Swords Above the Stars

by Roman Zlotnikov

  A Manticore could not be killed by any known human weaponry. There was only one thing fatal to it—gravity. Adult Manticore moved freely in outer space, absorbing everything possible, including dust. This could go on for thousands of years.

  It was rumored that some Manticore could reach billions of miles in diameter, but when all the free mass in a system came to an end, they died off because they could not get closer to planets and stars.

  Gravity killed them off instantly, and if they did not burn up in the atmosphere, then they dropped onto the surface as a fine dust. Only a fully grown Manticore was capable of moving across space. In order to achieve the necessary level of development it needed two things: firstly time, which theoretically there was enough of, and secondly, food. This was a problem, because clearly there was not enough of it. What was left of the remaining piece of the fortress was too small for the Manticore to gain enough mobility to escape the trajectory of its fall to the planet.

  “Well done, Lucky. Claim a double bonus for yourself.”

  Lucky smiled back with delight, “At double pay?”

  The captain shivered. This guy didn’t miss a trick, but on the other hand, he had just saved everybody’s lives. If the Manticore had devoured the entire mass of the orbital fortress, nothing would be able to stop it. Not even if they had suddenly found a couple of old gravitational mortar batteries, which incidentally, all orbital fortresses had been equipped with.

  “You managed it only with cannons,” said Stubborn Bull, and again he raised the microphone to his mouth. “Boarding party to return to the stronghold. Beer Keg, I want you to find an answer: where did this pile of rusty metal here come from?”

  “The answer is simple, Captain. It was dragged here as food for the Manticore,” boomed the deep voice of Admiral Anselm from behind him.

  The captain shook his head in exasperation.

  “That I know, but where was it dragged from?”

  “Why do we need to know that?” asked the cardinal in surprise. The captain did not deign to give him a gaze, and Don Anselm patiently explained:” There are few orbital fortresses anymore, so we stand a chance to determine how long ago it was taken. If this fortress was destroyed somewhere during or immediately after the Black Earl’s raid, then the Manticore woke up in its due time, and we can work away in peace. These creatures do not distinguish between who is the owner and who is the Enemy, so that is why their ships do not seem to be around here. When we woke it up early, they may turn up to see how she is doing. They have a bad habit like that, and this can happen at any time. Even now.” Don Anselm sighed, “Which of course, is not what we want.”

  Then Beer Keg’s voice came over the speakers. “Hey, Captain, the identification number is KAO763 984 943.”

  Fat Anselm squirmed excitedly.

  “Yes, it's the Wings of Samora from Karrash, but, of course! How did I not manage to recognize it in the first place? It has a double landing port for shuttle craft.”

  The captain turned away from the display and thoughtfully chewed his lip. The raid on Karrash took place over thirteen years, but that was almost twenty years ago, so who knows when they dragged this pile of metal into Zovros’s orbit.

  “Boarding party, come on board,” he commanded, and scowled in the cardinal’s direction.

  He thought to himself, perhaps this one would really block our payment. Money is tight now, and getting good contracts is even worse. When has it not been so!

  The captain turned and gave the command. “Prepare for landing. We will be landing on the fortieth parallel in eight hours’ time.”

  ***

  They stood at the open airlock hatch and looked at a lifeless Zovros. A furious wind blew clouds of ash over the surface. The mountains on the horizon looked pitted, and their tops were covered by snow with a strange greenish tint. Don Kior tried to scratch his head, but his glove just scraped across the helmet of his battle suit. He shuddered and shivered. “I swear by St. John and St. Inez, this is exactly the way I imagined hell to be.”

  Grey Mustache crooked his lips into a smile. “Well, my noble friend, maybe they have simply prepared a place for them to live?”

  “Are you still there, Beer Keg, or have you fallen asleep?” The captain's voice rasped over the headphones.

  Don Kior frowned and shook his head. “Let’s go! Let’s do the business and get back. I swear by Saint Jeremiah, this is not the kind of place I would like to stay for long.”

