Jenna had always been more pious than he. Vance also knew better than to voice any blunt critiques of the seven gods, not to mention any less-than-worshipful jokes that were passed around the taverns. He usually held his tongue when the subject of proper worship came up. But she glanced at him and almost laughed, despite his silence. It still amazed him how well she could read him.
"I know what you're thinking," she said. "You don't have to say anything. It doesn't matter where the gods came from, or if aliens and humans created them in some lab. The gods give us strengths and remind us of the virtues we need to hold on to. The pantheon gives us protectors, explorers and builders, and I want our children to learn from their examples."
"Remember that when Brent wants to become a protector. Those good examples often require sacrifice."
He saw a flash of irritation in her eyes, but it quickly faded. She settled into the chair with a sigh. "I wish I knew more about the old gods people worshipped on Earth. People have been around a long time. I wonder what we've lost, which gods we've forgotten and which gods have forgotten us. We must have had them for good reasons."
"All we can do is live in our own time," Vance said. "These are the gods we've got, and we'll never know what they think of us, and it wouldn't matter much if we did." He leaned over and gave her a kiss. "But I have to go, love. I have to go clean up one of the messes the gods left behind."
****
They called themselves the Granth.
That much was known. When they said the word themselves, they did so with a grinding of their flat teeth that sounded like gravel being chewed. The “th” sound at the end was more like the hiss of air being released from a balloon, but “Granth” was close enough, and was quickly accepted by the people of The City.
Gathering useful information from the Granth was a slow process. So was convincing them of anything.
Vance watched them through the viewing screen while his own environment suit powered up. Kriff, his lieutenant, had already arrived and was waiting for him by the airlock door.
On the other side, the Granth milled about unsteadily on their jointed, crab-like legs. Their streamlined bodies were shaped somewhat like fish, if you squinted. Their large eyes never blinked, although some were brightly colored, while other displayed the milky white that indicated sleep. Or fear.
The atmospheric masks and harnesses they had worn during their failed invasion of The City had recently stopped working, and so Talia had created an approximation of their native atmosphere in this unused underground chamber. But there was no way to correctly replicate the atmospheric conditions or gravity of their home planet. Vance suspected that was why the Granth seemed so clumsy and awkward.
Or it could have been the food. That was also a rough approximation of what the Granth needed to survive.
Talia may be a demigod now, but an alien chef she is not, Vance decided as he counted the piles of uneaten food lying around the chamber.
His suit completed its power-up stage. He deactivated the locks to the chamber and stepped through the airlock. Kriff followed a couple steps behind.
Vance's new implants included a translation suite that built on each of his conversations with the aliens, but deciphering the meaning of the Granth language was an imperfect exercise at best. Even with the translator's help, he had trouble mastering the clicks and rumbles that comprised their strange language.
Worse, he had to keep repeating the same requests every session, as if the aliens had forgotten what they had discussed the previous day. He didn't believe they had, but there was something about the way they communicated that seemed to require repetition and ritual.
On that, however, his was a minority opinion. Most of the guardsmen he commanded believed the Granth just weren't very smart.
The same alien was waiting for him in the same place as yesterday. It was easy to tell one from the other; each had distinctive striping and there was a surprising variation in size. Each one also had a unique pattern to the swirls of color in their eyes. Beyond that, however, figuring out their social order was baffling. Vance still didn't know whether he was speaking with the senior commander or if the Granth considered this interaction fit work only for the junior flunky.
"Did the large one send you?"
It was the same question that started their conversation every time. They called humanity’s gods “large ones”, and their disposition seemed paramount in the minds of the Granth.
“Yes, The City's large one sent me."
"Will the large one give us new breathers soon so that we can once again walk outside this burrow?"
"The large one is working on that. But other priorities come first. The needs of invaders are not paramount."
The Granth representative lowered its body slightly, a sign of acceptance, Vance had learned. "Your large one did not kill us today, so we rejoice in another day of existence."
Vance cleared his throat. The strange sounds he had to make to communicate with the Granth always left his voice raw. He was about to start in with his prepared questions, when the Granth spoke up again.
"This large one is not like the other large one."
Vance was momentarily silent. This was a deviation from the usual conversation pattern. "No," he agreed. "All our gods are different from each other. They have different strengths and talents."
Vance watched the Granth, searching for signs of comprehension. It was hard to tell, but his new implants picked up faint tremors in the muscles around the alien's big eyes. It was something, although what it meant would have to be studied later.
I'll probably have to explain it all again tomorrow, he quick-voiced to Kriff.
If not before then, came the response.
But since the Granth had altered the sequence of communication, Vance decided to take the opportunity and run with it. He moved forward toward the large mass of Granth. They were huddled close together in the back of the chamber. He slowly panned his head from left to right, looking them all in the eyes, and addressed them as a group. "Today I want to deviate from previous exchanges. I want to talk about the others. The ones who sent you here. We call them Otrid. What can you tell me about them?"
