Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  THE VANG 01

  STARHAMMER

  Christopher Rowley

  STARHAMMER'S MAP

  CHAPTER ONE

  The old planet had been a frozen wanderer for eons, but now it was dying, baked slowly by the young blue-white tyrant that had snagged it from the void. It turned sluggishly in its far distant orbit while on the ancient seabed the dust howled over the bare basalt, carrying forward the long moan of torment. Electrical energies sparked great lightning bursts against the purple skies.

  Out of a wall of dust came the great machine, crawling forward on treads a mile long. Beneath them, the rock powdered and joined the raging dust storm. Above, the vast edifice shuddered, shivered, and shifted forward another ten meters.

  Invisible in the dust, the convoy machines called mournfully, great klaxons wailing. In response, the great machine began to build up a refueling field.

  In the basalt ocean floor, three hundred kilometers north and east, a cube almost four kilometers on a side began to shake. The vibration increased, built to a crescendo and then with a flash of waste photons, a cubical pit appeared in the crust, four-kilometer-deep walls glowing white hot, incandescent vapor coiling over the bottom.

  Energy receptors in the great machine came alive with power. Sparks leaped and sizzled for a moment and then hot, ionizing beams of energy stabbed briefly through the swirling murk to the convoy machines. They ground on, guarding flanks, guarding rear.

  No reports came from higher command, no new targets were assigned. In the control center, the Keeper, a batrachianoid robot three meters tall, tried to call the crew once more. There was no reply. There had not been any reply in a billion years. It scanned the terrain ahead and readied the machine for the next lurch westward on the endless march. It knew nothing about the death of planets, it dealt simply with targets.

  —|—

  On terrestrial time scales it was generally regarded as the twenty-fifth century of spaceflight, the fifteenth century of the laowon tyranny and the worst of times for humanity.

  From the fertile sector of the Milky Way encompassed by the sweep of the Orion arm, two splendidly similar space-traveling species had arisen. From great golden Lao had come the blue skinned laowon, swift empire builders in Faster Than Light vessels. From humble Earth had come humanity, spreading out in cheerful anarchy on Not As Fast As Light drives.

  When they met, the empire was seven kiloparsecs across on the long axis and the sphere of human exploration stretched perhaps one twentieth as far.

  The meeting, therefore, produced profoundly contrary emotions in the two sides, while concepts of convergent evolution, pan-life mathematica, and DNA universality, found their ultimate consummation. Indeed, laowon and human were startlingly similar, except that laowon were slightly taller and had skin in shades of blue.

  From their pinnacles of advanced industry, both races had burst forth from their home worlds, driven by the indomitable, ancient urge: to be free!

  Unfortunately, the laowon were uninterested in human freedoms. Nor were the ancient religious prohibitions against the manipulation of laowon genetic material extended to preclude experimentation on humans. Strange abominations, in vast numbers, began to appear from laowon gene labs. A human slave population that threatened to dwarf that of free humans, grew relentlessly, century by century.

  In the Court of the Imperiom Lao, planet-hungry aristocrats, abetted by racist reactionaries in the lao cult, urged laowon colonization of thinly occupied worlds, wherever they might be. Contesting Seygfan groups, the cult, and—the Superior Buro—the Imperial Intelligence organ—were engaged in bitter internecine struggle.

  Since the human sphere lay entirely within the palm of the empire, it was only the Imperial Family's iron grip on the space fleets that kept the greediest from tearing up the lao-human treaties and grabbing human worlds at will.

  Manipulated by the all powerful Superior Buro and cut off from further exploration by the laowon battle fleets, the human race faced a peculiarly humiliating destiny as the permanent slave race of the laowon.

  And then in the year 17082, Lao Record (AD4533) one last, strange hope suddenly gleamed—a scrap of legend borne out of the deep deserts of a distant, dying world and an archaeologist, a man with half his head burned away, were the foundation of a secret that could yet save humanity from the grip of the higher race.

  When a small part of this intelligence was given to the decadent ruling elite of Earth, the information was in the hands of the Superior Buro within a few minutes. The Buro was particularly well organized on Earth.