  The boarding party went down the stairs and cautiously moved forward, checking out the surface before them with all the sensors on their combat suits, and checking out suspicious places by jabbing them with swords, which sometimes went into the ashes all the way to the hilt. Having learned by bitter experience, the Dons moved very carefully, and before they had probed the whole area in which they intended to set up camp, nobody made a sound. After setting up the force field barrier, the boarding party returned to the ship. In the evening, when Yv was giving Pip a fencing lesson, he was approached by Don Kior, who was somewhat inebriated.

  “Let's go have a drink, Lucky.”

  Yv quickly disarmed the training rapier from Pip, and turned to Beer Keg. “What are you talking about old man, how can someone like you not know the rules of tradition? During a raid, there is prohibition.”

  Don Kior sobbed and shook his head.

  “Today we are all drunk, all of us!” He beat his chest, and said with tears in his voice, “This was once a green world, you know? A bit crap, like everything touched by humans, but friendly. Here the birds were chirping, the kids were running around, and some grandfather like me was sitting on a river bank with a fishing rod, his hook dipped in some warm water, but look at it now …” He wiped his tears away with his hand, and shouted, “I swear by Saint George, they will answer for this!”

  With a look and a flick of his head, Yv ordered Pip to quickly disappear, and he sat down next to Beer Keg and reached for a flagon. Beer Keg topped up his drink, and they clinked glasses for the repose of the souls of this ruined world. And who is to say that worlds have no soul of their own?

  ***

  The next day it was already dark when they woke up. Before lunch, they offloaded electric vehicles and tunneling equipment. Cardinal Desiree excitedly rushed to the site, and for the umpteenth time did some triangulation, choosing more new points. Finally, everything was ready. The cardinal hastily celebrated mass.

  “By God’s will!” said Don Anselm, with a loud sigh.

  The first laser drilling machine moved forward, and with a loud hissing noise began to sink into the gray ash, which boiled up and flowed into hot pools. But after the pools froze again they didn’t form cakes of rock, but fell into millions of small flakes of ash, which the wind blew away. The lost world wanted to remain a ghost, and nobody could leave their mark on its surface.

  By the end of the next day, one of the vehicles made it to the former palace of the Tyrant, which was buried under a layer of ash and a layer of stone five hundred feet deep, some seven miles from the camp. The second vehicle was still more than two miles from the Sacred Place of the First Landing. They decided to continue their work.

  The Dons, servants, and crew, everybody apart from the teams on duty, split into work teams and worked as hard as hell. No one wanted to linger on this planet an hour longer than was necessary.

  Finally, the second vehicle reached its goal. On the seventh day of their stay on the planet, when the evening shift had finished excavating, and was preparing to pass over to the night team, Grey Mustache’s sensors detected a piece of perfectly shaped metal of a regular cubic shape under a pile of broken stone.

  He scattered away the boulders, revealing a metal box fused to the stones. With multiple flashes from his ray gun, he cut away the edges of the stones, carefully lifted his discovery, and called the captain.

  “Dear Don Diaz, I think we have found something of interest to us all.”

  Before the captain could reply, the excited voice of t
he cardinal came over the headphones.

  “What have you found, Don Charleman?”

  “I am assuming, Your Holiness, that this object is reminiscent of a safety deposit box.”

  “Do not touch anything, my son, just do not touch anything, I will be there as soon as possible.”

  Twenty minutes later, the cardinal ran inside the room, now cleaned of stone. Don Charleman, whose combat suit was covered from head to foot in soot and ashes, stepped forward and pointed to the wall. The cardinal turned, and on bended knees, moved forward cautiously to the discovery. With trembling hands, he cleaned off the ash and soot from the front door of the box, then he cried out involuntarily.

  “Oh Lord, it’s the sign of the University of Simaron! This is undoubtedly a safety deposit box from Dagmar’s expedition. On Neerget’s crystal there is mention of the fact that there were some crystals with information about the excavations—they are extremely important—now nobody, not even Cardinal Siemens would say that the expedition was a failure.” The cardinal bit his tongue, realizing that he had said too much. “I beg your pardon, my friends. I'm so excited that I am talking all sorts of nonsense.” He turned to Grey Mustache. “My son, this needs to be taken to the corvette forthwith.”

