“The hell is that?” Siran’s words came in clear over my armor’s internal comm.
A terrible sense of foreboding blossomed within me. Some kind of alarm? I half-expected to see the light of sirens flashing in the gray stones above us, but there was nothing.
“On our left!”
“I see them!”
“The right, too!”
I turned my head, trying to see just what it was the others were seeing through the smoke and the ranks of men to either side.
Then I saw them, and swore.
They must have come from bolt-holes hidden in the arms of the mountain. Hundreds of them. They had no arms, nor shields—but they needed neither. The SOMs feared neither death nor pain, and came forward with the focused scramble of a swarm of ants trying to bridge a puddle with their own bodies.
They were men once. Before the Extras carved out their brains and filled their heads with kit, before they meddled in the subtle language of their genes to harden them against the poisonous air. They had no will any longer. They never would again. They were only tools, puppet soldiers controlled by some intelligence—human or artificial I dared not guess—in the fortress ahead of us.
“Hoplites!” Siran exclaimed, singling out our heavy, shielded infantry. “Shield walls!”
All about us, the army shifted, hoplites shifting from the point position in their little triases towards the outside of our line.
“Fire!”
The hoplites opened fire, phase disruptor bolts crackling in the warm air. Siran seized my arm, “We need to get you to the Horse, Had.”
She wanted to escort me to safety, to get me out of danger and the enemy charge.
She wanted me to abandon my men.
“No!” I shook her off, then toggled my comm once more. “Commander!”
Lorian Aristedes replied at once, “Yes, my lord?”
“Order Sphinx Flight back around! Strafe the enemy line!”
The ship’s tactical officer acknowledged and relayed my orders.
The SOMs were still coming, loping across the flat ground to either side. How many armies had died thus? Smashed between the horns of the enemy? Shots rained down from above, and turning I saw men standing on the platforms above the Horse’s thighs and the fell light of the colossi’s rear cannons gleaming. It wouldn’t be enough, and it was only then I realized the source of that awful keening sound.
The SOMs were screaming, howling like a band of blue-faced Picts out of the deepest history.
Then I realized Siran’s mistake. Ordering the hoplites forward was standard procedure: they had the expensive shielding and the disruptor rifles, the heavy firepower. They were meant to shield the more numerous peltasts, who—without shields and with lighter armor—were cheaper to outfit and less costly to replace. But the peltasts carried bladed energy lances.
They had spears.
We had no time.
“Peltasts!” I called, transmitting my words to everyone in the line. “Forward! Forward!” There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. I suppose I cannot blame them, the order was unorthodox in our age. But they got the message when I added the crucial word: “Bayonets!”
A double line of light infantry stepped forward, allowing the hoplites to turn and fall back towards the center of the column. They moved with gearwork precision, the result of weeks of careful drilling and a course of RNA learning drugs. From above, it must have been beautiful, and for a moment I envied Lorian Aristedes and Captain Corvo their bird’s eye view. The peltasts lowered their spears, beam weapons firing into the galloping horde. I saw SOMs fall smoking from laser burns, only to be trampled over by the ranks behind. The puppets did not care for the loss of their brethren, did not care that they were charging without so much as a knife at two triple lines of armed Sollan legionnaires.
My men all did their best, but stopping the onslaught was like trying to block the tide. The enemy crashed against us from either side, throwing themselves against our spears like fanatics, only from their brothers to vault over them and hurl themselves at us. From the rear, the hoplites fired over the heads of the lines before them until the air was thick with the static aftershock of disruptor fire.
Where was the air support?
One of the puppet-men leaped fully over our line and landed in the narrow gap left between. For a moment it just stood there, processing, as if not quite sure what to do. It turned its head to look at me, and I think it understood who I was. The man it had been was shorter than I, bald as an egg and pale, skin burned and peeling in the chemical air. How it breathed at all I couldn’t say, though the gleaming black implants in its chest and throat perhaps had something to do with it.
