The Tuloriad-ARC

by John Ringo

  Querida huffed. She'd seen the grip the Switzers had taken on their halberds when they'd spotted her.

  "Your mother is not impressed with that, Son. Neither am I."

  "I'm sorry, Dad."

  "You will stay away from them now."

  "But . . . but . . . they proved they won't harm me."

  "Yes . . . and you will stay away from them as your punishment, until I say otherwise. In time, if you had listened, I would have spoken to their leader and let you talk to them. That time will be later, now."

  Sniffling, the boy turned away. Querida began to walk over to comfort him, but was stopped in her tracks by her husband's yellow-eyed glare.

  Guano turned away, asking himself, What's your real objection to the boy making human friends? Or is it that you don't want him to make human friends that are soldiers? Yes . . . I think that's it. I want the boy to follow in my footsteps, to become a minister of the Lord. But the drive among our people to fight is so strong that I'm afraid that exposure to human soldiers will bring it out in him.

  Is it so wrong of me to want something better for my son than I had in my time as a young kessentai?

  "Time, Dan," Sally said.

  "Excelsior," the priest said, with a smile. Higher.

  The launch began with a repeller field pushing the water of the lake away from the hull a distance of about half a meter. The water foamed and boiled, but allowed in enough air to eliminate any suction that would have put a strain on the hull.

  With the water not an issue, Salem went straight up on her integral anti-gravity, slowly, perhaps ten meters. She kept level the entire time. Equally slowly, one might even have said "majestically," she swung her nose around to face due west. The ship did a quick check to ensure that there were no aircraft in the way, and simply launched herself straight forward.

  Acceleration was slow, but steady. Even so, the passengers inside the hull could not have told they were under acceleration at all due to the inertial dampening field.

  The light around the ship disappeared as it left atmosphere and entered space. On the bridge, Dwyer quoted, "And as far as the eye of God could see darkness covered everything, blacker than a hundred midnights down in the cypress swamp."

  Sally, who had a better than encyclopedic memory of very nearly everything, added for him, "And God smiled, and the light broke, and the darkness rolled up on one side, and the light stood shining on the other."

  "And God said, 'that's good.'" Dwyer, too, smiled. Then he frowned as he said, "Sally, have von Altishofen bring up the Indowy. And tell Guanamarioch to stand by to bring up his Artificial Sentience."

  Chapter Fifteen

  And in the communal spilling of blood

  Did the diverse people become one.

  —The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren

  Anno Domini 2010

  Esstwo paced outside the ship, pondering a problem. It seemed that one of the great herds of normals that infested the surface of the planet had deviated slightly in its path and, while it should have missed the refugees' encampment, was now heading straight towards it.

  It's within the bounds of probability, though, the Esstwo thought. After all, they're just mindless herds. No doubt the grazing was slightly better in one direction than another and they simply diverted slightly. Also, no doubt, they'll divert again if the grazing is slightly better in some other direction.

  A cosslain trotted up to the Esstwo, squealing and grunting furiously. Of course it couldn't speak, so it—almost unthinkably—grabbed the Esstwo's harness and began to pull. The kessentai tried to brush off the lesser creature.

  The cosslain was insistent, however, and continued pulling on Esstwo's harness with one claw while pointing at the portal to the ship with the other. For a while, the Esstwo kept trying to send the cosslain away, even to the point of threatening it with his boma blade. The lesser creature remained insistent though, and—so the Esstwo thought—amazingly uncowed. Eventually, he decided to follow. Once inside the ship and on the bridge, Esstwo went over and looked at a screen toward which the cosslain pointed frantically.

  "Fuscirto!"

  I've got to send a recon patrol out.

  Tulo gulped. "How many of them did you say there were?"

  "Too many?" At Tulo's glare the Esstwo relented. "Several millions in each of five herds that I know of. There may be more coming. More herds, I mean."

  "Can we get the ship and landers airborne again?" Tulo asked Goloswin.

  "The landers, certainly," the tinkerer answered. "But it will be more than a day before the anti-matter engine is ready to remount."

  The engine itself was disassembled, except for the actual containment unit which could not be disassembled without some pretty disastrous consequences to the nearest several hundred cubic kilometers. It lay in a shed, under the care of Golo, Finba'anaga, and several dozen mixed kessentai and cosslain.

  Tulo turned back to the Esstwo. "And they get here exactly when?"

  "Midmorning tomorrow," the Esstwo answered.

  "How truly wonderful. Can we load up the pieces, then take off under landing thrusters and rebuild the engine in space?"

  Golo made a negative sign. "After the drain from slowing the ship to escape the sun, we can't even run life support long enough without the power from the antimatter."

  "And," added the Esstwo, "we can't run. Those herds are heading this way under something like direction."

  "You think there's an intelligence controlling them to attack us?" Tulo asked.

  Esstwo shook his head. "Didn't say that. I said they were under something like direction, as if our presence here keyed them to come after us."

  "How do we know they intend to attack?" Golo asked. "Maybe the normals are just looking for God-kings to bond with."

