"Very well."
Debbi asked, "Do you have a problem with me using the black gun?"
Martool stared silently for a moment. "You are human. I have no control over you."
"Great." Debbi hefted the Hellrazor toward Sahrin and nodded at her gun belt. "Trade you."
Sahrin's stone face broke into a grin and he took the assault rifle. He handed the Dragoon back to Debbi.
She buckled on her weapon and pointed to the black gun touch pad on the rifle. "That fires the black gun. Don't hit it. Let me show you how to operate that weapon."
Sahrin ejected the clip and checked it. Then he slammed it back in and worked the mechanism like an expert. "Point. Shoot."
"Okay," Debbi said with a smirk. She lifted the bag of extra ammo and grenades to her shoulder. "I'd say you're ready. Lead the way to the sun gate and let's go to work."
She followed the two anouks out into the corridor and they began to run. The complex was chaotic with warriors, both male and female, moving rapidly through the crowded passageways. Other anouks shepherded children in different directions.
Debbi and her companions burst out of the tunnels and into an open courtyard. The Ranger got a sense of the immensity of the complex that the model couldn't give her. Castle Rock took amazing advantage of the natural terracing and crevicing of the canyon to gain every inch of available space. Behind and above, Debbi saw more buildings on ledges and levels with bridges linking them, clinging tenuously to the rock face. Facades were intricately carved with figures and shapes. It was a confusing rush of geometric and chaotic contours. She caught glimpses of thick defensive walls in various places and then they were moving down a wide staircase back into the tunnels.
They paused at the bottom of the stairs as it opened onto a wide underground boulevard. A group of warriors on chanouks roared past at full gallop. Then Debbi and her companions raced across the avenue and into another smaller and steeper set of steps as more chanouks raced past in the opposite direction. Still moving at a run, they cut into a narrow passage that sloped down. Debbi was beginning to gasp for breath.
She was completely lost. She had no idea of where she was and didn't think she could find her way back to Martool's war room. It was no surprise that Castle Rock had become legendary for the grueling campaign to conquer it and the stories of battle terror that accompanied it.
Her father was here in '76, Debbi recalled with a jolt. Perhaps he moved through these very passageways, a hard young man on a mission. He was a UN Marine. His unit went over the walls in the second wave, right behind the sykers and the cyborgs. But even with the brainburners and the heavy cans punching first, the Marines' job was hardly a mop-up. The complex was huge and had countless places for the enemy to hide, regroup, and counterattack. And in '76, the defenders were composed of a powerful anticolonial coalition of anouks, Reapers, and Skinnies. It must have been a horrific fight. Debbi couldn't imagine leading soldiers through this place. She wondered if her father had been scared in the face of the savage, alien enemy.
Then she remembered she was now fighting on the side of that savage, alien enemy. It was Quantrill and his sykers who broke the back of the revolt here in '76. It was Quantrill and his dead sykers who were battering the walls again, the same Quantrill who had enslaved and degraded Ross. The same one who had allowed his soldiers to cannibalize innocent people.
Debbi felt a rush of adrenaline as she realized that this fight held no ambivalence for her. She didn't have to worry about morals or beliefs muddying the waters of her actions. This wasn't a war of humans versus anouks. This wasn't a fight about natural resources or political systems. This was about right and wrong. Her side was right. The other side was wrong. In fact, they weren't just wrong, they were evil.
She could pull the trigger and sleep like a baby afterwards.
Sahrin, Fareel, and Debbi emerged from the tunnel into another vast open-air courtyard that surged with chaos and dust. She noted off to her right a collection of stone monuments and slabs that appeared to be a graveyard. The courtyard was half a mile across, and a thirty-foot black tannis wall fronted it. Anouk warriors stood on the ramparts atop the wall, firing out with automatic weapons and hurling ataxes. More were racing up steps carved into the rear of the wall to reach the battlements. The interior of the wall resembled the side of a stepped pyramid, at least thirty feet thick at the base and narrowing to five feet at the top. The gate was reached from the courtyard through a thirty-foot wide avenue slicing through the tannis wall. On both sides of the entrance to this avenue were large stone capstans with wooden spokes. Anouks strained against the spokes, backs bent, calf muscles bulging as they turned the wheels inch-by-inch, drawing the gate closed through a mechanism hidden in the wall.