It lurched towards me, and before Siran or any of the hoplites could intervene, I pushed past them and lunged, sword out-thrust. The highmatter blade passed through the SOM’s flesh as easily as through water, and it fell with no legs to support it. For a single, awful moment, the upper half of the once-human form dragged itself forwards, clawing towards me until one of my guards shot it with a disruptor.
A metallic screaming filled the air, and glancing up a moment I saw the blade-like profile of five lighters burning across the sky. Sphinx Flight. Plasma fire picked its way in twin rows along the enemy line, parallel to our own. One of the SOMs fell smoking at my feet, and I slashed it in half for good measure. The earth groaned once more as the Horse advanced, closer and still closer to the wall and gate of the enemy fortress just as Sphinx Flight wheeled round for another pass.
I seized Siran by the arm. “Order everyone towards the Horse! We need to deepen the lines!”
She nodded and went about her orders. Turning, I proceeded up the no-man’s land between our lines, cutting down those enemies who’d made it through. “Commander!” I almost yelled into the line. “Find Petros and tell him to get his men down here. It’s time they were the ones surrounded!”
If young Aristedes replied I did not hear it. One of the SOMs threw itself at me and I had to duck to escape it, keeping my sword up so the creature cut itself in two for its trouble. Blood and something the color of milk spilled out and beaded on my cape. Disgusted, I shook the garment out and continued my advance. Behind me, the line was falling back, collapsing into a kind of mushroom shape as it thickened and grew shorter, making it far harder for the SOMs to clamber over.
The Sphinxes wheeled about once more. Plasma fire split the air and tore through the enemy. I’d nearly made it to the rear legs of the Horse. Ahead men were climbing the legs of the colossus to reach the platforms where their brothers rained fire down from above. The sound of the lighter craft overhead screamed across the sky, and I saw their wing-sails flatten to yaw them round for another pass.
Our lines were holding, thickened as we were into a tight box about the rear legs of the Horse. Where was Siran? I could hear her voice on the comm, ordering the ranks of our line to rotate, fresher troops in the rear replacing the spent men in front. Looking past those leading men, I saw a sea of scabrous faces, hollow eyes and grasping fingers spreading back as far as the southern ridge of the mountains. And behind them?
I thrust my sword into the air and let out a cry.
Petros and the Fifth Chiliad had come. Another thousand of our troops crashed into the hollow men from behind, splitting the attention of the fell intelligence that governed them.
“Concentrate air fire on the northern side!” I ordered, turning Sphinx flight away from the narrowing slice of the enemy between us and Petros’s relief force.
Fire reigned.
Smoke followed.
Not even the airless vacuum of space is so quiet as the battlefield when the fighting is done. Pillars of oily smoke held up the sky, and though my men busied themselves unloading the plasma bore from the Horse’s underbelly and the winds scoured in off the salt falts of the Soto planitia, I heard nothing. I stood watching from the shadow of the massive gate, my guards around me and my friends: Siran and Pallino, who had come with me out
of Emesh.
Thus we waited.
The plasma bore had the look of some swollen jet engine mounted on four legs. It took a man to pilot it—no daimon intelligences here—and the tech moved forward step by lurching step, extending the cigar-shaped body of the bore forward like a battering ram against the gates of ancient Jerusalem.
As the ground crew busied themselves with their preparations, I cast my eye skywards, past the circling shapes of Sphinx Flight and the sulfurous clouds. Somewhere above our ship waited, locked in geostationary orbit above us. The SOMs had been a nasty welcoming party, but everything had gone according to plan in the end. One of the once-human creatures lay not far off, dead eyes staring at the umber sky.
“Do you ever wonder who they were?” I asked aloud, indicating the corpse. There were burn lines on his flesh where the disruptor fire had fried the implants that enslaved him. I hoped that—for a fleeting moment, in the instant before he died—the fellow had remembered who he was, and that he was a man. I wondered what his name had been, and if he’d remembered it before the end.
