by Peter Nealen
They had come over three hundred kilometers from the M’tait’s landing zone, and they had yet to find any place that the monsters hadn’t touched. The speed with which they’d moved was horrifying.
There were four halftracks parked at the gate to the Casca Plateau PDF Base. Their turrets swung to cover the crawler as it trundled up.
“Halt!” a loudspeaker crackled in Oxidanese. “This is Provenian Government property! Any looters will be shot!”
“I think you had best put their minds at ease, friend Gaumarus,” Kan Tur said.
Grimacing, Gaumarus shut down the crawler’s engine and swung out of the cab. The heavy coilguns in the turrets tracked in on him, and he found that, despite the fey sense of despair and undirected fury he felt, he could still feel some fear at facing those muzzles. He wasn’t quite ready to throw his life away, not yet. He raised his hands, glad that he’d left the powergun in the cab.
“I am Corporal Gaumarus Pell, 121st Motor Infantry!” he called, his voice a hoarse croak that sounded even worse through his ventilator. The gunners in the turrets were also wearing ventilators; they would probably be necessary for a while, until more of the fallout was washed out of the skies.
“Try again, looter!” the man on the loudspeaker barked. “The 121st was wiped out to a man on the Monoyan Plain!”
“And you’d know that, would you, you rear-echelon, cowardly nuyak?” Gaumarus exploded. “Where were you during the fighting? Where were you when Tillens was getting torn apart, or Verlot? Where were you?” He was practically screaming.
“You have thirty seconds to turn that vehicle around and leave, or we will fire,” the man on the loudspeaker said. “You’re not the first looter we’ve had to deal with.”
“Did these other looters have a Knight of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster with them?” Kan Tur demanded, stepping down from the cab. “I would strongly suggest you avoid shooting me,” he continued. “The Order might not take it well.”
That seemed to have finally gotten their attention. Scarred, scorched, and filthy as it was, there was no mistaking the dark red combat armor of a Knight, nor the powergun he carried easily in his gauntleted hands. A voice might have called out an order to stand down, though Gaumarus couldn’t really hear it clearly. But the coilguns in the turrets lifted their muzzles, and a man in PDF fatigues, flak vest, and helmet stepped out from behind one of the halftracks and walked forward.
Gaumarus couldn’t help but notice, in the illumination from the crawler’s headlamps, that the man’s fatigues were very clean. Even his boots were spotless. He didn’t carry a coilgun, but instead had a pistol in a polished nuyak-hide holster on his belt.
He stepped up to Gaumarus and looked up at him. He was almost a head shorter. The insignia of a lieutenant was shining brightly on his vest. “If you’re telling the truth, Corporal,” he said stiffly, “and you really are the sole survivor of the 121st, there will be questions for you to answer.” His attention shifted past Gaumarus’s shoulder and he stiffened.
Gaumarus looked back to see Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff standing in the door of the cab. Worse, he was still wearing his mountain tribe coat.
“Wait here,” the lieutenant said. He turned his back and started toward the halftracks, lifting a comm unit to his lips.
Gaumarus glanced at Verheyen, who was watching him through one of the cab’s broken windows. He couldn’t see the other man’s expression, but he could guess.
This was hardly the homecoming to the PDF that either of them had been expecting.
Gaumarus looked up as the door to his room opened. They called it his room, but it was more like a cell. A comfortable one, certainly. It was better furnished than his barracks room at the Casca Plateau Base had been. But he wasn’t allowed to come and go without an escort.
The man who lumbered into the room and shut the door behind him was tall, but his sheer girth made him seem shorter by comparison. His chins waggled above his uniform collar, festooned with brand new colonel’s insignia. He pulled out the chair from the small, barren desk against the wall and sat on it with a huffing sigh.
“I know it was not customary in the 121st to sit in the presence of a superior officer,” Colonel Lamans wheezed.
Fighting to keep the bitter grimace off his face, Gaumarus slowly rose to his feet, focusing his gaze on a point on the wall a half-meter above Lamans’s head.
