Fire Storm

by Chris Ward

  A shrill whistle broke the night’s stillness. Caladan waved his crew to the ground, and the Luminosi effectively disappeared as their bodies became translucent. Lying in a sparse patch of grass, he felt exposed and alone, despite the rustle of breathing coming from all around.

  He had trained them as best he could, allowing target practice in the forest, but any who had glowed red, displaying their anger, he had moved to a different team. You needed to be cool during a raid; anger got you and your teammates killed.

  Lights came on inside the domes. Caladan smiled. The dried, condensed acid the first group had emptied into the river was entering the domes, disrupting the biosphere set up to keep the guards happy.

  Twenty blasters. Two assault cannons—one of which had so little charge it would be worth a couple of shots at best—and thirty proton grenades.

  It was a miniscule arsenal against a thousand armed slavers, but he had another weapon, one never to be underestimated.

  Surprise.

  As doors in the nearest domes opened, and disorientated guards ran outside, Caladan rose to his feet.

  ‘Let’s light them up,’ he shouted. ‘They have shown you no mercy. Show them none.’

  It had been a while since he had fired a blaster, but as he lined up the sight, pumped the trigger and saw the nearest Rue-Tik-Tan guard fall to his knees, his chest a bloody mess, Caladan felt a sudden sense of revitalisation.

  As his armed men rushed past him, heading for pre-planned offensive positions from where they could cut down the slaver guards as they emerged from the domes, Caladan pulled Solwig aside.

  ‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Raise them.’

  Solwig grinned. ‘I would be happy to die by your side, God who Points the Way.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’

  Solwig cupped his arms around his mouth and let out a shrill whistle, but over the sound of the blasters it was barely audible.

  Solwig turned to Caladan, a look of despair on his face. ‘They can’t hear me,’ he said. ‘The sounds of the battle are too loud. We must use the secondary signal. It is the only way.’

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  Solwig grinned. ‘And leading my men into battle isn’t? I have dreamed of this day.’ He patted Caladan on the shoulder. ‘I need high ground.’

  Caladan grimaced, looking around. They were far from the nearest high ground, leaving just one choice. ‘The domes,’ he said. ‘They’ll have maintenance ladders. Come on.’

  As they ran to catch up with the front line, Caladan cursed himself for such a simple oversight. Unable to signal to the rest of the Luminosi, they were a single band of twenty men, but brave as they were, against hundreds of armed and angry slavers their defiance wouldn’t last long.

  The Rue-Tik-Tan guards, flushed out of their domes, were beginning to establish defensive positions, hauling barrels, containers, and their own dead into heaps to create barricades. Far across the open ground between the domes and the spacecraft, other guards were leaving their posts and running to the support of their besieged counterparts, some accompanied by worker droids which likely doubled as defense robots. The tide of the battle, despite the Luminosi’s initial success, was turning.

  ‘That one,’ Caladan said, ducking behind an outcrop of rock which had become their foremost offensive position. ‘We can reach it if we had a diversion. Where’s the cannon?’

  The two Luminosi carrying the heavy photon cannon came forward.

  ‘That second dome,’ Caladan said. ‘Blast it.’

  The two men lifted the heavy device, one holding it steady while the other aimed. The blast knocked both off their feet, but with an eruption of glittering glass, the dome exploded under a direct hit into the entranceway.

  ‘Now,’ Caladan said, nudging Solwig. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  They broke from cover, running across open ground toward the nearest dome. The other Luminosi tried to cover them, but they were not trained soldiers, and ducked back as the enemy became bolder. Rue-Tik-Tan guns broke up the ground around them, Caladan scowling as a blast exploded right in front of his feet. He pulled Solwig down behind a rock just large enough to give cover, but they were barely halfway to the dome.

  As blaster fire filled the air, the crack of the guns mixing with the screams of dying men, Caladan turned to Solwig. ‘We can’t stay here. Perhaps if we can pin them down—’

  ‘No.’ Solwig laughed, shaking his head. ‘I will go on alone. It is my destiny.’

