Gau crept to the alley’s opening and gazed out at the slum.
Graffiti covered the anti-fungal, impact-resistant composite walls; boxes and crates hung with blankets for doors were propped up against the sides of the government-designated housing complexes; the whiff of rotting fruit led his gaze to where someone had spilled or dumped sacks of garbage in one of the empty intersections. The whole place carried a sense of failure so profound it could never be recovered from. The Terran government hadn’t even tried. Its only response had been to turn its back on the whole project and all of them living in it.
They would not be able to look away much longer.
Gau slipped into the tenement’s side door, padded down the first-floor hallway—and froze. There was another Osk standing before the closed apartment door. It was a black shape in his peripheral vision. He turned, hoping the other had interpreted his sudden start as one of surprise and not guilt.
“You’re back.” Ariveth’s voice washed over him. She stepped forward, looking him up and down, but he couldn’t read the expression on those elegant features.
“Yes. A little late, but in one piece.” He smiled. “Were you waiting up for me?”
Her snout twitched to the side, half turning away before she stopped the motion. It was a small hesitation, but it seeded a grain of uncertainty in his chest. “Lorsk is. Kevret and the others just finished their post-mission conference a few minutes ago. He said to send you in when you got back.”
A standard post-mission conference. Her phrasing was neutral enough that he almost relaxed, until she caught his shoulder before he pushed the door open and added, “He’s alone.”
The grain of uncertainty in his chest seemed to grow icicles. Ariveth spoke into his silence. “Are you all right to go in by yourself? I could come too . . .”
There’s no reason for you to come. I got into this all by myself. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and pushed open the door before his nerve failed him.
The first room of the two-room unit was empty, unlit. The refuse from their “feast” still littered the floor, though the trapdoor had been sealed. The warm glow of amber lights emanated from the second room. Gau followed it to the margin of the second room and stopped.
The sparse furniture had been moved to the edges of the room, except for a single Osk-style chair facing the room’s entrance. Like all the tenement’s furniture, the piece had been assembled from junkyard scrap. Lorsk Edrasshii sat on the chair, arms slung over its chest rest.
“You’re late,” Lorsk said.
“Had to retrieve the EMP spikes,” Gau said. He didn’t look directly at the faction leader, but kept his gaze fixed on a point on the floor before Lorsk’s chair. “And there were some drone patrols I had to avoid.”
“And that took you”—Lorsk glanced at the chronometer on his wrist—“an extra twenty standard minutes beyond our designated exfiltration time?” He didn’t wait for Gau’s reply. “Sit.”
Lorsk, of course, had the only chair. With a familiar hot feeling in his gut, Gau settled his belly on the bare carpet. The cheap matting scratched at his knees through his cloak.
Lorsk rose from his seat and approached until he stood less than half a body length away. Deliberately too close. He’d sloughed off his armor, but the body beneath his light cloak was half again as big as Gau’s, layered with muscle despite his age.
Gau had learned long ago that this proximity wasn’t a prelude to violence. Lorsk wasn’t a violent Osk—as faction leader, he had others to do the violence for him. It was simply a reminder of how things stood between them. Of the debt Gau could never repay.
His eyes bored into Gau’s, exerting an almost physical pressure to look down. Gau bowed his head quickly. If he played along and gave the expected responses, maybe Lorsk would let him out sooner.
“Lies,” Lorsk said evenly, “are poison to a faction’s solidarity. You will tell me the real reason you were late. Now. ”
“I went back.” The words escaped him before Gau could bite them down. He studied the carpet, feeling entirely too much like a sulking child again. “I went back to the base and searched their files for anything important.”
Wood and metal smashed to the carpet less than a body length from his head. “You stupid, selfish little krasna!”
Gau’s gaze jerked up in pure spinal reflex, and he half scrambled away from the overturned chair before he found Lorsk’s smoldering gaze fixed on him and went still and silent again in self-defense. “Krasna” meant something castoff, worthless rubbish that even scavengers wouldn’t touch. And it was one of Lorsk’s favorite words to use on Gau when no one else was listening.
