by Neal Asher
Aloud, Tholis asked, ‘What are your orders, Hierarch?’
Loman turned and gazed steadily at him, then after a moment relented: it was understandable that the man wanted to hear a direct order witnessed by others.
‘I want you to kill all of these Septarchy parasites on their wonderful lawns, and I want you to throw their bodies onto the borders, so that the flowers are fertilized by their blood. Is that clear enough for you?’
‘It is clear, Hierarch,’ Tholis replied.
They first came in high over the inhabited lands: ion thrusters filling the sky with actinic white stars in rectilinear display, on wave after wave of bulky landing craft. Below each wave the flickering of orange lights ignited the sky beyond the edge of the crater, and soon the sound of a distant storm came grumbling down onto them.
‘They’re bombing something,’ observed Gant.
‘Yes,’ said Cormac, ‘let’s get our gear together and get out of here.’
Out of sight the craft must have turned, because soon the first waves were coming in over their heads – now heading towards the inhabited area of the planet – and Cormac supposed it was too much to hope that the Theocracy would not come to inspect this site where the creature that had destroyed their arrays had come down. As the last line of craft rumbled over, one of them peeled away and descended on the eastern side of the crater.
‘Mika, move it!’ he shouted, as the Life-Coven woman once again turned on the inspection light she had secured to her temple with a skin-stick pad, and delayed to study some bizarre gory object and cut samples from it. She hurried to catch up, as he stood waiting with his boot resting on the bottom of the slab.
‘We could hide here,’ she suggested half-heartedly, indicating the macabre architecture she had been studying, which now – in the semi-dark which was all of a night this place managed – seemed to be turning into an organo-Gothic monastery. It was a protest really – she just didn’t want to leave this place of such reverential interest to her.
Trotting up behind her Gant said, ‘Not too clever an idea – only one way out, and they’ll certainly be coming down here.’
‘There’s so much more to learn – I’ve hardly scraped the surface,’ said Mika, looking back regretfully as she stepped onto the slab to follow Apis.
‘I promise that when this is all over we’ll let you come back here and dig it all up,’ said Cormac.
‘A lot of digging,’ said Mika. ‘There is, by my calculation, only fifty per cent of Dragon visible here in this crater.’
Cormac caught her arm. ‘What do you mean?’
She gestured to the slopes on either side. ‘The rest of it must be buried deeper under here, or it vaporized on impact,’ she said.
‘Remember, a lot was already sheared away from the creature,’ he reminded her.
She shook off his arm and moved on up the sloping stone. ‘I have, of course, taken all that into account,’ she said haughtily.
‘Oh damn,’ said Cormac, surveying the scene in the crater with infinite suspicion, before turning to Gant. ‘Where’s Scar?’
Gant glanced up the slope to Apis and Mika, then quickly scanned all around. Abruptly his expression became puzzled, and he lifted his fingers to touch the side of his head. ‘He’s not responding to his comlink,’ he announced.
And so it begins, thought Cormac, then instructed, ‘Go with the others and get them under cover. I’ll catch up with you.’
Gant looked set to protest, but Cormac didn’t give him a chance, quickly turning away and heading back the way they had come. A glance behind showed Gant hesitate, then turn to bound easily up the slab after Mika and Apis.
Cormac quietly initiated Shuriken as he moved into the shadows of the Dragon corpse. Many years ago he had been present when the entirety of this creature had apparently suicided. He’d foolishly believed it then, so to say he was suspicious now would have been an understatement.
‘Scar?’
The dracoman was crouched by a charnel hillock of black bone and broken flesh. At first Cormac thought Scar was staring at him, until he moved aside and realized the dracoman was gazing directly at the slope Gant had just climbed. Cormac moved to his side and squatted down next to him, peering in the same direction.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
Scar hissed, exposing his teeth – bright white in the moonlight – then turned and just looked at Cormac.
‘We have to get out of here,’ Cormac said.
‘I stay,’ said the dracoman finally.