  ‘You have no chance.’

  ‘You’re wrong. I have every chance, because I have the God who Points the Way on my side. I have faith in you, and faith that I can pull this off.’

  Caladan nodded. The look in Solwig’s eyes told him the Luminosi could not be persuaded. ‘I’ll cover you,’ he said. ‘You have to make this count. If this fails, we all fail, and your people will never be free. Run hard, my friend.’

  ‘On three,’ Solwig said, lifting a hand, three fingers raised. ‘One, two, three—’

  Caladan jumped up as Solwig leapt from cover and made a break for the dome. Howling with rage, Caladan blasted the nearest Rue-Tik-Tan offensive positions. Three guards took hits and screamed as they died, and Caladan turned his gun on the next group, only realizing when attacking blaster fire struck the rocks at his feet that his blaster had begun clicking empty.

  ‘Oh why, not now—’

  Solwig was still out in open space. A blaster shot grazed Caladan’s shoulder, knocking him down. He rolled and pulled himself up, but he was exposed and unarmed—

  ‘Caladan!’

  A lithe figure broke from the entrenched Luminosi position, pulsing a deep red, running straight at the Rue-Tik-Tan defensive line, her battle cry just audible over the fire fight.

  ‘Lorena, no—’

  Their guns turned on her, and he watched her fall, rolling over in the dust, her pulsing light going off.

  ‘God who Points the Way!’

  He turned. Solwig had reached the dome and scaled the ladder to its highest point, the height of a two-storey building. The old Luminosi turned, and his body began to pulse in a series of rainbows, cycling through each colour system.

  A great cry came from the ridge to Caladan’s rear. He turned as lights came on, the Luminosi organised there pulsing a pure, blinding yellow, like fire, the lights expanding out into the giant shape of a man, a single arm held aloft.

  The God who Points the Way.

  A line of lights rose up into the sky, accompanied by the harsh cry of the harpies as their riders took to flight. Answering it came a deafening roar from far across the field of starships. Thousands of other lights winked on, the enslaved, the downtrodden, the Luminosi, as they rose up to fight their captors.

  As his group pushed forward, breaking through the faltering line of slaver guards as many fled the twin-headed birds bearing down on them, Caladan ran to where Lorena had fallen.

  He could tell immediately that the girl was dying.

  ‘Lorena, why did you do that?’ he whispered, cradling her in his arms. ‘You didn’t need to sacrifice yourself for me.’

  She gave him a weak smile. ‘My whole life … I dreamt that you would come, and you did. You gave my people a chance.’

  ‘Lorena! My dear Lorena!’

  Caladan found himself pushed aside as Solwig leaned down over his daughter, his face distraught, body bleeding from a couple of blaster wounds but still pulsing a multitude of colours.

  ‘Father … no daughter could have ever asked for better.’

  ‘My Lorena….’

  Caladan closed his eyes as Solwig let out a piercing wail. When he opened them again, Lorena had gone still, her colour faded. Lying there on the ground, she looked more human than she ever had before, and Caladan found his eyes welling with tears which he hastily wiped away.

  The old Luminosi turned to Caladan. ‘We finish this,’ he said through gritted teeth, pulsing a clear blood red. ‘We finish this for her.’
>
  Then he was gone, running across the open space in pursuit of his people, chasing the battle as it raged around the landing gear of the massive starships, the Luminosi in ascendancy now, a blanket of wailing, shrieking red and black.

  Caladan pulled Lorena’s body to the edge of the clearing. He closed her eyes, stripped off his shirt, and laid it over her.

  ‘I won’t forget you,’ he said.

  22

  Lia

  The moon—if that was what it had once been—was in the grip of a giant, multi-armed vise, like a planet-sized metal octopus with hundreds of legs. The whole entanglement was spinning, far beyond a normal rotation, while thousands of smaller ships hung in its orbit like flies waiting to pick at a corpse.

  Lia and Stomlard, keeping the Matilda far out of visual range, watched the horror on the screens, many times magnified so the monstrosity filled the space in front of them.

