Steel Sworn

by Richard Fox

  The tip cut against the side of Nakir’s neck and blue-white sparks shot out. Nakir stepped into Pulaski’s guard and pistol-whipped the Karigole against the side of his face with the dead eye. The muzzle drew blood and knocked Pulaski’s head back.

  Nakir spun around and ducked, punching with his Wield and striking Pulaski in the chest with a massive fist of the energy. The Karigole flew back and struck the pile of pipes, sending some clattering around him when he hit the ground and slid into a crate.

  Nakir put one hand to the side of his neck, his mouth grimacing with pain. The Wield flickered and sank back into his hand and arm. He reloaded his pistol and kicked a pipe aside. He spotted Ely’s uniform beneath the mess.

  A gauss rifle snapped and the Wield flashed against Nakir’s other arm. He cried out in pain and fell to one knee, blood blossoming over his triceps.

  “Hands up!” Lars shouted as he ran from the cemetery building. Nakir dropped his pistol and stuck his good hand in his jacket, bringing out a small grenade. He clicked a button and held it for a moment, then tossed it at Lars.

  The Wield flared as Lars opened fire. He got a single shot off before the grenade activated and a flash of white light blinded him. Lars tripped over his own feet and fell hard. He swung his rifle from side to side, seeing nothing.

  “Lillebror! ’Ski!” Lars called out. He felt someone grab the side of his rifle and he blinked hard until he could make out Ely, beaten up and bleeding from a cut on his forehead.

  “What the hell happened here?” Lars tried to get up, but his balance was shot.

  “A Commissar…I’ve seen them use that power,” Ely said, breathing hard.

  “I have his scent.” Pulaski limped over to them. “He’s been here before and I failed to realize what he was.” The cut on his leg bled freely, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I didn’t get a look at his face,” Ely said.

  Pulaski went to blood splatter on the ground and ran two fingers through it, then licked his talons.

  “I can find him, no matter what disguise he takes,” Pulaski said, then glared at Ely. “You are a great deal of trouble to keep around, whelp.”

  “Steel Sworn!” Santos’ voice rose from their forearm screens. “I don’t know what’s going on out there, but return to base immediately. We have a mission.”

  “Can you track him from your suit?” Lars asked.

  “Not as well. Not that it matters. You heard the captain.” Pulaski helped Lars up and the Swede swayed on his feet. “Did you have your eyes open when the flash-bang went off?”

  “Yes. Those things don’t work on Armor…guess I forgot I was in crunchy mode.” Lars tried to shake dizziness away.

  “This pain stuff sucks,” Ely said, pressing a palm to his cut.

  “Back to the armory…I’ll pass on the spy’s description. Give the locals the honor of the hunt.” Pulaski reached under a pipe and picked up a metal disk. He slipped it into a small sheath under a sleeve.

  “How many knives has he got?” Ely asked.

  “What warrior goes into battle with only one weapon?” Pulaski asked, shaking his head.

  ****

  Ely, Lars, and Pulaski stood on the catwalk running in front of their Armor while medics worked on Ely and Lars. One sprayed Nu-Skin on a bare patch shaved onto Ely’s scalp, who winced as the medic pressed a hypo spray to his neck.

  “Just a flesh wound.” The medic closed his bag and moved away.

  “And you’ve never seen him before?” Santos asked.

  “He sounded like the one I fought yesterday,” Ely said, “and the one from the Breitenfeld. I didn’t see his face, but my guess is it’s the same guy.”

  “Why are the Geist so hard up to get him?” Lars asked. His eyes were pinpricks, and he didn’t quite seem to know what he was looking at. His medic had a sensor on Lars’s chest, attached to a wire on the medic’s oversized forearm rig.

  “Mr. Hale is in possession of a Qa’Resh artifact,” Santos said, touching the back of Ely’s head, “which can’t be removed without killing him. At least not by anyone on Aachen.”

  “We should plug him into his suit and not let him walk free again.” Pulaski took a suture gun from his medic and stapled the bullet wound on his leg himself. “If the enemy will take this risk, we should take more precautions.”

