by John Daulton
While she’d been doing a champion’s job up to that point of keeping the rush of fear at bay, it came upon her heavily now. She could hear the rise of her breathing even over the whine of the motorized table mechanism, and her heart beat palpably in her chest—though not for long, she knew, a fact of which she was suddenly very aware.
The hunched figure took a bottle from the tray and spritzed brownish-yellow liquid onto a cotton pad. Antiseptic, Orli recognized. What the hell do they need that for? The distant part of her brain was still striving to hold on to sanity, to herself, to that person who had been staring out through her eyes throughout her entire life, so seemingly unchanged over all these years.
She looked back at herself in the mirrored glass, could see herself slowly tipping back. She couldn’t even tilt her head forward. She was going to lose sight of herself, denied her own reflection. Maybe that was mercy. She hardly knew.
Thoughts flew through her mind. She thought of Altin. Missed him. Forgave him anything. Apologized for everything. Loved him so thoroughly. She thought of Roberto. He would be heartbroken too. And her father. He would hide in anger. He would only become more fierce. But mostly there was Altin. She wished she could have been better for him. She should have made love to him. She should have forced him to. Pointless morality be damned. She wished she could hold him now, just that, just one last time. She hadn’t held him enough. She hadn’t held any of them enough.
“Ensign Pewter,” came the voice of Commander Adair through a raspy speaker mounted in the ceiling. She could see it clearly now that she was lying almost completely level with the floor. She stared into its tiny black holes as if expecting to see poison gas clouding out. “You have been sentenced to death for crimes against the Northern Trade Alliance, against your country and against the people of Earth. Your sentence is upon you. Is there anything you would like to say before that sentence is carried out?”
At first came a surge of anger, and she felt, for a moment, like spewing forth yet another string of profanity. But, somehow, it seemed too late for that. So instead, she said only, “Tell Altin I am sorry. Tell him I love him. Tell him I tried.”
“Is that all, Ensign Pewter?”
She closed her eyes and let the tonsured man do his work. He stretched a tube of rubber underneath her arm and tightened it at the base of her bicep. Her hands shook so violently that, on her other arm, the bones of her wrists and elbows began to drum a dull staccato on the stainless steel. He tapped her arm and then stuck her with a needle attached to a short length of tubing, sliding it slowly into a vein. Blood flowed down the scant inches of the tube but stopped at a small plastic valve.
Commander Adair let his question hang in the air a moment longer, before continuing, taking her silence as her reply. “Then, by the authority given to me by the Northern Trade Alliance and the government of the United States of America, I order that you now be put to death.”
A shudder ran down her spine, but she fought hard against fear, if futilely. Not only could she hear her heart beating, she could feel it pulsing in the backs of her knees where they pressed against the cold stainless steel. The terror was so enormous she could no longer think.
The hunched executioner repeated the process with a needle in her other arm. He added a third into a vein on the back of her hand.
There came another series of whirs and clicks, and she could not help but open her eyes. A series of panels had opened in the ceiling and clear plastic pipes, no more than a quarter inch in diameter, were coming down, three of them. Each had a valve at the end and, attached to that, a length of transparent tubing held in place by a metal clip.
The man hooking up Orli took a flexible bit of clear tubing from one of the pipes and attached it to the one coming off the needle in her arm. He did the same for each of the other two needles that he’d pushed into her.
Spots began to swim before Orli’s eyes, and her fingertips tingled. She’d started to hyperventilate.
The hunched figure reached under the cart he’d brought and pulled out an oxygen mask, drawing out yet another length of tubing with it. He secured the mask as best he could over her nose and mouth, the task made difficult by how firmly her head had been strapped to the table. He leaned down and opened up a valve on a small tank on the cart’s lower rack, releasing a flow up the light blue length of its slender hose. The spots and tingling began to go away.
He double-checked the connections at his three needles and looked out into the mirrored glass with an expectant expression, though, he did not speak.
“Do it,” crackled Commander Adair’s voice from the speaker on the ceiling.