  In the evening, on all the decks, the talk was all about the discovery. Everybody wondered what was inside it. Eventually, long after midnight, Don Anselm appeared on the gun deck. The Dons who filled the corridor leading to his cabin, surrounded the old admiral.

  “Well, Admiral, what is it?”

  “What have we found Fat Anselm?”

  “Is there anything in there?”

  But the fat man, smiling enigmatically, tried to push through to his cabin. Don Kior would not for stand such abuse, and blocked the admiral’s passage to his cabin with his voluminous belly, shouting, “Come on, say something, you old bugger, or else, I swear by Saint Isidore, I will pull your smug head off!”

  Anselm laughed at the Don.

  “My God, how menacing you are, Beer Keg!” He looked around at the audience and said solemnly, “We found two of the crystals. On one Saint Dagmar had fully duplicated the information that was on the crystal of Neerget the Martyr. And on the other …” he paused and finished in a deliberately indifferent manner, “on the other was only a report of an anthropological-archaeological expedition.”

  But he didn’t fool anybody. Don Kior became angry and pushed him in the belly.

  “Stop trying to kid us.”

  Fat Anselm sighed. “The cardinal will have my head.”

  “If he is going to keep it a secret from the team,” Beer Keg grinned, “then he intends to bloody come back here on some of the ships of the monasteries. If he wants to deal with the Dons, then let him share his discoveries, or like hell will he get anything else until we all see and touch what we found for ourselves.” Don Kior grinned again. “Come on now, don’t you think that the cardinal did not realize that!”

  Fat Anselm shrugged and sighed again. “There are only Saint Dagmar’s conclusions on the results of the excavations in the Sacred Place of the First Landing.” He cringed in embarrassment. “In short, there were no landings, neither a first nor a last. This was the place of a battle with the Enemy, and it was not fought by humans. The battle lasted just one day, and the Enemy was thrown off the planet, like a naughty cat. In truth, there are only illustrations of Scarlet Princes … or rather, not quite scarlet … but many colors… but no sign of trolls, Kazgarots, or other vermin.”

  For a few moments there was silence, then someone whispered, “The Eternal One.”

  Don Anselm shook his head. “I do not know. Anyway, it happened about a hundred thousand years ago, at a time when our ancestors were still wearing nothing and wandering around the forests and valleys of Mother Earth.”

  With these words, Fat Anselm pushed Don Kior with his belly, so that he fell into a corner, and quickly disappeared into his cabin.

  The next day, a pilgrimage began to the cardinal. When he learned that the admiral had told the Dons everything, he flew into a rage, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Dons were hanging around the door to his cabin, crowding in, demanding a blessing or a confession, but at the same time eagerly asking about Saint Dagmar’s crystals. The cardinal cursed the day and the hour when it had come into his head to bring the Noble Dons on this expedition, who were well known for their violent temper and contempt for any chain of command. That was until the next discovery.

  It happened on the twelfth day. This time the discovery was made in the palace. The excavations there had been very difficult; it was clear that the Tyrant had fiercely defended the place. The whole palace was essentially one huge lump of fused rock. The sensors in the suits were often useless in the chaos of stone, soot, and metal, sintered together into a horrible mass, and sometimes the Dons had to put aside their ray guns and work by hand.

  At times, they came across voids in the rocks in the shape of human bodies, and in some melted lumps there remained light silhouettes of vaporized men, women, or children. Eventually, they managed to reach the lowest level. In the deep catacombs beneath the palace, hacked into the earliest rocks, cavities still remained. One such cavity was screened on the top with silver veins, perhaps formed from molten silver utensils from the palace kitchen, and Pip fell over one of them.

