Dornen nodded. The thought had occurred to him already, of course: if the future turned out the way Freya said it would, in four hundred years Yavesk would be overrun with Cho-ta’an possessed with the singular mission of eradicating humanity. The people who had spent twenty years aboard Varinga to get here had no future on Yavesk. Unless the future could be changed.
“You’re talking about genocide,” Dornen said.
“I’m talking about a preemptive strike against an aberrant branch of humanity that threatens to wipe out the rest of us.”
“And if we fail?”
“Fail? How? You’ve seen those mech suits in action. We send Macron’s men into Kavded with those things, they could destroy the entire city and be home for lunch. Their security force is a few hundred Cho-ta’an armed with iron-tipped spears. We don’t have to kill all of them. Just wreck their city, burn their crops, and take whatever’s in those labs. Then we get everybody aboard Varinga and start over somewhere else. Maybe come back in a few weeks and finish the job if they’re not all dead from malnutrition or exposure.”
“Good God, Bartol. You’ve put some thought into this.”
“I assumed it would come to this sooner or later. It was always going to be us or them.”
“You think we can get Macron and his men to go along with it?” Aboard Varinga, the marines were subject to Dornen’s command, but now that they were on a planet and the Izarians were apparently no longer a threat, the chain of command had gotten a little fuzzy.
“Are you kidding? They were itching for this even before Livius went missing. You give them the green light, they’ll take care of the rest.”
Dornen sighed. There was a feeling of inevitability to all this, and some small part of him wanted to fight it, but in the end he knew he had no choice.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll give the order.”
*****
Varinga carried no vehicles capable of transporting men in mech suits, so Sergeant Macron and his men went overground in the suits. Across the rough ground, the suits were nearly as fast as their vehicles anyway.
The Cho-ta’an had sentries posted south of the city, presumably to warn of such an incursion, but it made no difference. By the time word reached the rest of the city’s security force, just after sunrise, the marines were nearly to the nucleus of the city. The marines ignored the Cho-ta’an hurling spears and rocks at them and set about destroying every building in the vicinity of the greenhouses. Some of the suits’ missile launchers had been swapped out with flame throwers; these were used for the few buildings that were made of organic materials. Many Cho-ta’an were caught in the crossfire, and many more likely died inside the buildings that the marines torched or exploded, but the intent was only to destroy the Cho-ta’an’s warehouses and what little industrial operations they had—weaving houses, canneries and the like.
Most of the Cho-ta’an they met ran screaming. The security force members and a few civilians held their ground, attacking with spears, rocks, and the occasional primitive incendiary device. At last the marines became annoyed and began to mow the defenders down with their machineguns.
When every structure within a hundred yards of the laboratory complex had been destroyed and cleared of Cho-ta’an, Macron ordered half the men to stand guard while he and the rest of the men spread out across the city toward the farms that lay to the north and east. Fields were torched and silos and barns were razed or blown to pieces. Farmers and laborers who got in the way were gunned down. By midday, the city’s entire food supply had been destroyed. The marines converged on the city center again, destroying everything and everyone in their path.
When he was certain the city was clear, Sergeant Macron and three of his men climbed out of their suits and began a thorough search of the greenhouses and laboratories. The plan was to make sure the buildings were clear of Cho-ta’an and any other hazards and then secure a path through the city so that Dr. Bartol could bring a team in to analyze anything inside. They had cleared the greenhouses and two of the buildings when they encountered two Cho-ta’an guards armed with iron swords guarding a heavily reinforced door well inside the building at the center of the complex. The marines dispatched them quickly with their side arms and then set a charge to blow the door off its hinges.
After the blast, the men emerged from cover and pulled the door aside, letting it crash to the floor. Through the smoke, they saw something moving inside. A soft moaning permeated the air. It did not sound like a Cho-ta’an. They entered the room.
“My God,” said Corporal Ireneus, as the smoke dissipated.
“Medic!” Sergeant Macron ordered. “Thales, get in here!”
Lying on a table in the center of the room, his wrists and ankles secured, was the missing boy, Livius.
Chapter Twenty-eight
L ivius died three days after being returned to Varinga. Dr. Bartol made an effort to keep him isolated from the other settlers, but it was too late: several of the marines had already been exposed. Even if the marines had been more careful, though, it wouldn’t have mattered. Several other members of the community had fallen ill the evening before the attack. Livius’s mother, Drea, was one of the first. The stuffed animal that she had recovered from the ruins was identified as the source. Dornen reflected ruefully that his mistake hadn’t been trying to eradicate the Cho-ta’an: it was not doing it sooner. By the time the marines launched their attack on Kavded, the Cho-ta’an had already struck a death blow against the humans.
The virus spread through the settlement like fire through the Cho-ta’an fields. Those who had become infected early got sicker. Dr. Bartol could do nothing for the sick but give them drugs to ease their suffering. Then he got sick and could no longer even do that. Many died. Sergeant Macron was one of the first, and several of his men died not much later. Soon, only Dornen, four marines, and about a quarter of the miners were unaffected by the virus. They shut themselves inside Varinga and waited for the end.