  “Stay in the pod for how long?” Ely’s eyes went wide.

  “You’ve never gone into the deep dark, have you?” Lars asked. “Being locked in for days on end with no expectation of rescue is one of the first tests we go through to earn our plugs.”

  “He doesn’t have plugs,” Pulaski stated.

  Santos pointed a knife hand at Ely’s chest. “You move only with your battle buddy from now on. Showers? Shitter? Rack time? Lars’s there. And probably a security detail if one can be spared. Congrats, Mr. Popular, your life just got more complicated,” the captain said.

  “I’d take the thing out if I could, sir.” Ely patted at his liquid stitches.

  “We mount up in an hour.” Santos looked at his forearm screen. “Geist are massing troops outside the wall and Marshal Roland will launch a spoiling attack. We’re getting standard munitions loaded. I volunteered for the twilight devotional. Stay in the compound until we roll out. Questions?”

  Ely drew breath in, but when Lars grabbed him by the wrist, he opted not to ask anything.

  “Check your gear,” Santos said and walked away.

  Pulaski jumped over the railing and landed next to Stinker. The Toth menial hissed at him and scampered behind an ammo crate. The Karigole limped into the storage room.

  “Two drops in each eye every half hour.” The medic working on Lars pressed a little vial of medicine into his palm.

  “Easy enough.” He tilted his head back and followed instructions. “You ready to go back out, lillebror?”

  “Combat again in an out-of-date suit…or hang around and wait for that Commissar to come back for me. Rock and a hard place,” Ely said.

  “Whoa…got some neat colors going on.” Lars stood up. “Let me teach you how to check head space and timing on your gauss cannons. Should have enough time for the Saint once we’re done.”

  Chapter 13

  A gavel banged.

  Marc Ibarra raised his gaze and found himself in a courtroom sitting in the witness stand. Shannon stood at the prosecutor’s table…next to another Shannon at the defense. Judge Shannon leaned over from her bench and wagged her gavel at him.

  The jury box was filled with twelve angry-looking Shannons. The benches for the public were different…individuals of varied human races and dress sat still and packed together. Their eyes stared into the distance, faces slack.

  “The People of Earth versus Marc Ibarra,” Judge Shannon announced. “Prosecution?”

  Marc tried to move, but his feet were welded to the floor, his hands immobile against the arms of the chair.

  “Ten billion dead.” Shannon rose from her table, and a holo of Earth appeared before the jury box. Population figures hovered over each country. “Ten…billion. All murdered by the Xaros. All murdered while Marc Ibarra watched it happen. Because you let it happen.”

  Some in the public benches disintegrated, burning from the inside out like they’d been hit by Xaros weapons. Others decayed into skeletons then into dust that wafted away. New bodies appeared to replace those that had vanished.

  “You think guilt means anything to me now?” Ibarra asked. “I had six decades to prepare for the fall of Earth.”

  “Six decades and you only saved a few hundred thousand. Did you enjoy playing God, Marc?” Shannon walked along the jury box while her doppelgangers nodded along, some staring daggers at the defendant.

  “But I saved that many. Had I failed, humanity would be extinct. The Xaros’ march across the galaxy would never have stopped. The Xaros would have found the Geist and the Ark eventually…you think you could have beaten them?” Ibarra tried to rock his chair from side to side, but it wouldn
’t budge.

  “The Geist are evidently more capable than humanity on the battlefield.” One side of Shannon’s mouth pulled into a grin. “The Xaros proved no match for the Qa’Resh, and Malal is forever with us.”

  She pointed to the Earth holo and lines of Xaros drones streamed from orbit onto major cities. The population tracker fell quickly.

  “What was it like watching it all end?” Shannon purred. “Did you drink your sorrows away? Fiddle as cities burned?”

  “I was there through it all…and so were you, Shannon. You don’t remember because everyone on Earth had to die. Couldn’t have you remembering those days before the end, wouldn’t jibe with your memories of being aboard the Saturn Colony mission and coming back to my employment, would it?”

