Half crawling, half sprinting, the three traversed the valley’s lower tiers in pursuit, westward. Sava lost them in the smoke. Footprints in the leaves dovetailed into a provisional trail, the enemy’s hasty slips and skids leading down to the gorge’s maw.
“There’s five, maybe six of them,” Sava huffed over the radio. “Mach, we’re going after them.”
“Roger that.”
The cleft’s walls stacked shadow upon shadow, a roofless cave. Even the pearly hoarfrost was impotent against the gloom. A labyrinthine broken road wove its way through the granite fissure. Long impassible by motorcar, the tarmac was fractured. They’d gone far beyond Alkonost’s defensive perimeter. The mouth of the river gorge was enemy territory. Near a bend in the chasm, Sava stopped to rally Dragan and Orel.
“I don’t like it,” Dragan said, cheeks puffing into his clenched fists. “It’s a trap.”
“Carpi territory. They own it,” added Orel.
“We’ll scout up, skirt the road, and do a little recon, half a klick maybe. If we don’t find anything, we’ll turn around.”
Both nodded.
The recruits followed Sava down a slip path to the shore of the gorge’s ice-chunked river. The sleet turned to sodden snow, as the Saharan monsoons lost their battle with the taiga freeze. An artillery barrage rippled up the gorge. The explosions released a cascade of icicles from canyon walls, splinters spangling the air with a rainbow mist. Twisting in the riverbank’s mud, Sava looked back in the direction of the city. A rolling flash erupted from the hotel, a direct hit; the enemy mortar had broken the building’s spine.
“It’s going to collapse. The squad!”
“We’ve got to get back.”
“Hold tight, goddamn it!”
Sava climbed back up the embankment to the tarmac, pulling and pushing his men. Once on the road, they started to jog back to town when they noticed a man loitering a few decameters ahead, unperturbed by the raging battle.
They stopped and took cover.
“Who in the hell?” Orel whispered, scrunched over Sava’s shoulder.
Sava snapped his Vepr to his shoulder and activated the sight. The man was a Carpi, his back to them. Loading the chamber, Sava aimed for the head.
“He’s turning around.”
Something was wrong. The barbarian wore a tattered trench coat; his jackboots glistened with buckles and straps, his head shrouded. The Vepr’s red crosshair swayed between goggled eyes, canvassed jowls puffing through distended filters.
“He’s wearing a hood. What the hell?”
“Must be a chief, no tribal livery. He sees us.”
Sava was about to pull the trigger when his scope clouded. Smoke. He looked up. Spiraling contrails of sputtering grenades tumbled down, expelling a flowery gas, rich and dense. He panned the hollows and caves of the canyon wall but saw no one.
“It’s halothane!” Dragan said, covering his mouth and nose with the pit of his elbow.
“Nerve gas?” Orel asked.
“No, an anesthetizer, an old Morosov recipe.” Sava realized nobody brought hoods. No dead zones were forecasted, so they hadn’t seen the need.
“We’ve to get out the fuck out of here.”
Sprinting in the direction of the hooded barbarian, they unloaded their rifles. Numbness overwhelmed them, their vision blurred, each burst more poorly aimed than the last. The halothane took effect quickly, reducing the men to flailing cross-eyed idiots.
Roused from his fugue, Sava’s joints throbbed. Smacking his lips, he cleared the mucus from his throat with a cough. Stinging eyes squinted at a bleak, inverted world, the blurs pulsing with the throbs of congested blood flow. Strapped upside-down to the wooden crossbeams of a capsized cross, his wrists and ankles were cinched together with rope. Canted back, Sava struggled to lift his head from the frigid mud.
“Cine esti?”
“El este un vampir!” answered a chorus of children.
Wood smoke billowed over him. He coughed again. His sinuses were on fire, lungs pricked by a million needles.
“Cine esti?” the voice repeated.
A dog, poorly restrained by a frail child, lunged. Someone had painted yellow eyes above the animal’s own. Sava struggled to look around.
They were in the center of a Carpi mountain village; ramshackle huts crowded around a cobbled square, sickly conifers demarcating the claustrophobic perimeter. Pieces of discarded plastic and long-broken machines littered the ground. Dragan and Orel, unconscious and half-naked, were restrained in similar ritualistic fashion. A barbarian towered over him, his feral beard framing a leathery face.
