by Rick Partlow
Sandi hit the belly jets nearly simultaneous with the low altitude warning sounding, and the bone-jarring deceleration felt as if it were going to drive her through the deck of the lander. The airframe shook violently and she thought for a second she’d badly miscalculated and the bird was about to break in two…and then they were hovering two meters off the ground, drifting slowly sideways on a column of fire, sand and dust and debris billowing around them in an obscuring cloud, and the belly ramp was already on its way down.
“Go! Go! Go!”
She wasn’t sure if she was yelling, or if Jacobson was, or both, but the words echoed back through the rear compartment of the lander and through her ‘link’s ear bud, and the ground force platoon leader was already unstrapped and heading out to lead his troops off the belly ramp. The Constabulary fortress loomed ahead, harshly illuminated in the glare of the floodlights, its high walls ugly and threatening. She could see the closest of the crew-served KE-gun turrets and she played the Gatling laser over them, flares of ionized air passing across the front of the building, leaving a row of strobe-light flashes in their wake from vaporizing metal and concrete.
“We’re clear!” Jacobson’s voice was as loud as if he’d yelled the words from a few centimeters away, but she could see in a corner of the viewscreen that he and his platoon were rushing at the garage entrance…and she couldn’t tell if it was open.
She bit off a curse and flipped the control to raise the ramp, then slid the lander sideways on the belly jets, still firing the Gatling. She could see the round counter in her mind’s eye, projected through the interface, and she knew that she had maybe two to three more seconds before the hopper ran dry, but she needed to keep those KE-gun turrets suppressed to give the infantry a chance.
She didn’t know where the shot came from, but she knew when it hit. The tantalum slivers punched through the portside air intakes, raking the wing and shredding the turbine inside it. Jacked into the system, watching with the slow-motion perceptions of the interface, she could observe every minute detail of it, could see each microsecond unfold as if it were a picture in a frame, but couldn’t change the inevitable outcome.
The lander’s port belly jets billowed black smoke as the turbines tore themselves apart, their fragments taking the wing right off the fuselage, the thrust cutting off abruptly. She tried to feather the starboard belly jets manually, but the controls were damaged and it was far too late. The lander flipped over, belly up, and Sandi’s world flipped with it, the interface spitting her out into harsh reality as the craft smashed to the ground with a shriek of rending metal and an impact of dull agony. Sound and feeling and sight all snapped off and everything was infinitely black.
***
She couldn’t remember her old name. She’d simply been “the Matriarch” for long years now, and before that she’d been “the Protégé,” and before that…before that, she’d been a young female, picked out of a house of other young females for her quick wit and quick tongue, and she couldn’t remember what that young female had been called. What would that girl have said if she could have seen the end of her life? Would she have run away from the calling, had she seen a vision of herself confined to this tiny chamber in the human place, the place they called the Constabulary? Would she have believed that a warrior, a male who had served the Emperor against the enemy, would stand over her so brazenly, alone in that same, small room?
It was something so outrageous, so blasphemous, that any onlooker would have tried to kill him for it, even though it meant their own death. Yet he regarded her coolly, calmly, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. She’d tried to ignore him for the long minutes he’d stood there, backlit by the glowing panel in the ceiling, looming over her as she sat on the edge of the cot that was the holding cell’s only furniture, but it didn’t seem to deter his interest.
“What do you want of me, Vala-Kel?” she asked, risking blasphemy herself to end this ridiculous standoff.
“You are far too old to make a male lose control in your presence,” he mused, still looking at her quite inappropriately, as a craftsman might regard a new tool. “I wonder why it is forbidden for an adult male to be alone with you?”
“Things are, as they have been,” she quoted from the text they both knew from rote memory, the one impressed upon all of them as children. “Why do you question the Path? What has led you to betray your own people? You were a warrior, a respected male who could have led us.”
“I will lead you,” he corrected her. “That is inevitable.”
“Must I repeat myself?” She hid fear behind vexation. “What do you want of me?”
