She and the few remaining marines, most dragging an injured comrade, moved quickly onto the upper fo'c'sle just in time to join Lady Elphinstone and evacuate the last wounded warriors.
On Kestrel's lower gundeck the Guldur finally break through the hatch to the hold. A mass of them leap down through the hatch to the lower hold. They and their Goblan riders are wide-eyed with terror at the prospect of meeting the ghastly Dwarrowdelf that has been defending every hatchway with such ferocity. Instead, there is nothing. No one. They look around in wonder, expecting an ambush.
More and more curs and ticks leap down to join their comrades. The Guldur first mate drops down to join them, barking orders. The curs dive through the hatch, through the plain of Flatland, to the upper hold, still expecting resistance. One pops back through and tells the first mate that the enemy have disappeared. Out of curiosity the Guldur officer reaches down and removes the piece of tarp that covers the Keel. He yelps in fear when he sees what is under the tarp.
Kestrel sends one last message, up through the Guldur's paws where they touch the deck: <
* * *
Broadax is the last to leave the Kestrel. As she leaps across to join the boarding party, the noble old Ship begins to sink. From above and below the plain of Flatland, the view is exactly the same as the Ship seemingly melts into the sea, leaving two-space and entering interstellar space.
The two Ships are tied together at the railing, above and below. The Kestrel sinks and the Guldur Ship stands fast. The railing is torn and shattered, with splinters flying. Soon only the Kestrel's masts can be seen. Finally they too disappear, somewhere into the hard vacuum of deep space.
On the enemy's upper deck the boarders maintained the momentum of their attack. After the one volley of the precious flashbang grenades and Lieutenant Fielder's unexpected flank attack, the enemy was falling back on all fronts. As Melville approached the ladder to the enemy's upper quarterdeck a huge, brown cur, with large black spots, reared up in front of him. It was the biggest Guldur he'd ever seen and on its back was the biggest tick he'd ever seen.
The huge creature in front of him had to be the enemy's captain. It looked at Melville's monkey and said, with a bizarre, lap-tongued doggie grin, "I srree rrou have a tick! Hrrold strrill, rrI'll get it!"
Melville responded in surprise, "Tick?!"
The monkey echoed, with outrage, "Kick!!?"
Von Rito, Kobbsven and Josiah were all occupied. For once, Petreckski was busy elsewhere. No loaded pistol was available. The middies were madly reloading.
Melville had just dispatched a loose Goblan with a downward slash, and it took him a split second to dislodge his sword from the body. The oversized cur in front of him swung a ferocious, overhand sword stroke at his head, and he was out of position to block it.
At times like this the senses can become acutely, intensely clear, seeking to find any escape or alternative. Besides the obvious one. In this case the information provided by that vivid clarity served only to confirm the fact that Melville was doomed.
I shall not die alone, alone,
but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and
fighting like the flowers.
* * *
So, thinks Melville, This is how it will come. This is how I will die. This is the being who will kill me. He is astounded to find that there is no anger in him, not even resignation, just wonder and . . . a fierce joy!
One sound shall sunder all the spears and
break the trumpet's breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall
laugh in death.
His sword comes up in slow motion. He can tell that it will be too late. The rest of the battle doesn't exist. All sound is gone, only eery silence remains. His tunnel vision permits him to see only his opponent's head, torso and upper arms. He doesn't see the sword tip crashing down. Sword tips move too fast to follow, best always to watch the enemy's arms and project the position of the sword.
His sword is still moving up. Too slow, too slow! He is looking upward. At the edge of his vision he sees his monkey's belaying pin, a tattered, splintered, torn, beautiful belaying pin, meet and slightly deflect the huge Guldur sword. The long, straight, sword is deflected to his left! He jerks his head and body to the right. So little time. Time to move just slightly right. The enemy sword clips his hair, clips off the top of his left ear and slices deep into his left shoulder. He is alive!