He nodded, and without looking at his victim, he reached up and turned the valve on the first of the three pipes. It immediately filled with a bright red liquid which dropped from the ceiling, filled the tube completely and snaked down to the smaller valve at the end of the flex-hose coming from Orli’s arm, where it stopped. He watched as the long silvery bead of air rose up its length and then bubbled up the pipe and vanished through the ceiling. He turned the small valve and let it flow into Orli’s arm.
It felt very cold, whatever it was pouring into her.
He went to the second pipe and once again turned the lever to open it. The fluid in this one was as yellow as lemonade. When the air had cleared the line, he opened the valve at Orli’s arm and released its chemicals into Orli’s blood as well.
Orli’s body started to feel heavy.
The executioner opened the third pipe, which filled with a pale green liquid at the same time a film of red warmth covered her, a thick blast of mist like an enormous sneeze. There was an ozone smell and smoke filled the room. Orli could hear dull shuffling.
Her vision was blurring, a red haze clouded everything. Dimly she felt pain in her hand, and then twice more, once each in the crook of her elbows. Then someone was wiping at her face.
She smelled bacon and garlic, and someone gripped her temples hard. Right after, a heavy weight pressed upon her chest, like someone was lying on top of her, and she blinked to see through a gray haze.
Doctor Leopold’s fat face stared blankly at her, his fleshy cheeks mashed out upon her breast like he was melting there. His eyes had the vacancy of someone listening, his mouth slightly ajar, breathing audibly.
He said something that came to her like sound through water, and he was gone. Light left, or it was blocked, and she realized she was looking at the palm of his hand mashed against her face, his fingers, powerful for all that fat, gripping her head almost brutally again. He shouted at someone. It sounded like “Shut up.” Then he began to sing.
She lay there in her heavy body, his hand crushing down on her nose, his song dull in her ears, and then her skin began to sting. She could feel rivulets of sweat running down her face, down her neck, into her bosom, her abdomen growing warm as it soaked into her uniform, her groin and thighs all growing hot and wet. The sting became a burn, a tremendous burn, and it felt as if she were being inflated, squeezed from the inside with terrible force, as if the blood and bile and perspiration, all of it, the very juices of her body, were being forced out through every pore, every orifice, violently. The sting-become-burn became pain, a searing horrible agony in her flesh, pain too overwhelming to endure. She would have screamed, but she passed out.
When she woke up, she was dry again. She lay in a bed near a window. She could hear someone breathing nearby, rhythmic, rich with slumber. Altin lay on couch nearby, his robes brown and crusted with dried blood, his face a mess of the same, and his hair stiffened into short sticks, crackly and all askew. She looked out the window and saw smoke, several white plumes of it gently rising beyond a castle wall. Calico Castle’s wall.
She couldn’t stop the tears. They burst free in that instant, loosed in the moment of realizing that she was home.
Chapter 23
Colonel Pewter’s face was the picture of severity as he moved with his unit across the open plains of Kurr toward Crown City. The thumping
footfalls of two hundred and fifty Marines in heavily armored battle suits beat a bass drum to the song of so many whirring servos and the hiss of hydraulic rams as the company approached the capital, still several miles off. Every stomping step splashed up sheets of muddy water in great spreading waves and sent chunks of dirt and grass flying out in a globular spew of green, gray and brown, each footfall an explosion bursting upon the ground so violently it seemed as if grenades were being tossed beneath five hundred steel-clad feet. Nine platoons marched in orderly formation, moving to deliver the ultimatum from planet Earth, the demand that the Queen call off the Hostiles or watch her city burn.
“Canopies unsealed,” Colonel Pewter ordered his men as the first of the outlying farms shaped themselves in his view screen. “Their magicians will blend us together like protein shakes if they can. So crack the windows, Marines. At least sixes inches around.” He followed his own instructions and tapped the battle suit’s console, bringing up the canopy controls. He hit the manual release, then slid the control forward and watched the windscreen break its seal and slide forward half a foot. The distant farm disappeared when it opened, the proper angle for projecting the image on the armored glass compromised, leaving him with only the view of the open prairie upon which they still trod through the canopy itself. He switched on the small console monitor instead. It was barely as big as the palm of his hand, but it would suffice. He knew what he needed to do, and he operated this machine reflexively.
