Drop zone drop trooper b.., p.15
Drop Zone (Drop Trooper Book 10), page 15
“There’s always that possibility,” Hachette admitted and I sighed, knowing he wasn’t going to listen to me. “But we’re here to get information about the Seekers, and this may be our only chance.”
“And you really trust these Xidan?” I asked him. “You really think they aren’t just as bad as the Qara?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” he said, “if the enemy of our enemy is our friend.”
16
The Qara propaganda we’d watched on their version of television had been a temperate paradise. Not that I wasn’t sure they’d been showing only the most pleasant parts of the planet, but those parts did exist, and Qara Khitai seemed like a pretty nice place to live.
Xidan was not. I’d known it before we landed, just orbiting the world. It was harsh and cold, with the greens and blues shrinking away from the ever-present white. All the cities were clustered around the equator and so was the one where we’d landed. The oceans regulated the temperature, keeping the ports ice-free and holding back the glaciers, but the edge of chill to the wind bit into me the second my boots hit the ramp.
Yeah, boots. Hachette had done it again, keeping me out of my Vigilante despite the fact that I could do the most good there.
“I need your judgement,” he’d said when I’d objected. “That’s why I brought you and Sandoval along on this mission, not the fact that you’re good in a battlesuit.”
“My judgement is that we shouldn’t be here,” I’d reminded him, keeping my voice down, but just barely. We’d been in the hangar bay when he’d sprung this on me, just as I was about to climb into my suit and board the drop-ship. “It’s also that you shouldn’t be going down in person. You’re not listening to me, so why not let me at least watch over you in my suit?”
He’d sighed, as if this was all somehow my fault.
“It’s an order.”
And that had been that. At least he’d let me bring a gun and had brought Vicky along to command the squad of Drop Troopers he’d authorized for security. Lan-Min-Gen had a sidearm as well, and we’d let him bring a platoon of Shock Troopers to watch the drop-ship while we were gone. Together, the collection of gathered armor looked pretty impressive, but I knew better than anyone that a massed force of even more primitive arms could overwhelm our comparatively small numbers.
“There’s like a billion and a half people here,” I said quietly beside Hachette’s ear, eyes on the small group of approaching Xidan. They were taller than I’d thought they’d be, the males approaching two meters, though they mostly had a thin, rangy build that made them seem even taller. They were dressed much like the Qara we’d seen in the videos, except their garments were thicker to compensate for the temperatures. I wish mine had been. The uniform jacket I was wearing seemed inadequate against the biting wind. “Let’s say that ten percent of them are in the military, which is probably low, given that they’re a warrior society. That’s a hundred and fifty million. Wild-ass guess, seventy-five percent of that is going to be on spaceships or orbital stations, which leaves over thirty-seven million in the ground forces. Maybe half of them would be off-planet at any given time. That’s about eighteen million. If their division between service/support troops and combat infantry is similar to ours, three quarters of them will be in support. Which leaves our one squad of Vigilantes and one platoon of Shock Troopers facing four and a half million combat troops.”
“You do all that in your head?” he grunted, clearly unimpressed by my logic, if not my math.
“Hell, no,” I admitted. “I figured it out with my ‘link on the flight down.”
There were mountains in the distance, covered in snow and ice, imposing and oppressive, reminding me of how close the glaciers were to the cities. What would happen if these guys miscalculated and those glaciers swallowed up the whole city? Not that I expected to be around to see it. I tried to picture the rough, squared-off lines of the city, those cyclopean towers and steppe pyramids covered in the unforgiving grasp of a forever-winter, the bay choked with icebergs, and I shuddered sympathetically. Maybe that was why these Xidan were fighting the Qara, to get off this planet.
The Xidan contingent was all male, which seemed odd, given that the Resscharr, who had created them, had warriors of both sexes. I couldn’t have told the difference myself, but Dwight had given us a primer on what we’d learned of the species from the video translations. The females had hair. Not much, just a roach of black at the top of their heads, but it was seemingly a cultural thing that all of them had to have it. They also had mammaries, but the clothes all of them wore completely obscured their chests, so that would have been hard to discern.
