by John Ringo
The Swiss Guardsmen, carrying their halberds, ate while standing and walking from group to group, introducing themselves and reminding everyone that should a religious argument begin and get out of hand they were there to bust heads.
It was a nice picnic, but a melancholy one. Not a man, or sentient alien, for that matter, but wondered if he or she would ever see Earth again, but wondered if they would not die on some strange world, unmarked and unmourned, for the cause of their various faiths.
While Dwyer made the rounds, Sally, sitting on a spread blanket, became aware of a newcomer, an Indowy, approaching the congregation from the direction of Rome. As the Indowy came closer, and her perceptions grew more acute, Sally's flesh and blood body stood up, and raced in the direction of the alien, screaming, "Swiss Guards to me, to ME!"
Aelool, walking alone and wearing a really awful multicolored jacket with odd geometric designs, came to a very surprised halt when a blond valkyrie suddenly appeared in front of him, with a half a dozen big men in armor and carrying bizarre chopping instruments hard on her heels.
"Freeze in place, Indowy," the valkyrie ordered. She kept her eyes away from him. Turning to the foremost of the men who followed her, she shouted, "If that furry little bastard doesn't take that jacket off and fold it up in the next two seconds, chop him into dog meat!"
It took rather less time than that for Aelool to doff the coat, and fold it up with the design on the inside. By then, the Switzers had formed a protective screen in front of Sally.
"I should have known better," he said to Sally. "My apologies, Madam."
"Apologies be damned. Why did you come here carrying a virus to infect me? Answer quickly, Indowy. These men will kill you if I don't like the answer."
"I am Aelool," the alien said. "I came here to help you—"
"Yeah, sure. That and the check's in the mail and you won't come in my mouth. Kill him!"
The Switzers raised their halberds and advanced.
"Wait," Aelool said. He'd been frightened aboard the Posleen ship, and among the Posleen, generally, but nothing he'd ever experienced was quite as frightful as the eager way these human guards raised their weapons to slash him to ribbons. "Wait! You seek the Posleen. I, and the coat I wore, are the directions. Wait, I tell you."
The first halberd began to descend when Sally cried, "Halt." It was a measure of the Swiss Guards' training and discipline that that halberd stopped bare inches from the Indowy's right shoulder.
"You've earned another two minutes, Indowy. Use it well," Sally said.
Dwyer thought, Uh, oh, when he saw a tiny Indowy being marched off around the lake under the close guard of a half a dozen of the Switzers led by his wife. Smelling trouble, he followed. Also smelling trouble, the Reverend Doctor Guanamarioch followed the priest. They caught up to Sally and the Swiss by the lake shore, in a hidden spot where the vegetation had been trampled down. By that time, the Indowy was on hands and knees, with his neck outstretched and a halberd poised above, held ready for a fast descent. They were plainly going to kill him and Sally, one hand raised, was just as plainly about to give the order.
"This rotten little bat-faced swine was trying to infect me with a virus, Dan," Sally said, before he could even ask what was going on. "He claims he was only trying to give me directions to some Posleen escapees. Says he helped them escape. And not just any old Posleen either; but the core of the band of Tulo'stenaloor, the great war chief. You want to give the little motherfucker last rites before I have him chopped?"
"Wait," Dwyer said. "Check your records from the war, Sally. Isn't it true that no trace of Tulo'stenaloor or his close band was ever found?"
"Yes. So?"
"So maybe the Indowy is telling the truth. Maybe we can use the information he has."
Please, please, listen to this man, Aelool thought, gulping hard.
"No good, Dan. He says he can't tell us, he can only infect me to bring me there without my permission."
"I'm sorry," Aelool said, twisting his bat-faced head around to try to look at the priest. "Even I don't know where the Posleen can be found. It is a Great Secret of the Bane Sidhe. The directions are encoded in the jacket I wore. I can't tell you; I can only show you . . . well, show you the jacket."
"And me lose my free will?" Sally scoffed. "Make ready," she said to the designated executioner, who lifted his halberd a foot and a half to add to the power of his impending stroke.
Dwyer took two steps forward and knelt down next to the Indowy. If nothing else, it might make Sally and the Switzer hesitate about swinging that halberd.
"Better come up with something quick, Aelool," the priest whispered.
"I can't!"
"Perhaps I can help, myself and my AS," Guano offered, through the Artificial Sentience. "Tell me, Indowy, is your coded message able to work on an AS?"
"Yes!"
"Will it have any harmful effect on the AS?"
"No! Certainly not, if it isn't in control of a ship."
Guano reached down with both claws, lifting his AS from around his chest to a place near his face. Guano's crucifix chain, half intertwined with the AS' chain, dangled between them.
"Old friend," Guano said in Posleen, "I will not order you to do this. Yet I think if you do not, the little fuzzy one will die. Are you willing?"
