by Peter Nealen
He wished his father would say something. But Dagarius was looking down, not even looking at the vid pickup.
“I should be home tomorrow or the next day,” he explained, trying to steer the conversation away from Waldenius’s hate. His mother and sister looked somewhat abashed, both at Waldenius’s rancor and Dagarius’s silence. “They want us to stay on standby for a while, until they know whether or not there will be another rebel backlash after the attacks and the destruction of Bar.”
Something in Waldenius’ eyes changed. “Destruction, you say?” he asked.
Gaumarus nodded, even as he glanced around the barracks looking for Yuusen or Verlot. He wasn’t really sure how much he was allowed to talk about the day’s incident. “The Knights almost leveled the place,” he said. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”
Waldenius leaned back in his chair, a bitter smile on his face. “Well, good,” he said. “It’s only too bad it took off-worlders to do it.”
“It’s not good, Grandfather,” Gaumarus ventured. “There were women and children in that village. Blu…the scouts saw them.” He did not want to hear his grandfather’s reaction to calling Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff by his name.
Waldenius only snorted. “Serves them right. Latecomers!” He didn’t seem to think that it needed any more comment than that.
Gaumarus lifted his head, listening. There was some kind of commotion out by the entrance to the barracks. Voices were being raised. It might only be some of the soldiers having gotten into the wine stocks early…
A crash and a yell decided him. Even if it was just a soldier having a little too much to drink, that was something that noncoms had to deal with. “I have to go,” he said. “We might have a disciplinary problem, and I’ve got to go be a noncom.”
Waldenius just looked disgusted, as if he knew that the PDF’s discipline was inadequate. Rothardae and Whenna bid him farewell. His father only lifted his eyes to the pickup long enough to say, “Good bye, son.”
Gaumarus hesitated a moment, then touched the disconnect button. The screen went dark. He stood, stepping away from the small table and toward the door to his barracks room. The commotion was getting louder.
He hesitated. He knew that his father would come out of his funk again once he was back on the farm and away from the PDF. This always happened when he went to muster, as if the combination of his son’s position in the Motor Infantry and his father’s disdain made him withdraw into himself.
Someday, he would have to sit down and talk with his father about it. Maybe, with Whenna’s help, they could even sit down with old Waldenius and have it out, clear the air. Someday.
He had to admit, even as he left the room, that “someday” might never come. Because he was just as afraid of his grandfather as Dagarius was.
The noise was coming from the barracks’ entryway. When Gaumarus came into the room, he saw most of two squads flanking Lieutenant Yuusen and Capitan Desmeth, facing a tall man in a high-collared, broad-shouldered, short coat, with a short cape affixed to the back. The tall man was red in the face, shouting in Capitan Desmeth’s face, even as two more men in similar clothing held him back. Gaumarus could not understand a word the Knight of the Tancredus Cluster was saying; he was speaking their language instead of Oxidanese.
Four more Knights came striding through the doors behind them, and one, a dark-haired, olive-skinned man with a vicious scar puckering one side of his face, spoke sharply in the same language. The red-faced man jerked around to glare at him, but straightened when he saw the white-haired man in the center of the group.
The white-haired man stepped forward to loom over Capitan Desmeth. All of the Knights seemed to be taller by at least a handspan than the Provenians. Gaumarus briefly wondered how that was; he had thought that all the Knights of the Tancredus Cluster came from various worlds across the Perseus Arm. With the variety of worlds, of varying gravities, their uniformity of height seemed strange.
“What is the problem here?” the white-haired man asked, in accented Oxidanese. He had enormous, flowing mustaches, that looked too large to fit in one of the Knights’ enclosed helmets.
The red-faced Knight launched into a bitter tirade in his own language, pointing at Yuusen accusingly. The white-haired Knight said nothing as the man continued, his face calm and serene.
Once the red-faced man seemed to run out of steam, the white-haired man looked at Capitan Desmeth. “It is late, and my Knights require a place to rest,” he said. “Why is your man refusing them shelter?”
