The wolf worlds, p.19
The Wolf Worlds, page 19
He spun back toward the command circle. “Alex!”
The voice command—and Kilgour found himself at attention.
“Sir!”
“Six hours to nightfall. I want you and five men—volunteers from Ffillips’ unit—standing by.”
“Sir!
We have location on the Jann command post?”
“Aye.”
“Tonight, then. We go out.”
And a smile spread slowly across Alex’s face. He knew. Indeed he knew. And it would be far better to die in the attack thanhuddled in this perimeter waiting for it.
CHAPTER FORTY
IT HAD TAKEN almost two days to dig Khorea and what little remained of his command structure out of the bunker. They’d found him, huddled under a vee-section of the collapsed ceiling, deep in trance state.
The Jann medics had quickly brought him out of it, and Khorea had refused further aid. He’d insisted on taking charge of the final destruction of the mercenaries.
Khorea was probably still in minor shock, delayed battle stress. He had ordered the slow death of the mercenaries who’d deserted and insisted that all Jann be ordered to take no prisoners. He was determined to wipe out the far-worlders who’d shamed the Jann—to the slow death of the last man and woman.
Khorea now sat behind the hastily rerigged computers and screens in the command post. He hated them and longed for the days when a leader led from the front.
Then he half smiled. Realized that all of his electronics, all of his analysis, produced only one answer—the mercenaries would not, could not, surrender.
He shut down his command sensor and stood. “General!” An aide.
“Tomorrow. We will attack. And I will lead the final assault.” The aide—eyes wide in hero worship—saluted.
“Tonight, then, assemble my staff. We shall show these worms what Jann are, from the highest to the lowest. But tonight—tonight we shall assemble for prayers. Here. One hour after nightfall.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“… BUT BEFORE WE could stalk the streggan,” the ancient Bhor creaked, “there was preparation. We fasted and considered the nature of our ancient enemy. And then, once we had determined our mind upon him, we feasted. Then and only then would we set out across the wave-struck ice to find him, hidden deep in his lair…””
Ancient, Otho thought, wasn’t the word for the old Bhor. One sign of approaching death for a Bhor was for the pelt on his chest to begin turning gray. Shortly thereafter, the Bhor would assemble his family and friends for the final guesting and then disappear out onto the ice to die the death, lonely but for the gods.
This Bhor, however, was almost totally white-haired from curled gnarly feet to beetled brow. He was, as far as anyone knew, the last surviving streggan hunter.
And so they listened in council.
Just as the council had patiently listened to Otho, still being bandaged from the wounds incurred as he’d pirouetted his lighter up and out-atmosphere when he heard of Parrel’s abandonment.
Just as they had listened to the youngest Bhor discuss why the entire Bhor people must immediately support the marooned warriors.
Just as they had listened to the captain of a merchant fleet discuss calmly—for a Bhor (only two interruptions and one hospitalization)—why the mercenaries should be abandoned and attempts made to reach reapproachment with the Jann. The merchant also happened to be Otho’s chief trading rival.
But the council listened, as they would listen to any Bhor. The Bhor were a truly democratic society—any of them could speak at any council. The decision, which could take weeks to reachand involve several minor brawls, would have been discussed, argued, fought over, and then settled.
Once decided, the Bhor moved as of one mind. But the time it took! For the first time—and Otho realized his inspiration was a corruption gotten from those beard-curs t’ humanoids—Otho wondered whether his was an excessively longwinded and indecisive society.
And the ancient droned on, making no point at all, but telling the old stories. Normally Otho would have been the first to sit at the ancient’s right, keeping him full of stregg, fascinated by talk of the old days. But his friends—friends, by my mother’s beard, friends who are humanoid—were dying.
Otho ground his fangs. The debate might continue for another four or five cycles. Since Robert’s Rules hadn’t penetrated to the Bhor, there was only one customary way to force a vote. And generally it meant the death of the Bhor who did it. By my father’s chilly bottom, Otho groaned, you owe me, Sten. If I live through this, you owe me.
The ancient creaked on. He was now describing exactly how you tasted a streggan’s fewmets to determine whether the creature was seasonable or not.
Otho rose from his bench and stalked into the center of the council ring, his meter-long dagger leaving its belt harness.
Without warning, Otho pulled the long, trailing beard straight out from his chest and, with a dagger-flash in the firelight, cut it away. He tossed the handful of fur down, into the center of the ring, then, as custom dictated, knelt, head bowed.
To the Bhor, the length and thickness of one’s beard signified personal power, much as the length of other appendages has signified similarly to other cultures and beings. To chop off one’s beard, in-council, meant that the issue was life-defining.
And, since none of the Bhor appreciated threatening situations, normally the beard-cutter lost his measure and, shortly afterward, his head. Grumbled comment built to a roar covering the ancient’s reminiscences.
Otho waited.
And now—the issue on whether or not to support the human soldiers would be voted on. Otho would most likely lose and then a volunteer would separate Otho from his head. Most likely the volunteer will be his Jamchydd-cursed competitor.
But, contrary to custom, someone spoke. It was the old streggan hunter.