They were also all warriors, though that was no surprise. Warriors led the government here and there seemed to be no such thing as a civilian state. Their body armor was thick and old-fashioned by our standards and looked godawfully heavy, but I was fairly sure that even the M5 service pistol I was carrying at my waist could slice through it. What the Shock Trooper KE guns could do to it didn’t bear consideration.
One of the hairless, corpse-white males stepped away from the rest, hands at his side, fingers splayed facing us.
“That is a gesture of peace,” Dwight said in my earbud, where he was going to be working as a translator. “To show he is unarmed and unprepared to fight.”
I grunted. He might have been unarmed, but the squad he’d brought with him in the open truck wasn’t. They carried massive, big-bore rifles that might not have even packed enough punch to take down a Tahni Shock Trooper, much less a Vigilante, but wouldn’t have done me or Hachette any good at all.
The group stopped about five meters from us, close enough to be heard but well beyond the personal bubble of any society I’d encountered. Maybe the fact that they were constantly at war made them even warier than the Tahni. One of them stepped forward, his rifle barrel propped against his shoulder, and offered a gesture that I took for a greeting.
“I am called Korduvai.” The movement of his lips was a half-second ahead of the translation, but I was learning to mentally adjust for that after the last few months. Korduvai’s voice was scratchy, hoarse, the sort of voice that made me want to clear my throat sympathetically. “I welcome you to Yelu, in the name of the Proctor and the warrior heart of the Xidan, Lady Tandee. I have been charged to bring you to her august personage that she may tell you of the struggle with the heretics of the Qara Khitai.”
Hachette shot me a look that was just shy of rolling his eyes.
“I’m Colonel Hachette of the Commonwealth Space Fleet starship Orion. We come from Earth, the homeworld of the Seekers, on a quest to find them. I am honored to meet with your Proctor.” Hachette was putting on his best diplomat voice, though it was probably wasted on the translation program. “We will leave our troops with our shuttle, except for my honor guard, of course.”
The honor guard was the Vigilante squad, and even the stalwart Xidan warriors took a step back, their weapons coming to their shoulders when Vicky led the metal monsters out of the drop-ship. Spiked soles tromped on the ramp, a martial drumbeat that echoed off the façade of the administration buildings facing the landing pad. Other Xidan were watching from the walkways in front of the structures, and some ducked back inside while others watched in what might have been disbelief or maybe envy.
That was the great thing about Vigilantes—they’re just so damned intimidating to people who haven’t seen them before.
“Is that a problem?” Hachette wondered. “It’s our custom, but I wouldn’t want to alarm anyone.”
Now that was masterful. We didn’t know these guys very well, but if there was anything made plain by their propaganda, it was that personal fear was seen as an unforgivable weakness. I had to give Hachette props.
“Of course not,” Korduvai said, brushing it aside as if the very thought was nonsense. “Your honor guard may go with us as far as the palace, though custom dictates only you three…” He gestured at Hachette, Lan-Min-Gen, and myself. “…may come into the presence of the Proctor.”
“Of course.” Hachette smiled, and I wondered how that translated. “Captain Sandoval, you may lead the way.”
“Aye, sir. We’ll be waiting for you at the palace.”
Jumpjets screamed and the Vigilantes rose on jets of superheated air. This time, many of the Xidan cried out, and I wondered how many would have to beg forgiveness from their warrior gods for the fear. I could picture Vicky’s savage smile as she rose above their heads and into the night sky. The glow from the jets merged with the stars afar and the roiling fire of rocket exhausts closer as Xidan ships reached for orbit. I wished I was up there with her. There was something satisfying about being here on the ground, knowing exactly what was happening and why, who was making the decisions. But the grass always being greener, I realized now how boring the whole process was, and especially how vulnerable the poor assholes making those decisions were.
