against the pain.
And she dove.
Of all the different kinds of combat spells out there, they generally fell in one of three basic categories. Most of the ones you saw in ordinary duels were point spells — the curse was crammed into a spell envelope, which carried it through the air, once the envelope broke against something the curse released to do its thing at whatever it just hit. There were also big area-effect spells, that spread out in like a cloud or a cone or whatever, the effect of the curse applied to anything and everything caught by it. Since those curses generally had the same effect a point spell might, but were spread over a much, much larger area, they took far more power to cast, often hundreds of times an equivalent point spell, the advantage being you could get multiple people at once and didn't really have to aim. (Though friendly fire was a problem, Beth assumed that was why nobody here was using any.) Sirius and Dora could both cast plenty of these, but Beth couldn't really, not powerful enough yet.
There was a class of spells that were sort of halfway between the two, instead of a single point spread over an arc. There were multiple advantages to these kinds of spells — especially for someone like Beth, who had the skill to learn advanced battlemagic but not the power. For one thing, you could get out way more powerful spells this way: mages were limited by how much magic they could cast at a time (your magic didn't run out as you used it, but you could try to draw too much at once), so if you spread out the casting of a spell you could pump far more energy into it than you could into a point spell. You could get the maximum strength you can manage in a point spell into every hand-span or so of an arc, meaning you could easily get a total power of ten times as much as your strongest point spell, if you know what you're doing. Also, these spells could be way more versatile: the shape and the length of the arc was defined by your last wand movement, and you could make that pretty much whatever you liked. You could aim it to get a very exact cut in something (cutting charms were arc spells), or ice someone's feet to the floor (one of Dora's favourite tricks); you could slow down the movement, dragging out the spell, squeezing more power out of it; you could have a wide enough band to get around a shield, or make it impossible to dodge so someone has to shield, pinning them down; you could twirl your wand in a sort of curlicue, sending the spell out in a dense spiral that could overwhelm all but the strongest shield charm; and basically whatever else you could think of, the only limit was your own creativity.
The arc of the spell would follow your wand movement, but only one movement. If your wand stopped moving, or reversed directions, or whatever, the spell would be cut off — so, in most situations, there was a limit to how much space you had to work with. Since, you know, your arm could only reach so far.
Even just in the normal arc she could manage in normal situations, this was one of the most powerful spells Beth could cast, each second hungrily drawing out very close to the maximum amount of magic she could channel at once. Enough that it hurt — kind of a lot, actually. Which, Dora had been impressed Beth could cast it at all, apparently not the sort of thing you saw from not-quite-fifteen-year-olds. In a slicing curse, once any part of the band hit something, breaking its envelope, the spell released as a single cutting plane over that area. This one was more like a thousand piercing curses strung together side-by-side, as soon as it hit anything stabbing into it all along the arc at once. But, in addition to that, like the Lance of Modestus there was a second part: the piercing curse acted as a second envelope, once it was a expending releasing a dense burst of fire.
So, basically, this curse was a fire-elemental blasting curse, wrapped up inside of a piercing curse, which was then multiplied like a hundred times and wrapped up inside a single envelope, stretching out like a cutting curse. No fucking wonder it was one of the most powerful spells Beth could cast, because that was absurdly complicated. Like any arc spell, you could get more out of it by extending the arc — the longer you stretched out the casting, the more fire-blasting-piercing curses you could get. Normally, like any arc spell, you were limited by the length of your arm, and how far you could get your wand to move without changing directions.
Beth was a good forty metres above the alien ship.
At the moment, she could get her wand to move pretty damn far.
The curse spitting out of her wand in a constant stream, a dense, vivid red ribbon extending out and trailing behind her, the magic so thick she felt like her arm was fucking on fire. Diving, diving, she nudged her course a little this way or that as the ship skipped around. Her jaw aching, clenching her teeth hard against the pain keying up hotter and hotter, tears prickling at her eyes — from the wind or the pain, or maybe both. Coming in quick, she aimed to pass as close by the side of the ship as she dared, zipping past in a blink, letting go of the spell (gasping as the magic dissipated, her wand arm tingling and shivering), she pulled up, whipping over the heads of the muggles, nearly running right into a truck before buzzing on over the yard.
Behind her, she heard a dense series of explosions — bang-bang-bang-bang, one barely even finished before the next began, nearly as quick as the soldier's machineguns but even louder — but she didn't hang around to watch the fireworks, kept zooming along toward the remaining ship. The front of the convoy was well into the trees by now, the park to both sides of the road burning, mages dancing around the ship to the near constant retort of muggle guns. Beth wasn't entirely surprised to find a several mages pull up alongside her, she must have killed the first one. Soaring ahead at full tilt, it only took a couple seconds for them to approach spell range. "Vocem vecta. Clear the east side." The flyers ahead scattered, but didn't abandon their attack on the ship, just swirling around to sides where they'd be out of the way.