“No Carpiani,” Sava croaked.
“Ce doresti? De unde ești, ce armată?.”
“No Carpiani. I don’t speak your garble!”
“El este un vampir! El este un vampir!” The Carpi brood giggled.
Something about a vampire, Sava gathered. The children looked like malnourished goblins with their oversized enrichment hoods, distended torsos supported by spindly legs. The gear was war booty, doubtless nicked from another ambush. The remnants of clothing they wore were filthy, bony knees protruding from torn pant-legs.
Orel exploded in an animal shriek. A child had impaled his doughy stomach with a sharpened stake. The boy, startled by his own act of brutality, leapt back, leaving the wooden dirk dangling from Orel’s midsection.
“Stop!” Sava screamed. “For Christ’s sake!”
The barbarian lashed Sava’s midriff with a horsewhip, the sting silencing him. Jackboots kicked a dollop of ooze into Sava’s face, the mud trickling into his mouth and nose. He recognized his tormentor: the un-hooded Carpi chieftain from the road.
“I need a drink of water . . . please,” Orel begged.
“Give him some water, goddamn it!” Sava yelled.
The chieftain knelt down and batted Sava’s cheeks with the coil of his whip. “Porci de razboi,” he laughed with a yellow grin. “Aveti de gand sa mori?”
Two men approached from the cobble square. They carried a disassembled mortar, tripod and tube slung over their broad shoulders. Words were exchanged, heads nodded. One of the barbarians, a lanky man with a black braided beard, crossed to Sava and stooped down.
“He wants to know who you are?” The man’s accent was thick with lisps. “And why are you here?”
“Why?”
The barbarian lifted his thick-treaded boot, ready to stomp.
“We’re soldiers . . . like you.”
“Like us?” the Carpi snorted, pulling his foot back. “Not like us, mercenary man.” He motioned to Dragan and Orel “You three are vampires.”
“Vampiri!” The children shouted.
“What? Vampires?” Sava replied, confused.
“You and your men kill for gold, lustful for the old ways, for the empire. Our children—” the interpreter gestured to the slovenly youngsters “—die to fill your coffers.”
“Not true,” Sava protested. “We’ve tried to reason with you people, but you won’t listen.”
The barbarian laughed, deep and guttural. “It matters not, does it? Our children believe you to be creatures of the night, wandering shadows of St. Andrew’s Eve, a harbinger of ill fortune and death.”
“Superstitious nonsense,” Sava spat.
“The Carpiani have seen the Alkonost drink innocent blood. You are life drainers. Demons. So—” he said, petting the head of a jittery child “—it is time to suffer a vampire’s fate.”
“Stop! Wait!”
“Stop? If we show you mercy, will you show us mercy? No, vampire man, a road of poppy seeds and thorns would do little to slow your greed.”
“But—”
The conversation was over. The barbarian straightened, then kicked Dragan’s head with a stiff leg. Sava heard a nauseating cartilaginous pop, tissue grinding into bone. Dragan’s eyes widened then rolled back into his head. The chieftain grabbed a torch from an alder pyre and licked the tops of Dragan’s outstretched arms. Pale pink
flesh reddened, bubbling with blisters.
“His neck’s broken!” Sava barked. “He can’t feel it!”
The horror was unrelenting. Sava pinched his eyes shut with a clenched grimace, desperate to awaken from the nightmare. But the children’s cackles and the moans of his comrades proved escape impossible.
Just as the mania reached crescendo, Sava felt a crunching snap of his metatarsals. He tried to catch his breath from the excruciating pain. In between gasps, he saw a boy perched above him aiming for his toes with a bolt cutter. Rivulets of blood coiled down his leg like ribbons around a maypole, staining black the blue-gray of his camouflage.
His small toe plopped to the ground next to his head. A child picked up the grape-sized amputation, rubbed it clean it with filthy snow, then handed to the chieftain. With a rotted smile, the bearded barbarian tossed it up like a coin flip, then tucked it into his trench coat.
Hyperventilating, Sava’s vision dimmed. The blood pooling in his brain made him dizzy. Clenching the edge of the wooden crucifix, he felt splinters dig under his fingernails. The pain was too much, blackness a gift.
Gray drizzle, dawn or dusk, Sava couldn’t tell. Dehydration had led to headache, his temples and eyes throbbing. He opened his mouth to drink the rain but managed only to wet his throat. The warmth of hypothermia replaced the painful shivers, his chattering teeth finally silenced.