He knew Lamans by reputation only. While the Lamans Family as a whole might have been on-again off-again allies of the Pells, generally considered to be among the less odious rival Families by old Waldenius, Razo Lamans had only ever been spoken of with fear and contempt. While most of the Family men who gained PDF officer commissions were political animals, Razo was a predator, and one who specialized at gaining as much power and influence with as little physical effort as possible.
He had clearly been nowhere near the fighting with the M’tait. For that matter, the fresh-faced youngsters with coilguns outside of Gaumarus’s door didn’t look like they’d even seen a slayer, either.
“May I ask why I am being held under house arrest, sir?” Gaumarus asked.
“I would say that you may not,” Lamans said coldly. He had a faint lisp, as if he was trying to talk around a mouthful of spittle, “except that that explanation segues nicely into the rest of our conversation.
“You present a problem, Corporal. Your survival, when every other soldier who went down onto the Monoyan Plain against the enemy died, raises suspicions. We have determined, through extensive interrogation of rebel prisoners, that a substantial number of M’tait catspaws were inserted onto our world before the attack. They were responsible for the terrorist strikes that nearly decapitated our defenses just before the M’tait landed.” He peered at Gaumarus with cold, dead eyes, set in folds of pale flesh. “So, you understand why the sudden reappearance of a man who should, by all rights, be dead, raises certain questions?”
Gaumarus felt himself flush with fury, and he flicked his eyes down to meet Lamans’s. “Are you seriously insinuating that I am a M’tait agent, sir?” he demanded.
“Mind your tone, Corporal,” Lamans said. “And choose your words very carefully. You arrived at a base far from your last known assignment, in the company of a mountain tribe indig, carrying non-standard weapons, well after your death had been recorded. There is only one reason for the M’tait to have spared you, Corporal, and we will not be victimized the same way a second time.”
“I am a Pell!” Gaumarus snapped. “In what insane universe would a Pell be an alien agent?”
“I would not stress your Family name too hard, Corporal,” Lamans said. Was that gloating in his tone? “The Family Pell has never been especially cooperative with the Central Government. Did your own grandfather not threaten to bomb the Ruling Council?”
“That was thirty years ago!” Gaumarus realized he was clenching his fists.
“A trifling time for a Family well-known for holding grudges, especially when Waldenius Pell was behind the grudge,” Lamans said, his voice low and ugly. His face was composed, but Gaumarus thought he could see an evil glee in the man’s eyes.
“It makes a certain sense, doesn’t it?” he continued. “A disaffected Family, longing for the ‘good old days’ of a frontier world, where they could run roughshod over everything and everyone within their demesne. Feeling tied down and marginalized by the fact that they are now under a common government that they do not dominate, no longer able to act like kings. How better to regain their old status than to try to smash the government they feel is holding them back, restraining them with more civilized values?
“They can’t do it themselves, of course,” he continued, his eyes daring Gaumarus to say anything that he could use against him. “Their power has waned far too much for that. But let them find allies...”
“It would have been quite clever to use the despised Latecomer rebels, not to mention the mountain tribe indig who have been running wild across human lands for the l
ast several days, carrying advanced weapons that must have been supplied by outsiders, such as smugglers contracted by the same mastermind who wanted to see the order of the new Provenia we’ve built smashed. No one would ever suspect the Pells of having anything to do with such rabble. They have always been the bitterest enemies of indig and Latecomer alike. One might almost say it was fiendishly clever…if you had not been so foolish as to give away the game by arriving when you did.” He shook his head with mock sadness. “I suppose the later generations cannot hope to uphold the ways of the older, can they?”
“That is impossible, sir,” Gaumarus said. “And Kan Tur will confirm my story. I am no M’tait agent. I survived by luck and have been fighting the M’tait since the battle.”
“Ah, yes, the Knight,” Lamans said, his lip twisting. “A bit of a problem, there; the other members of his Order will not surrender him to our custody for questioning. However, they will soon be gone, and no longer of any concern to our investigation.”