The cargo vehicle was strange and uncomfortable, a cross between one of the ubiquitous panel trucks I’d seen at every periphery colony during the war and a Tahni troop transport. The wheels were rounded casters on individual suspensions, and the engine must have been in the rear since there didn’t seem to be any room at the front of the vehicle to fit one. The seats were hard and narrow benches that barely fit my smaller human ass and must have been absolutely painful for someone as big as Lan-Min-Gen or the Qara. Korduvai didn’t complain though, and the rest of them had their faces covered by darkened visors so I couldn’t have told how they felt even if I knew how to read their expressions.
“What does this truck run on?” I asked, counting on Dwight to translate through the micro-speaker attached to the breast pocket of my jacket. It was internal combustion. I could tell that much from the rumble of the engine and the faint hint of fumes.
“Petroleum,” was the unexpected answer.
I blinked, disbelieving. I knew we’d used to run our vehicles and power plants off petroleum back on Earth in the past, but by the time we’d developed as widespread of a spacefaring civilization as the Khitan, we’d moved beyond that. Even in the colonies where internal combustion was common, they used distilled alcohol just because it was easy to produce.
“That explains the smell,” Hachette murmured, and wisely, Dwight refrained from translating it.
The trip dragged on for what felt like an hour, though I knew from our orbital survey that the palace was only eight or nine klicks from the spaceport. The road was rough and poorly tended, full of ruts and cracks, probably from the seasonal freezes, and the truck barely managed thirty klicks an hour, bouncing and jostling with every meter.
“I apologize for the length of the ride,” Korduvai said as if he’d read my thoughts, “but our aircraft are grounded by the incoming storm.” He waved out the open back of the truck toward a rising wall of dark clouds coming in from the ocean. Lightning crackled and a rumble reached us even this far away from the shore. “Xidan is a violent world.”
I’d noticed there were no aircraft up, just the rockets launching. None coming in, which meant they were just as cautious of the weather as the planes were. This wasn’t a place anyone lived by choice.
Besides aircraft, the other thing I didn’t see was any slaves. That wasn’t to say they couldn’t have been around indoors, taking shelter from the inclement weather, but it made things easier that they weren’t around… at least I could pretend these were the good guys.
The palace was as brutal and unforgiving as the weather, hewn from rough stone, a primitive temple amidst a modern city. That had to be some kind of statement, though I didn’t know what sort exactly. The Vigilante squad had already landed ahead of us, standing on either side of the ramp into the building, much like the honor guard we’d claimed they were but also an implicit threat to ensure our hosts wouldn’t forget that we were guests.
Xidan soldiers stared at them from the entrance, their weapons not exactly pointed at the battlesuits but held at the ready. At least the suits kept their attention away from our unarmored, lightly-armed asses clambering off the truck. Korduvai led us inside past loose ranks of armored warriors, gaggled together like a bunch of brand-new privates at boot camp, waiting for a DI to come scream them into a formation. I wasn’t sure if that was some indication of their lack of discipline, cultural differences, or just my own personal biases as a Marine.
I’d seen half a dozen different societies since we’d arrived on this side of the galaxy, and each one was so totally different from the other, even when it was the same species. Art, architecture, living spaces, furniture… everything was different. And yet these guys weren’t different enough. There was something familiar about the layout of the corridors, the arrangement of the rooms. Representative art decorated the walls, not exactly paintings or frescoes or carvings, but something of all three, and it reminded me very much of Tahni and human works I’d seen on this trip. These Xidan were an artificial combination of human and Tahni DNA, and they hadn’t had much time to develop their own culture, so maybe the Seekers had given them one?
“You appreciate our Tribute to the Purpose?” Korduvai asked me, motioning toward the long, crooked, brightly colored engraving set in the wall. “It was commissioned by our first Proctor, the great Sandeen, two hundred years ago.”