Vance watched their reactions using the amplified senses of his implants. Their responses were uniform. The muscles where their legs joined their bodies clenched and shivered, and the color faded from the eyes that faced him.
"We have revealed this to you," came the representative's voice from behind him. "They came from the sky, along with the other large one that looks like you. They were cruel. They promised us food and technology if we fought for them. When we refused they killed many of us. They brought pain. Then the large one came into our minds and forced us to comply. They took us from our world and brought us here."
"You are correct, this much has been established as true," Vance said. "But we wish to know this story in greater detail. Much truth is still obscured from us."
He was greeted by silence and what he could only interpret as furtive looks.
"Did the large one speak to you, or tell you anything directly? How did you know it was the large one that entered your mind?"
"I was there." From the cluster of alien bodies, one of the smaller Granth stepped forward. "The large one came from their vessel with the others. They were joined by many strands. There was another large one, a very different large one. Not like you. Not like the others."
Finally. Something new, Vance muttered internally as he patched the conversation into one of Talia's report links.
"We did not know the purpose of the strands. Were the others leading the large one, or was the large one leading the others? Who was the true enemy?"
The other Granth released a burst of clicks and grunts. Eyes suddenly shimmered with bright colors. Vance's translator suggested "assent or encouragement," but it also had slowed down considerably in rendering its verdict. And now that he thought about it, some of those pulsing colors in the eyes were the same ones he remembered s
eeing while fighting these creatures across The City.
With his senses newly heightened by the implants, Vance could detect the small telltales that indicated the weapons suite in Kriff's suit powering up. Steady there, he quick-voiced.
Vance stepped in front of the smaller Granth. He held its gaze.
"I swear this truth to you now. The human large one was not acting on our behalf. He was held against his will, serving the Otrid, who seek to conquer us both." Vance observed the shifting colors of the Granth's eyes, recording it for the next update on the translation program. "Of this other large one, I cannot say. Perhaps master, perhaps also slave."
The background noises subsided and the Granth grew still. Vance turned in a slow circle as he spoke.
"Fight with us against the others who took you from your world," he said, slowly, firmly, or at least that was how he hoped it sounded to Granth ears. "Join us, so together we can stand against the invaders that attacked us both. Fight by our side."
The Granth became very still. Vance boosted the sensitivity of his implants to maximum, searching for any signs of imminent hostility.
At last, the Granth representative moved, with deliberate steps, in front of Vance. Its large eyes boiled with new colors Vance had not seen previously in these strange aliens.
"How can we trust? The first large one stood with the others and told us we must fight you," it said. "Now the new large one tells us that we must stand with you and fight the others. And you. You killed many of us in the fighting, brought much pain. Now you seek our aid.”
"You can trust us because you are still alive. You can trust us because we are asking you to fight with us, not telling you. We seek allies, not slaves. And if we are victorious, our City's large one has promised to make every effort to return you to your world."
A buzz of clicks and rumbles swept through the crowd. Vance's translation program stumbled over the deluge of noise, delivering nothing discernible.
A minute later the alien sounds tapered off.
"We will fight with you," the Granth representative said. "But we have one request, and without it, I do not think we can make war at your side."
"Yes?"
"Can you tell your large one to give us better food? What we have been given tastes like the offal we expel after parasite infection. Some of these warriors believe you are trying to poison us."
Vance suppressed a laugh. "I'll bring it up with the large one personally."
Chapter 6
Sharpening the Sword
"G14, if you don't stay in formation you're going to pull back two stumps where your forelegs used to be," Vance barked at the Granth warrior.
G14 scurried back to its position in the squadron, eyes flashing the colors of embarrassment.
Vance had given up trying to pronounce Granth names. Even the translator program choked on them. So he had assigned each a number. His men still had trouble telling the Granth apart, and had scrawled their numbers on the new environmental harnesses that Talia had devised for their erstwhile alien allies.
Allies. That was assuming they could be integrated into any kind of coherent fighting force. And that Vance's own men could overlook the Granth's previous occupation as invading enemies.
"Understand, G14, the servitor robots are laying down suppression beams," Vance said. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that the Granth absorbed information by repetition and ritual. "Their targeting is guided by the axis flyers above. They key on motion and mass. We don't advance until the servitors have powered down and the axis flyers report all clear."
Vance was running his third round of unified combat exercises in the deep UnderWorks of The City. They were practicing intra-City skirmishes, one of many possible battlefield scenarios for which they needed to prepare. The next step was wargames outside the dome under Skyra's toxic open skies. And then there were shipboard drills to run once the fleet got up and running.
There was no end to the training necessary for a people that had not had to fight in living memory.
"Let's reform the squads and start again," Vance widecast on the local net. A wave of groans answered him.
