by Peter Nealen
Dravot and Powell stepped forward, understanding what needed to be done. Dravot took a knee and Powell stood behind him, reaching up and clamping an armored fist around the warped remains of the ladder. Dravot braced himself against Powell’s back and nodded.
Scalas put a boot on Dravot’s thigh and hitched himself up, grabbing the ladder above Powell with one hand as he lifted his other leg to put his foot on Dravot’s pauldron. Once again, the armor’s articulation would take most of the weight off the men themselves.
Scalas hauled himself up, raised his powergun, and pushed the overhead hatch open with his still-warm muzzle. The hatch fell open with a dull clunk, and he put his other foot on the remains of the ladder and heaved himself up to where he could grab the lip with one hand, keeping his powergun ready in the other. It took some scrambling, but then he was up and through, into the cockpit.
He lowered his powergun. He wouldn’t need it.
The cockpit had fared less well from the blasts than he had expected. It was a wreck. The acceleration couches had been torn from their mounts and thrown against the overhead. The deck was perforated where shrapnel had sleeted through it from the HV missile warheads.
Three of the four yeheri in the cockpit were clearly dead, their mangled corpses leaking orange blood onto the consoles and the shattered deck. One had a gaping exit wound at the top of his head; it seemed that a fragment had been propelled up through his body from below. The jagged chunk of metal was embedded in the overhead, dripping blood.
The fourth yeheri was still alive, but badly wounded.
“Dravot!” Scalas called down the hatch. “Tell Forster to be ready. We have a prisoner, but he’s in a bad way.”
As Scalas stepped closer, keeping his powergun ready, he saw that the yeheri was actually a female. That was not unknown among the yeheri. Many of the pirate bands were essentially roving packs of exiles, clans and families cast out into the dark. Some were more organized and professional, and even received some sponsorship and support from various yeheri worlds and organizations; in fact, some of the “pirate bands” were actually fighting units from yeheri worlds. These did not appear to be the latter, however. Just outcasts, greedy or proud enough to take what they wanted by force. Though sometimes their attacks were motivated by need. None of their equipment seemed to be in the greatest of repair.
Yet any sympathy Scalas might have felt for their poverty had been wiped away when they turned pirate.
He looked down at the bleeding yeheri woman, looking for traps or weapons. When he was satisfied, he slung his powergun, lifted her from the buckled deck, and lowered her to the Brothers below.
Forster, the medic, was identifiable by the dark red cross on his pauldron as well as the medical bag he carried. He worked on the yeheri woman on the deck of the destroyed troop compartment by the light of two powerful handheld lights that he had clipped to his shoulders. He wouldn’t have much in the way of medical supplies for a yeheri in that pack—most medical devices were constructed for specific physiologies, and it was simply impossible to have supplies on hand for every race that might be encountered in even one small sector of the galaxy—but some things, like bandages and direct pressure, translated across species, and he was doing his best to patch her up.
Still, she appeared to be catatonic, though she occasionally moaned when pressure was put on one or another of her wounds, and even without Forster’s grim prognosis, Scalas could see that she probably didn’t have long. Part of the problem was that Iabreton II’s atmosphere was as inimical to yeheri physiology as it was to human or ekuz, and though the woman’s suit was compromised, Forster had explained that her helmet was still feeding her enough oxygen to stay alive—which meant that he couldn’t remove it without killing her then and there.
The shapes of humans and ekuz appeared in the hatchway. Half a dozen or so Quarisian militiamen stood there, weapons in their hands. Scalas turned to face them.
“So, there izz one left,” said one of the ekuz, scuttling forward, a coilgun in his hands. “That will be eazzy enough to remedy.”
Scalas stepped forward and blocked the Quarisian’s way. “No,” he said.
The Quarisian looked up at him in surprise. “It’zz a pirate,” he said reasonably. “Why are you protecting it?”
“Because she is wounded and likely to die,” Scalas rumbled. He stood nearly half a head taller than the ekuz, and his armored bulk was intimidating even without the powergun in his hands. “Are you the magistrate?”