I shrugged. It was a tribute to the Purpose? I could have sworn it was a love story between a pair of starving badgers.
“You’ve only been here for two hundred years?” Hachette said.
“That was the time of the Great Fracturing,” the Xidan confided gravely. “Before the Fracturing, we Khitan were one people, united in our commitment to the Purpose, in our desire to be the best possible warriors to make the Seekers proud when they returned. We’d defeated and subdued the humans and the Tahni and made the world of Qara our own, and we thought we’d accomplished the Purpose.” Korduvai’s features screwed up in a grimace, though he didn’t seem to consider how his casual talk of killing humans and Tahni would play with us or Lan-Min-Gen. “That was when the heretic, Dalvann the Traitor, declared that all who believed the Purpose had been achieved were heretics and should be purged.”
Korduvai began walking again abruptly and I skipped a step to keep up with him. He went on with the story as he walked.
“It was a dark time, a time when brother fought brother, and father fought son.”
“Are none of your females warriors?” I asked him. It hadn’t been addressed in their video streams and I hadn’t seen any so far. It was probably stupid to bring up something that might have been a religious stricture, but if nothing else, maybe I could prove to Hachette that I wasn’t fit for diplomacy.
I wasn’t sure if Korduvai’s expression was horrified or furious, but I knew almost immediately I’d fucked up.
“Do not tell me your people do such a thing!” He raised a hand as if to fend off a monster from a horror movie. “This is rumored to have been done by the primitive humans on Qara, but surely warriors as sophisticated as you wouldn’t indulge in something so blasphemous!”
“Surely not,” Hachette agreed soothingly. “But we’ve seen it in our travels.”
“I am fairly certain,” Dwight said, for our ears only, “that the reason they don’t allow female warriors is the birth rate we were discussing on the flight here from Qara. Every healthy female is needed to keep up their population.”
Hachette grunted agreement, but Korduvai was still talking.
“I suppose there is every sort of blasphemy and perversion among the stars. If there were not, the Seekers would not have had to create us to fulfill the Purpose.”
“But the Proctor is female,” I prompted. I should probably have learned my lesson, but curiosity stubbornly insisted on trying to get this cat killed.
“Of course! For is not the Proctor the Mother of us all?”
Well, that was a curious turn of logic. I wanted to press harder on the subject, but Hachette offered me a glare and I dropped it. Maybe we’d figure out more about it when we actually met the Proctor.
The corridor seemed endless and we kept passing intersections that led off to unknown fates, furtive figures going about their alien business, giving only hints of their presence. The place hadn’t looked that large from outside, and I wondered if the throne room was going to be at the very back, but what was actually in the rear of the structure was a curving ramp leading upward. I stifled a groan. Another culture that apparently didn’t believe in elevators.
“You guys okay in there?” Vicky asked. I was almost surprised the microwave signal could reach through the thick, stone walls… and that the Xidan hadn’t bothered to jam it.
“They’re fine,” Dwight answered for us, probably with the idea that it would look less suspicious and less rude if we didn’t say anything that wasn’t translated. “They’re heading up to the throne room.”
At least it wasn’t on the top floor. I’d tried to spend more time in the gym, but I’d had so much to do getting the replacements trained up and supervising the suit repairs…
I wasn’t quite breathing hard when we reached it. Dwight had been translating it as a throne room, but I would have called it more an administrative office. There was no throne, for one thing, just a sort of raised dais that might have passed for a standing desk in an office back on Earth. Still, there was no mistaking who was in charge. She was a spider at the center of her web, surrounded by video screens—thick, ungainly things that reminded me of museum displays about the first computers. Images flickered fitfully on them of our ships in orbit, the Vigilantes outside the palace, the Tahni Shock Troopers back at the drop-ship. Other screens showed sensor displays that I guessed were from deep-space observatories, unidentifiable blips swarming around other unidentifiable blips somewhere I didn’t recognize. I hoped they meant something to her.