“Now your protégé, Gen-Lya-Tal,” he went on, as if from his original thought, ignoring both her questions and his answers, “she is not yet to that age.”
The Matriarch felt alarm and fierce anger, and she rose from her seat on the cot to her still-unimposing height and stood nose-to-chin with Vala-Kel.
“How do you know her name?” she demanded.
“She has need of it again,” he explained, putting a hand on her chest and pushing her backward. She squawked as she stumbled on the edge of the cot and fell heavily back on it, outrage battling with the still-growing fear. “Now that she is no longer eligible to be a Matriarch’s protégé.”
The Matriarch felt as if she were shrinking in on herself. That could only mean that Vala-Kel had mated with her.
“You drag everything we are, everything we represent through mud and shit,” she hissed at him, the outrage finally winning out over the fear, “and you think we would follow such a one as you.”
“When the choice is that or death, of course I do.” He was imperturbable, somehow. It was infuriating; everything about him was infuriating, but she knew that to attack him would mean her death, and the people needed her now more than ever.
She simply stared at the male, waiting for him to get to the point.
“Very well, I will tell you what I wish of you, you old, useless, feeble bitch.” He stalked across the room restlessly, hands clenching and unclenching as if he wished to kill her and was having to restrain himself. “If you were to simply disappear in this place, to never be heard from again, your bones rotting in some forgotten hole, then there would be nagging questions. Those who might otherwise be useful cogs in our society would need to be killed, and I find this idea wasteful.”
“You think I’d agree to support you? After what you’ve done?” She wasn’t sure if it was the absurdity of the idea or his temerity in suggesting it that she found more objectionable.
“Not support,” he said, making a gesture of placation. “Simply keeping your mouth shut.”
“I assume there’s a threat or a promise involved in this somewhere.” He would have to be stupid as well as mad to assume she’d cooperate with him otherwise, and she didn’t believe him to be stupid.
“I’d think it’s fairly obvious,” he said, gesturing surprise. “They’re your people, your followers. Every one of them I’m forced to kill would be on your head.”
Her instinctive response was to tell him that his words were dishonorable, and she was about to invoke a traditional curse on him when the klaxons sounded and she looked around at the loud, annoying warbling, a human sound that was piercing and painful to her ears. He went to the door of the cell, yanking it open and sticking his head outside, yelling something in the human tongue, English, that she couldn’t make out over the sound of the siren. When he stepped back into the cell, his expression wasn’t alarmed or angry…it was satisfied, as if this were something he’d anticipated.
“Come with me,” he said, seizing her wrist with the ruthless speed of a striking predator. She tried to pull away, but his grip was iron.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, trying to dig in her heels and resist. It was useless; he dragged her out into the hallway outside the cell, heedless of her efforts. The walls were slate-grey down in the confinement level, grim and featureless. “I should have let Kan
-Ten kill you.”
Then he did pause, looking back at her, manic and feverish and insane.
“Yes, Matriarch, you should have.” He yanked her after him with cruel insistence, pulling her along when she stumbled. “You won’t get that chance again…and neither will he.”
Chapter Eighteen
Abel Freeman watched the world burn around him and waited for his turn.
The night sky was alight with the flames, choked and dark and cloudy with the thick, black smoke. The only home he’d ever known roared and cackled insanely, as if the fire were a demon, delighting in the chaos, destroying all it touched. It had consumed his mother and his younger sisters the moment the first missiles had struck, and the blast had washed away half their house like a wave, and left him trapped in a pocket of wreckage that had spared his room the immediate destruction. The fate had been cruel rather than kind, since it meant he would be denied the quick death of the explosion to savor the agony of burning alive.
His father had arrived like an avenging angel, the big man’s massive boot crashing through what remained of his bedroom door with a billowing inrush of smoke and heat. George Freeman was on fire, the flames eating away at his clothes and his skin, and already burning the hair off his head in wisps of curling smoke. But he grabbed his son by the arm and sheltered him with his body as he bulldozed a path back out through the conflagration, through a heat so intense that little Abel thought it would burn him down to the bone. Then one final impact as the front door gave way, and they were outside, and he could breathe again.
