by Chad Huskins
Only now, in service to Holace Kalder, had she found any reason to take notice of the immensity of the task laid at the feet of humanity’s leaders. They needed money and resources for countless projects, the Crusade being one of those projects. Money that ought to be going to some other family who had suffered tragedy like Moira and her family, but had instead been diverted to this cause. She was reading about it on the pubnet, she heard it in the news, one could not avoid it.
Resources. It was something that kept coming up in her search for information on Holace Kalder. Some unknown years ago, Kalder had written a book, a lengthy tome called simply Determinacy. Part of it seemed to be a treatise on how to find a flawlessly winning strategy, and the other part was a meditation on the immensity of the cosmos and the futility of struggles to win in the first place. In Determinacy, Kalder outlined how a person could determine everything they needed to know about an enemy by guessing at two of three key knowledge points: objectives, resources, and behaviors. He called it the ORB method.
Know any of the two, Kalder had written, and you can guess the third. Know an enemy’s resources and behaviors, and you can guess his objectives. Or, know his objectives and resources, and you can anticipate his behaviors. And so forth.
The sailor beside her moaned in her sleep. When Florence shifted, the sheets uncovered one of her small breasts, which still had a pink mark where Moira had bitten it.
Moira thought, Somewhere, someone is not getting paid because I’m here fucking a greasy sailor on an idealistic quest conceived by an old man that no one can tell me the origin of. Resources are being used to put me on this adventure.
On the heels of that, she thought, What are your objectives, Holace Kalder?
A chime went off in her ear. Her imtech alerted her to a find. She blink-clicked on a message that appeared on her lenses, and it opened. Moira had run a search-merger program on anything related to a Republican soldier found stranded on an abandoned world, or any story like it that might predate the Republic. She figured it couldn’t be difficult. How often does a single soldier get stranded on a planet for thirty-eight years? What made it even easier was that, in the story Kalder had told them, it had been on a planet with a Stranger Watchtower in orbit. A possible Worshipper world.
What her program had found was a single file, partially corrupted, from precisely 1,281 years ago. It was a story from some long-dead news outlet called Around the Spiral, and was translated from some branch of the Chinese language no longer in use. The headline read, in big bold letters, SOLDIER RESCUED AFTER ALMOST FORTY YEARS ALONE ON ALIEN WORLD.
That was long before the Republic of Aligned Worlds had even been dreamt of, back when humanity had only been the Aligned Systems, with a single alien world brought into its fold.
Moira searched for pictures of the survivor. There were none. Even the name of the soldier appeared to have been redacted, perhaps for security’s sake. But the name of the military vessel that finally rescued the soldier was mentioned, as was the system. The Delphine’s Hammer had pulled the soldier from a rocky world called Tuhhbis, a planet believed to have been partially terraformed by an unknown race.
The Strangers, Moira thought. Or the Worshippers.
Again, she looked at the date of the story.
One thousand two hundred eighty-one years ago. There was no mention of the soldier’s physical description, no way for Moira to compare him to the senator now leading this Crusade.
Moira waved her hands, bringing up the vid files on what all she had documented inside the Tantis 815 site on Zhironovsky 373b. A pane popped up in her periphery, and with an eye-flick she centered the image in front of her. She saw the light display, heard her own voice talking over it, describing what she was seeing. She froze the vid on the weird purple serpent she saw floating through the light show.
Then she played the audio file from the sepulcher itself, isolating only the weird voice that had emanated from the walls.
“Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda’dreth’dreya’dreddi,” it said.
Then she brought up the audio files from the Grazen site on Dwimer. “…demons,” a haunted voice croaked, seemingly in desperation, pleading with the listener to understand. “…All demons…”
Moira jumped as two fingers walked up her arm. She turned and looked at Florence, her naked sailor, giving her that look with her eyes.
“What are you thinking about?” Florence asked.
Moira was honest with her. “The immensity of it all.”
“All of what?”
“Do you even believe in this Crusade?”
Florence made a face, and snorted. “I don’t believe in much, darling. I get by with engine work and the occasional fistful of tits.”