  He banged his head hard and even lost consciousness for a few moments. When he came to, he saw that he was lying in the corner of a large casemate, carved into the rock. At the far end was a table laden with rusted equipment, and next to it, on a chair, in front of a long extinct display device, was a crippled, dried-out female corpse. Everything indicated that it was a secret palace room accidentally preserved, and the woman, despite the fact that her body was behind the screen of the display device, could have been anyone, from a cleaner to one of the concubines from the Tyrant’s harem, who happened to be here at the final moment.

  The cardinal literally flew into this casemate, looked around with crazed eyes, then fell to his knees and began to pray fervently. When he finally got up and cautiously approached the table, he turned pale as a sheet and nearly fainted.

  In the evening the Dons again rallied on the gun deck. Fat Anselm appeared at the door of his cabin, looking as if someone had just whacked him on the head. When Don Kior again barred his way, he just bumped into his belly and stopped, as if still thinking of something else. Beer Keg repeatedly waved his hand in front of the admiral’s nose, then punched him in the shoulder:

  “Hey, wake up, you old bugger, because I swear by Saint Tomigron you don’t look like yourself!”

  “What?” Don Anselm asked absently.

  “Well, I swear by Saint Dushanoy, today you look like somebody has banged you on the head!” Don Kior bent over the admiral’s ear and screamed, “We want to know what has been found?”

  Fat Anselm looked back at them calmly and detached, and as if telling them something insignificant, he said, “Saint Dagmar.”

  Then, using the fact that Beer Keg had recoiled in shock, the admiral stepped forward and disappeared through the door.

  The cardinal took this news worse than the previous news, but what happened next led to even more anxiety for the cardinal. Early in the morning, the combat alarm sounded on the ship, and in a loud voice the captain said, “Combat Alert! An Enemy ship has appeared from around the star, prepare for takeoff in forty minutes.”

  Don Kior, who had only just dropped his head on the pillow after a night shift in the catacombs, frantically jumped up and hit his head on the top bunk. When the captain repeated the message again, he gasped, then broke into a smile.

  “Well, finally, something is happening. I have spent too much time digging! It's time to do what I know best.”

  4

  By seven o’clock in the evening, after blasting off from Zovros, it became clear that they did not have time to escape. The unusual Enemy ship, resembled a scorpion with its widely spread antenna fields on thick beams. It had a pi
lot’s cockpit perched on a thick folded tail above the ship’s body, and it was approaching inexorably. These scorpions were high-speed ships and roughly equivalent to a destroyer class vessel. The ships were two classes superior to that of Stubborn Bull’s ship.

  However, Don Diaz’s little ship was not a usual corvette either, and even if the armament and protection capabilities of its systems were clearly inferior to those of the Enemy, its speed of flight should have been superior. Even so, the Scorpion ship was catching up on them.

  Stubborn Bull was sitting in the captain's chair, swearing in German, then in Turkish, then in Romany, and when it became clear that a fight was unavoidable, he switched to Russian. The officer, who was sitting at the communications console shuddered and whispered hoarsely, “There is a call, sir.”

  Before the captain had a chance to say anything, Cardinal Desiree hastily said, “Yes, yes, reply.”

  Don Kior roared and rushed to the console, but did not make it in time. A scarlet figure with a face the color of dazzling white snow appeared on the main screen. Thick eyebrows curved in an arc over its burning black eyes, and three shiny horns stood over its forehead like a strange crown.

  “I'm glad to see you people,” it spoke in a sonorous contralto, and everyone felt themselves fall into a sweet stupor. It’s beautiful face, its eyes, its graceful scarlet figure wrapped up in its huge wings like a cloak, and most importantly, its voice, which was fraught with something terrible, yet inevitably attractive. Beer Keg suddenly felt that he had lost all desire to press the off button, and lowered his outstretched hand. “It would be better for you to stop, and not to tempt me to enjoy what you would call a painful memory loss.” The people felt their hearts filled with horror, but it was a sweet horror. The creature looking at them had the ability to prepare them for a sweet foretaste of suffering, and even anguish. The captain, whose sweat was pouring from his forehead from the stress, managed to say through his numb lips, “Try catching us first.”