“No,” the Quarisian replied, a note of puzzlement in his voice. “Magizztrate Hozzkinzz wazz killed in the initial attack. We have not elected a new one yet.”
“Then you do not have the authority to execute this woman,” Scalas said. “The battle is over; this is no longer a matter of warfare. It is a matter of law.” He stepped closer, looming over the Quarisian militiaman. “Even summary executions must be carried out by lawful authority,” he growled. “If anyone here has that authority, it is me. Were I to let you kill her, it would be murder.” He let a bit of dark amusement creep into his voice. “And then I would be obligated to take steps against you.”
“You can’t do this,” a human protested from the hatchway. It might have been the same man who had nearly gotten himself killed running across the open ground to the Brothers’ position overlooking this very lander. “This isn’t your world. They didn’t attack you.”
“Which is utterly immaterial,” Cobb snapped, stepping up beside his centurion. “We are bound by the Code, and the Code says that we protect the weak and defenseless. And if not for us, you would be dead or groveling at the feet of a yeheri slave trader right now.” Acid dripped from his voice. “Besides, how do you propose to take her away from us?”
“Who do you think you are?” the ekuz demanded.
“Who are we?” Scalas thundered. “We are the Caractacan Brotherhood! We are the men who came to your rescue without regard for reward. We sacrificed nine of our Brothers to save your colony from these pirates. And now you dare to question our Code, and get angry at us because we will not step aside and let you take needless revenge on a helpless, wounded prisoner?”
The ekuz stepped back nervously. The Brothers in the troop compartment, as well as those outside, stood at the ready, powerguns in their hands.
“By all means,” Scalas continued, lowering his voice, “find a magistrate to render judgment. But do not expect me to stand aside for a mob.”
“A magistrate would be too late anyway,” Forster announced, rising to his feet. “She’s gone.”
Scalas did not move, but continued to stare at the ekuz in front of him. His expression was invisible behind his visor, but he knew the narrow vision slit in his otherwise faceless visor was far more intimidating than any scowl. The chameleonic coating had shifted to a mottled, scarred gray and black inside the wreckage of the lander, making him a towering, broad-shouldered specter with a still-warm powergun in his gauntleted hands.
“Stand down, you idiots,” another voice called, amplified by an external speaker.
A man in ancient space armor, though still painted in the same orange and white as the rest of the Quarisian militia’s spacesuits, stalked up the ramp, shoving a few of the militiamen out of his way. He stopped in front of the ekuz and faced him, turning his back on Scalas.
“Po’ulu, I know you’re not stupid enough to try to go toe to toe with a Caractacan, even if they hadn’t just pulled us out of the fire. I trained you better than that.” His face was hidden by his helmet, but he made it clear that he was looking around at the rest of the assembled Quarisians. “I trained all of you better than that. Now get your butts back to the staging area and report to Sergeant Traynor. We’ve got a lot of cleanup to do, and we’ve still got people missing.”
The man continued to stand there, his hands on his hips, giving every indication that he was glaring at his subordinates, as the militiamen reluctantly turned and headed down the ramp. Only once they were gone did the man
turn to face Scalas.
He was armed with a coilgun that looked like it had been built in a local machine shop. It was wired with a thick cable to a jury-rigged power pack on top of his sustainment pack; the attachable power packs must have run out at some point, if the coilgun had even been built to take them.
“My apologies, Centurion,” he said, in Trade Cant. “It’s been a rough few days. The men are… rather ragged.”
“Apology accepted,” Scalas said. “I trust we can expect no further such incidents?”
“Of course,” the man replied. “I will make sure of it. The loss of Magistrate Hoskins has been a shock, but we are getting things back together, and I assure you that there will be no more such breaches in discipline. I am Captain Agalan Voss, acting commander of the Iabreton II Militia. I would like to formally thank you.” He turned slightly toward the plain outside. “I wish that we could offer you something more tangible in the way of gratitude, but we have a great deal of rebuilding to do before we could even begin to repay you.”