Dornen was so busy tending to the others that by the time it occurred to him to move Varinga, it was nearly too late. His temperature began to spike and he felt light-headed. Executing the launch sequence normally took a good three hours, and that was with a full crew. Doing it by himself, in an impaired condition, would take much longer. And the ship’s sensors were already warning him they were under attack.
The attack didn’t amount to much—Cho-ta’an with sticks, spears and stones—but eventually they would break through the hull, and when they did, they would have access to Varinga’s supplies, food production machines and technology. He couldn’t let that happen.
The surest way to destroy Varinga and everything aboard would be to rig the propulsion system to explode. Dornen knew it was possible, but it had been many years since he’d had to use the control software. There was no “self-destruct” option, and in fact the system had so many failsafes and safety precautions built into it that getting the reactor to overload required a great deal of jury-rigging components, rewiring, and manual editing of configuration files. His fever continued to worsen, making it difficult to think clearly, and all the while the Cho-ta’an banged and pried at the hull. Ultimately he gave up and went back to plan A. He didn’t need the ship to land; he just needed to get it high enough that when it crashed, there wouldn’t be anything left worth scavenging for.
Unfortunately, lifting a ship the size of Varinga off the ground was not a simple matter either. Skipping most of the pre-launch checklist, Dornen got the thrusters to fire, lifting Varinga into the air. The ship lurched and shuddered, and Dornen realized too late that the Cho-ta’an had somehow managed to anchor the ship to the ground. Knowing their plant-fiber ropes couldn’t possibly have the strength to resist Varinga’s thrust, he gave the engines more power. Varinga lifted a little higher, but then rolled dramatically to the right, throwing Dornen against the wall. What the hell?
Lying on the floor, he stared at the monitors showing views of the ship and its surroundings, his fever
-addled brain trying to make sense of what he was seeing. At last he figured it out: they weren’t using ropes at all; they were using the heavy-duty power cables the crew had used to wire the settlement from Varinga. Each of those cables had a tensile strength in excess of five hundred tons, and the Cho-ta’an had thrown several of them over Varinga and tied the ends to boulders weighing at least that much.
Dornen climbed back into the pilot’s chair. He had no choice but to push the thrusters to maximum and hope for the best. Maybe they would overheat and explode—though he didn’t have much hope for this. As the cabin shuddered around him, Varinga leveled out, dragging the boulders behind it. All he needed to do was get a mile above the ground. A fall from that height would smash every piece of equipment aboard Varinga beyond recognition.
Groaning and pitching, the ship slowly rose to a hundred yards, and then two hundred. It was nearing three hundred when a warning began to flash that the engines were overheating. Now near-delirious, Dornen managed to override the warning. The ship rose to four hundred yards—over a quarter mile. Then another warning flashed, indicating an impending reactor breach. Dornen wanted to weep. With considerable difficulty, he mustered the mental focus needed to override this warning as well. Varinga rose a few more yards before several more warnings appeared. The roar of the thrusters was suddenly muted. Varinga began to lose altitude.
There was no time to override all the warnings in an attempt to force Varinga to stay airborne or explode. Dornen shut down the thrusters and Varinga fell like a rock.
*****
“The sky ship is coming down!” Veyka-Chenn cried. “Stay back!”
He, Chief Churrik, and the few hundred other Cho-ta’an who had come to execute one final blow against the invaders fled as Varinga began to drop. A moment later, the plumes of flame holding the ship aloft were snuffed out, and the huge craft plummeted to the ground. It was now over the ruins of the city the humans called Tiberias, and it disappeared behind a row of taller buildings. The ground shook, and a rumble like thunder reached their ears. A cloud of dust billowed into the air.
“To the sky ship!” Churrik shouted. “It is our only hope!” He ran toward it, pulling his tunic over his mouth and nose to filter out some of the dust. Veyka-Chenn and the others followed him. They moved through the streets, slowing to a walk as the dust cloud rolled over them, making it nearly impossible to see. Dust penetrated their makeshift dust filters, and many fell to the ground, overcome by gagging and coughing. Veyka-Chenn pressed on.
A blast knocked him to the ground, and for a moment he lay dazed, coughing, disoriented. Then the dust cleared a bit, and he saw something on fire ahead. He had lost track of Churrik, but several others, who had also been knocked down, were getting to their feet. “Do not stop!” he ordered. “Get to the ship. Recover any food you can find before it all burns!”
He reached a wall of metal that radiated heat. Still holding his sleeve over half his face, he turned right and followed the wall until he came to a pile of rubble that appeared to be recently created. He climbed until he reached the top. The dust had now settled enough that he could see that two sections of the ship’s hull had separated where it had struck the building. He piled rocks against the hull until he could reach the opening, and then squeezed inside.