  ‘I guess that’s a Barelaon Helix,’ Lia said. ‘What on Old-Earth is it doing?’

  Stomlard had turned the Karpali version of pale: the mottled creamy brown of a desert world city.

  ‘It’s consuming the world,’ Stomlard said, voice barely above a whisper as though afraid the Barelaon would hear. ‘I’ve heard of this, but only as a myth, a childhood story. I never knew it could be real.’

  ‘It’s eating that moon?’

  Stomlard had pulled up some historical files from the Matilda’s database, and now paraphrased what he had read for Lia. ‘In a sense. The Helix’s fleet initially engages any defending fleet. When the defenders are defeated, the Helix moves in, attaching itself to the planet. First, it does a sweep of the surface, rounding up the populace, the fauna, anything it can assimilate. Then it takes whatever it can use. After that, it begins slowly stripping the planet down, taking whatever minerals it wants, refining them, then storing or discarding as necessary. You see what looks like a dust trail? That’s ejected material.’

  ‘What happens when it’s finished? What happens to the planet?’

  ‘When it considers itself finished, it will release the planet and move on.’

  ‘I thought Olin said the Barelaon were feudal?’

  ‘The creatures they assimilate are—groups of ships regularly break away from the main fleet, forming militias which eventually cave in on themselves, but the Helixes themselves can’t be—essentially it is a single organism.’

  ‘That thing is a single off-worlder?’

  ‘Think of it like a hive mother—or what you would have found on your home planet: a queen bee.’

  ‘And it’s heading for Trill System?’

  ‘If what Olin told us was correct.’

  ‘But Olin was assimilated, even if he didn’t know it himself yet. You said there were transmissions picked up by the Matilda heading into the wormhole? Maybe they can tell us something.’

  ‘I’ll see if the Matilda can decode them.’

  Stomlard headed for a communications desk to work on the transmissions. Lia stared at the real view screen, on which the Barelaon Helix was a distant speck, made blurry by the density of surrounding ships. She wondered what Caladan’s advice would be in this situation. They couldn’t stay out of visual range forever. The wormhole was the only one nearby, so they had to either return to a system where a damaged deep-space lighthouse might still have a magnetic beam waiting for them, or approach the Helix and hope to escape through a wormhole in its vicinity.

  With a smile, she realised Caladan’s advice would be simple: full-on attack.

  ‘Lia!’ Stomlard shouted. ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The transmissions. They’ve come from within the Trill System Government itself.’

  ‘They can’t have.’

  ‘They have. The most important one is an invitation, welcoming the Barelaon to the system, offering trade agreements, economic pacts, guarantees of protection from pirates.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘It reads like the kind of agreement one company might send to another.’

  Lia shook her head. ‘Something’s wrong. The Trill System Government would never allow such a thing.’

  ‘The source code of the sender is encrypted beyond what I can manually crack. Perhaps the droid—’

  ‘I don’t dare attach him to the ship’s systems. If the lighthouse infected him, he could shut us down, leave us drifting in space.’

  ‘Then we’ll never know.’

  ‘Wait.’ Lia pointed to a black lump of metal pressed in behind a row of passenger seats. ‘That thing. Do you know how to access its memory banks?’

  ‘That? I thought that was junk.’

  ‘It kind of is. Harlan5 had trouble with it, which is how he ended up inside a trash compactor … it’s a long story.’

  ‘Like a lot of things. Let me see if I can hook it up.’

  A few Earth-minutes later, Teagan3’s eyes lit up and it twisted what was left of its head around to look at them.

  ‘Have you chosen your punishment? Turn your blaster upon yourself and remove small pieces at a time to maximize the pain. It is the only comparable thing to what my master has in store for you—’

  ‘You see why we keep it switched off?’ Lia said.

  Stomlard grimaced. ‘If I can access its systems I can at least reduce the volume.’

  ‘Do it manually. I don’t want to risk this thing getting control of the ship’s transmitters. Getting blasted with insults all day long is the pilot’s job.’ Thinking of Caladan, she added wistfully, ‘Or at least it was.’