The square was empty. Dragan and Orel were dead, lips blue, eyes open but cloudy. Exsanguinated, Orel was drained by the impalement. A coagulated mask covered his cheeks and forehead, as inner hemorrhage had sought its own level. Sava guessed Dragan’s end had been quicker. His snapped neck had spared him the pain of partial immolation.
A lingering child threw rocks at him, muddy pebbles, more agitating than painful. Sava opened his mouth to speak, but his mouth felt peculiar. Probing with his tongue, he felt raw sockets filled with the iron taste of blood. Someone had yanked his canine teeth out, the impish rabble finally succeeding in de-fanging their vampire. The leather tore at his wrists as he struggled to free himself. He wobbled trying to topple his cross. Above the child’s snickers and the patter of raindrops, he heard a distant hydraulic whine.
The mule appeared at the village edge. Curious, the Carpi child approached the walker, its mechanical legs nearly as tall as the boy. On a mission, the automaton wove around the child and headed to the square’s overgrown churchyard. Lacking a stealth mode, the machine indifferently sauntered through enemy territory. Shrieking incoherently, half-dressed barbarians poured from their huts in pursuit.
The mule wandered into a Balkan church near the village’s well. Frantic, the warriors collected in the adjacent graveyard and argued amongst themselves, afraid to enter. The building’s mildewed windows sputtered with sparks. An explosion vaporized the building, incinerating the tinder like thermite.
The church was a Carpi weapons depot. Somehow the mule’s operator divined it as a target of opportunity, and like a guided missile, had honed in on the arsenal. More bursts shook the ground as stockpiles of mortars and ammunition detonated. The surviving villagers recoiled—scorched and wounded from the blast.
Two Alkonost crept along a fence toward Sava. The child tried to scream an alarm, but Krajnik dispatched the boy with a silenced round to the head.
“Jesus, Sava,” Mach said, cutting his leather restraints. “You’re a mess!”
With a somersault, Sava toppled into the ankle-deep muck. Krajnik hoisted him upright, eyes locked on the reeling Carpi villagers. Weakly, Sava reached out for Dragen and Orel.
“We can’t leave them with these monsters. It’s not right!”
“Sorry, Sava, there’s no time. They’re dead, and we’ve got to go!” Mach motioned to Krajnik. Both wedged their shoulders under Sava’s armpits to crutch him.
They ducked into a sedge-filled pasture, passing by a huddle of bony horses as they limped for the forest. The weather was warming. Icy paths melted into ramps of slick rock and root. Movement down the mountainous slopes was difficult, but the muddy earth was more forgiving. Mach radioed for evacuation. Their rendezvous was a half-klick away, a plateau high above the valley.
Sava fought for air—lungs filling with festering phlegm—as they hobbled up the last boulder-strewn rise to the landing zone. A thumping whoosh of helicopter blades greeted them. Mach and Krajnik eased Sava onto a canvas litter. A medic leapt down and rushed in with a thermal blanket and an IV.
With everyone aboard, the Hind gunship dipped over the granite precipice, fighting for lift as it headed east and into Alkonost territory. In the valley below, a black mushroom cloud billowed above the Carpi village, the ammo dump still smoldering.
“One survivor: Lieutenant Sava Valis; Specialist Dragan and Private Orel are dead. Massive Carpi casualties.” Mach radioed. “He’ll survive. They’d him tied up all night, he’s suffering from exposure . . . ” Krajnik pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit two and handed one to Mach. “Yep, got it. Roger that, over and out.”
“Who was it?” Krajnik asked, taking a drag.
“A Lieutenant Uri Vitko?” Mach replied, stowing his headset. “Mission intelligence point-of-contact, they’re always shuffling the deck. Said he’s working a listening post up near the dam, collecting information on Carpi movement behind the lines. Do you know him?”
“Uri?” Krajnik nodded, taking a drag. “Of course. He’s my commanding officer when I’m not on special assignment.”
“Do you like him?”
Krajnik shrugged, “He’s not a bad guy when you get to know him. A hell of a chess player, I hear.”
CHAPTER FIVE
September 2163 C.E.
An oasis: a wadi filled with date palms, camels drinking from papyrus-lined pools of emerald, the obligatory Bedouin tents, perpetual sunsets of pixilated purple and mango orange, the silhouette of a desert caravan wandering the crests of a dune sea . . .