"For the Lord God, above, and the salvation of our people, I am willing, Guano," the AS answered, in English. "Choose me, Lord," it said, more softly.
Chapter Thirteen
And so the sacred seven
Clustered like loyal cosslain
About their lord ingathered
And fought their way toward home
—The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren
Anno Domini 2010
Posleen ship Arganaza'al
From the outside, looking in, it appeared that hundreds of centauroids, clothed in EVA suits, clustered about the ship on the side facing away from the star. Some sliced off sections of ruined landers. Still others carried the pieces inside through the airlocks. That outside observer could not have seen the reason for carrying in those pieces of metal, though he could have surmised those reasons from the finished sections of chain that still other suited Posleen carried out. These built, piece by piece, until sixteen long silvery strings dangled out and away from the main ship.
Goloswin, watching from the view screens on the bridge, said, "I've been over Finba's calculations a dozen times, Tulo . . . no, two dozen. It ought to work."
"It ought to work if they finish before we are much closer to that star," Tulo corrected.
"Well, yes, there's that. It will be close."
Hemaleen was a great burning presence on the ship's lower side. Three landers, their engines facing out, remained fixed to the ship, clustered around its own landing engine. On the upper side, four landers, clasped together, strained at the leash.
"Begin," ordered Tulo'stenaloor.
Essthree took a deep breath and said, "C-Dec engine, one hundred percent thrust." The ship shuddered with the strain. It did not halt its progress toward the sun, though it did slow. "Affixed landers, one hundred percent; towing landers, seven percent."
Still more the ship slowed. "Towing landers, ten percent thrust," Essthree said. "Fourteen . . . twenty-two . . . thirty-four . . . fifty."
"We're stable relative to the sun," Esstwo announced.
"Towing landers, seventy-five percent thrust," Essthree ordered, then waited until that was achieved. "One percent increase per five beats to one hundred percent thrust."
Faintly, the shrieking protests of the metal chain links fashioned to Finba'anaga's specifications worked their way through the shackles and through the metal hull down to the C-Dec's bridge. It was eerie and unnerving but, as the Essthree said, "I think we're going to make it."
A normal Posleen invasion took on the attributes of what the humans sometimes called, "The Eye of Baal." Space was rent, kinetic energy projectiles and various beam weapons raised great clouds of dust whi
ch swirled and sparkled above. Fires on the ground added their smoky glow. And then, in a mass, through the swirling maelstrom, the landers began descending.
This was nothing like that. After escaping from Hemaleen's gravitational pull, the ship and its landers made for the nearest inhabitable world, the one that, with the asteroid belt, still told of a great war using the greatest of weapons. Around that it assumed orbit, scouting for a suitable landing site.
Below, there were no cities. If there were any pyramids of the old time kessentai, they were deep-buried under the collected soil of ages, with perhaps only their barely noticeable caps protruding.
Most of the planet below was forest. That forest was criss-crossed with clear cut areas, each as much as one hundred human kilometers across.
"We've identified nineteen great herds down below," said the Esstwo.
"Herds of what?" asked Tulo.
"Herds of us . . . well . . . not us, exactly. We sent down a low probe. They're normals, not even with cosslain. Stunted normals, at that, maybe three-fourths the usual size. Hundreds of millions of them in a mass. They move across that world in straight lines, pretty much, eating everything in their path down to the roots. It looks like they've been doing it for a very long time."
"What kind of weapon would do that?" Tulo asked.
"A genetic one, clearly," Goloswin answered. "And it might still be hanging around."
"We have to know before we can trust a landing," Tulo said.
"I don't know that we'll have any choice," Golo pointed out. "We need more refined metal and that's about the best source."
"The asteroid belt," Binastarion offered.
"Not for all our needs. Oh, yes, the metal's there. But we can only employ a fraction, a small fraction, of our work force at getting it at any given time. Down below, if we can land and survive, we'll be able to use every being."
"I don't see why we're worrying," Binastarion said. "As a people we're pretty much immune to every disease."
"There are hints in the scrolls," said the Rememberer. "The people who made us immune to every disease they could identify or even conceive of are quite likely also the people who attacked the world below with a disease we were not immune to."
"The Aldenata?" Tulo asked.
"The Aldenata."
Esstwo pored over his screens. While Tulo'stenaloor had agreed to a landing, in limited force, and for no more than exploratory purposes, the precise spot for that landing made a difference.
Touching one claw lightly to the screen, the Esstwo thought, There's a great deal of refined metal there, under the surface of that spot. An ancient city? It seems likely. Will it also be an epicenter for disease? Will the disease, if it's real, still be active?
The site upon which the Esstwo concentrated was also at a juncture of the cleared paths left by the hordes of what he had come to think of as the subnormals.