Gau managed to limit his response to the insult to a twitch of his head. Don’t move. Don’t react. He still clung, it seemed, to that childish hope that if his victim didn’t fight back and give him sport, Lorsk might get bored and end this sooner rather than later.
No such luck.
“You disobeyed a direct order,” Lorsk bit out. He paced around the downed chair as though it were a fallen opponent.
“Did you even think for a second what your disobedience would mean for the mission? Your selfishness could have compromised all of us!”
A trickle of indignation cracked the grim endurance Gau had wrapped around himself. Unwisely, he snapped, “But it didn’t. I covered my tracks—”
“Shut. Up.” Lorsk’s voice was a bare hiss, but the quiet words were weighted by something more than command. A threat Gau could almost smell in them.
“Did I say you could speak?” Lorsk said.
Gau bleakly contemplated the impossibility of answering, before he remembered to sign. His hand swept through the air in a line as short as he could make it.
Heavily, Lorsk righted the chair and settled into it. “When you were a child,” he said in an almost contemplative voice, “I could write off your ingratitude as a child’s foolishness. A lack of appreciation you would grow out of. Was I wrong?”
Gau gave the only right answer. “No, commander.”
Lorsk leaned forward against the chair’s rest. “Compromise the mission again,” he said, voice smooth as spider silk now,
“and I might decide you have no place among us.”
Gau’s fist caught a seam in the carpet and clenched. That threat again, now? Yet Lorsk must know that without Gau they could never—
Lorsk seemed to read his thoughts. “I don’t need you to run this campaign. No matter how important you think you’ve gotten . The Djandjer-Pralsh made you. It will survive without you.”
As I can survive without you. Once, the threat of expulsion from the Djandjer-Pralsh had been enough for Lorsk to extract all kinds of compliance from Gau. There was nothing worse for a sick, scared adolescent fresh from the streets than the prospect of going back. That child wasn’t him anymore. Six years on the front edge of a war zone had eaten that child up as completely as any burial feast. But if he got himself kicked out now, it would be the end of his plan. He would find himself on the outside of the very vengeance he’d set in motion. So he kept silent and stared at the floor.
Lorsk blew out a long, tense exhalation. “I think it’s time I told you a story,” he said in a lighter, almost conversational voice.
“A story?” Gau said. He inhaled silently, scenting for some trick, but Lorsk’s scent was neutral.
“An old war story.” Lorsk leaned back from the chair’s forward rest, stretching his shoulders. “You know the Djandjer-Pralsh fought on Rreluush-Tren with the rest of the Coalition.”
Gau jabbed slowly. The Teluk Coalition’s invasion of Rreluush-Tren was well-known history. After the Expansion’s failed gambit to wrest territory from Teluk, the Coalition had turned from defending their home to interfering in the war between Terrans and Urd. It had been hoped the Urd Empire would make a valuable buffer against the Expansion, and the Urd themselves loyal allies.
“I’m going to tell you the story of how we got out of that mess,” Lorsk said.
&n
bsp; Chapter Twelve
Lorsk Edrasshii broods on blood and pain, beneath the fat yellow wedge of a gibbous moon. Blue-violet foliage forms a shield thicket around their meager camp, an impenetrable wall of interlocked branches and vines hard as steel and resilient as rubber. The camp itself is a series of crude bubble-fabs set up on red-brown earth. Lorsk and his battalion of Osk hiked ten days through grasping jungle to get here, carrying what supplies they had left in panniers slung around their bodies. They have no aircraft anymore, and land vehicles are worse than useless in this endless thicket. When at last he called a halt, it was only to spend another day carving a clearing out of the trees and creepers, using crude shears and hoes fashioned from the wreckage of their craft. At the end, they dug and hacked with their bare hands and blades. Lorsk had joined his soldiers, cutting and cutting at the rubbery undergrowth until his blades ached like a sore tooth.