  Shannon leaned back, one eye twitching. “Don’t confuse the issue.” She raised an arm to the public, where the dead burned away even faster as the Xaros continued their advance across Earth in the holo. “Explain to them why they died. Why did so many billions perish for your plan, Marc?”

  “There was no other way!” Ibarra fought against his invisible restraints. “I could hide only so many ships from the invasion. There was no escape from what was coming.”

  “The Xaros were coming, no doubt of that.” Shannon touched the East Coast of the United States as Washington, DC was scoured of all human life. “Yet the Qa’Resh had their jump technology. Why didn’t they bring Bastion’s Navies to Earth and beat the Xaros right then and there?”

  Marc stopped struggling. “Trillions of drones,” Ibarra said. “Show the video from the fleet action over Luna against the first Xaros dreadnought. The combined Navies of Earth were slaughtered. You think Bastion could have done any better?”

  Judge Shannon banged her gavel. “Tell the truth,” she said and leveled the hammer at him.

  “That was never the plan.” The prosecutor looked back at Ibarra. “That was never the bargain, Marc. The Qa’Resh came to you and they promised that some of humanity would survive…but they had to have their prize.”

  She snapped her fingers and a nearly complete Crucible appeared in the holo.

  “This was that prize. This is what ten billion human beings died for…why, Marc? Why did you kill so many?”

  Ibarra snarled at her then settled back into his chair. “It wasn’t enough to beat the first Xaros invasion, my dear. The Xaros always returned, as they did when they moved a moon from Barnard’s Star across interstellar space while building more drones along the way. Winning a battle against extinction doesn’t mean much when you lose the war against the same enemy. Either we took the deal to win the whole thing or we were done. I chose survival,” he said.

  “Yet,” Shannon said, touching her mouth, “yet why didn’t the Qa’Resh offer to exalt Earth before the Xaros’ arrival? The Dotari sent off their Golden Fleets then sterilized all those left behind. The Xaros preserved their world and built a Crucible over it. Why not offer the same chance so more humans could have survived?”

  Ibarra didn’t answer.

  “The Qa’Resh at Bastion are the same Qa’Resh as Malal,” she continued. “They knew how to exalt a sentient being’s soul and preserve it. Why didn’t they come to Earth and offer that salvation? You could have kept your hidden fleet. The plan to capture a nearly finished Crucible would not have changed.”

  “You tell me.” Ibarra smiled. “You’ve got the Geist moving behind your eyes—have them whisper in your ear too. The Geist altered you in the tubes to believe that they’re on some sort of altruistic mission to save souls…but that’s not how it works, Shannon.”

  “Enlighten me?” She put an elbow on the rail before him and rested her chin on her palm.

  “The power…” Marc stopped, then looked up at the ceiling, then over to the judge and the jury. “Souls, my dear. Did they let you remember your daughter?”

  Shannon stood up straight.

  “The true you, the woman that worked for me for so long and the woman that died in Phoenix fighting the Xaros…she told me what happened. Did the Geist let you keep the memory I made sure Shannon always had?”

  “Don’t…” the prosecutor said softly.

  “The little girl was named Daphne and she died on a Tuesday morning. You remember telling me about this?” Marc asked as the light in the courtroom dimmed. “You were a very talented analyst for the CIA some years before that day, had the ear of powerful people in Washington, DC. You were summoned to the White House for a targeting briefing where the president had to decide if he was going to bomb a terrorist hiding out in Afghanistan…did the Geist let you keep this?”

  Shannon’s lip trembled.

  “You convinced the president to call off the strike because there was a risk of collateral damage. There were children in the compound. Couldn’t have an American bomb do that…and then what happened? You got that president to hit a couple empty training camps instead. And that terrorist moved underground. But that mercy wasn’t returned…was it? No. That Tuesday morning you dropped Daphne off at a daycare and—”

  “Stop!” Judge Shannon hit the gavel so hard that the shaft cracked. “Stop right now—”

  “You were almost to the embassy when you heard the news about the bombings. You got back to Daphne as fast as you could…but you were too late. The pieces came together pretty quick and the terrorist that you let live was responsible. You blamed yourself. You advised mercy and compassion for those animals and they killed your daughter.”