Cormac shook his head. ‘You’re not stupid, Scar. Theocracy troops will be down here soon to investigate this place. They may find you here, and if they find you they’ll certainly kill you.’
Scar seemingly did not consider this worthy of a reply, and Cormac understood that perfectly. The dracoman used only such words as were necessary and never bothered formulating replies to the patently obvious. Cormac reached out to touch the dracoman’s shoulder, but Scar’s hand snapped up and caught Cormac’s wrist – that hand was hot, febrile.
‘What is happening, Scar?’
‘I stay . . . it is soon.’ Scar released his wrist, then returned his attention to the slope.
Cormac stood up: he had no time to spare, and he knew he would be wasting time trying to get anything further out of the dracoman. He stepped over and picked up the denuded pack of oxygen bottles Scar had discarded.
‘Take care,’ he said, turning to go. The dracoman bared his teeth in what might have been a grin.
The stars were now easing into visibility between ragged strips of cloud – cloud that also parted coyly to reveal the distant baroque and glassy sculpture of a nebula. Glancing at this, Cormac realized it was the same one as filled the sky of Callorum, only there he had seen it from the opposite side. As he scrambled down the sloping debris into the flute grass outside the crater, one of the moons sped across the face of the nebula like a searchlight flung by a catapult – its tumbling light occasionally stabbing through cloud gaps. Gant still waited for him at the edge of the flute grass, then led the way into a dense area where the stalks gathered in a protective wall all around.
‘Scar’s not coming,’ Cormac told him.
Gant nodded. ‘I knew one day it would happen. He’s not human, and he’s always seemed to me to be marking time – waiting for something.’
‘I’ll let you explain that to Mika, then,’ said Cormac.
Gant grimaced.
Without an oxidizing atmosphere, the laser worked at almost twenty per cent above expected efficiency, and it took the team only a few hours to knock down a wide enough area of flute grass. Such a clearance was not entirely sufficient to the task at hand, which was why a second team went in – once the laser was shut down – to spread a powder of copper sulphate to poison all the plant roots in that same area. Had they laid the inflatable flooring direct onto still-living rhizomes, new growths of flute grass would have punched up through the tough plastic within a matter of hours. After observing all the outside activity for a while longer, Aberil turned his attention from the infrared screen to his own gathered staff.
‘The loss of the Lee and the Portentous is an object lesson to us all: we must never underestimate the rebels, and we must show not the slightest hesitation, nor mercy, as we prosecute their destruction,’ he said.
Returning his attention to the screen he observed the troops, now disembarked from the landers, gathering into squads and preparing to move out. They had little in the way of armour or transport – the largest items being balloon-tyred cars on which could be mounted launchers and larger rail-guns, but which were mainly for the moving of supplies – but that was intentional. Though there was always comfort in having armoured vehicles to use, in this kind of war they never lasted very long. Lellan had employed her tanks for a swift assault, their main target being the rail-gun towers of the compounds, but now those tanks were all but obsolete, just as were large airborne carriers. When a single man could easily carry a high
-penetration missile-launcher with intelligent tracking, large vehicles soon became more vulnerable than single individuals. In fact, Lellan had quite dramatically proven this point at the spaceport.
He considered what had happened there: obviously she had sacrificed a carrier, and ordered the apparent disarray of her forces thereafter, to fool them into thinking they had killed her. An elaborate trap and an effective one: in one stroke she had wiped out a quarter of the force sent against her. That she had destroyed the heavy armour aboard those ships was irrelevant as such, because Aberil suspected she could easily have taken the spaceport before, rendering such armoured vehicles – perhaps the only ones that could have lasted long enough under hand-held attack and put a dent in her forces – completely useless. No matter, right now he had with him thirty thousand well-armed and thoroughly vicious infantry skirmishers, whereas Lellan’s forces numbered perhaps one-third of that even including those she had recruited from the crop fields. And she would pay – he had seen to that.