“What do you think about the Strangers? The Worshippers?”
“I don’t think about them at all.”
“So you’re just going through the motions until Man finally vanishes, until we all just disappear?”
“Push me, I thought that’s what we were all doing.”
Moira snorted out a laugh. “Is that why you joined the Navy, to kill time until there’s no more time.”
Florence shrugged. “That about says it.”
Moira looked back at the pane floating in her lenses, the one showing the purple serpent writhing in light. It had her vexed. As much a mystery as Kalder and everything else.
“What about you?” Florence asked. “Why did you go to the College and become a stellarpath?”
Perhaps it was her tiredness, matched by the post-coitus bliss, that brought the truth so readily to her own tongue. “Because I was lonely. I figured if I was going to be alone forever, might as well be alone with a purpose.”
“And what about now? Why are you on this Crusade? Is it just the money he’s paying you?”
“No,” Moira said.
“Then what is it?”
The answer was the same. “Because I was lonely.” It hurt just saying that. It hurt because it was true. All she had ever had was Pritchard and her Series Seven and her work. It was always the same. From one job to the next, carrying her dog along, mapping out itineraries for cargo fleets and rich men on holiday.
Florence sat up on her elbows, the sheets completely falling away. “It’s not lonely down here in the sheets,” she said. “Come join me. You nibbled on my left tit, now the right one’s jealous.” She freed one of her feet from the sheets and ran it down the length of Moira’s leg.
Moira gave another few seconds of thought to her mysteries, then pushed them aside and joined Florence in the sheets so that she would not be lonely again. In her ears, the audio file continued on loop.
“Dredda’dress’dresda’dredda…”
: The Battle of Phanes
There was this elasticity to everything. Moments were drawn out. The days were long and stretched out, time was flexible and even wound backwards at times. Or seemed to. Everyone and everything was pulled wide apart, and thin. The streets were at times theirs, at times the enemy’s, and at times they belonged to everyone. The ground widened as the corpses piled higher. Every soldier’s gaze was stretched thin, too, and the ground beneath their feet seemed as secure as the ground in one’s dreams. Likely to give at any moment.
Lyokh did not know the time. He just knew that both suns were in the sky, disappearing behind dark clouds, and that his blade had sunk deep into another enemy. He knew that his back was to one of the five Ravagers still kicking. He knew when the ninth wave finally ended, and one of the medics demanded that he take a break and swallow some water and go-pills. He knew that someone had brought him the rifle of a dead man and that he hadn’t had time to use it. He knew his sword had worked just fine.
These things he knew. But the wider-scope things, those remained elastic and ill-defined.
Lyokh was in a flow state. A state of mind where he was at his peak performance because he had accepted the fact of present circumstances and given in to both muscle memory and the theory of death. He was
mindful, yet also mindless. A perfect flow state. When a person was in such a state, they became a passenger in their own body, watching it happen outside of themselves. The key to maintaining this state, as Herodinsk had pointed out, was to never recognize the state. Never acknowledge it. Keep with the flow.
The flow was formed by the crucible of exhaustion, anger, and the acceptance of his own mortality. It opened him up to new strengths, once buried, reservoirs only unleashed in times of utmost desperation.
The sword seemed to swing itself, his enemies looked slower, his body less tired than it ought to be. It was the flow. He was swept up in it, and he allowed it to take him.
In his mad haze of killing, Lyokh saw things. Images. Probably brought on by a mind that wasn’t aware of how exhausted it was. Fleeting images. A planetrise from Timon’s surface. His mother’s touch, holding his hand while they picked flowers near Uncle Jodick’s farm. He smelled those flowers. And he felt the wyrm’s breath…yes, the purple wyrm. He saw it, too. As he slayed one enemy after another, he saw the large wyrm coming for him, its jaws opening, swallowing him whole…
Three days they had held this spot. Three days of long, elastic silences broken only by the occasional flashfire of combat, and Lyokh growling old Timonese curses. Three days of forming phalanxes to hold their lines, men with shields at the fore, dying at the fore.