  The laowon pressed eagerly. What was the secret? And where did it lie? But the betrayal itself was betrayed, and those who possessed the last hope began a desperate race against the Superior Buro, across the deeps between the stars.

  From the beginning, the Superior Buro felt confident of victory. Indeed, the opponents were grotesquely mismatched. And yet, not even the Buro's gigantic computers could calculate every chance, every ricochet of fate.

  For example, in the same year that Doctor Ulip Sehngrohn staggered out of the desert with horrifying wounds and his strange story, a boy was born to Hutmother Joana 416, of North West Alley, in the dusty township that served Castle Firgize on the laowon frontier world Glegan. He was part of an experiment by Lord Deshilme of Firgize, a member of the ruling Imperial Family who had chosen exile on the frontier to avoid the fate that had overtaken his brothers at the court.

  Fertilization in the laboratory with microsurgically altered genetic material was followed by implantation in the chosen female's womb.

  Shortly after birth, however, Jon 6725416 was removed from the experimental batch because he had retained normal human intelligence. His number was printed on his forehead and he was sent to Joana in Hut 416 to raise, outside the laboratory.

  From the first days though, Joana also spoke to him his "remembered name"—Iehard, which had been passed on through the females of Hut 416 for generations, kept alive by sheer human determination and cussedness, characteristics that the laowon consistently worked to breed out of the township populations.

  Two decades later, Jon Iehard toiled in the great gangs working on the expansion of Castle Firgize that Lord Deshilme had taken up to give himself something to do in exile.

  For days Jon's work gang had moved blocks of pink granite, onto the loading elevator beneath the great crane. The elevator took the stones the first hundred meters. The crane lifted them the second hundred, to the top of the new walls of the North tower.

  Over them Ushmai, the laowon overseer, was a constant, demanding presence.

  Another load was maneuvered into place. The elevator rattled upward. Jon sensed that Ushmai was not watching them so he slipped away to sit by the wall. There in the deep shadows, he was out of Ushmai's sight for once. He relaxed, squatting in the shadows watching the rest of the gang, naked but for the leather aprons and shoulderpads they wore to protect themselves, waiting the next shipment. The men milled around the watertank; they sweated like beasts.

  In another minute Ushmai had noticed Jon's absence from the gang. The tall stickfigure of the laowon was moving into range, scanning for the missing worker.

  Jon pushed himself to his feet and away from the wall. His hands rested on the blocks behind him for a moment. He felt cracks in the stone. He turned to look more carefully and discerned more cracks. All along the bottom course there were cracks in the big primary stones of the wall. The tower was to be raised another hundred meters, and when completed it would soar three hundred meters above Firgize hill. Since Deshilme preferred to build for posterity, he chose simple building materials—massive blocks of stone, reinforced with steel and concrete. The effect was an architecture of the brutal.

  Ushmai was whist
ling at him. Harsh, piercing whistles. Ushmai was pointing angrily at the watertank.

  "Damn the Ushmai," Jon said to Truk and Gus when he returned to his place. More blocks of pink stone were waiting to be lifted onto the elevator.

  "The Ushmai is always looking for you," Truk said with a thin smile.

  "He knows Hut 416 ate plump wabboo this week," Gus commented.

  "Now who might have told you that?" Jon's eyebrow arched.

  "A little flopper I know."

  "Gus 555 is seeing your sister Wem, that's how," Truk gurgled.

  "He never asked me." Jon scowled at Gus.

  "Since when does he have to?"

  "I'm eldest in my Hut. That's enough reason."

  "Eldest male, I asked Joana. She agreed all right. Everything square and hutwise."

  Arlbi leaned forward. "Look out, here comes Ushmai."

  The angular form approached. The white overseer's suit gleamed in the sunlight. "6725416, you have been slacking again. If I have to remind you once more, you'll be for the pain booth, you hear me?"

  Wearily Jon groaned his assent in the laowon tongue.

  Ushmai turned to go but Jon called after him.

  "By the way, there are cracks in those bottom stones. Cracks right through I'd say."