  "I thought of that and dispatched two kessentai on a single tenar."

  "And?"

  "They ate them and smashed the tenar into flinders. Deliberately."

  "With what?"

  "They carry short flint blades, hardly more than longish knives really, and those are the only signs of any technology they seem to have."

  "With numbers like that, against numbers like ours, they could use rocks," Golo observed, then added, sheepishly, "Oh. Flint is rock, isn't it?"

  "What do we use against them?" Tulo asked.

  "I can't make fission bombs and so I can't make fusion weapons either. And the anti-matter we need."

  "How about those nasty little things the humans used to use?" Tulo asked. "The things that lay on the ground until one of the People gets close enough and then they jump up and: CHOP!"

  "Bouncing Barbies?" Golo said. He shook his head. "Wish I knew what that name implied. In any case, no, I can't make those. We don't have the force field generators to pervert to make them. I can make land mines."

  "How many by tomorrow . . . say . . . first light?"

  "Ten or fifteen thousand."

  The sun was down and the stars out as Tulo walked, with a outward calm he did not feel, toward the waiting tenar. Of the sixteen flying sleds the Arganaza'al had carried, three more than normal, one was lost. The remainder, with fourteen kessentai, under the command of Brasingala, hovered near the C-Dec awaiting final orders.

  "I don't know if it will even work," Tulo said. "But I think it's our best chance to thin out the ranks of those coming towards us."

  Brasingala grimaced. "Something had better work, Lord."

  Tulo made a short nod of agreement. "You know your orders?"

  "Yes, Lord. I and my kessentai are to seek out a herd and shoot it up. We are not to try to stop it nor to waste ammunition killing more than necessary. What you hope is that the normals will waste time feeding on the dead and buy us some better odds by spacing out their arrival more. Once we see if it works with one herd, we're to move on to the next. If at all possible, you want us to distract four of the coming five herds then return here to act as a mobile reserve."

  "That, yes, and not to get killed doing it," Tu
lo reminded.

  "Won't quarrel with those orders, Lord."

  "I may have to call you back before you get to any of the other herds."

  The camp was a bustle of activity as the People strengthened the ramparts, sited weapons, passed out ammunition and emplaced the landmines Goloswin's forge churned out as fast as raw material could be provided.

  Even so, with every hand needed, Finba'anaga had still made an appointment to speak with the Rememberer. The time for that appointment was now. Respectfully, in truth a lot more respectfully than he felt, Finba approached and made his offering, a bit of heavy metal he took from a pouch on his harness.

  The Rememberer looked askance at the golden bit laying in his palm. His contempt was enough to send Finba's claw searching deeper in his pouch.

  "I don't do this for reward," the Rememberer said, thrusting his claw out, "or, at least, not for material reward. So keep your metal and get your claw out of your pouch."

  Finba had never heard of a Rememberer who didn't demand some kind of edas, at least, for his services. Then again, this band of Tulo'stenaloor is insane, anyway.

  "Yes, Lord," he said, as he wetted his claw and picked up the gold, before scraping it off on the inside edge of the pouch.

  "What was your question, new one?"

  "My questions"—Finba put a clear emphasis on the last word—"concern the Knower Wars . . . that, and the Aldenata."

  "Ask."

  "This planet . . . and the asteroid belt? They are the result of the Knower Wars?"

  "Yes."

  "We are descended from the victors in those wars?"

  "Yes."

  "Which side won?"

  The Rememberer sneered, not at Finba but at the memories contained in his scrolls.

  "Both sides lost," he said. "But for what you mean, the side which preferred to be pure suppliants to the Aldenata, the side which rejected any new knowledge the People might discover on their own . . . they 'won,' for some values of winning. By that I mean that they defeated those who sought new knowledge on their own, and as their reward they were exiled by the Aldenata to an inhospitable world from which they were never expected to escape. That was our reward for faithful service."

  "Then who were the ancestors of the normals here on this planet?" Finba asked.

  "You think the Aldenata could really have tampered with the genes of the People here in such a way as to make them kill kessentai?" Golo asked of Finba. "That they weren't content with just poisoning the eggs?"

  "What powers did the Aldenata not possess, Lord?" Finba asked in return.

  "It would be a logical way to ensure that intelligence, at least our intelligence, never arose here again," Golo agreed after a minute's thought. "After all, it was always possible that some egg containing a kessentai-to-be might have proven immune to their plague, and that immunity it might have passed on. Devils, they were."

  "So the Rememberer informs me, Lord. And there's something else, too."

  "Go ahead; spit it out."

  Finba answered, "I think it is possible—no, Lord, I am not sure but it is possible—that the disease left here, I think by the Aldenata, does more than kill kessentai and cosslain in their shells. I think it changes the normals so that they turn. I think it is the pheromones of those who descended from the 'victors' in the Knower Wars, the same ones we use to bind normals to our service, that set off the normals locally. As if they were a backstop, a failsafe, on the odd chance we might escape from the world of our exile and abandonment. I think this planet is a trap."