And that, too, is odd. All the other possible sites, as well, are either at such crossroads or along the harvested paths. Mere herd instinct? Some sort of racial memory of what once was? I wish I knew.
But there'll be no knowing until some of us go down and look.
To a human, the planet would have been the height of ugliness. To a Posleen, it was positively homelike. Everything appealed, from the grit crunching underneath, to the orange-red foliage, to the relative absence of surface water.
Not that there wasn't water. There were rivulets and creeks aplenty. But few or none of them, and none in the landing area, were so deep than even a fairly short Posleen couldn't wade right through.
Goloswin hadn't been allowed down in that first wave. Instead, his assistant, Finba'anaga had gone in his place, along with forty-nine other kessentai, a like number of cosslain, and three hundred normals. For this, Tulo had ordered arms broken out and issued. The C-Dec had been ransacked for anything that might be of use.
Essthree was in command, with Esstwo by his side. Tulo had wanted to descend, himself, but those two had prevailed upon him to stay in the C-Dec. In this, they had been joined by Goloswin and the Rememberer, as well as Binastarion. In the end, that weight of opinion was enough to keep Tulo, safe and chafing about it, off of the landing party roster.
One good thing, Essthree thought, as the lander screamed through atmosphere; at least there are no human planetary defense bases below to swat us from the skies as we descend. Better still, there'll be none of the metal threshkreen, or the humans' damnable war machines, to contest possession of the ground we land on. For this, I thank thee, o spirits of the ancestors.
Of course, being the ancestors, what they may have in store could be much, much worse.
Essthree powered a microphone and said, "All kessentai, landing in . . . thirty beats. Standard drill."
The Arganaza'al had been nearly denuded of EVA suits to outfit the landing party, only half a dozen members of which—all normals of little or no more than normal attributes—had been denied suits. This was to see if whatever it was on the planet that withered the People affected those who were already full grown. Those half dozen had also not been given weapons.
All the rest, but for the lander's own bridge crew, formed in a mass before the ramp. They swayed and shook on their feet as their craft was buffeted by winds and atmospheric vagaries. In unconscious imitation of human Soldiers or Marines closing on a hostile beach or landing zone, many of the kessentai stroked talismans, or whispered prayers to half forgotten spirits.
Each God-king stiffened as he heard the warning, "All kessentai; landing in thirty beats. Standard drill. Twenty-eight . . . twenty . . . ten . . . five . . . three . . . two . . . one." The lander shuddered and rocked with the touchdown.
There was a loud whine that signaled the opening of the ramp. Inside, the darkened hold grew brighter as first a thin streak, then a bar, then a square of light opened up. When the ramp was approximately thirty degrees above the horizontal, the whining cut out with a loud, ship-shaking clang. The ramp then dropped under the power of the local gravity to the ground, bounced twice, and came to a stop.
The four kessentai selected as group leaders were in the van. As soon as the ramp ceased bouncing, their claws began churning at the metal, propelling them outward. One went straight ahead and stopped several hundred meters from the ramp. Two turned to the right, of which one went straight and the other galloped around the lander to its far side. The fourth cut left.
There was no particular order to the debarkation. Each kessentai chosen for leadership had bonded with a certain number of cosslain and normals; each chief was followed by a dozen or so junior kessentai. These tracked their leaders and lords through pheromones left on the ground or hanging in the air, even as their normals and cosslain tracked them. In what seemed to be no more than a few beats, the apparently disorderly mass had separated out into four streams following their chiefs.
Vegetation was trampled and rocks and gravel propelled upward by the Posleen claws as they raced to form a square around the lander. Even as they did, the lander's own heavy weapons emerged from their position of repose within the hull and began to sweep for signs of danger. A last few normals and cosslain filled in the gaps in the four lines oriented around the ship and then . . .
"That's it? Nothing else?" the Essthree asked, rhetorically.
"I think you've grown paranoid from dealing with the humans,"
Esstwo answered.
"It's impossible to be paranoid when dealing with humans," Essthree countered. His voice grew contemplative as his head cocked to one side. "Somehow, your wildest imaginings of doom never quite equal the reality."
"Point," Esstwo agreed. "What now."
"As I said, standard drill." In Low Posleen, "Standard Drill" translated, approximately, as, "This place sucks. Dig in."
When Finba'anaga emerged, wearing Goloswin's suit, he saw half of the cosslain and kessentai standing guard with a mix of the heaviest weapons available. The rest, the normals, dug like furies, blasting into the ground with their rail guns, h
alf of them, and scooping the spoil out to form a tall, broad berm, the other half. The height of the berm was matched to the height of the weapons mounted on the lander in order to give them good fields of fire without endangering the Posleen behind the berm.
None of my business, Finba thought. My job is to figure out if this is clear for the rest of the crew to land.