The last wave was falling back, and they were just now advancing beyond their makeshift wall of debris and corpses. They had waited just long enough for the Novas to drop fresh supplies, some spare ammo hoppers and MREs, and now they were on their way.
They traipsed over a building that one of the Ravagers had collapsed on purpose, pinning two grasshoppers and a whole squadron of the enemy. Two of them were still alive, trapped in the rubble, and Lyokh ended their suffering with a stroke of his sword. He led them all with that sword, moving quickly with his main assault force up from, and with tactical units covering their flanks. The only ones ahead of Lyokh were two warhulks and Ravager One, their guns quietly smoking as they slowly panned left to right, up and down, looking for work.
“Watch those windows, Paupau,” Lyokh said into his helmet’s mic.
“Copy that, doyen.”
“Takirovanen, say status.”
Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Lyokh heard the distant crack of a rifle. It was still impossible to say Takirovanen’s location, for his helmet cam was out, and he spoke little.
“I count six on the rooftop to your ten o’clock, doyen,” he said. “I just put one of them to sleep.”
“See if you can’t tuck the others in, too.”
“I’ve already got the lullaby ready.”
“Meiks? How’s our flanks?”
“Got some stragglers moving down the alley,” Meiks reported. “Yabbaphast and O’Tulley tagged one apiece, the rest ran away. Target suppressed. Gunner up, scanning with local sensors. We are tracking the group that ran. Should we prosecute? Over.”
“Negative. Maintain a hard posture, only prosecute targets that are an immediate threat. Hold our flanks while we advance, then follow behind. Keep me apprised of any further changes. Over.”
“Copy that, doy—”
Suddenly, an explosion rent the air. They all halted, took up positions, and knelt. Lyokh conferred with his HUD to see where all his teams had gone to take cover, and with his hand and NUI he shuffled their positions around to something more to his liking. He noticed they all moved more sluggishly than days before. Bedraggled, beaten, and having witnessed the deaths of so many of their friends…It’s weighing on them. It’s weighing on me.
The explosion had come from beneath Ravager One, an explosion of fire and dust, which did nothing to the tank but had nearly knocked one of the warhulks over.
“Minix, report!” Lyokh shouted.
“It’s all right,” said Sergeant Minix, the man who had taken command of the warhulks after Heeten’s death.
Heeten.
“What happened?”
“Another improvised explosive, doyen,” Minix said. “Sensors didn’t catch it in time. Ravager One just ran right over it.”
They had been hitting a lot of those lately. The mechanicae had dropped dozens to cover their retreat. “Let’s take a break for a second, do a brief scan. Ziir, Gohmark, hoy up.” The two soldiers raced to the front with their SenseSpheres, tossing them onto the ground and letting their AI direct them along. Like bomb-sniffing dogs in the past, the tiny drones were looking for anything from the scent of nitrate to unusual spikes in radiation. Lyokh watched the SenseSpheres roll right past the warhulks, and could not help but notice one huge absence.
Heeten.
A mile back, they had passed where her warhulk had fallen. Her remains were inside, diced into bloody pulp, only part of her skull remained, and one of those green eyes had looked out at Lyokh dully…
Put that away, he told himself. Oblivion awaits, and you damn well know it.
A mile ahead of them, looming like some disapproving parent, was the Dexannonhold. Presently, a low mist had gathered around it. Gray rainclouds were brewing some bad business overhead. The lack of quality light did not lessen the shimmer of the Dexannonhold, though. If anything, the gloomy day made the palace seem like the tomb of an ancient god.
A huge explosion sounded in the distance and shook the ground.
“What the hell was that?” said Rootspire, asking anybody.
“Probably the next batch of lucky souls to join us,” Lyokh said. “War Council’s last message said they landed fifty klicks off course, somewhere to the west.”
He took a moment to review the feeds from all wing commanders, seeing where ammo and power was the lowest. “Gold Actual to Devastator Actual. Tsuyoshi, I’m seeing you’ve got some STACs running on fumes. You need some juice?”
“We could sure use it, doyen.”