  Stomlard inserted a cable into a port in Teagan3’s chest and began tapping frantically on the touch screen communication terminal. His frown deepened, his forehead lowering over his eyes in a way Lia knew the Karpali had also adapted for defense. Stomlard’s whole forehead was a retractable sheet of bone that could act as a visor. She wondered why humans, with their warring history, hadn’t developed such an inbuilt battle helmet.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What?’ Lia put a hand on the engineer’s shoulder and leaned over to see the screen, but all she saw were complex lines of numerical code.

  ‘There. This is a personal transmission identification for a member of the Trill System’s independent trade advisors. During our training we learned how to read these. Looks like a mess, right?’

  ‘Just numbers….’

  ‘It’s as clear as the night sky to me.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘This section is the sender’s titling information. Here is his authorization. Hmm … it looks a little erratic. I’d put my three remaining arms on this being fake, but then it has to be, doesn’t it? No one in their right mind would invite a Barelaon Helix into their system.’

  ‘Can you tell me the name?’

  Stomlard nodded. ‘Ah, I remember this one. A smalltime warlord who talked—and likely bribed—his way on to Trill System’s Independent Trade Council. From there he was elected a private governor—something that was extremely suspicious considering his past misdemeanors, but the Trill System Government granted him immunity from prosecution in return for protection of their outer-system fire planet mining operations. As the biggest of a rather unsavory collection of fish, he won government backing to keep the other fish in order.’

  Lia was practically jumping up and down. ‘His name, Stomlard! Tell me his name!’

  Stomlard nodded. ‘I doubt you’d know him … Raylan Climlee … does that name mean anything to you?’

  23

  Caladan

  ‘No, I beg you … please don’t.’

  Caladan shook his head. ‘Shut up. Hold out your hand, or I’ll have my men do it for you. This is mercy, you scumbag. You want a slow death? It can be arranged.’

  A shaking hand lifted. Caladan, his trousers soaked with blood from the two hundred captured slavers who had come before, lifted the steel scissors one more time. Resting the lower handle on his knee so he could close them with his only hand, he moved the blades until they encircled the Rue-Tik-Tan genera
l’s middle finger, just above the knuckle.

  The air was thick with the moans of a group of previously punished guards, the final group waiting to be led to the transports. They sat in a circle, guarded by Luminosi holding confiscated weapons, clutching their bleeding hands, each forever marked with the intergalactic sign of a slaver—the missing central digit of whatever that race had for hands.

  ‘I, Caladan of the Matilda, bestow upon you, forever nameless, worthless, leader of other nameless, for your name is of less value than your life, a punishment fitting for your crime. You are nothing, as you have made others nothing. I have allowed you to watch the punishment of your men, so that you might appreciate in full what you have done.’

  He leaned on the scissor blade, his aching shoulder thankful it was the last.

  The Rue-Tik-Tan wailed as his finger fell into the pile of two hundred others—mostly from the lizard race, but many from other mercenary guards, including a few that were human.

  Caladan stared at the slaver captain’s face, wondering how many times the Rue-Tik-Tan had laughed at the suffering of others. With a snarl he slammed the scissors into the off-worlder’s chest, twisting them hard where he knew the Rue-Tik-Tan’s heart would be.

  ‘And as commander of them all, you must pay the ultimate price … with your life.’

  The slaver fell dead on top of the heap of severed fingers.

  ‘Burn them,’ Caladan said, throwing the scissors down, then getting up and walking away. ‘Load these men onto the last transport and seal them in. I will activate the launch sequences myself.’

  He found himself alone as the Luminosi ran off to complete their tasks. He hoped the act of mercy would help them recover from their generations-long ordeal, that future generations would remember the day the God who Points the Way gave them back their freedom, and taught them that mercy was the only way to live.

  They didn’t need to know about the auto-destruct systems he had activated in each of the three transports, which would turn the slavers into food for space fish a couple of hours after launch. It wouldn’t help them, but it would make him feel better.