Bombing from landing craft was not an easy option, as they were not really equipped for the task. They had accomplished this by connecting magnetic mines to the undersides of the craft – mines they could disconnect by radio, and detonate by the same means. Only one craft had been lost, when some fool sent the wrong signal first, but overall Aberil’s main aim had been achieved: Lellan could not retreat directly back down into her caverns, now he had destroyed all her breakout tunnels.
‘Over this night we’ll move our soldiers into position, and in the morning we go in on their left flank,’ he said. ‘Nothing elaborate: we just hit them hard and drive them back from the spaceport towards the mountains.’
‘The mountains are easily defended,’ noted Torthic, the logistics officer.
Aberil studied his fingernails. ‘And utterly useless to us. We cannot establish crop ponds or colonies there, and they are riddled with caves where traitors can hide.’
‘Your meaning?’ Torthic asked, taking the prompt Aberil sent him over a private aug channel.
Aberil shrugged. ‘The Witchfire is aptly named. I should think a scattering of ten- and twenty-megatonne devices should take the backbone out of Lellan’s army once she considers it safely ensconced in the mountains.’
In bright moonlight, they moved out in squads of twenty into the flute grass. Each squad had its own commander with an open aug link to Aberil’s logistics staff, its own car carrying either a heavy rail-gun or a mortar, plus supplies. Each soldier was armed with a rail-gun capable of firing anything from single shots to eight hundred a minute, and carried enough of the small iron slugs to maintain ten minutes at that latter rate of fire; a short-stock grenade-launcher; and curve-bladed commando knives for more intimate work.
They had trained all their lives for this kind of action and were ready and willing for it. They eagerly looked forward to their first encounter with the rebels, who at present were ten kilometres away from them. As squad commander Sastol led his men in a brief prayer, he felt his stomach tight with excitement and his head buzzing with the sometimes contradictory instructions that filtered down from First Commander Aberil. Finishing the prayer with a silent ‘Amen’ over his Gift, he found that nevertheless the central order was unchanged. Advance and destroy the rebellion – in the end it was simplistic.
‘We march behind the car for the present. The moment any part of the line hits resistance, we spread out and link up with adjacent squads,’ said Sastol. Then focusing on his lieutenant, Braden, he went on, ‘You and two others of your choice get to ride on the car. I want you on the heavy gun at all times as I think that when it starts, it’ll start fast.’
‘Don’t you want to ride?’ asked Braden, with a touch of irony.
‘Not now. I need to loosen up for . . .’ Sastol paused as the order for them to move out came through his aug. He held up his hand for a moment, then raised it above his head, made a circular motion then pointed with two fingers into the flute grass. Hand-signalling – an anachronism from days before the Theocracy had received the Gift from Behemoth – was something many military commanders obdurately continued to practise. The precise technology of aug communication not being entirely understood, these men liked to be prepared for the eventuality of its failure in a battle.
As one, the army of the Theocracy moved into the flute grass, each squad cutting a swathe separated from its neighbours by a hundred metres of vegetation on either side. Sastol watched Braden ensconce himself behind the heavy rail-gun, observed Donch and Sodar clamber up behind him, Donch taking up the simple detachable drive handle to set the car in motion. As the rest of their squad moved in behind the car in a loose double column, Sastol moved in behind them. In truth, he preferred walking because he was so charged with adrenalin that it would be almost painful for him to sit still – experiencing action at last after a lifetime of training for it.
Only action came rather sooner than he expected. A hissing crunching sound to the right snapped Sastol’s attention in that direction, whence he saw a sharp-edged yellow hook the size of a man’s arm cleaving through the ground towards his men. It was such an odd sight that it took him some time to recognize it for what it was.
‘Mud snake!’ he bellowed, just as the sliced mat of rhizomes parted and the creature heaved its giant caterpillar body into view, clacking its huge beak with appended slicing hook, and emitting horrible coughing barks. Rail-gun fire slammed into it from both sides, and it was beginning to disintegrate even as it surged forwards. Turning its blind head sideways at the last moment, it clashed its beak shut on Dominon and bore him to the ground. Continued fire separated front end from back and leaking blood like molasses, its rear end sank back into the ground. Immediately the squad fell upon the front end with knives and rail-guns, levering the monster’s ragged beak open.