“Some poor sod, most like,” Pallino answered in his gruff way. “Merchanter or some such as got skyjacked by this lot.”
Cape snapping about myself, I advanced and turned the fellow fully on his back with my toe. The man was bald as the first one I had cut down and pale almost as the Cielcin who drink the blood of worlds. My heart fell, and I swallowed, kneeling to get a better look at the tattoo inked on the side of the man’s neck. It showed a fist clenched around two crossed lightning bolts above the Mandari numerals 378.
A legionary tattoo.
“I think I know what happened to our lost legion.”
Silence greeted this pronouncement, deeper and darker than the quiet that had come before. I stood, turning my black-masked face toward the towering expanse of grim metal looming from the mountainside before us, and at the vast war engine and our army arrayed beneath it.
The silence broke with a great rushing of wind as the plasma bore roared to life, sucking at the air around us. The mouth of the plasma bore was pressed right against the bulwark, passing clean through the high-velocity curtain of the energy shield that guarded the gate.
The metal began to glow and run like water.
It was time.
THE CAPTAIN
All was dark within but for the flashing of sirens warning the defenders that their fortress was breached. I followed the first wave of my men over the threshold, the heat of still-cooling metal beating on my suit despite the coolant sprays the plasma bore released when its work was done. There I stood a moment, surveying the hangar before me, the parked shuttles and stacked crates of provisions and equipment.
“Search the shuttles and drain the fuel tanks!” Pallino called out, signaling a group of his men to advance. They did, moving off in groups of three, rifles and lances raised.
“Mapping drones have gone ahead, my lord,” said Petros. He saluted as I drew nearer, his fist pressed to his chest. He extended his arm as I acknowledged the salute. “It’s a fucking maze.”
A wire-frame map of the fortress was even then sketching itself in the bottom left of my vision. The levels that rose stacked above the hangar bay seemed straightforward enough, but the warren of tunnels and caverns carved deep into the living rock at the base of the mountain were anything but.
“I don’t want anyone wandering off,” I said to Petros and Pallino. “Groups of two and three decades should stick together. We should assume there are more SOMs where those others came from.” If the entirety of the 378th had been taken and converted by the Extras, it was very possible that thousands more lay in wait for us, but I couldn’t help thinking that if such were the case, these pirates would surely have deployed them before we breached their fortress. Perhaps some of our soldiers we still alive. Perhaps most of them were.
My officers turned to go about their duties, and I was left with Siran and a vague sense of deja vu. The caverns—vaguely damp and lichen-spotted—reminded me of the city on Vorgossos. I shut my eyes, as if by doing so I might retreat to some other place: to the cloud forests on Nagramma where Jinan and I had hiked to the old Cid Arthurian temple; or the foggy coast at Calagah. Instead, I saw swollen hands rising from black water and the countless blue eyes of the Undying King of Vorgossos, and despite the warm wind from the Araenian desert outside, I shivered.
“Get a seal on that door!” I said, gesturing at the smooth hole the plasma bore had put in the main gate. “Static field will do! I don’t want anything impeding our exit should it come to that.”
I could still feel those bloated fingers on me, and shook them off with the memory of their touch. This was not Vorgossos. This was Arae. On Vorgossos I had been alone, but for Valka. Here I had an army at my back, my Red Company.
“Lord Marlowe,” came the voice of some centurion I did not recognize, one of Petros’s men, “we’ve captured their captain. We’re bringing him to you.”
Unable to suppress a crooked smile, I said, “No need, centurion. We’ll come to you.”
Sunlight fell through windows narrow as coin slots high on the high chamber’s walls. The turret was in the very highest part of the mountain fortress, and through the holograph plates that imitated larger windows I could see the Horse; the arms of the mountain spread out below; and the infinite, sterile whiteness of the Soto Planitia beyond.