  Ushmai purpled. "Cracks? In the Contractor's good stones? Nonsense. What would you know of stone quality anyway? Have you been to the quarry? Have you been among the skilled stone cutters? No, of course not, you are alley stuff, with the wit of a wild wabboo. Stick to what you know, moving stones from pallet to elevator. That's all you have to do. All you're capable of. Cracks! Indeed!" He sniffed loudly and turned on his heel.

  The men moved stone. Ushmai oversaw them, the gang on their left who mixed tubs of mortar for their elevator, and the gang on the right who put facing slabs on another elevator.

  The men quizzed Jon anxiously about the cracks. He described them as best he could. None were satisfied.

  "So Ushmai is taking a cut on these stones, that's for sure."

  "Ushmai fancies himself a planet lord. He'll make his pile, buy a jumper, and take his own world. That takes heavy raking from the Contractor. Everyone knows that."

  At shift's end they stumbled wearily away. Jon took another look at the cracks. They were definitely wider. He reported it to Ushmai who immediately became ill tempered.

  "Get away from me!" he snapped haughtily. "If you repeat these slanders on the good stones of our gracious Contractor, I swear you're for the pain booth."

  Jon shrugged and turned away. He was due for the pain booth that week anyway, for wabboo bones in the hut last month. What would it matter if he spent another five minutes in the booth?

  But other than Ushmai there was no laowon he could talk to who was likely to listen to his story for more than three seconds. Laowon found human attempts to communicate intrinsically annoying. Humans were meant to be silent, servile, and as nearly invisible as possible.

  He turned onto the causeway and followed his workmates back over the hill to the sprawling human township, where restless throngs of workers moved to and fro in the dusty lanes as the shifts changed.

  Back at the Hut, a big square room of slatted wood sealed with plastic, Mother Joana and her youngest daughter Troli were waiting with a lunch of tuber soup and dark ration-bread.

  The soup was hot and still flavored lightly with the scraps of plump wabboo that Jon had poached the previous week from the Sweetcrystal game preserve.

  The door opened and his younger brother Sab came in. Sab was but fourteen, a thin, lithe boy. He worked in the vineyards that radiated southwards from the castle walls.

  "So Sab, back for lunch," Jon said in greeting. As the oldest male in the Hut, he took a constant interest in the doings of the others, Joana's four girls and three other boys. All the product of artificial breeding techniques, all as different as they could be.

  Sab was a quiet little thing, a docile worker who rarely spoke. He had spent his first years in the laboratory, but had survived to return to Joana. His nights were wracked by dreadful dreams. Once in a while he had fits and tried to bite his own flesh. They had to tie him up on those occasions.

  Together Hut 416 ate soup and ration-bread. Joana discussed young Wana's mysterious ills. To Jon, the symptoms sounded like the black-spot virus. He suggested that Joana take Wana to the infirmary, but Joana just pointed at the near-empty money pot. Jon chewed soup and schemed of some way to add to their slender financial reserves. For his own labor he received the ration-bread and water that maintained the hut. The labors of the younger children brought small cash payments, enough so that normally the Hut stayed ahead of the rent and heat bills. Sab and Gelda, who worked in the vineyards, would be due their monthly payment of wine soon. If he sold some of that, there would be money for Wana's visit to the infirmary. If little Wana lived that long, if it really was black-spot disease. It could be awfully quick. And then the Hut would be fumigated. It would stink for months.

  There was a sudden noise, a shudder went through the Hut. A few moments later the door banged open, and Little Gita—one year older than Wana—flew in, all pigtails and waving hands. There was an uproar somewhere in the distance.

  "What do you think's happened?" Joana asked, peering over the township roofs toward the back of Firgize hill.

  "A spaceship must have come!" Sab shouted. "Like the one that brought Lady Magelsa to wed the Lord Innoo. Everyone will take the afternoon off!"

  Jon checked the sky, no trace of exhaust fumes was visible against the cloudless blue.

  The hill blocked off all but the view of the four towers of Firgize. Except that now Jon saw there were only three! "The cracks!" he shouted. "The cracks in the tower!"