His father had collapsed beside him out on the front walk, his eyes staring into infinity as the great, strong man had finally let his life slip away, his last task accomplished. Abel couldn’t even cry; this wasn’t real, this was some nightmare from which he couldn’t wake. He stared dully at the barn collapsing just a few dozen meters away, across what had been lush grass, but was now charred and smoking earth. In the distance, a red glow lit up the dark horizon, and he wondered that it could be dawn already; it was too early.
When he heard the engine grumbling, heard the tires grinding on the dirt and ash, he couldn’t even rouse himself enough to look up. There was the squeak of an ancient suspension, and a door opening, and heavy footsteps that came to a halt right in front of him, the battered work boots filling his vision. He finally looked up, into the craggy, lined face, the ragged, blond hair and the unkempt, blue uniform shirt.
“I’m sorry about your family, son,” Constable Llewellyn Johansen said, hand resting on the butt of the big revolver holstered at his side. “But y’see that glow over there?” He pointed at the horizon. Abel nodded slowly. “Well, that’s Kennedy City, and most of it’s already gone. It’s the Tahni, y’see.” He waved upward at the sky and Abel heard the roar of jet engines overhead in the distance. “They swarmed through the Jumpgate and overwhelmed the orbital defenses and we just don’t have enough ships insystem to stop them. I’ve been picking up survivors.”
Abel stared at the battered, ancient, alcohol-fueled utility truck, and vacant eyes stared back at him. Many were little older than him, most of them still only teenagers. He wondered for a moment where their parents were, until he felt reality slap him in the back of the head like his father would do when he asked a stupid question.
“If you wanna’ come with me, son,” Johansen continued, softly but urgently, “then we need to leave right now. The Tahni are landing in the city, and they’ll have patrols out here soon.”
He reached out a hand, and Abel took it, the dry strength of it so much like his father’s as it pulled him up to his feet…
Abel Freeman felt the world swim around him in a haze of pain and confusion, and a heat that seared his lungs when he tried to take a breath. He hadn’t been unconscious…he didn’t think he’d been unconscious…
Shit, he thought with rueful admission. Unless all that stuff back on Aphrodite was a daydream, then I was fucking unconscious.
He’d certainly at least had the wind knocked out of him by the force of the blast from whatever it was that Jordi Abdullah had fired. He’d never seen one before, and hoped like hell he never saw one again.
He forced his eyes open, forced his body to move despite the dull ache that seemed to engulf it, punctuated in places by sharper, knifing agony. The ruins of the garage office were scattered about, and under and on top of him, and pieces of them were still on fire. He jerked instinctively, despite the pain it caused in his back and shoulders, throwing the burning bits of wood and plastic off of him, leaving behind smoldering, charred patches on his jacket and jeans, and burns beneath that he’d have to ignore for now.
It was hard to make out anything through the smoke, particularly with half the light panels in the garage burned out, but he could tell that he was alone; there were no bodies around him, no dead or wounded, and no one shooting at him. That part was good, the rest not so much. Freeman pushed himself to a sitting position, searching around on the debris-littered floor for his handgun, but not finding it.
“Damn it,” he mumbled. That had been Johansen’s gun.
The sound of his own voice seemed off, and he realized then that his ears had been ringing, his hearing muted by the blast, but it was beginning to come back…and the cacophony of battle came with it. He looked up sharply, hearing gunfire, explosions, feeling the ground shaking. It all seemed to be coming from off in the direction of the garage door, and there was one spot where the sound was louder, clearer than anywhere else, a gap in the metal of the roll-up barrier. He could tell there was a source of fresh air that way, as well; the smoke was roiling out in that direction, starting to clear, though he still couldn’t make anything out by the dim and flickering light of the fires.