The man who sat in the chair between four of my soldiers wore an old gray and white uniform. His face was as gray, and his hair with it. He did not look like an Extrasolarian. He looked...ordinary, the very model of the old soldier. Indeed, he reminded me of no one so much as Pallino: aged and leathered, with a sailor’s pallor and sharp eyes—though unlike Pallino this man still had both his eyes. The fellow had the stamp of the legions about him. A former officer, most like. Such men often turned mercenary, if they did not turn gladiator. I knew his type.
“What’s your name, soldier?” I asked in my best aristocratic tones. There was enough of the Imperial iron left in the man to straighten his spine at the sound of it.
“Samuel Faber, sir. Captain of the Dardanines.” From his accent I suspected the man was at least of the patrician class—though certainly he was not palatine.
“The Dardanines?” I echoed, stopping five paces before the chair. Turning to survey the room, I caught sight of the dozen or so other officers who had surrendered with Captain Faber.
Faber cleared his throat. “Free company.”
“Mercenaries?” I said, and arched my eyebrows behind my mask. “Foederati?” But it did not matter, not then. I pushed on to more pressing matters. “Where is the Three Seventy-Eighth?” I saw a muscle in Captain Faber’s jaw clench, but his gray eyes stayed fixed on my face. He did answer. “Legion Intelligence tracked a convoy carrying the 378th Centaurine Legion to within a dozen light-years of this system, captain. I need to know what you did with them.” I did not say What you did to them.
Faber was silent for a moment, and when he did speak it was with the air of one resigned. “I know who you are.” Seeing as he had started talking, I did not interrupt, only tried not to glance towards Pallino where he stood near at hand. “Is it...true you can’t be killed?”
I did look towards Pallino then. The old veteran alone of those in the room knew something of the answer to that question. Voice flattened by the suit speakers, I answered, “Not today, captain. Not by you.” The man seemed to chew on that a moment—or maybe it was only his tongue. He looked down at his scuffed boots and the gunmetal floor, arms crossed. “Tell me: How does a man go from a posting with the Legions to kidnapping one for the Extras? Was the money that good?”
I expected the man to rage, expected that there must be enough of the Legion officer he had been left in him—and enough honor—to insult him. I wanted him to stand, to take a swing me, to give me an excuse to put him right back in his seat. The man had sold human beings—his fellow Sollans, his fellow soldiers—to the barbarians who dwell between the stars.
I did not expect him to shake his head and press his lips together, as if he were afraid to speak. Taking a step forward, I asked again, “Where is the legion, Captain Faber?”
Nothing.
Gesturing to Siran, I stepped aside, saying, “I had hoped it would not come to this.” I had seen video of the mercenary captain relayed to my suit before we’d boarded the lift to come upstairs, and I’d guessed at his legionary past. Four men entered the command chamber a moment later, carrying a fifth between them. They stopped just before Faber’s seat and dropped the body there, face down.
The SOM did not move.
For a moment, I said nothing, only hooked my thumbs through my belt and waited for the shoe to drop. Faber must have felt it coming. Kneeling, I turned the dead man’s head with one hand, presenting the fist and crossed lightning bolts of the 378th Centaurine. Then nothing needed saying, and Faber found he could no longer look at the dead man or myself. He looked rather at the dozen of his own lieutenants who knelt on the ground to one side, manacled with guns aimed at their backs.
“We’re both soldiers, you and I,” Faber said into the vacuum growing between us, and for once I did not argue the label. He was nodding steadily, hands clasped in his lap. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Sir Hadrian, for the Empire and after. But that’s the job.”
“These were your brothers, captain,” I said, more regretful than angry. The anger stayed far below the surface, churning like a river of eels.
“It was the job,” he said again. “That’s what they paid us for. Tag a convoy while the men were still in fugue, bring them here. It’s not even hard if you know where the ships are going to be—but they did. They must have a mole in Legion command.”
I took a step that put me between Faber and the corpse on the floor. “Who is they? Who are you working for?” Faber only shook his head, still not making eye contact. I could see the whites there, and the way his hands shook. Was he afraid? Not of me, surely?
Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within Page 30