“Contact at two o’clock, Colonel,” came Major Kincaid’s voice over the com. “Altitude six hundred and sixty feet, bearing north-northeast at fifty-one knots. Looks like they’ve spotted us, sir.”
Colonel Pewter tilted his head back and looked into the gray skies. It took him a moment to find what the major had identified, but he found it, some kind of winged creature flying straight for the city. At first he thought it might be an eagle, but it was too big.
“I can take it out,” offered Corporal Chang, whose mech unit marched next to the Colonel’s. “I got that bitch.”
“No,” ordered the colonel. “They need to know we are here. We need them to call off the Hostiles. If we have to kill them, we’ll be living here full time. Remember, there won’t be anyone back at home if this doesn’t work out.”
“What the hell is that thing?” asked another Marine marching just behind the corporal.
“If I remember my mythology right, I think that one is called a gryphon,” offered Major Kincaid.
“So what is this place, like the original source of fairy tales or something?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing, Sanchez,” said the Major. “This planet is pretty hard to swallow.”
“Keep your heads in the game, people,” ordered the colonel. “Keep the channel clear.”
They marched onward, and soon the farmhouse that had appeared on long-range sensors came into visual range. They could see a large group of men on horses charging across a wide plowed field.
Laughter crackled in the speakers of the colonel’s battle unit and someone said, “What the fuck? They’re literally ‘sending in the cavalry’? Someone should tell them that’s just a saying. This ain’t, like, 1950 or something?”
“They have lances, Sanchez, you moron. It would have to be, like, the 1800s,” countered Corporal Chang.
“You’re both wrong, now can the chatter,” snapped the colonel. “We have no idea what those men can do. A magic trap on a door killed Krakowski easy enough. Don’t think their cavalry will be less dangerous than their doors. Spread out.”
The nine platoons parted, shaping a long line, gently curving forward at the ends, the beginnings of the flanking maneuvers that would follow. The thunder of their stomping feet splashed heavily upon the muddy ground as they moved. Once in position, they stopped and waited, the press of their great weight squishing ooze out in puddles around them.
Colonel Pewter stepped forward from the line. “Chang, Sanchez, you are with me. Let’s go. Major, you know what to do if this goes bad.”
“Roger that, Colonel.”
The three Marines tromped across the plain toward the forming lines of heavy cavalry, thus far grown to three lines of fifty animals abreast, but more were still racing across the field to increase the ranks.
Three riders came forward, one on the left bearing the crimson and gold standard of the Queen, one on the right in plate armor that appeared to have seen considerable use in its time, and at the center a glorious figure on a prancing charger wearing gleaming plate armor and upon whose helmet bobbed a bright crimson feather, dancing gaily with the motion of his horse as if it were a plume of playful smoke. It was this central figure who removed his feathered helmet as they drew near and tucked it under his arm, revealing a face that was very young.
As a reciprocal courtesy, Colonel Pewter tapped at his control panel and opened his suit’s canopy all the way, the whine of the motor sounding until the windshield was thrust straight up into the air where it folded back, conveniently providing cover from the drizzle coming from the dull gray clouds above.
The two officers stared at one another for a time, the Prosperion’s horse continuing to dance beneath him, its iron-shod hooves making alternating slaps and sucking sounds in the mud as it pranced and shied, the beast clearly uncomfortable at the proximity of the alien machine and its whirring, whining immensity.
“Why do you bring your war machines into Her Majesty’s land?” said the proud figure upon the agitated mount. “You must realize this encroachment cannot be seen as anything other than an act of war.”
“I am here to negotiate the terms of Her Majesty’s withdrawal of Hostile forces from my planet,” intoned the colonel precisely as he’d been told. “Director Nakamura of the Northern Trade Alliance has authorized me to give your people six hours to comply. If you do not, I am under orders to level Crown City and then every other fortified city, town and village on the continent until she does comply. We will not leave this planet until one or the other has occurred.”