Gaumarus stared at him, his fury giving way to an icy knot in his guts. “Am I being formally charged, sir?” he asked, straightening and staring once again at the wall.
“No, not yet,” Lamans said, with that same oily satisfaction in his voice. “So far, this is only a theory, though one which seems to fit the facts as we have them. But don’t worry, once Discovery is finished, I am sure we will have all the information we need for formal proceedings.” He stood. “I suggest that you cooperate as best you can, Corporal. It would be a shame if you were too damaged by the time you confess your treason to face the court martial.” He smiled. “The Emergency Decrees that went into effect after the bombing of the Altgeld Market are quite…permissive, when it comes to interrogation methods.”
Gaumarus remembered hearing that one of the rebels had died under questioning. He still kept his face carefully composed, unwilling to give Lamans an inch.
Lamans stood, a faint smirk on his face, and turned to leave. “I’ll let you think long and hard about your future, Corporal,” he said. “However long or short it turns out to be.”
For a long time after Lamans left, Gaumarus just stood there, staring at the locked door. Slowly, he started to shake, and lowered himself to the floor before his knees could collapse under him. He put his head in his hands.
Visions of fire and death danced behind his eyelids. The M’tait slayers murdering the wounded and dragging others off. The swathe of destruction blasted across the landscape. Verlot. Tillens. All the rest of his Section. Raesh. Xanar Dak. His mother and father. His grandfather. So many dead. All to come to this.
He was to be accused of treason as part of a power play by a slug of a man who hadn’t even had the courage of Colonel Piett. Those who had hidden from the enemy and survived wanted a scapegoat for what had happened, and he and his companions were going to be it.
He shouldn’t have listened to Verheyen. He should have simply gone to find a way off-planet. Surely the smugglers, if any of them were still alive, would have a way?
But now it was too late. He thought he saw Waldenius glaring at him accusingly. I’m sorry, Grandfather. I failed. I never even had a chance.
He thought of Whenna and groaned. As astronomical as the chances of ever finding her had been, now her rescue was completely out of his reach.
He hoped she was dead. Hoped that she hadn’t been taken, to spend whatever nightmarish length of her life was left at the hands of the M’tait, while he rotted in a cell, to finally be executed for a crime he’d never committed.
They let him wait for the rest of the day. No one else came to see him. He was not taken out for interrogation. They just let him sit in his cell—and there was no doubt in his mind any longer that it was a cell—and think.
He tried to sleep, to escape the horror of his situation in unconsciousness. But there was no escape there either. He either relived the battles with the M’tait, only in such a way that there were more of them, and they never died when they were shot. Other times, he saw his sister being tortured by strange biomechanoids.
Or he saw his grandfather.
Those were always the same. Waldenius would stand there, either whole and angry, or broken and bloodied as he had been when he’d died, or in the worst of the dreams, he was nothing but charred bone from the ribcage down.
He never said anything. He simply glared. And Gaumarus awoke gasping, rather than face that glower.
By the time night fell again, he was sitting against the wall, shaking, trying not to think too much, or fall asleep. It would be a long night.
They had fed him at breakfast and dinner, but supper was not forthcoming. He gritted his teeth. He’d done little more than pick at his food at dinner; it had come after Colonel Lamans’s visit, and he’d had no appetite. When they didn’t feed him in the evening, he clenched up, knowing that it was beginning.
They probably wouldn’t take him for interrogation right away; they’d let him be for the night, at least. Let him sit there, stressed and hungry, his fears and anticipation preying on his mind.
He had checked the windows a dozen times already, but they were sealed and there was no way to break the polymer transparency. He’d known men who had smashed bones trying to break windows in bars, and this was a military installation, so the window was probably stronger than those. And they would have been prepared, since they were holding him there.
Furthermore, he was four stories up, and the wall below him was sheer, almost as sheer as the hull of the M’tait Huntership. Even if he could break the window, going out that way would be suicide.