“Repayment is neither necessary nor desired, Captain,” Scalas said. “As I said, we are the Caractacan Brotherhood. We only followed the Code. The only thing we ask is a place to bury our fallen Brothers.”
Voss nodded. “You will have it. And when we are able, I promise that there will be a monument erected there. A monument that will last a thousand years.”
“If you so desire,” Scalas said. As he began to walk down the twisted wreckage of the lander’s ramp, he glanced upward and saw the drive flare of the Dauntless making its orbital insertion burn. The last of the yeheri ships had either fled or been destroyed. “We shall conduct the burials and be on our way.”
3
The Brotherhood’s Avar Sector Keep was built into a mountain on the fourth moon of Kaletonan, a super-Jovian gas giant and the third planet in the Tokanan system, twelve parsecs from Iabreton. Unlike Iabreton II, Kaletonan IV had a breathable atmosphere and its own ecosystem.
As the Dauntless descended toward the massive landing pads that had been cleared out of the red-orange vegetation on a pillar of blue-white fire, her massive landing struts were already stretching out to her flanks. In the distance, a herd of the local quadrupeds dashed away through the waving, chest-high grasses, fleeing the thunder of the descending starship, even as that thunder dwindled away to a dull rumble and finally faded away altogether as the Dauntless came to rest on her jacks. Steam billowed from the landing pad as the cooling systems desperately tried to dissipate the drive plume’s heat. For a brief time, the area around the starship’s base was uninhabitable by anything not heavily shielded.
Scalas stood with Mor and the rest of his squad sergeants in the antechamber above the descent pod. Grounded at the Sector Keep, they were no longer in armor; instead they wore their white tunics and black trousers, the badge of the Brotherhood pinned at each man’s left shoulder, a sidearm in an impeccably shined leather holster at each man’s hip. These holsters might appear decorative at first glance, but closer inspection would reveal the telltale signs of wear that comes from hard use.
Even without his armor and helmet, Scalas cut an impressive figure. Not a millimeter below two meters tall, he had an angular face, burned dark brown by many suns, and a short, neatly pointed beard ever so slightly darker than the close-cropped shock of reddish hair on his head. His eyes, half-hidden behind a semi-permanent squint and a mass of fine crow’s-feet, were black—a black that could quickly turn to icy-cold obsidian when he was angered.
Cobb stood next to him, slightly taller, significantly heavier, and considerably darker—except for his eyes, which were a pale blue so light that they made him look like a madman, and his hair, which was blond almost to the point of being white.
On the other side of Cobb stood Kahane, nearly as wide as he was tall, his skin nearly as pale as his tunic. He was rocking a little on the balls of his feet; “low” gravity—meaning gravity that was comfortable to most of his comrades—tended to make the young squad sergeant fidgety.
When the pad’s cooling system had brought the pad and the surrounding atmosphere down to survivable temperatures, the indicator above the hatch turned green, and the small leadership contingent of the Dauntless and Century XXXII entered the car that would take them down to the surface. The outer hatch then irised open, and the car slid onto its descent rail, humming slightly as it moved along, its armored transparencies revealing the full glory of the moon’s surface in the early morning.
The sun, a yellow dwarf edging toward orange, was rising over the shoulder of the mountain where the Avar Sector Keep was ensconced. Its rays gleamed off three more towering, tapered starships sitting on their tails on more distant pads, as well as off the shining pinnacle of the Keep itself. Mingled with the light of the sun was the reddish-purple reflection of Kaletonan, looming over the opposite horizon, filling nearly a third of the sky.
Two hoversleds approached rapidly from the direction of the Keep, the howl of their fans audible even through the descent car’s armor. These weren’t heavy cavalry sleds; they were sleeker, lighter, civilian models: Juaran Ibexes shipped from Otaiho, nearly two parsecs away. They were expensive, but the Brotherhood had no civilian vehicle manufacturing of its own. The Caractacan Brotherhood had only one business.
That business was war.