“We have no hostile forces on your world, and if we did, Her Majesty certainly would not remove them simply because a mob of ruffians riding in iron golems thought to threaten us.”
Colonel Pewter’s eyes narrowed at that, and he studied the man carefully. He could see the signs of a dangerous collision underway, ego and fear. He decided to change tactics some.
“Listen, son, you haven’t got the stripes to make the decision you’re about to make, regardless of that feather there. Just send word to your queen and get her out here to talk to us. And you need to get her here right away.”
“I will do no such thing. You will remove your ... constructions from this field immediately, or I will remove them for you.” The man to the young officer’s right made a ticking sound that could be heard despite being mainly muffled in his helmet.
Colonel Pewter looked past the man and saw that the rows of cavalry had grown to seventy-five animals wide, and there were now four lines of them. The back row was comprised of riders wearing no armor, which boded all the worse in the colonel’s mind. He figured those would be magicians back there. He looked back at the young officer, locking gazes with him. “That’s not going to happen. So, if that’s all you’ve got to say, then we’ll be moving on to the city to find her ourselves. I suggest you tell your boys back there to stand aside. We don’t want to hurt anyone right now. We only want to speak to the Queen.”
“I must insist, sir, that you comply with the instructions I have given you and remove yourself back to Little Earth. If you do not, there will be no help for what comes next.”
Colonel Pewter shook his head and tapped the controls to lower his canopy back to where he’d set it earlier. “Look, it’s your funeral,” he said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Into his com he said, “Bring them up, Major.”
“You are making a terrible mistake,” warned the mounted officer. “You have one last chance to call them off before it is too late.”
C
olonel Pewter only continued to shake his head. Dumb kid, he thought. Probably some rich guy’s son. Going to get all his men hosed. They wouldn’t even know what hit them.
The sound of the approaching line of mechs rose, the vibrations in the ground more pronounced, until all of them had come even with the colonel and his two companions of the recent parlay. “Tell them to step aside,” said the colonel one last time, hoping the young Prosperion would comply. He did not, so the colonel ordered his men to advance. “Steady ahead,” he said. “Don’t shoot if they don’t.”
The young officer turned his horse sideways, the length of it directly blocking the colonel’s battle unit, about which the animal protested with a wide-eyed whinny, rearing high on its hind legs. But the skillful young rider spun it round in a full circle and sidled it up to where its flanks nearly brushed against the unit’s plasma shield. “Halt, I say,” demanded the youth.
Colonel Pewter reached down with both of the battle suit’s arms, and down it was, for the horse at the withers was only half as tall as the war machine, and as gently as possible, he picked up both horse and rider and placed them carefully aside. Laughter erupted over the com channel as the colonel pressed forward past the officer.
With the young officer behind him now, the colonel did not see the signal the youth gave for his men to charge, but signal he did, and suddenly on they came.
The first line of horsemen lowered their lances and pounded across the wet turf, cries of “For the War Queen” sounding from the darkness inside their helmets.
“Do we fire?” asked Corporal Chang, sounding uncomfortable. “I mean, it’s going to be bad.”
“Concussion grenades in front of the charge. Give them a fifteen-yard buffer. Try to scare the horses off.”
The hollow thwoop-thwoop-thwoop sound of two hundred and fifty concussion grenades being launched from tubes in each Marine’s mech filled the air, followed by the dark shapes of the grenades tumbling in the direction of the onrushing horses like lobbed rocks. Almost as one they went off, a tremendous blast of sound and a pressure wave washing out toward the oncoming animals. A few of them reared and pulled up, tumbling riders off their backs. Others stopped short and hard, pitching the riders forward. But only a few. The rest, while angling sideways, reflexively veering away from the unseen force, came on anyway, their eyes wide with fright, but their ears back with anger, trained war beasts with courage in their hearts. Their riders leaned forward even closer to the necks of the charging animals, and it was clear that they would not be scared away. The tips of their lances began to glow.