The hacked odds and ends of the undergrowth litter the bare earth around the margins of their camp. Some of the gashed ends of the vines still weep sap, a dark ichor that burns like acid on contact with unarmored skin. The fluid will blind a solider unfortunate enough to walk under one of the whole plants with their fat, poisonous seed pods. The pods sense body heat and burst when an animal is near, scattering their feathery seeds and tarry sap over the luckless passerby. The plants do not care that their bombardment is likely to blind the creature; a blind host will still ferry the seeds a ways as it tries to outrun the pain, and when it falls its body will provide the baby vine with its first source of nourishment. The battalions of the Coalition call these vile growths venomvines.
Their encampment is surrounded. They have lit no lights—Osk need none, and the light would only bring their enemies down on them faster—but it is only a matter of time before their lines clash. Even Lorsk’s eyes cannot see the enemy through the blue jungle; they are still tens of kilometers from their camp as the warship flies. But he knows they’re out there. Both kinds.
His scouts came limping back this afternoon, struggling into camp through rude tunnels dug in Rreluush-Tren’s red clay. They reported Urd warships and cannon platforms to the northeast, following the steel-gray ridge of the mountains toward the coast. And near the coast itself, at least three platoons of Terran tankboys are wading through the jungle, hoping to cut off his footsore battalion as it makes for the sea.
Lorsk is relieved to hear of the tankboys, at least: the big machines will set a maddeningly slow pace through the thick jungle. Unless they come upon a travel corridor free of foliage, the Terrans will have to slash their way through the undergrowth to gain every step. If Lorsk and his warriors are unlucky, the Terrans will also have warships, but the last he heard most of those are in space or plying the coast, harrying the battered Coalition forces in orbit and in their ragged stronghold on the tip of the world.
Arkkranet Peninsula. The same place Lorsk and his battalion are trying to go. In another day they will make it, if the Urd and Terran forces pincering them don’t cut them to pieces first.
He’s more worried about the Urd, to tell it true: despite their absurd spikes and crenellations, those warships are viciously fast. Each carries a complement of twenty razorcannons, and two hundred reptilian soldiers with handheld versions of the same ordnance. The mobile war platforms carry only a few soldiers, but with their small size comes obscene stealth. Several times their column was on the march, sure that the sky above the trees was clear, only to have an Urd platform strafe them with razors from some position just out of sight. Lorsk has developed a healthy fear of those razor weapons. He’s seen what their clouds of sharpened metal projectiles can do to living flesh. He thought his own species had a proclivity for slicing their enemies into tiny pieces, but has decided the Osk have nothing on the Urd.
Lorsk wears no armor this night. Although Rreluush-Tren’s sun has slipped beyond the horizon, the night air wraps him in a blanket of cloying heat. Yet it is cool compared to the sweltering heat of the day, and the relatively cooler night makes body heat a problem: he’s had his soldiers erect a net of heat-absorbent fabric over the medical tent and sleeping quarters, but that is all they have to spare. Every soldier is equipped with heat-shielding armor, but on the third day of their march Lorsk ordered the warriors who remained to him to slough their armor and pack it away. If they’d continued to wear it, the sun would have parboiled them in their own sweat. He would lose twice the number the Urd took to heat exhaustion, and armor made no difference to a razorcannon anyway. His soldiers had grumbled, but they had obeyed.
Striking a lightless camp, concealing the bulk of their heat . . . these small concessions toward camouflage are the best the Osk battalion can do in these miserable conditions. And the enemy knows they’re here anyway.
Shev’na, he mouths into the hot night air. Retreat. The word is bitter as vine venom on his tongue. They are in retreat. Lorsk doesn’t know what else to do, only that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Coalition Fleet had arrived in Rreluush-Tren orbit expecting to be greeted as heroes saving the Urd from the Terran invasion of their colony world.
Instead, Lorsk has watched his forces become more entangled in the jungle, fighting an enemy they can only glimpse, but which seems to be presenting them with a united front.
Meanwhile, the Coalition’s own forces have fragmented, slowly squeezed apart by the crushing blue jungle like pockets of blood trapped in the dead end of a capillary.