He couldn't blame his troops for their impatience. Once more he wondered if integrating the Granth into the City Guardians was such a good idea.
He clenched his jaw. Stop it, you've already studied this from all the angles.
The value of the Granth would be in a hand-to-hand struggle. Vance had studied the recordings of their assault on Tower when they had first appeared in The City. They could swarm a target and immobilize it, wrapping it up in a basket of thorny legs.
They had another desirable talent too. The ends of those long, jointed limbs included a retractable digit with a pretty nasty claw at the end, apparently what the Granth used for stabbing prey in the shallow swamps of their home world. Vance had seen those claws in action when he'd led the first group of City defenders during the invasion. Those hard, leathery legs had an impressive reach.
But that was about the limit of what Vance could coax out of them now. Despite his efforts, he had been unsuccessful in training the Granth to use human weapons. They simply did not have the anatomy to manipulate any weapons designed for human hands.
As Vance and his officers had worked on integrating these ungainly aliens into the combat force, he couldn't help but wonder why the Otrid had conscripted these beings for the assault on The City. Were they merely cannon fodder? That was another term Vance had learned while studying historical tactics used in humanity's wars. He couldn't imagine people ever being so plentiful they could be wasted in such a way, but he had recently come to understand how ignorant he was of ancient human history.
When he first began studying the arts of war he’d been shocked by the bloody-mindedness of human conflict, but had quickly gotten over judging the ancients too harshly. The City needed some of that killer instinct right now.
The squads reformed and Vance gave the order to begin the mock assault again. The axis flyers darted ahead, hugging the roof of the cavern. Within seconds, they relayed images of the target robots scurrying from hidden spaces at the far side of this seldom-used, half-excavated chamber.
Vance glanced over at the bunched Granth warriors and was pleased to see that this time they did not emerge from their covered positions too soon.
The glowing beams from the modified servitor robots ripped across the dim light of the cavern. Six of the target robots glowed briefly before dissolving. The fighting robots were simple construction and heavy labor servitors that had been repurposed for war. Vance had given their new weapons the sinister-sounding title of "suppression beams," but they really weren't much more than amplified cutting beams, the type used in fabricating new sections for the dome.
They were brutally effective in their simplicity, but they took a long time to recharge after each burst. Good for an initial volley, but not so good for sustained engagement.
Vance activated the second group of target robots. These were programmed for much more random distribution. They surged out in large numbers, some in formation, some as random singles.
The practice battlefield lit up as the weak simulated laser fire from the target robots sought out their opponents. From their sheltered positions Vance's sharpshooters answered with a volley from their own beam weapons. Each hit immobilized the target bots. Soon the cavern was littered with frozen servitor robots, but dozens more still maneuvered around their stilled compatriots. Vance observed that the hit percentage of his shooters was dropping rapidly.
"Concentrate your fire on the lead bots," he widecast to his shooters. The progress of the attackers slowed under the concentrated fire, but several target robots quickly breached the "lines" of his position.
He gave the order for the Granth to engage. Vance was pleased to see that they responded immediately, clambering down from the rocky outcroppings on the right flank.
The Granth only had two methods of fighting, but Vance had to admit they were effective. The
Granth at the point of attack lashed out with their forelegs, their pointed claws ripping through the metal of the practice robots. The following Granth then swarmed over the bots, wrapping them up with their long legs and rendering them immobile before crushing them.
As the Granth rolled through their lines, the practice robots altered direction. They were equipped with limited adaptive programming, and maneuvered away from this incursion—directly toward Vance's squadrons.
Vance darted from his position. His squad was in the unfinished end of the cavern, among great heaps of rubble and boulders. He slid down the loose stones to the cabin floor. "Engage now!"
He heard the heavy footfalls of his men behind him.
Vance ran, bent low, beneath the standard field of fire of the practice robots. He pulled the immobilizer patches from the thigh pockets of his uniform and slapped them on the central trunk of the nearest practice bot. It immediately slumped forward and sat inert. He zigg-zagged through the forest of mechanical servitors, slapping patches on all that came within reach. The immobilizer patches were an imperfect weapon for training sessions, as they had little application in a real-world skirmish, but it was the best they could do for now for simulating hand-to-tentacle combat with large alien enemies.
After "patching" eight practice bots he circled back to his original position. He scrambled up onto one of the boulders to watch his men in action.
They moved through the lines of robots quickly, boldly even, slapping patches on metal, but Vance knew that the true tests of bravery were still to come.
In short order, the only things moving on the ground were human and Granth soldiers.
Vance surveyed the wreckage. The Granth still had trouble with the concept of "practice exercise." They rarely left a practice bot that could be reused and this exercise was no exception. Before even counting the robot casualties, Vance accessed his command implants, called up the manifest for the machine shop, and placed the order for more units.
Gods and the Stars Page 4