Funny, he feels no pain as the sword slices through his flesh. Only the pressure of the blade cutting through the muscles of his shoulder. He also feels the pressure of his sword in his hand, coming up, thrusting forward. His left leg thrusts his body forward. His right knee bends. His sword point, a gory, dripping, hungry red sword point, lunges home:
Through teeth, and skull, and helmet
So fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out
Behind the Tuscan's head.
The enemy drops, with Melville's sword through its brain, protruding out the back. Its tick leaps down to the deck where it dies, almost casually, anticlimactically, sliced in half as the tip of Corporal Kobbsven two-handed claymore begins an upward sweep.
Melville watches his enemy, his noble, noble enemy, fall.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes!
I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet
of the brave.
Melville asks himself, "Why are there tears in my eyes?" Water for the dead. Water for the brave. He has killed the enemy captain. Brave, brave captain.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and
love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing
falls shattering from the sky.
Hans and Valandil are coming toward him from the enemy's quarterdeck. Only a handful of Guldur and Goblan are still on their feet. It's only a matter of time now and this mighty Ship will be his. The rightful fruit of honorable combat. Melville drops to his knees and looks down at his fallen foe.
The hour when death is like a light and
blood is like a rose,—
You have never loved your friends,
my friends, as I shall love my foes.
Somewhere in the darkness of interstellar space, a wooden ship drifts. Perhaps, in the unthinkably long lifetime of the universe, some alien race will find that ship. Inside this bizarre wooden vessel they will find the corpses of many doglike creatures, and gray, goblinlike beasts, all dehydrated and mummified by the vacuum of space. As they examine these corpses, if they look closely at their faces, and if they understand such things, perhaps they will be struck by the fact that all of them appear to be very, very surprised.
Chapter the 7th
Recovering from Battle:
Lief Should I Rouse at Morning
Could man be drunk forever
With liquor, love or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down at nights.
"Could Man be Drunk Forever"
A.E. Housman
Melville was hung over. Seriously, seriously hung over. He hadn't touched a drop of liquor, but he felt like a sailor the morning after he got knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk, got beat up in a bar fight, and then got falling-down, belly-crawling drunk.
He'd been going on a physical and emotional high from the minute the apes attacked him on Broadax's World, up until the capture of this Ship. Man could not be "drunk forever, with liquor, love or fights." Now, finally, things were slowing down, and he must pay the price.
During combat an effect called vasoconstriction makes the veins constrict. The arteries are wide open, but just before the capillaries the return flow is cut off and the veins collapse. This is why a person's face will go white under intense stress. The blood pools in the body core and in the large muscle masses. Blood pressure skyrockets and, unless an artery is hit, bleeding f
rom wounds can be very limited. In effect, the whole outer layer of the body becomes a layer of armor. Immediately afterward a powerful backlash can occur. Vasodilation sets in, the veins are wide open, and the face turns red and flushed.
For Melville that meant the blood loss from his shoulder wound was limited, initially. Shortly after combat was over and he relaxed, the blood began to gush from his wound and he christened the deck of his new Ship with a fair amount of his blood. The last thing he remembered, before he slept and woke up with this incredible "hangover," was Lady Elphinstone applying a little psychological first aid as she staunched the bleeding and plied her Sylvan skills to stitch up his wound.
He was lying on the deck where he had collapsed after slaying the enemy captain. His shoulder was a blaze of pain. Anesthetics and pain relievers did work in Flatland, but any complex chemical compound that wasn't part of a living creature tended to slowly break down. Thus, over time, the effectiveness of pain numbing medication grew weaker and weaker as it sat in storage. The Kestrel had been at sea for a long time and the stuff he'd been given was very weak.