Uri puffed on the hookah and idly watched the holograms.
Oasis nostalgia was Al Fadah Madina’s second religion, a pining for a world that existed only in glossy montages unearthed from an extinct global culture. The chaos of short, exhausting lives had been replaced by the peace of Al’ Madina’s soothing lounges. The seductive notion of “oasis” offered a divine peace. For Uri, the absence of his endorphin-fueled anxiety was its own euphoria, the artificial tranquility a fleeting luxury.
The guest salon was dim, a dado of ambient jade providing a cool light. Green—the color of Islam—glossed over cracks within the woven polycarbon and epoxy, smothering imperfection with shadow. The caliphate deemed it important to maintain “atmosphere.” Without these illusions, the recycled air and tasteless water threatened to shatter the fragile membrane protecting them from their orbital reality.
Vicarious and insular, the sheikhs thrived on notional archetypes, canonical players on Earth’s fragmented chessboard. A rogue’s gallery of madmen, slaves, mercenaries, kings, and conquerors played historic analogs in the sheikhdom’s simplified models. Uri didn’t have the heart, or the incentive, to re-educate his clever, yet naïve, paymasters.
Through the course of their idle investigations, Neolithic savagery was a prehistoric compulsion the sheikhs could never reconcile. Uri believed the world’s brutality had to be lived to be fully understood. The evolutionary spine of hominids had sprouted horns; civilization managed to file them down to blunt ornaments for a short time, but no longer; the beast was back.
To Uri, the much-preached new Dark Age was spurious. It was more like a new Stone Age: humanity regressed to its simplest state. Humanity was dying as human beings were born: id-driven, whimpering, and thrashing; ignorant of both the past and the future.
Uri took a puff of the apple-apple shisha and let its sweet incense fill him. He closed his eyes and slumped back into the satin of the salon’s divan.
He dozed, another brief nap, the ambient sitar music lulling away his thoughts. Minutes, or maybe an hour, passed before a whisper muted
the artificial music. Sayyid requested his presence. Uri switched off the wall glyph holo, and the desert life evaporated into black-emerald crosshatch.
Uri floated in the mosque’s outer arcade as the sheikhs gathered for evening prayer inside the turning hall. A suspended platform, pulled by hydraulics on circular tracks, revolved inside the toroid’s hub. Knee rungs and foot clips perforated the carpet’s arabesque, anchoring the prostrated pious in zero gravity. The Qibla—the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca—was always down, the holy mosque slightly north of Al Fadah Madina’s nadir. Illusory, the Azraq Hawat toroid spun around the mosque’s “floor,” everything in motion except those performing Sala’at.
“Hayya’ ala Falah. Hayya’ ala Falah.”
Uri quietly hovered; a courtesy lanyard kept him from knocking about irreverently. Sayyid was to meet him at the mosque prior to his technical and mission briefs. The toroid’s engineering bays were nodal to the sheikhs’ office, requiring a journey through the hub complex.
“Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar.”
Prayer ended. Sayyid detached from the rug’s blue tessellates and drifted over to the arcade’s antechamber. Uri deposited his empty porcelain coffee bulb into a receptacle and detached.
“Thank you for waiting. My salon’s inertial rug is very uncomfortable, and its directional spotter needs calibration. I try to get to the mosque when possible.”
“Shall we?” Uri said, impatiently motioning toward the elevator lobby.
Uri had no tolerance for humoring Sayyid’s uptight eccentricities. An investigation had been opened into his weapon violation. As was customary, an incident report had to be filed with Al’ Madina’s police. Showing little allegiance to his archivist, Sayyid said nothing as the imams enforced the colony’s sharia. Penalty fines were incurred, and Uri’s stipend dwindled by a third. Al’ Madina’s incorruptible austerity could be maddening.
Sayyid’s laboratory was electromechanical mayhem. The technical mania of the facility rivaled Earth’s looted equivalents. Junior technocrats greeted them. Not yet full members of the sheikhdom, they labored as apprentices, dabbling in the Earth’s lost arcana. Kaliq, an awkward boy with a faint mustache, introduced himself. Uri guessed he wasn’t any more than twenty-five. Denizens of Al’ Madina were slow to incubate, pubescence delayed by a vague celestial dilation.
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