He was willing to bet that Jordi Abdullah and his people had gone out there to deal with the attack; and, if Fontenot, Singh or Kan-Ten were still alive, they’d be out there too.
Should I go out and try to raise some hell on my own, he wondered, or should I go cut my deputies loose from the holding cells first, and increase the level of potential hell-raising exponentially?
He put that debate on hold when he heard voices coming down the hallway from further into the building. He thought for a moment his hearing was still messed up when he couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he quickly realized that was because they were speaking Tahni. He’d heard it often enough back on Aphrodite during the occupation to get a feel for it, though he still couldn’t understand a word of it, even after all these years on Brigantia.
He thought about Jordi’s Tahni allies and rolled into a crouch, looking around again for a gun, or something he could use as a weapon. It was too late; their shadows emerged before they did, backlit by the undamaged lights in the hallway, projected across the layer of particulate dust and smoke floating across the garage. It was a male and female---together, which was odd---and it looked as if the male was dragging the female physically out into the garage. She was old, and oddly dressed even for a Tahni, and suddenly he realized that he recognized her from Jordi’s broadcast video: she was the Matriarch, that Tahni priestess they were holding hostage.
The male, he couldn’t place; they all tended to look alike to him. But if he was here, and allied with Jordi, and dragging the old lady around, Freeman figured he must be that Vala-Kel he’d heard about. And he didn’t seem to be carrying a gun, which made Abel Freeman feel so much better about things.
They didn’t seem to notice him there, crouched in the shadows, and he waited until they were almost even with him before he leapt to his feet. He charged the male, throwing his not-inconsiderable weight into a body block that took both of them down. The female’s arm came loose of Vala-Kel’s grip, and she rolled away from him and out of Freeman’s peripheral vision as he focused on grappling with the big warrior. The Constable had fought Tahni hand-to-hand before, and he knew not to aim any blows at the head; the bone there was thick, and he was more likely to wind up with a set of broken knuckles than to do any
damage. He also knew not to attempt any of the joint locks or arm bars he’d trained in for so long, since they didn’t work well on joints that bent in slightly different directions than a human’s.
Freeman went for what had worked for him before: strikes at the throat, and knees aimed for the upper thigh, but this guy wasn’t sitting still for it. This Vala-Kel was strong, even for a Tahni, and when he blocked Freeman’s attempted chops at his neck, it felt as if the Constable was ramming his arm into an iron bar set in cement. Freeman didn’t even see the blow coming; one second, he was on top of the Tahni, pounding away at him, the next he was rolling off across the floor, his right shoulder pulsing with a flare of pain, like it had been dislocated.
The Tahni was up before Freeman tumbled to a stop; he could see the alien springing to his feet with an inhuman litheness to his motions, and he knew he’d bitten off far more than he could chew. He was clawing for purchase in the wood and bits of concrete on the floor when the fingers of his left hand brushed against a polished, wooden grip; his hand closed around the revolver and he rolled onto his back and fired by instinct. There was a flash from the rocket’s exhaust, a red glare that left an afterimage across his vision, and the Tahni was spinning away, clutching at his right shoulder.
The Constable tried to follow through with another shot, but Vala-Kel was already running behind cover, and the warhead plowed into the side of a rover, already peppered with KE-gun needles, as the Tahni dropped from sight. Freeman cursed, trying to push himself to his feet and hold onto the gun simultaneously with one hand, the other useless from his injured shoulder. He saw the wounded Tahni dash between vehicles and fired off another snap-shot at him, but he was unsteady and rushed, and the warhead flared impotently against the roll-up door at the far end of the garage.
Freeman coughed, unable to hold it in, the smoke scratching at his throat, the barrel of his revolver wavering at the motion as he held it out in the direction he’d last seen Vala-Kel. Shadows flickered between the vehicles, but he couldn’t be sure if it was actual movement or just a trick of the flames. He nearly stumbled as he tried to shuffle across the wreckage-strewn floor, sliding over to where the old Tahni female crouched behind a vehicle charging station.