He'd once read an early twenty-first century book entitled Ether Day, about the invention of anesthesia. The book fortunately survived the Crash since it was deemed fit to include in military archives, which the paranoid military types kept religiously separate from the vast interlocking Info-Net. A certain line from that book stuck in Melville's mind. "When one speaks of 'pain' during an operation without anesthetics, it is a word with ragged tails of meaning and imagery that permanently dye the mind: the peculiar red of one's own blood, the echoing blue of a limb dropping to the floor." Yep, that was about right. There was a lot of that going around today. Pain is relative. It doesn't get any more intense than when it's related to you.
The warriors of Westerness had found mind control tools, based in warrior science, to help them handle their pain. In the early twenty-first century, elite military units learned to apply the precepts of "Lamaze" to combat. Lamaze was initially a tool that was used to permit women to go through the very painful process of childbirth without pain medication. Soon the basic process of breathing, relaxation, visual concentration, and listening to a coach were applied to a wide variety of situations where individuals were in pain and medication wasn't immediately available or effective.
Melville was applying his Lamaze skills diligently. He was doing his breathing. He was working consciously on relaxation, avoiding the tension/pain/more-tension/more-pain cycle. He was listening very intently to Lady Elphinstone. And he was concentrating his vision intensely on a focal point, a knot in a rope far above him as he lay flat on the deck of his new Ship. Lovely, fascinating, remarkable knot. The combined effect was such that so many senses were being used, and so much thought processing was going on, that there was little mental capacity left over for feeling pain.
It really did work. One author called this the "ceremony of diminution," quite rightly stating that, "this stoical appearance of indifference in fact diminishes the pain."
It really did work. Melville kept telling himself that. Trying hard to believe it.
Next to him Lieutenant Broadax, coated in drying blood, was looking up into the stars with a blissful smile and a fresh cigar. She gave new meaning to the term "crusty old Marine" as she said to no one in particular, "Aye, this is wot I joined the Marines fer. Travel the galaxy, meet exotic creatures . . . and kill 'em!"
"Captain," said Lady Elphinstone as she worked on him, "lives have been lost, and thou must take care, lest thou shouldst feel some guilt in the aftermath of this combat. Dost thou hear me?"
"Yess . . . my lady," he gasped in reply. The wound in his shoulder was deep enough that she had to apply her stitches in two layers, a few stitches in deep to hold it together, and then a layer on the surface to close the wound.
"Thou hast no cause to feel guilt. Thou hast done well. Most importantly, thou hast done thy duty, and there is great healing in that. Hast thou read the Bhagavad Gita? 'Twas written on thy world in, I believe, the fourth century b.c."
"No," replied Melville, breathing hard, concentrating hard, relaxing hard, and trying to ignore the pinwheels of pain coming from his shoulder as she worked on him. "I . . . haven't read it. Tell me, how doesss-sss-sss it apply . . . to the current haah-aah! sssituation?"
"It says that, 'Valor, glory, firmness, skill, generosity, steadiness in battle and ability to rule—these constitute the duty of a soldier. They flow from his own nature . . . If you perform the sacrifice of doing your own duty, you do not have to do anything else. Devoted to duty, man attains perfection.' Dost thou hear me?"
"Yesss."
"Captain, thou hast done thy duty. For a little while, today, thou didst attain perfection. Go now and rest, for thou art weary with sorrow and much toil."
"Th-thank you, Doctor," said Melville, gasping with relief now that she was finished. "Any additional medical advice?"
"Yes. Thou must never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. Now sleep. Sleep." There must have been a dose of hypnosis in the healing skills of that good Sylvan surgeon. When she said "sleep," even as Melville was grunting in disgust at the very idea, he found himself drifting off. . . .
He awoke to the great-grandmother of all hangovers. His body shook like a sick dog. His stomach, no, his entire digestive tract, was a gurgling churning mess. His very soul ached. Every muscle was wrenched and every movement was pain incarnate. Every breath was pain. If only he could stop breathing. Yes, that might help. . . .