  A pall of dust was rising where the great tower had collapsed. Jon slipped out onto the Alley and ran down to the township gate. A mob of human workers was pouring over the causeway. Their faces were a tapestry of rage.

  "Hundreds are dead. The whole tower has collapsed."

  The men gathered in the township square. Red Urk was hoisted to speak. "The Overseer Ushmai was warned of the cracks!" He bellowed. "We demand the Overseer's expiation in the Agony Booth."

  The crowd roared at that and flowed back to the causeway. But at the other end of the causeway the Guards, seven-foot-tall human pinheads, were massed in phalanx. The Guards held their shock batons at the ready. Steel helmets covered their tiny skulls. They were not noted for their compassion; at the whistle they charged the men.

  For once the battle was long and furious; the men of the township were enraged by the latest in a long line of disasters brought on by Firgize incompetence. But eventually, the Guards broke through and by late evening had complete control of the main alleys of the townships. All that night huge bounding warriors with diminutive skulls ran through the Huts in an orgy of violence, rape, and slaughter.

  In the morning rebel survivors were gathered inside the Keep of the Palace. They were harangued by Deshilme Firgize and then the identified ringleaders were taken for expiation. One by one they were thrust into the Agony Booth. Their chilling screams rang out all day and night, completing the dismal atmosphere that lay over the castle and its surroundings.

  Jon waited on line for the Booth, having been marked down by Ushmai himself. Around the captives towered the huge microcephals, who nudged them and tittered at each quavering shriek from a dying man in the booth.

  There was a movement on a balcony a few meters above, where a party of blueskins had appeared to witness some of the expiations. Jon noticed the Lord Innoo, heir to Castle Firgize, and his bride, the Princess Magelsa Gnovii among the laowon.

  Ahead of him Rad 4623 was thrust into the booth. The clamps closed around his neck leaving only his head visible. The pain began and Rad bellowed mightily.

  As the bellows hollowed out into the fluting screams in the "middle passage," so Jon noticed the Princess wince and stop her ears with her fingers. Was she perhaps dismayed at the heavy-handed ways o
f the frontier worlds? She looked down and for a long moment his eyes caught hers. Her scrutiny became a very careful one.

  An unconscious Rad was removed from the booth and his body tossed onto the pile of those who had already expiated. The big microcephals enjoyed these events immensely, and they were giggling as they thrust Jon into the booth. He glanced back to the blue Princess on the balcony. She had taken her husband's arm and was speaking passionately in his ear.

  While the clamps were swung into place around his neck, Jon noticed the booth stank of human excrement, sweat, and pain. He stared back along the line of doomed rebels and those who were drawn up to witness the expiations.

  Unexpectedly a command in laowon was bugled down from the balcony. After a moment of shocked hesitation among the steel helmeted pinhead guard, the command was repeated with considerable impatience.

  The clamps were lifted, Jon was pulled from the booth and hurried away to one side and around a corner, where a small door opened unexpectedly in the smooth wall of the castle. He was thrust through it.

  In total darkness he climbed a winding secret stair. A guard was waiting for him above and he was taken through another secret door, then down a long corridor paneled in pale ochre velvet and wall mural landscapes to a white door. Within, waited the tall, angular Princess Magelsa. In short order she offered him first the velvet suit of a valet to Lord Innoo, and then herself, in her own bed. Not long afterward she conducted his initiation into interspecies sex. She was young and energetic and had acquired a taste for all kinds of unusual pleasures on Ratan, her sophisticated homeworld.

  Laowon and human were similar enough physically to find such encounters mutually rewarding, but long afterward Jon lay on the enormous circular bed in Magelsa's bedroom and stared out the window. From far away, almost from another planet it seemed, he could still hear the agonized screams of those who were expiating for the rebellion.

  —|—

  At first his life seemed indeed to have taken a turn for the best. Magelsa arranged for the bar-code on his forehead to be reduced by plastic surgery, but demanded that a slight addition, a small brand with her laowon initial code, be burned into his right buttock.