  Golo turned away and began to pace. There was a thought there . . . a . . . something . . . something . . . something we're not seeing. What could . . . ah . . . shit.

  "Tulo! Tulo!" Goloswin gasped with the effort of his gallop to find his chief. "Tulo!"

  "I'm a little busy right this second, Golo," Tulo said calmly as the tinkerer came to a shuddering stop.

  "However busy you are, you've got to take some of the People off preparations and start them destroying any eggs that may have been laid since we awakened those who were in hibernation."

  "That's nonsense. Why should we? Normals lay eggs. It doesn't matter."

  "Because when they hatch the nestlings are going to come after us. And some of them are almost certainly about to hatch, if they haven't already. Enough nestlings can gnaw a kessentai down to bone, Lord. And they always mass for an attack."

  "HERE THEY COME!"

  Tulo heard the words, distantly. He didn't need the warning, none of the People did. The pounding of the oncoming herd's motive claws had been strong enough to feel through the ground for the last half hour.

  "So this is how the humans felt," he muttered. "This is how they felt when seemingly impossible numbers of us swarmed them."

  Even now, the line on the wall facing this first herd was a little thinner than it should have been. Those missing files were searching through the camp, chopping any egg or nestling they found. Tulo had already received one report of a hurt cosslain, ripped up badly when a quintet of the little bastards had ambushed it from a hide.

  "AS, get me Brasingala."

  "Yes, Lord," the AS answered.

  There was a slight pause, and then, "Brasingala here, Lord. It's worked so far. Both the first and second herd stopped their progress to eat the dead. I'm working over the third now."

  "The fourth is badly positioned, Brasingala, and can't hit us at the same time as another herd. I need you to finish distracting the one you're on and then get back here. Fast."

  "Wilco, Lord." This was another human expression Tulo had picked up and spread throughout his host back on Earth. Wilco: I understand and will comply. Of course, since it came out as Aaavvviiiillllcooo, with sundry snarls, glottal stops, and grunts interspersed, it sounded a bit different in low Posleen.

  The scrawny native Posleen normal usually thought of itself, to the extent it thought at all, as "stomach, needing to be filled." In this particular it was exactly the same as the one million, seven hundred and forty-seven thousand, eight hundred and twelve other members of its herd. Occasionally, too, it thought of itself as "dick, needing to be rubbed," and "egg holder, needing to be emptied." It shared these particulars, as well, with its one million and change siblings and cousins.

  Stomach-Dick-Egg Holder Number Six hundred and Fifty-seven Thousand, Fourteen (which number it didn't know about and wouldn't have understood if someone had tried to explain it) did have one distinction or, rather, two. Being even scrawnier than the herd norm, it had been on the very edge of the great animate eating machine. This had enabled it to be the very first to smell the almost impossibly faint whiff of enemy pheromones on the breeze.

  It had immediately sent up a keening cry, which cry had been picked up by the others as they, too, caught the scent. As one, then, the point of the herd, uttering a wail of hunger and hate, had turned into the faint breeze, following that scent. The rearward ranks had followed, as they always did, until they, too, caught that first whiff of what their distant ancestors would have called, with prejudice, "non-Knowers."

  A few of the herd, a bit slow to catch on, or perhaps only slow to realize that the scent, however faint, had caught onto them, were knocked down and, while still living, eviscerated and ripped into shreds. All the rest moved at a-strength conserving trot into the wind.

  Our particular Stomach-Dick-Egg Holder, because it was on the outside of the mass, was actually able to move more easily and quickly. Thus, it was the first to notice the odd round things that positively reeked of the hated genetic enemy. It was thus also the first to come close enough to one of them to see it launch itself upward in a small plume of smoke and the very first to have its face ripped off by metal shards and ball bearings.

  It was, then, not one of those who first saw the arcs of some thousands of railguns, firing as one.

  The AS, serving as communicator, spoke, "Brasingala to Tulo'stenaloor. Brasingala to the lord of Clan Sten."

  "Tulo speaking."

&n
bsp; "It didn't work with this crew, Lord. No clue why. We blasted a few thousand of them but they just kept on going."

  "Maybe our scent is too strong at the range they're at," Tulo answered.

  "Maybe so, Lord. Doesn't matter though. You planned on dealing with one herd at a time, at most. You're going to have to face two of them."

  "How truly good . . . Brasingala, can you delay their arrival here?"

  "Doubt it, Lord. They ignore casualties. And we're not carrying an infinity of ammunition."

  "Right. Come back then."

  The main armament of three of the landers' could be brought to bear on the oncoming herd. These, however, were only heavy duty railguns. The C-Dec, likewise, being centered on the high ground in the middle of the camp, could fire as many of four or sometimes five of its heavier weapons. These eight or nine, plus the two to three thousand hand-held railguns that the ground troops carried, were not enough. Already there were leakers, and of every so many leakers, one would find one of Tulo's people with its short flint blade.