  “She…” Shannon looked down at her arms, cradling an unseen baby.

  “Your husband drank himself to death less than a year later,” Ibarra said. “And you…you became an avenger. You gave yourself over to the CIA and became one of their deadliest agents. I read your interrogation reports. The US government had to go to a lot of trouble to keep the gorier details from becoming public knowledge.”

  “No…no, I would never have…”

  “You never forgave yourself!” Ibarra shouted. “That one death haunted you forever. Now tell me, Shannon, who will claim your soul? The Geist…or whatever peace that was there for Daphne?”

  Shannon slammed her hands against the side of her head and screamed. The judge disintegrated to a Xaros beam and those in the benches suffered the same fate.

  “Malal!” Shannon ripped handfuls of hair out. “He is our final salvation. He will—”

  “Not for Daphne.” Marc shook his head. “You remember her now? Enough faiths believe that family is forever, and that ours sins can be forgiven, Shannon. Your husband. Your daughter—”

  “No!” Shannon slammed her hands against the witness box, splintering it. She pointed at him and spoke, but her voice faded to nothing, then darkness encroached.

  Marc was left alone in a small circle of light, his chair gone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said up at the light source. “I’m sorry, Shannon. You don’t deserve to suffer like this…but you believe you do, and I could never convince you to forgive yourself.”

  Marc paced the inner diameter of the circle, lost in thought.

  ****

  “Daphne!” Shannon shouted from the interface chair. She lurched against the restraints, her eyes swimming with drugs, her scalp bleeding from where she’d torn the data lines loose.

  Zegor grabbed her by the neck and severed her spine with a quick twist. “I grow tired of this,” he said to Noyan.

  The Geist in the Ambassador body lifted her hand from a screen, motes of light trailing away. Noyan rubbed her fingers together, like she’d touched something awful.

  “Ibarra…the apostate is more capable than I gave him credit for. The procedural program that generates the Commissar’s consciousness does have the deep memories of the child. Most procedurals are created with similar histories…but there is more to Shannon’s memory. It’s tied into a neurological trigger that renders her useless.”

  “He was wasting our time!” Zegor stomped a foot, cracking the glass floor and disrupting the shaders, revealing Ibarra si
tting in the chamber below. “Using your meat puppets to access his mind is pointless.”

  “The other procedural servants don’t have the same history with Ibarra…nor are they as capable as she is. It will take the Naroosha months before they can undo Ibarra’s meddling.” Noyan leaned over to look at Ibarra.

  “Are we admitting defeat?” Zegor’s fingers lengthened into scythes. “Let me tear him apart. Breaking his body over and over again might get us somewhere.”

  “You would despoil a relic of Malal’s people? No…we will move the battlefield to a place where Ibarra has no power.” Noyan motioned to a wall and the small Qa’Resh probe fragment taken from Ely Hale floated toward her. “Though your rather atavistic idea still has merit.”

  Chapter 14

  “Everyone that gets back to the Crusade can fight on. If they stay behind, they can sell their lives boldly and accomplish little else,” Makarov said. “Some have made that decision on other worlds.”

  “Yet the Crusade is still surprised when it happens.” Roland shook his head. “It will take time to fabricate the anti-grav generators…give me eighty hours.”

  “The Warsaw will be there,” Makarov said, and the recording fizzled away, replaced by a scale model of the star system. Potential headings from the Keystone gate and the Ibarran fleet to the planet traced through the holo.

  Mahnark’s eyes glittered.

  “An opportunity…yes, quite the opportunity for me.” The Geist raised a hand and intercept courses from the Geist forces behind the inner moon intersected with the Keystone gate.

  “I do not understand, Exalted One,” Gon’baya said. “The Ibarrans will likely make a high-velocity swing around the planet. You can destroy them easily enough.”