“Lieutenant Yuusen is refusing no one shelter, Excellency,” Desmeth said, his back ramrod straight. “But there are guest accommodations elsewhere; this is my company’s barracks.”
“And your company is being offered the honor of showing the Knights of the Tancredus Cluster their hospitality,” the white-haired man said placidly.
Gaumarus thought he understood what was going on. The Knights had decided to spend the night planetside, had followed their cordon, unwilling to ask about better lodgings, and were now insisting that the PDF had to put them up for the night.
“We have no ‘hospitality’ to give, Sir Knight,” Capitan Desmeth said, spreading his hands. “All of my men are essentially militia on muster. These barracks are temporary quarters only, and my men have little enough space as it is.”
“What is going on here?” a raspy voice called out from behind them. Gaumarus glanced over his shoulder, to see Colonel Vermuelen, as fat and sweaty as ever, coming into the barracks from the far end, his usual considerable entourage in tow. Gaumarus glanced at Tillens, who was clearly struggling to keep his own military bearing. The last thing they needed now was Colonel Vermuelen to get involved.
Capitan Desmeth straightened to attention and the PDF men, dressed in varying degrees of uniform, from those still in their dusty gray fatigues to those already down to shorts and t-shirts, parted for the lumbering Colonel. “There appears to be some misunderstanding with the Knights, sir,” Capitan Desmeth said.
“I do not want any ‘misunderstandings,’ Capitan,” Colonel Vermuelen said, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. “The Knights are our guests and benefactors. You will give them whatever they ask.”
“But, sir,” Desmeth began.
“No ‘buts,’ Capitan,” Vermuelen snapped. “Or do I need to put you on report?”
“I was going to say, sir,” Desmeth continued, his voice tight, “that the Knights are effectively asking me to throw my men out of the barracks to accommodate them.”
Whether or not the man understood Oxidanese, the tall, scarred Knight said something sharply in his own language. The white-mustached Knight looked over at him condescendingly, and said something that Gaumarus could not understand, but that sounded amused. A couple of the other Knights chuckled, and the scarred man’s eyes flashed as his face darkened.
“If your men need to sleep in shelters on the parade ground to accommodate the Knights, then that is what they will do, Capitan,” Vermuelen said. “Do I make myself clear?”
Desmeth’s face was stiff and pale, his lips a bloodless line in his face. “Yes, sir,” he ground out.
Gaumarus sighed, feeling a sinking in his gut. He glanced at Verlot, to find the terrible old noncom already watching him. He knew how this was going to end. The noncoms were going to sleep outside, while the rankers who could fit would still get to stay in the barracks. He started to turn back toward his room to reassemble his coilgun, at least, before he was banished, when everyone’s comm started squawking.
For a moment, everyone in the entryway froze. He looked down at the little device that was still strapped to his belt. Those who had stripped most of the way down were looking over at their comrades who still had their comms on them. But the tone was unmistakable. That was an alert. The second in the last three days.
With a sense of unreality settling around him, Gaumarus pulled up his comm unit and looked at the tiny screen.
Alert. Bombing attack at A
ltgeld Market. Heavy casualties. Rebel presence confirmed. Ambulance personnel have been fired upon.
He looked up at Verlot. The veteran noncom seemed completely unruffled. “Well, don’t just stand there, ladies!” he bellowed. “Get dressed, get those weapons back together, and kit up! We roll in five minutes!”
The shocked militiamen started milling around as Verlot continued to apply very loud verbal encouragement to get them moving. Gaumarus was swept back toward the rooms, barely noticing that the Knights had turned on their heels and left the barracks, presumably heading back to their skimmers and their armor.
He caught Tillens’ eye as they hurried down the hallway. His old friend looked as worried and confused as he felt.
Something is happening. The rebels have never been this aggressive before. What has changed?
He feared that he didn’t want to know the answer to that question.