Debbi stuck close behind Sahrin and Fareel. The courtyard was crowded with barkas, thunderous herd animals that also were being driven in through the gate. They nudged one another with the horn on their snout. Sahrin and Fareel paid them little heed, swatting them aside with their hands and making hard, clucking sounds to urge the brutes out of the way. Debbi collided with barkas several times and almost fell beneath the massive stamping hooves of the milling creatures.
They reached the double gate; each side was twenty feet high and made of tannis with heavy wood reinforcement. Bloody warriors streamed inside, helping the wounded and carrying the dead. The sound of gunfire was audible and through the retreating mob, Debbi saw muzzle flashes a couple hundred yards away where the ground dropped away steeply and separated into fissures. Undead Legionnaires were scrambling up over the rise and pouring out of ravines like insects crawling out of a freshly opened grave. Shells buzzed through the air and splintered off the massive gates.
Debbi and Sahrin opened up with their weapons. Fareel flung his atax as he continued running forward. He grabbed a wounded anouk under the arms and began to drag him back toward the walls. The atax arced in a magnificent crescent through the heads of three Legionnaires before it made for home in Fareel's hand.
Debbi saw several Legionnaires drop, but then stir and clamber to their feet again. She hit one in the head with a steel-jacketed bullet and watched it stagger. It kept coming.
She compensated the Dragoon's sights for the black gun. She picked a specific dead trooper. Steady. Breath out. Squeeze the trigger. The zombie kept coming. She had missed. She steadied again and squeezed.
It froze in its tracks.
"Hah!" she yelled and squeezed off several shots.
Half its head exploded and it dropped. This time it didn't rise thanks to the black gun.
She laughed out loud. Then she realized there were at least one hundred dead sykers charging past the one she had just killed. They didn't yell a terrifying war cry. They were silent. The sight of the decaying, virtually unkillable mob surging forward almost caused Debbi to break and flee. She took a careful step back toward the closing gate. Controlling her panic, the Ranger moved steadily back while firing. She took Fareel's arm and helped him with a wounded warrior.
The Legionnaires suddenly halted their headlong advance and began to form up orderly ranks in multiple lines.
Sahrin stepped forward and held the trigger on the Hellrazor. Several troopers staggered. Then a shimmering shield fell in front of them and shells ricocheted off.
"A force screen?" Debbi muttered. "What the hell can't they do?"
Debbi reached the gate with the last of the retreating anouks. The stone and wood walls were groaning shut. The force screen dropped from in front of the Legion ranks. Seconds later a roar of energy poured out of their ranks and engulfed the gate. A cracking sound filled the air and splinters like javelins flew.
Debbi was knocked off her feet. Chunks of wood plummeted around her. She struggled up. The front of the gate was badly scored with large gouges ripped out of the wood. But it was still intact and it was still closing.
And Debbi was on the outside.
She lurched forward as her view of the chaotic scene of anouks and barkas in the courtyard narr
owed between the closing monolithic gates. She could hear the roaring of the massive stone hinges.
A purple hand grabbed Debbi's jacket and pulled her through the crevice. Both of her shoulders brushed stone and she heard a resounding boom and rush of air as the gates shut behind her.
Sahrin released her coat and slapped Debbi hard on the shoulder. It almost brought her to her knees. The anouk grinned broadly.
The wall rumbled again from a second psychic blast. Debbi felt it in her bones, but the reinforced gate held.
Sahrin pointed up. Debbi nodded and followed him and Fareel up the steep steps of the wall. They reached the battlements and elbowed their way to a firing position just as another bolt of energy poured out of the Legion ranks and hit the gate. It tore out more wood, but Debbi sensed that the tannis was absorbing most of the force.