“Let’s get it done while we’re resting. Ares, Fierce, spare a couple hulks.”
Seconds later, a pair of Dagonite warhulks were spared from Ares and Fierce, and went marching over to where Devastator Wing was hunkered down. Warhulks came equipped with small fusion backup batteries in their legs, which could be used to charge Mantises, Ravager guns, and STACsuits on the go. Tsuyoshi’s men huddled around the Dagonites and plugged in for the five minutes it took to get a good charge.
As he watched it all play out on his cams, a shadow fell over Lyokh, then fluttered away. He looked up at Thrallyin, bloodied but yet still flying, three other wyrms in its flock.
“Gold Wing Actual to Thrallyin Actual, do you read? Over.”
“Go ahead, Gold Actual.”
“You seen in any changes, Artemis?”
“Negative, doyen. It’s pretty quiet up here. The Novas are moving into a wider patrol, establishing a greater sphere of dominance of airspace. I just came back from a scouting run up ahead. A few platoons have dug in at the foot of the Dexannonhold,” he said, even as she sent vids of his reconnaissance to Lyokh’s HUD. It looked like a colony of steel ants quickly erecting walls of debris, much like Lyokh and his people had done to maintain their camp. Even corpses were being used. “They’ve completely surrounded it. They didn’t seem interested in us when we flew over—all their guns and weapons platforms are aimed at the palace, like they’re afraid of what might come out of it.”
“Any idea what made them panic and flee into us?”
“Negative, no sign of even the slightest resistance fighters,” Artemis said. “No Order Guard, no city guard, nothing. There are a few corpses I highlighted, though, that I think you should take a look at.”
Lyokh saw that. He zoomed in on those bodies, and was at first unsure of the quality of the video. Perhaps Artemis’s cams were corrupted? It certainly seemed reasonable, considering the state some of the mechanicae corpses were in. Around the base of the Dexannonhold, Lyokh saw bodies that were twisted, elongated, with organs that seemed to have either been vomited out of their mouths, or yanked out their anuses. Some
of the skulls were malformed and bulbous, while other bodies were covered in angry red sores. One body even seemed to have an extra arm growing out of it.
Are the vid files corrupted, maybe at a different compression that my helmet’s vid-player, or are those just some new models of mechanicae previously unidentified?
Even after all he had seen, those images gave Lyokh a cold chill up his spine.
“Artemis, give me a wide patrol over area grid six-seven-niner-eight-three-seven. Over.”
“Copy that, doyen.”
“Spotted two more mines, doyen,” Ziir said next to him. He was watching his drone’s footage on his HUD. “Working on them now.”
“Excellent. Chan, how are our patients doing?”
“One just died,” the medic said flatly. He might have been talking about a mild case of trenchfoot. “The rest are stable. We’re going to need a resupply of antibiotics and nanite flushes soon, though.”
“Copy that. Do what you can.”
“Of course, doyen. I always do.”
Suddenly, Ziir exclaimed, “Got ’em! Both mines disarmed, sir.”
“Good job, Ziir. This is Gold Actual to all wing leaders. We are moving out.”
More than three hundred soldiers stood as one and proceeded down the street towards the Dexannonhold, where Artemis of Artemis had recorded the ominous images. With each step he took, the sense of foreboding grew. The streets were quiet except for the grumble of the Ravager and the mechanical footsteps of each warhulk. The spilled rubble of bombed-out buildings crunched beneath Lyokh’s feet. The debris all around ranged from potted plants to childiren’s toys to body parts.
The rain started in needles, panging off their armor and pattering like little fairy footsteps across the street.
Lyokh came across a number of corpses that looked warped in ways similar to the ones he’d seen on Artemis’s aerial footage. Necks stretched out unnaturally, engorged hands and feet, flesh sloughed off and still sizzling. One impossibly wide mouth was fixed in a permanent scream. All of these corpses had tendrils of some black creature climbing slowly, slowly out from their flesh. Filaments of fine black softness grew out of the anus of one of the dead, and aspired up the wall of a bullet-dappled bakery.