A dozen curses leapt out of their group, streaking in at the ship all within a second of each other. At more or less the same time, several trails of fire shot up out from under the trees, aimed right up at the ship — Beth didn't know what those were, had the muggles brought rocket launchers, maybe? Attacks coming in from multiple directions at once, the ship managed to dodge some of the curses, some of the rockets continuing on past it...but plenty of them hit, curses bursting and cracking into its sides, the bottom pummelled and crumbling.
The ship listed, fluttering like a fallen leaf, damaged but obviously still alive. One of the mages flew terribly close, practically standing on the thing's nose. A sharp jab of his wand, and a two-foot-wide hole was punched straight through the transparent window — and, presumably, the pilot. The ship immediately lost control, jolting this way and that on its slow drift to the ground, hitching against a tree, rolling over and finally ploughing nose-first into the grass.
Beth glanced over her shoulder back to the first ship, just to make sure — craggy boulders of fire-blackened rock scattered among the half-melted trucks were all that were left. Maybe she'd overdone it with that curse, a little bit...
It took a couple minutes to get the convoy going again, with the damage to their vehicles and all the wounded. Soldiers scrambled around, in places helped by uniformed mages, checking the bodies sitting here and there. Some of them were clearly still alive, the mages hitting them with a few quick healing spells so the soldiers could load them up in the trucks, but some were dead, their bodies left where they were. (Maybe shitty, but they just didn't have the room to carry them all — Beth assumed there'd be a memorial or something for the fallen later.) It seemed like they'd lost more trucks than they had people, soldiers sitting on the roofs or clinging on the outsides of doors, which seemed unstable, but they got going again before too long.
Beth's healing was shitty, so she didn't bother trying to help. Drifting low over the road, she did search for a certain truck — there it was, toward the front of the convoy, the Queen's flag still flying from a post stuck at the back, seemingly undamaged. Good, then.
At some point, Beth wasn't really paying attention, Sirius drifted up next to her. "You alright?"
"I'm fine." She wasn't hurt, anyway — considering all the shite flying around, spells and bullets and fucking lava balls, she was honestly a little surprised she'd managed to avoid getting hit with anything.
"You sure? That was a hell of a spell back there."
"...My wand arm's a little numb and tingly, I guess. It's not that bad."
Sirius's eyebrows dipped in a concerned frown. "There should be a pinkish-purple potion in your bag — it'll heal the nerve damage from overchannelling."
It took a bit for Beth to find it, her numb, clumsy fingers not making it any easier. "This one?" she asked, holding up the most purple-looking of the potions. Sirius just nodded, so she popped the cap off the little bottle and downed it in one go. It tasted a bit sour, a flash of cold running through her — the potion doing its thing itched, crawling over her like a hundred baby blast-ended skrewts, she rolled her shoulders, tried to ignore it. Tossing the empty bottle aside, she washed her mouth out with a gulp of water, before closing her bag back up again. "Yeah, that's better already. I know I was kind of pushing it with that big spell, but I saw a shot, so I took it."
"And a damn good shot it was, too — you snapped that bloody thing into four pieces with one hit."
Beth blinked. "Oh. Well. I guess it worked, then."
His voice low and dark, Sirius chuckled. "That it did, kid." He drifted over closer, reached over to take a light hold of her arm. "We can go home at any time. If you're tired."
"I'm fine," she insisted, shaking her head. "Where we going next?"
Sirius sighed, but didn't try to argue the point.
If you're wondering about the reference to radiation, the aliens' shielding works through absurd gravitational forces, basically creating mini- black holes. (This is just hand-waved in canon, ignoring how fucking absurd that is, but Star Wars is basically high fantasy in space, so just call it magic and move on.) Objects will be torn apart by tidal forces as they approach the singularity, eventually even down to the molecular level, resulting in intense bursts of heat and radiation. In large celestial black holes, the point this happens at is inside the event horizon, so the radiation will be captured by the gravity of the black hole itself — the radiation we do see from black holes is mostly generated by friction among the material falling into them — but in micro-singularities like these it happens well outside the event horizon, so the radiation released can still escape.
(I'm maybe only 80% sure I'm right about this, but let's run with it.)
Beth will be fine, though — radiation sickness is a much lesser problem for mages, for various complicated worldbuilding reasons. Those sparks in her vision would probably be a sign of a lethal radiation dose for a normal person, but the cheater resistance to injury / improved healing mages have is sufficient to prevent the effects. Multiple exposures over a short period of time will start pushing it eventually, but even then she'll just need a common healing potion, it's not a big deal. And the muggles are far enough away from the source that their exposure will be much less — over the course of the war, some of them might be getting pretty serious cumulative radiation exposure, but in the short term it shouldn't be a problem.
Yes, I did actually think that hard about something that was completely hand-waved by the original authors. I'm a nerd, this should surprise no one. But I'm done, you can go now, see you tomorrow.