The car came to a slow, smooth stop at the bottom of the rail, the starship’s massive drive bells looming and smoking overhead. The car was designed to descend as fast as a dropship if needed—but here at the Keep, that was unnecessary. Scalas led the way out, with Mor following immediately behind. Mor was actually the senior officer by nearly a year, but he was a starship captain; here on the ground, the centurion took precedence.
The two hoversleds stopped at the edge of the pad, and their doors opened. Two young men in gray novice tunics stepped out. Both had to be nearing the end of their five-year novitiate; only senior novices were assigned honor guard duties. The rest were deep in study and training, learning the arts of war and the philosophy of the Code as finely as possible before they would be allowed to don the tunic and armor of a full-fledged Caractacan Brother.
The first novice saluted stiffly, raising his immaculate BR-18 to present-arms. “Welcome back, Centurion,” he said, his voice slightly raspy. The man’s scars suggested that he had seen heavy action in whatever planetary defense force he had come from before joining the Brotherhood. Few men joined the Brotherhood without experience. “Legate Kranjick is awaiting your report in the Keep.”
Scalas returned the novice’s salute gravely, lifting his sidearm in front of his face. He well remembered his own novitiate, and not only did he refuse to condescend to the less-experienced soldiers, he strictly forbade his men from doing so either. Volscius often skated the ragged edge of disobeying that mandate, but Volscius was a problem for other reasons.
When the Brotherhood officers had climbed aboard, the two sleds rose fractionally off the pavement, spun about on roaring air cushions, and sped toward the distant Keep. The pads were situated far from the habitation sections of the Keep and its environs for good reason. The dissipating cloud of steam and faintly radioactive gasses floating downwind were all the illustration that was needed. Scalas sat in his seat, his arms folded, watching the plains speed by out his window. Much of this part of the moon was grassland, fading to forest on the flanks of the inert volcano where the Keep stood, high above the treeline. It could have been built down on the surface, but the forest was far too dense and the vegetation too iron-hard to clear efficiently without using a starship’s drive to do it, and that had been considered not worth the effort.
Nevertheless, a path had been cleared for the road, although even that needed nearly constant upkeep. The tangled mass of the red-and-orange forest didn’t grow quickly, but it constantly buckled and strained the ground beneath it. Some said that the entire forest shared a single root system—that it was basically a single tree draped around the flanks of the mountain. Scalas didn’t know
. Someday he might have the time to indulge his curiosity and investigate the matter. There were surely scholars living in the Keep who had studied the forest enough to know.
He listened with mostly detached attention to the low conversation behind him in the hoversled’s main passenger compartment. Kahane and Solanus were debating some new sport that was coming from Wesalia. Scalas wasn’t familiar with it, but it seemed to involve a combination of racing, sparring, and goal-scoring.
“Dershod’s certainly got the endurance,” Kahane was saying, “but he’s never going to be able to go as long as Ikkaa.”
“Of course he won’t,” Solanus replied, sounding exasperated. Solanus was the youngest squad sergeant in the century, and as such was usually reluctant to speak his mind. Sports, however, seemed to be the one subject on which he felt it was safe to venture an unqualified opinion. That was probably why Kahane had started in on it. “A human will never be able to match a tehud for staying power. It’s a matter of two legs versus four. No one’s disputing that. But Dershod’s more agile. He can get around obstacles faster.”
“Maybe.” Kahane didn’t sound convinced. “What do you think, Kunn?”
Kunn, the third squad sergeant in the sled, said nothing.
Scalas glanced in the rearview mirror on his side and saw Kunn sitting behind him, his narrow face the slight gray that was characteristic of Nostrics, sitting stiffly in his seat, his curiously blank, deep-blue eyes fixed on nothing. Kunn was an excellent soldier—he would never have reached the rank of squad sergeant otherwise—but there had always been something vaguely off about him. Scalas couldn’t help but feel his hackles rise a bit every time he looked in the man’s eyes, and he often found himself wondering just what was going on behind that blank, enigmatic stare. True, Kunn had never acted inappropriately for his rank or his position, but he did make his comrades wonder. No man could really be that… robotic.