“Old men”—and his voice was rumbled whisper—“sometimes lose themselves in the glories of their youth. Most of which, I recollect by the beard of my mother, are lies.”
Bones creaked as the old Bhor rose. And then, in a blur, his own dagger flashed and the long icefali of the ancient’s beard fell onto the flagstone’s atop Otho’s own beard.
The council was silent as the old Bhor knelt—nearly falling—beside Otho, head bowed.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE SNAP OF the man’s neck was not all that audible. Sten knew, watching as Alex let go the first Jann’s helmet and snap-punched a knuckled paw against the second man’s face. Still, it sounded loud.
He lay to the side of the Jann observation post, flanked by the five volunteers—Ffillips’ men, including their commander—waiting for Alex to finish his minor massacre.
The tubby man from Edinburgh made sure both Jann were dead, then rolled out of the OP.
They crawled on. The Jann, very sure of themselves, had structured their defense line as a series of strongholds, with possibly fifty meters between posts. Sten wished that he had Mantis troopies instead of mercenaries and somewhere to go—it would have been simple to exfiltrate an entire battalion through those lines.
But he didn’t and he didn’t, and low-crawled on, below the unsophisticated EW sensors, pressure traps, and command-det mines that linked the strongholds.
Two interlocked Jann lines had been established, but the raiders had no trouble penetrating both of them.
Then, behind the lines, Sten and Alex eyed each other.
Sten wondered what Alex was thinking—and wondered why he hadn’t found any words before they left the perimeter.
The second would always remain unanswered and it was as well for Sten’s battle confidence that the first wasn’t either.
Because, Alex was crooning, in his mind’s voice, his death song:
“Ah sew’d his sheet, making my mane;
Ah watch’d the corpse, myself alane;
Ah watch’d his body, night and day;
No living creature came that way.
“Ah tuk his body on my back
And whiles Ah gaed, and whiles Ah sat,
Ah digg’d a grave and laid him in,
And happ’d him with the sod sae green…”
The raiders came to their feet and moved toward the command bunker. The low murmur of Khorea’s vigil filtered through the entrance as they moved toward the structure.
Of the two sentries proudly braced at attention before the entrance, the first died with Sten’s knife in his heart. The second caught a seeping circle-kick as Sten whirled, kicked, recovered, and drove a knuckle-smash into the sentry’s temple.
And then Sten was standing above the bunker’s steps, watching Alex’s ghoul grin as he pulled a delay-grenade from his harness.
And then the Bhor arrived.
Their ships hurtled in low from the east, landing lights full-on. They burst over the ruined spaceport barely ten meters above the ground. Fire sprayed from their every port.
An efficient atmosphere trader also makes a fairly decent gunship, Sten realized, when all the off-loading ports are open and there are a dozen Bhors using laser blasts, multibarrel projectile cannon, and explosives.
Sten had time to wonder where their intelligence came from as the ships banked, curving just above the Jann lines, hosing death as they went, before the world exploded and Jann officers came tumbling up the bunker steps and Alex had the grenade among them and was spraying fire from his weapon and then the shock of the firewaves caught Sten and he was pitched forward, into the softness of corpses and tumbling down the steps and then . . .
He was inside the bunker.
Sten rolled off a sticky body, to his feet, then went down again as he caught sight of the black-bearded Khorea, weapon at waist-level, and a burst chattered across the bunker at him and the lights went out.
Above him, Sten could hear the howls and screams of battle. Forget it. Forget it, as he moved softly forward in the blackness.
In the hundred-meter-square bunker there was no one but Khorea and himself.
Sten’s foot touched something. He knelt and picked up the computer mouse. Tossed it ahead of him, and then nearly died as fire sparked out of the blackness not at the mouse’s thunk where it hit something, but in a level arc behind the sound.
Sorry, General, Sten realized. I thought you were dumber thanyou are.
Lie here on the concrete and think about things. Ignore the war going on topside. You are here and blind in the dark trying to kill a blind man who has designs on your body.
Breathing from the diaphragm, eyes scanning emptiness, Sten crawled forward, knees and hands coming up, sweeping down, feeling for obstructions. Ah, a microphone with a cord attached . . . Interesting . . . Along cord.
Sten moved to a wall support and looped the cord around the support. A strand of the cord ran through the trigger guard of his hand weapon, and there was enough extension for him to slither five meters away.
The weapon was now lashed to the vertical beam. Sten pulled the cord experimentally. The weapon flashed, and the round ricocheted wildly off the ceiling, floor, and walls.
And Khorea triggered a burst at the flash.
Sten yanked the cord as hard as he could, and the weapon went back to full-automatic, and the darkness became a strobe-flare of flashings as the hand weapon spurted its magazine into the bunker and Khorea came up from behind a terminal, aiming carefully at the flashes and was aiming for the shot that would end the duel in blackness having only time to catch the blur of Sten in the air toward him and the flicker of the knife in Sten’s hand and the knife drove into the side of his head and Sten smashed into the dead general and then painfully into a careening table.
And then there was no sound except from outside as the Bhor began their victory chant and grenades and small-arms fire resounded and Sten could hear the howl of his mercenaries and the Companions as they broke out from their death perimeter and came in for the final slaughter of the Jann.