She joined in the barrage that was pouring down from the parapets onto the Legion. Again the shimmering field rose up as the zombies stood motionless in the field. Then the rear rank peeled off and retreated beneath the rise. One by one, the undead ranks turned under cover of the protective shield and departed the field. Soon all the troopers were gone.
The line of anouks on the wall let out a massive cheer, shaking their fists and weapons over their heads.
Sahrin laughed again and shouted to Debbi, "We win!"
Debbi backhanded Sahrin across the chest in a playful gesture she doubted he even felt.
Even Fareel was smiling. He shook his bloody atax with satisfaction.
As Debbi looked over the wall, she saw that the rocky ground was empty. There was not one motionless Legionnaire to testify to the anouk victory. She knew she had destroyed at least one, but it was gone now. Perhaps its retreating comrades had dragged it off. Or more likely, she thought with a tremble, she hadn't killed it at all and it simply got to its feet and walked away. It would come back to fight again, as would all the Legionnaires that were injured in battle, an unstoppable battalion of the dead.
Then she turned and viewed the vast courtyard below. In the acres of anarchy, the unruly barkas were being herded toward one side and hundreds of anouks raced back and forth, staggering in confusion and pain. Some were sitting in the dirt lost in shock, or lying dead.
The Legion had been driven from the gates. This was a victory for the anouks.
A few more like it and they might all be dead.
Chapter 17
In the day that followed the battle for the sun gate, Debbi stayed close to Sahrin; he was the only anouk warrior who exhibited anything other than disdain or open hatred for her. She had expected that after the fight she would be returned to Martool. But as time passed, it was increasingly clear that she had been lost in the whirlwind of war preparation. When darkness fell and the air grew cold, she and her companions settled down on the edge of a barka pen. The animals' warm, earthy scent was oddly comforting. Debbi chewed one of the algae bars she kept in her pocket and offered the remainder to Sahrin and Fareel. They both sniffed the bars curiously and bit into them. Sahrin actually enjoyed his. Fareel, however, spat the piece onto the ground and passed the bar to an anouk youth nearby. The youngster tore into the algae bar with gusto and was soon asking for more. Debbi felt bad she didn't have any more on her. Not that it mattered, for soon they all fell into a restless sleep.
They were up before the sun and Debbi spent another day helplessly following Sahrin and Fareel around the Castle Rock complex. She tried to spend the time learning her way around the massive ruin, but realized that would take many months, not mere days.
She watched her guides as they conferred with warriors at gates and waited atop the walls as they collected reports on enemy movements. All around the city the previous day, the Legion had struck without warning, testing the walls at several points, and being repulsed at all locations. The speed and surprise of Quantrill's attacks kept the anouks on their heels and gave the Legion almost complete freedom in the territory surrounding Castle Rock. Through the night and into the day, spotters reported constant Legionnaire movement. Small groups of zombies worked their way up and down the canyon wall and clambered over ravines. They positioned themselves to block trails and roads leading away from the city. Sahrin told Debbi in his broken English that the anouks had contested the Legion several times for control of access to roads, but the results were brutal. The sykers inflicted enormous casualties on the anouks. Castle Rock was not completely cut off yet; several of the smaller trails were still open. But by the second night, the main roads were already too treacherous to risk. The Legion's opening gambit was skillfully planned and executed, which was not surprising given the fact that Quantrill and his Legion had fought here twenty years before.
Hardened warriors complained, and Fareel moodily agreed, that the tragic history of Castle Rock had hamstrung the tactical thinking of Martool and the War Council. Some of the warriors felt they should regroup and attack the small Legionary camps and columns and begin to destroy the enemy piecemeal. They hoped to draw the full Legion into a battle in the rugged canyon, which had been the anouks' home for many years, and where they felt they had the advantage. But the War Council refused to allow a full-scale offensive out of fear that the Legion might turn any sally, breach a gate, and a feared enemy would pour in to slaughter children.