Melville was flat on his back. His left arm was strapped to his side. His left shoulder ached. His left ear ached. He reached up with his right hand to push the sleep mask up on his forehead, wincing as it caught on his wounded ear. The Elbereth Moss provided a constant soft yellow light anywhere inside a mature, healthy Ship of two-space. To really sleep well you needed to be in the dark, so those who slept below decks usually wore a sleep mask. Someone had kindly put one on him.
With the mask removed, Melville could see that he was in a cabin in his new Ship. His spider monkey slept, curled up beside him. He knew they were somewhere in the stern cabin of the Ship, directly below the quarterdeck. He could see the eternal constellations of Flatland, through what were obviously stern windows. Under his pillow he felt the butt of his pistol: a short, squat, black, double-barreled, over-and-under, .45 caliber "security blanket." In two-space he was never without this old family heirloom that seemed to grow better and better across the centuries as its Keel charges adapted to Flatland. He hadn't used it in his last battle, but it had been tucked into his belly sash like a lucky rabbit's foot. A rabbit's foot with teeth.
A portly sailor looked kindly down at him. "Captain," he asked, "how are you feeling?"
Duty. Duty was still ringing in his mind. Elphinstone said he was doing his duty. That made it okay. All he had to do was keep doing his duty. That would make everything okay.
He pulled at his blanket and looked down at himself. He was naked. Can't do your duty naked. At least not his duty to Westerness. He might just be able to do his duty to his nation if he could find some clothes. But the kind of duty he might perform while naked was definitely outside his ability at the moment. Fortunately that was not his pressing need.
"Dresh me." His mouth was dry. His voice was slurring. He worked some saliva into his mouth. His monkey looked up with sleepy curiosity.
"Sir, you can't get up!"
"I'm . . . captain. Dress me. Dammit. Or you're fired." Portly One's eyes got big and he began to scramble about obediently while Melville stifled a moan.
It hurt. It hurt bad. Melville made a visit to the head in the little quarter-gallery hanging out over the blue plane of Flatland, voiding his bladder and bowels out into interstellar space as he rested on the seat of ease with his head swimming. He looked in a mirror mounted to a bulkhead. The fellow looking back at him didn't look like the winner in a battle. (Yeah, yeah, "You shoulda seen the other guy." Sure, sure.
) The top half of his left ear was missing. His face was white and pasty from loss of blood. His monkey sat on his right shoulder, like a huge, fawn-colored tarantula, with its legs splayed out in all directions.
Finally he was dressed in white trousers, shirt, black belly sash, and blue jacket. Tucked in the sash was his ugly little pistol. He would have felt naked without it. He was weak, depending heavily on Portly to accomplish even the simplest tasks. His steward had somehow manifested a steaming cup of tea that Melville eagerly sipped down. What was his name? He'd seen him before. Used to be Captain Crosby's steward. Should remember his name. Brain not working right . . . "What's your name, sailor?"
"McAndrews, sir."
"Aye. Thank you, McAndrews."
And so he went out on the deck of his Ship. His Ship.
As soon as he poked his head out he could tell that his cabin was under the upper side quarterdeck, which is where the captain's quarters should be. A marine stood on guard at his door. All sails were furled and the Ship appeared to be docked.
"Are we at Broadax's World?"
"Aye, sir," McAndrews replied. "We've moved all the dead below. They've been buried and Words said. Lieutenant Fielder said we needed to move fast, to avoid the main Guldur fleet and warn the Stolsh."
"Good. That's right." Fielder. He felt a knot of fear and dread in his stomach. Would Fielder try to rob him of his Ship? So far everything Fielder had done was appropriate. Best to confront the issue immediately. Mostly Melville wanted to crawl back into his bunk and keep sleeping, but duty called him. "Where is Lieutenant Fielder?"
"Here, sir. I'm right here."
Melville turned around and there was Fielder, standing above him at the railing on the upper quarterdeck, where the officer in command should be. He'd called him "sir." That was a good start.
Two Space War Page 14