3
A thick pall of smoke and dust hung above the Altgeld Market, underlit by the fires that flickered in the wreckage left by the bombing. There were other flashes beneath the spreading cloud; brighter, more actinic flashes. Someone down there was shooting, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge in the column, no other PDF units had responded yet.
The Knights’ skimmers roared out front, followed more sedately by the 121st’s halftracks. The heavier halftracks simply couldn’t keep up with the air cushion vehicles, and the Knights weren’t slowing to let the Provenians keep pace. The gap was getting wider and wider as they got closer to the Market.
“It looks like there’s a fight going on in there, lads,” Verlot said matter-of-factly from his seat just behind the halftrack’s driver’s compartment. “But remember that it’s a market, and the bomb went off early enough in the evening that there were plenty of civilians in there buying and selling. So let me catch one of you spraying his fire around indiscriminately, and I’ll shoot you myself. ID your targets before you shoot.”
None of them doubted that Verlot would follow through on his threat.
Gaumarus sat in his seat in the rocking halftrack, the dim green lights casting eerie shadows over the rest of the PDF Motor Infantrymen crammed together inside. His coilgun was between his knees, the long barrel pointed up at the overhead. They were told in training that it was to avoid shooting down, through the vehicle’s transmission, but Gaumarus doubted the coilgun beads would penetrate the armored deck plating. For that matter, he expected that if someone let off a negligent discharge inside the troop compartment, the bead would simply ricochet around inside until all of them were dead.
It was cheerful thoughts like that that kept him from thinking too much about what they might find in the Market.
He looked down at his gloved hand, staring at his fingers. He was surprised that they were steady; they felt like they should be shaking like a leaf.
He didn’t want to go in there. He hadn’t even seen much of what the Knights had done in Bar, but the strange awareness that he had witnessed, in real time and with his own eyes, the violent deaths of over a hundred people was lurking at the back of his mind. It was something they’d trained for, and they’d all seen the vids of actual combat actions with the rebels and the indigs before, but to have it become real, right in front of one’s own eyes, was something else.
It was something that every soldier had to eventually face, but something that Gaumarus, even after five years in the PDF, hadn’t really thought about. And now he was rattled, and not at all sure how he was going to react to seeing it again so soon.
But he had no choice, and looking at Verlot’s pitiless eyes, his face shield lifted up into the overhang of his helmet, he knew that the sergeant wasn’t going to offer him a centimeter of slack.
He felt a flash of resentment as he looked at Verlot, knowing that the man was going to demand just as much, if not more, of him as ever, despite what had already happened that day. He was careful to keep it off his face, though. He didn’t keep his bearing out of a sense of duty or stoicism, however, but just because he was afraid of Verlot.
He tore his eyes away from the sergeant and looked across the compartment at Tillens. The other man had his head down, staring at his boots. In fact, Gaumarus found, as he looked around, most of the rest of the men in the compartment were in similar poses of pensive, withdrawn brooding. He realized that he wasn’t alone, and that part of the baleful stare he’d been getting from the only combat veteran in the unit before Bar, Verlot, had been because he’d been sitting there, pitying himself, while the men he was ostensibly supposed to be helping lead were going through the same doubts and fears.
But it was too late to step up and try to be a leader. They were at the market.
The Altgeld Market, on the edge of the Monoyan Plain and within sight of the Thorean Plateau where the Capitol and the main Planetary Defense Headquarters loomed, had begun as an open-air gathering place for the Families, shortly after the first landing. As such, the original Market had been unplanned and fairly chaotic. The original Families’ stalls were still there, in the same sort of vaguely circular arrangement, though they had been built up with prefabs and awnings in the years since the place had become established. The establishments on the outer rings of the market were newer, fancier, and often more extensive, extending to three-story storefronts and sprawling, multi-winged shopping complexes and vehicle and machinery dealerships. But the Families still commanded the highest premiums, and the Latecomers still had to pay their fair share to the Family in whose zone they had built.