Veyka-Chenn found himself standing on the wall of a large room filled with machines whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. They were far too big and heavy to be removed in any case. Smoke was pouring into the room from somewhere above; if he was going to recover anything of value, he was going to have to be quick about it. He made his way to a door and managed to force it open. He stumbled into another room, lit only by the light from the crack behind him. The smoke was even thicker here. He moved across the wall, his eyes burning, coughing into his sleeve. Hopefully the others were having more luck than he was. It didn’t look like he was even in the vicinity of the food storage areas. His foot struck something, sending it skittering across the room. He knelt down and crawled until he felt it. It was roughly the size and shape of a large book, but it was made of one of the strange synthetic materials that the humans favored over wood or bone. He grabbed it, tucked it under his arm, and made his way back outside.
He half-climbed, half-fell back down the rubble pile, and then crawled away from the ship, hacking and coughing all the way. Finally the air was clear enough of dust and smoke that he could catch his breath. There was an explosion from a more distant part of the ship, and moments later debris clattered to the ground around him. He got to his feet and staggered away.
At last he came upon a group of Cho-ta’an who, from their coughing and soiled clothing, appeared to have just come from the ship as well. They stood around a pile—as high as a Cho-ta’an—of the humans’ food packets. It was a start. Perhaps they would survive until the next harvest. Embarrassed by his own feeble efforts, Veyka-Chenn slunk away, waiting until he was around a corner of a ruined building before examining the artifact he’d recovered.
He sat down and set it on the ground before him. Having seen a human use such a device once before, he pressed a button on the corner of it. An image of a machine appeared before him, floating in space above the device. Below it was a line of text in the humans’ script, which he could not read. He had been trying for the past several weeks to learn the human language, but without much luck.
He dragged his finger along the text, from left to right, as he’d seen the human do. The device spoke some human gibberish. He tried it again, and the words repeated. After doing this several more times, he took a stab at mimicking the voice.
“Hai pur spays draiv,” he said. “Selp dest ruck see kwins reh kurd not fount.”
He made the voice repeat the phrase several more times and then tried it again.
“Hai-per spays draiv. Selff destruck seekwins rehkurd not fount.”
He made it repeat several more times, then gave it another try.
“Haiper spays draiv. Self destruckt seekwins. Rehkurd not fount.” Veyka-Chenn smiled, feeling like he was making progress. Noticing another small line of text below the one he had been practicing, he dragged his finger along this one.
“Seleckt ahnahther topick,” he said. “Seleckt ahnather topick.” He reached out again, meaning to get the thing to repeat the phrase, but he jabbed too quickly, and the view changed. Now he saw only many horizontal rows of text. At the top was another phrase he couldn’t read. He dragged his finger along this and then repeated the phrase.
“Haiper spays draiv. Ahvayluhbuhl topicks.”
He sighed heavily. This was going to take a while. But he would be patient, and he would learn. And he would remember what the humans had done to his people.
Chapter Twenty-nine
A ndrea Luhman’s Cirrus SR22 was ten thousand feet above the Atlantic, just southeast of Cape May, when a man’s voice she didn’t recognize came over her headset. It wasn’t unusual to receive updated flight instructions as one neared New York City, but almost immediately Andi knew something was wrong. The man knew her call sign but didn’t identify himself as air traffic control. The voice itself was wrong, too: the man’s tone was too natural, too conversational. It lacked the bland singsong cadence of an air traffic controller. And what sort of accent was that? Norwegian?
“Cirrus N91193, this is Vordr. Do you copy?”
“This is Cirrus N91193. I read you, Vordr. Who is this?”
“We’re a rescue ship five miles north of your current position.”
“Understood. Do you require assistance, Vordr?”
“No. We are here to rescue you, Andi.”
Andi’s gut tightened. “I do not require rescue, Vordr.” There was something very wrong about this. How did the man know her call sign? How did he know her name? How did he know her flight path? The only people who should have that information were air traffic control. She had only filed her flight plan five hours earlier in Fort Lauderdale; the decision to attend the conference in Boston had been last-minute
.
The plane’s engine began to sputter.
“Your engine is failing, Cirrus N91193.”
It’s a coincidence, Andi thought. Probably just a plugged air intake or fuel line. Not likely to be a mixture problem, as she’d been at this altitude for two hours. Strange, though, as she was meticulous about maintenance. She’d just checked over the whole fuel system yesterday. In any case, it would most likely clear itself out shortly.
But the sputtering continued, and then the engine died. For a moment, the only sound was the whistle of the wind as the little plane rapidly lost altitude. She tried to restart it, but it wouldn’t respond.
“Your engine is dead, Cirrus N91193.”
“How the fuck do you know that?” Andi demanded. “Who are you?”
“There is a parachute and a flare gun behind your seat, Andi,” said the voice. “I suggest you put on the parachute quickly and exit the plane.”
“Mayday, mayday,” Andi said, banking the plane to the left. “This is Cirrus N91193 en route from Fort Lauderdale to Boston. Engine is dead. Currently at nine thousand feet over water. Coordinates 37.9197 degrees North, 74.1347 degrees West. Does anyone read me?” She could just make out the coast in the distance. If she couldn’t get the engine started, her best bet was to put down in the water, as close to shore as possible.
“We’re jamming radio communications in this area, Andi,” said the voice. “No one can hear you. You need to put on the parachute.”
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 22