And then Sten hooked up a chair with his leg and sat in the blackness, plotting his revenge against Parral.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE MEETING WAS on neutral ground-a planetoid in the Lupus Cluster’s no-man’s land. It was a Holy of Holies. It was the first place the founder of the religion, Talamein, landed when he fled to the cluster.
It looked a bit like a park, with broad meadows, gentle streams, and woods thick with small game, and one small chapel, the only building on the planetoid.
Two sets of troops faced each other from opposite sides of the chapel, with ready weapons and nervous trigger fingers. The soldiers were the personal guards of the two rival Prophets. After generations of fighting and atrocities on both sides, they were waiting for the signal to leap at each other’s throats.
First Theodomir and then Ingild stepped away from their bodyguards and began the slow walk across the grass toward each other. Both men were edgy, not knowing what to expect. They stopped a meter or so apart.
Theodomir was the first to break. A huge grin on his face, he threw out his arms in greeting. “Brother Ingild, what joy it brings my heart finally to see you in the flesh.”
Ingild also smiled. He stepped forward and gently hugged his rival, and then stepped back again. Tears streamed from his eyes.
“You said ‘Brother.’ How appropriate a greeting. I too have always felt as if you were my brother.”
“Despite our difficulties,” Theodomir said. “Yes, despite them.”
The two men hugged again. Then turned and walked arm and arm toward the chapel, before which was a small table covered with a white cloth. Shading it was a small, colorful umbrella. And on either side of the table were two comfortable chairs. There were documents on the table and two old-fashioned pens.
The two men sat, smiling across the table at each other, Theodomir was the first to speak.
“Peace at last,” he said.
“Yes, brother Theodomir, peace at last.”
Theodomir did the honors of pouring the wine. He took a chaste sip. “I know that at this moment,” Theodomir intoned, “Talamein is smiling down on us. Happy that his two children have heeded him and are laying down their arms.”
Ingild started to take a large gulp of wine, then caught himself. He took a very small, priestly sip. “We have been very foolish,” he said. “After all, what are our real differences? A matter of authority, not theology. Mere titles.”
You lying sack of drakh, Theodomir thought, smiling broader.
You great bag of wind, Ingild thought, smiling back and reaching a hand across the table for Theodomir to clasp.
“Brother,” Theodomir said softly, his voice thick with emotion.
“Brother,” Ingild said, tears dripping down his nose, equally emotional, wishing for all the world that he had dared to trank up with a few narco leeches.
“Our differences are so easily settled,” Theodomir said. He shot a glance at Ingild’s guards, wanting so badly to grab the wizened little drug addict by the throat and choke the life out of him.
“It came to me in a flash,” he continued. “From the very lips of Talamein.”
“Odd,” Ingild said. “At that very moment I was thinking the same thing.” And he thought of his awful casualties, and, more important, the terrible cost to the Holy Treasury. For half acredit he would gut the cheap piece of drakh right now.
“So,” Theodomir said, “I propose a settlement. An ecumenical settlement.”
Ingild leaned forward in anticipation.
“We cease all hostilities,” Theodomir said, “And each of us assumes the spiritual leadership of our rightful regions of the Lupus Cluster.
“Both of us will be called True Prophets. And each of us will support the claim of the other.”
“Agreed,” Ingild said, almost too quickly. “Then we can end this stupid bloodshed. And each of us can concentrate on his primary duty. Our only duty.”
Ingild bowed his head. “Saving the souls of our brethren.”
And in two years, he thought, I’ll raid Sanctus with half a million Jann and burn your clotting throne to the ground.
Theodomir patted the documents in front of him. They were treaties, hastily drawn up by his clerks for the meeting.
“Before we sign there, brother,” he said, “shall we celebrate together?”
He pointed at the small chapel.
“Just the two of us,” he said, “in front of the altar, singing our prayers to Talamein.”
Oh, you slime, Ingild thought. You heretic. Is there nothing you’re not capable of? “What a marvelous suggestion,” he said.
The two prophets rose and walked slowly into the chapel.
* * * *
Parral eased back in his chair, watching the two on the monitor as they opened the door, disappeared inside, and closed the chapel door behind them. Tears of laughter were streaming down his face. He had never seen anything so funny in his life. Two sanctimonius skeeks with their “brother this” and “brother that.” Hating each other’s guts.
He rang a servant for a jug of spirits to celebrate. What a master stroke. Theodomir had fought him when he had suggested the meeting. He’d screamed, almost frothed at the mouth.
And then he had become suddenly, silent, when Parral explained the rest of the plan.
Parral leaned forward as the hidden monitors in the chapel picked up the two men inside. This is going to be very interesting, he thought.
He congratulated himself once again for having the foresight to remain on Nebta. Because, despite his assurances to Theodomir, he wasn’t too sure how things were going to work out.
The two prophets were nearing the end of the ceremony, their chanted prayers echoing through the little chapel. It was taking way too much time, Theodomir thought. Normally a High Joining took about an hour to go through. But each man was trying to outdo the other, keeping the prayers slow and solemn. Each word was enunciated as if Talamein himself were listening.