Debbi wanted to see Martool. She wanted news of Hallow's condition, although she doubted Martool had had time to attend him further. She mentioned Martool several times, but Sahrin merely shrugged apologetically. Fareel glared angrily at her intrusion. Finally, as the sun set for the fourth time since the siege began, Sahrin left Debbi waiting near a large cook pot in a courtyard where warriors were gathered. He brought her a plate of some sort of meat stew, probably barka, and said, "Wait." Then he and Fareel took off at a run.
When night fell in the canyon, it grew cold. Anouks crowded around the cook fire, warming themselves, and sharing the comforting orange glow. They excluded Debbi. She sat apart, eating her food alone. She pulled her light jacket tighter around herself and began to shiver The anouks talked. Debbi listened to the sound of their language. It was hard and guttural, angry-sounding to her ears. But the more she listened, the more she picked up the rhythms and cadences. It had a beat to it that she found hypnotic. She began to recognize patterns and sounds she knew to be words. It was exciting to suddenly know that a group of alien beings were talking about their knee hurting or bad food. She could tell some of the anouks were telling war stories, reenacting events of daring and danger. Some laughed and told bawdy stories that elicited raucous laughter or snide comments. But others sat quietly with fear etched on their silent faces. This was a universal language of war The anouks' familiarity and camaraderie, and even their fears, reminded her of a gathering of Colonial Rangers at Mo's. She smiled at the melancholy memory and wondered if Stew and Ringo and the others were there right now, downing a few drinks and reliving recent adventures. She wondered if they were thinking about her.
The anouks around her, however, were not simply soldiers waiting for battle. Children scampered about. Anouk warriors, who were bloody and torn, lifted small ones and embraced them, bounced them on their knees, played games, and laughed. This wasn't a military base full of soldiers. This was a village full of families. The young anouks stared at Debbi. Some approached her hesitantly only to be yanked back by their elders and scolded or warned. As Debbi sat finishing the last of the stew, she tried to force herself to realize that she was looking at mothers and fathers. And they were mothers and fathers who were afraid for the lives of their children because of a terrible enemy outside the walls. This vision of anouks gave Debbi a different slant on these people. It bolstered her intellectual belief that humans and anouks had to cooperate for Banshee to have a peaceful future.
Still, Debbi was inside an anouk town far from friends, surrounded by a foreign language and angry glares. She sensed with depressing self-realization that even the most deeply held and well-meaning beliefs could fade under such stress. She had to adm
it that as she watched the natives with their tannis weapons sitting around a fire that cast shadowy flickers across their nonhuman faces, there was still an instinctive place deep in her mind that translated those images into terrifying pictures of savage aliens. It was the standard human gut reaction, one that she found hard to fight despite her best conscious intentions. Her species feared and reviled anouks. Her father had called them "grapes." A lot of Colonial Rangers used the same epithets, or worse. It was a culture of hatred learned in childhood. It seeped into the bones to some degree and never completely vanished.
This vast courtyard was far from Martool's war room and these tribesmen were not privy to their shaman's diplomatic desire to build bridges with this Colonial Ranger. They stared at Debbi with open contempt, the same contempt that the people of Temptation would have for an anouk who wandered into town. Clearly, she was not welcome among the common anouks, particularly during a time of crisis that required the clan to unite against outsiders.
Trying to avoid their dark eyes, Debbi began to realize how alone and isolated she really was. She was trapped here just like all these anouks around her. She had already heard the news that the Legion had swarmed over her Stallion and, unable to make it work, had burned it out. So even if she wanted to leave, she couldn't.
Debbi settled back to wait amidst the glares of her allies. For hours, warriors came and went from the fire, no doubt rotating watches on the walls. She dozed fitfully through most of it, trying to rest because she knew the time would come when sleep would be a luxury.
She saw Sahrin appear out of the darkness. It was as if she had spotted a long lost friend. She leapt to her feet. He was gnawing meat off a bone as he approached.
"You eat?" He tossed the bone aside and licked his fingers.
"Yes."
"You fight?"
"What? I don't understand."
Sahrin thought about what he was saying. "We go to fight. You fight?"
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