He still seriously thought about it. What else was left to him?
The sun went down, and the sky, which had been overcast with an ugly pall of evil-looking cloud, probably still mildly radioactive, turned black. Most of the city of Fueria was dark; whether blacked out out of fear of the M’tait returning or a due to a lack of available power, he didn’t know.
The guards certainly weren’t going to tell him.
It was dark outside, but the lights in the ceiling of his cell stayed on. The switch on the inside didn’t work anymore. That much he knew was an interrogation technique; they would keep the lights on to keep him awake. It would have worked better if they’d put him in a proper cell instead of a barracks room where he could see out.
He laughed, barely noticing the note of hysteria in the sound. “Won’t let me sleep?” he croaked. “You’re doing me a favor!” He dreaded the nightmares even when he blinked.
He paced the floor. Even though he could tell it was night, he still lost track of time. He knew what was coming, and as much as he hated himself for it, he dreaded it with a sick feeling in his guts and a shaking in his knees.
He stopped dead and listened. There were voices outside his cell. He glanced at the window, but there was no sign of light in the sky. Pitch blackness met his eyes.
So, they weren’t going to leave him the whole night. Lamans must really have been eager.
They were coming for him.
25
He braced himself, or tried to. He didn’t know if he was going to fight or simply meekly go along. In his despair, he was almost prepared to simply confess whatever Lamans wanted him to confess.
My family is dead. My home is in ruins. What do I still have to fight for?
He could imagine Waldenius’s furious glower. But Waldenius was dead. Everyone was dead. Why should he still fight to stay alive? Why should he endure whatever tortures that Lamans could invent just to maintain his innocence, that no one was left to care about anyway?
Voices outside the door were raised. He frowned, jarred out of his misery. That sounded like shouting, and some of it almost sounded…filtered?
Then there was a heavy thud, and the doorframe shook. A cry was choked off by another, lighter thump.
The door started to open.
Gaumarus stepped back. Actually, it was more like he stumbled. He stared at the door as it swung inward, not knowing what to expect, but sure it
wasn’t going to be good.
He stared, bug-eyed in shock, as the door swung open to reveal a tall man in battered, dark red combat armor, his blank-faced helm featureless except for the T-shaped vision slit. He had a pistol in his hand.
“Well, are you going to stand there like a frightened animal, or are you going to come with me, friend Gaumarus?” the flat, mechanical voice of the Knight’s translator asked.
Gaumarus gulped. “Kan Tur?”
The Knight nodded shortly. “Who else would come to break you out of prison? Come, we need to hurry. Aside from those two, no one is going to question a Knight of the Order of the Tancredus Cluster. At least, not for a few more minutes.”
Gaumarus nodded, struck dumb by the shock of what had just happened. He knelt by one of the fallen guards, quickly taking his flak vest, helmet, and weapon. “Why?” he asked.
“Do you really have to ask?” Kan Tur replied as they hurried down the darkened hallway, Gaumarus shrugging into the flak vest and pulling the helmet onto his head. Fortunately, since he was technically still being persecuted under PDF jurisdiction, they had issued him a clean uniform, so in moments, he was just another armed PDF guard. And, as he had said, no one was going to try to stop a Knight.
“It’s just…haven’t your people sent for another ship?” Gaumarus asked, slightly out of breath. Kan Tur was walking quickly, and it took work, especially in his exhaustion, to keep up. “The M’tait are gone. Nothing going on here on Provenia should be your concern anymore.”
The Knight glanced at him. “You sound like your superiors,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. What is right is right. What is true is true. Something that some of my former brothers seem to have forgotten.”
It was only then that Gaumarus noticed that the Tancredus Cluster crest was missing from Kan Tur’s shoulder pauldron. “You’re leaving the Order?” he asked.
“Say rather that the Order has left me,” Kan Tur replied. “I argued that we had to vouch for you, Verheyen, and Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff. Knight Subcommander Zaruth Mar said the same that you just did. ‘It is none of our concern.’”