‘I’m okay, no need to panic.’
Finally, by cutting corded muscle at the base of its beak, they were able to wrench the top half of it back – which unfortunately released human arteries that had been pinched shut.
‘Really, I’m okay,’ Dominon reiterated out loud, then, ‘Oh.’
He died before one of the roving med-squads could reach them, but Sastol thought that perhaps for the best, as Dominon – as athletic and libidinous as the rest of them – would not have wanted to continue living in only the top half of his body.
‘Gods protect us all,’ intoned the medic as he bagged and tagged Dominon to be picked up later.
‘Not the first?’ asked Sastol.
The man looked at him, his face expressionless behind his tinted visor as he sent the statistics across via a private channel. Mud snakes had already killed eight and injured seventeen sufficiently for them to be out of the fight. A siluroyne, disturbed at the eastern end of the line, had taken out an entire squad of twenty. Three were lost to a heroyne before the creature had been brought down. It had apparently swallowed them whole.
‘It’s not even night yet,’ Sastol said gloomily.
‘They’re certainly all stirred up,’ said the medic, ‘but let’s hope the enemy will be facing the same problem.’
A wide area of flute grass had been flattened around the enemy lander, and that area was now lit by arc lights as troops began pulling equipment out into the open.
‘Laser,’ observed Gant, holding up the ends of some of the laid-over grass for inspection. Discarding them he pointed to a heavy device mounted on a flat tray, with one driving wheel behind. ‘Only for levelling an area of the grass – not really manoeuvrable enough to be used as a weapon.’
‘Like they need another weapon?’ said Cormac, eyeing the rail-guns and grenade-launchers most of the men carried.
‘True,’ said Gant.
How bloody must warfare become when most fighters carried weapons that could turn a human being into steak tartare in a second – and where there was nothing but flat swampy ground and nothing to hide behind? It seemed to him that the fighting Gant had earlier referred to must have been bloody indeed.
He glanced aside at the Golem, then back towards the spot where Apis and Mika were concealed. The four of them possessed APWs, so could wreak havoc in this clearing, but it seemed unlikely that they would live long enough to board one of the landers and lift it off. Even Gant with his Golem Twenty-seven chassis would eventually be destroyed by enough rail-gun hits. He caught the trooper’s eye and nodded back the way they had come. They crawled back into deep shadow beyond the range of the lights before standing up and returning to join Apis and Mika.
‘What do you suggest, Agent?’ Gant asked.
‘I suggest we find somewhere to bed down for the night, and reassess things in the morning. Maybe they’ll send an investigation party down into the crater, and an opportunity may present when there’s a few less of them about the lander.’
‘Scar’s still in the crater,’ said Mika, falling back on her usual technique of not asking the question she really wanted to ask.
‘Yes, well spotted,’ retorted Cormac and, ignoring her pique, turned back to Gant. ‘Maybe we could get ourselves one or two of their uniforms – reach one of the landers that way?’
Hesitantly Apis asked, ‘Where would you then take the lander? Hundreds came down between here and where you want to go, and if you steal one, that will soon be broadcast.’
Cormac glanced at him and nodded. ‘I know that. I’m just thinking about our immediate future.’ He rattled a forefinger against his oxygen bottle. ‘Anyway, we could fly out and round, and put down in the mountains.’
‘If not shot down first,’ said Apis.
Cormac grimaced. ‘We’ve gone from an AI dreadnought to creeping around in the undergrowth, so I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘And there I was thinking you an optimist,’ said Gant.
‘You still haven’t—’ began Mika, but just then grenades went off to their right.
‘Lead!’ Cormac shouted to Gant, then he, Mika and Apis hurried after the Golem as he moved swiftly into the flute grass.
‘How did they . . .?’ Apis did not manage to finish the question, but Cormac answered it anyway.