Even the outer rings of the Market were too densely built up for the halftracks, or even the Knights’ skimmers. The skimmers were grounded in an arc around the southeast flank of the Market, their powergun turrets aimed down the main thoroughfares that led in toward the center of the Market and the Family installations. They appeared to have that flank of the Market covered, without need for the halftracks’ heavy coilguns and missile launchers, so the Provenian vehicles slowed and halted a few dozen yards behind them.
The halftrack door began to drop, hissing on its hydraulics, and Diricks was off his seat and down the ramp in a flash, his coilgun at port arms. Of all of them, Diricks had seemed the most eager that morning, and seemed relatively unaffected by the carnage in Bar. Gaumarus forced himself to rise and head down the ramp. His legs felt a little rubbery, as if they didn’t quite want to do what he told them to. Or maybe that was just in his head.
With his fireteam, he jogged around the right flank of the halftrack, taking a knee on the ground near the front wheel, his coilgun leveled at the market in front of him.
Smoke was still billowing into the sky, and panicked, wounded civilians were still staggering out of the Market itself. Crowds of people were gathered some distance away from the outer cordon, watching. Most of them must have had to scramble to get away from the skimmers and the halftracks as they’d approached.
The Knights were already on the ground, though they hadn’t yet penetrated into the Market itself. Even with the facelessness of their great helms, they still managed to convey impatience with the Provenian Defense Force soldiers. A red helm turned toward them, and the exterior speakers boomed and crackled, even over the noise of weapons fire and explosions coming from within the Market, audible now that they were out of the armored box of the halftrack.
“What are you waiting for?” the voice said, in the same flat, mechanical tones that he’d heard before. “Is the Provenian militia afraid to come to grips with the enemy?”
One of the other Knights said something in their own language, apparently cutting out the translation function in his helm. It sounded somewhat like the scarred man who had seemed uncomfortable with the Knights’ attitudes in the barracks, but Gaumarus couldn’t be sure, and at the moment, it was of minimal importance.
“Up and moving, men!” Yuusen barked. “By fireteams, advance! Fire Team One, take Aleph Avenue; Fire Team Two, move up Bereth! Three and Four, move in trace and be prepared to support!”
His le
gs still feeling weak and unsteady, Gaumarus heaved himself to his feet. His coilgun felt unusually heavy as he listened to the gunfire and looked up at the smoke boiling up from the center of the Market. The cordon around Bar had been bad enough. Now he was going to have to go into that.
The nearest structure was a large, H-shaped brick building owned by one of the Latecomer companies, an affiliate of some interstellar trading empire. They had considerably more resources at their disposal than all the Families combined, and offered off-world luxuries that could not be obtained anywhere else. But on Provenia, they were still Latecomers.
The big store was currently dark, and the street running in front of it, leading deeper into the Market, was as well. In fact, as he looked around, the only light in the Market seemed to be coming from the burning buildings and the weapons fire. The bombing must have knocked out the power.
The squad of six Knights waiting at the head of the street saw the Provenian soldiers coming and impatiently turned and started up the street, their powerguns in their shoulders. Gaumarus could only imagine what kind of detection gear the Knights had built into their helms. His own helmet projected a ghostly image on his face shield, amplifying what light there was, but he suspected that the Knights could just about see through the brick walls.
Remembering his own task, he signaled to his fireteam to split up along either side of the street. He and Diricks took one side, Tillens and Bryss took the other. They moved cautiously, trying to scan every darkened opening and corner, and soon found that they were falling behind the Knights, again.
“Hurry up,” he called. He didn’t want to be the one straggling in behind every other unit when they got to the action. The thought of Verlot’s face if that happened almost made him shudder.
They had to break into a jog to try to close the gap with the Knights, and he knew it was a mistake; they were going to miss things. And he didn’t want to miss anything. Any gap they missed could conceal a rebel, waiting in ambush. He wished the scouts were with them. But Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff and his fellow tribesmen had vanished into the plains after their task was done, and there hadn’t been time to wait for them to respond to the summons.