Lorsk has spent months watching his soldiers die: cut down by Urd razorcannon or Terran slug guns, fallen prey to traps laid in the jungle—mines and pits and snares, or Rreluush-Tren’s equally ferocious flora and fauna. He’s seen the ground under their feet open into a gaping maw lined with sharp stakes, the loose soil that had hidden it a funeral shroud for the Osk who fell to their deaths. Or a tripwire triggered by a careless foot, a barely visible line against the blue that unleashed a cloud of spinning blades into their ranks. He has felt the ground shake as a mine woke under the pressure of a soldier’s weight, leaving only smoke and choking dust and gobbets of flesh in its wake.
As far as Lorsk can grasp, the situation is the same for the Coalition forces all over Rreluush-Tren. Radio contact has been sporadic; his side is paranoid that the Urd or Terrans may find a way to decipher one of the multiplicity of languages in which the Coalition codes its transmissions. But the overall news is not good: heavy losses for their side have beaten the Coalition off of the two smaller continents, and pressed them out of the heart of Suurjai to its peripheral coasts and mountains. The last message the Osk battalion received, just before reaching the ridge, was an order to make for the nearest Coalition base, where they would have a chance to regroup and reevaluate the campaign.
Reevaluate. Lorsk turns the word over with scorn. The euphemism of a bunch of fools trying to put a good face on their defeat. They had already lost Rreluush-Tren in their minds the minute they landed on the face of Suurjai to find Terrans and Urd united. The cumbersome, multispecies Coalition had not been able to pivot to a new strategy that included the Urd among the enemy, and instead had crumbled.
Whalg-General would have committed to taking Rreluush-Tren without local support, Lorsk was sure. He would have done what was necessary, and rallied the other leaders to him. But the Baskar had stayed behind on Teluk, to form the nucleus of the new government behind the Coalition. So Whalg-General will secure a comfy seat on the High Council and add a new achievement to his name, while the Osk are left to die one by one on Rreluush-Tren. Swallowed alive in this devouring jungle. Lorsk wonders if Whalg-General will memorialize this invasion in a new name segment. Then he remembers wryly that the Baskar only allow their successes to lengthen their names.
The ridge, the battle they fly from, was supposed to turn the situation around. Lorsk had his orders by then—to run back to Arkkranet Peninsula to lick his wounds—but he’d known if his battalion could take the territory, he could redirect the Coalition force’s helter-skelter retreat and bring the panicked ground battali
ons under his control. Lorsk was the highest-ranking commander still mobile on the ground, as far as he knew. He understood the situation better than the cowards holed up back at base.
A small garrison of Urd had held the ridge, a spine of gray granite that fenced off the jungle from Suurjai’s craggy south-eastern coast beyond. If his forces had taken it, they would have brought three-fourths of the continent’s southern coastline under Coalition control. A poor trade when their goal had been control of the entire continent, but a good position to regroup from. Along the coasts and foothills, there was clean air to breathe and a clear line of sight from which to plan campaigns anew. Out of the jungle, there was hope.
Lorsk had dared to hope. He’d still had the Leading Edge then: the central nucleus of the ship had stayed in the Coalition’s hangar on Arkkranet Peninsula, but its other components had flown them into the interior. For what it was worth, the Leading Edge’s full complement of warplanes watched over them as they fought and bled in the jungle. The thick foliage had stymied the planes from offering any real air support: visibility through the trees was nonexistent, and even with heat vision the gunners were just as likely to shoot their own troops in the confusion of a battle on foot. Anyway, in the jungle there was nothing to shoot at: just traps and pitfalls that left his soldiers bleeding or dead, and mobile platforms that appeared like wraiths to ply his ranks with sharpened metal before vanishing into the trees.
The ridge seemed a simple battle in comparison. Two Baskar detachments he’d won to his way of thinking already had the defenders pinned in their dugouts on the hillside. They were only waiting for Lorsk’s planes to come in with their heavy guns and drop the mountain on top of the Urd. A quick aerial reconnaissance flushed out a few Urd platforms, which the planes quickly dealt with. The lizards hadn’t seemed to have any serious air support, and of the Terran forces there was no sign. The Baskar and Osk squads had crept slowly up the ridge, firing every time a head or limb or gun barrel announced itself above the Urd dugout, as the planes swooped in for the strike.
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