Firemask: Book Two of the Last Legion Series

by Chris Bunch

  “They like ‘em so much they’ll probably want you to go back to their worlds and teach ‘em how to shoot a net.”

  Some laughter, but there were wry mutterings.

  “Or teach ‘em how to use someone for bait, eh, Njangu?” a woman called.

  That got laughter — most of them had heard about Yoshitaro being used in exactly that capacity when he came home with Ton Milot, a long time ago, when he was a trainee, and almost becoming dinner for a voracious barraco.

  “Now you know why I’m fighting,” Njangu said. “I don’t want to go back to being bait. Especially for some aliens. But what about you? You think you’ll do just fine, hanging about, throwing your nets, and the Musth’ll live and let live?”

  “Never known a government to do that for fishermen,” someone called. “Why should we expect a bun-cha furry aliens to do different?”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you. But I’m not. My personal call is they’re going to get more and more demanding, harder and harder to deal with. And I know it’s easier to get rid of a hard-ass master before he gets all his hooks seated in you.

  “The Musth still have got their thumbs up, wandering around on their elbows. But they aren’t dumb. Little by little, day by day, they’ll get more secure, know us better, and we’ll be farther and farther up that creek.

  “Think about it. If you want to join us, there’ll be people around. If we need you for a specific job, we’ll call you. There won’t be any problem from us if you say no.

  “But don’t go and sing to the Musth about us, about what I said, about what you maybe’ll see your friends and neighbors doing.” Njangu’s voice changed, became soft, dangerous.

  “If you do that, you and I’ll have a chat. And I don’t think you want that to happen.”

  He slid off the porch, slung his blaster. Someone in the crowd — he thought it was either Ton Milot, who he’d brought along for exactly that service, or Alei, his brother — cheered, and there were some other cheers. Not everyone, but some. Most of the crowd was silent, thinking about what Yoshitaro had said, about what they’d seen already of the Musth, about what the future might bring.

  His tweg, Stef Bassas, came up.

  “Are we pulling out tonight, sir?”

  Njangu glanced at the lowering sun.

  “Negative. I’d just as soon not chance the rust bucket in the air when it’s getting dark. Too big a goddamned signature, and I don’t like meeting aksai in the dark. Or anywhere else, come to think.”

  The team’s Grierson was under cam nets about half a kilometer outside Issus. This was the fourth speech Njangu had given that day in as many villages, and he was tired. He’d deliberately chosen Issus as the last stop because he felt it was as much of a home, besides the Force, as he had on Cumbre.

  “We’ll set up camp outside the village,” he decided.

  “I’ll have the men detailed off, sir. And I’ll have rations distributed from the Grierson. Maybe we’ll be able to get some fruit from the people to supplement them,” Bassas said.

  “ ‘Lo, N’anju,” a shy voice came.

  Njangu turned, saw Deira. She’d lost a bit of weight since he’d last seen her, but was still voluptuous. She wore, like a lot of the fishing women, a comfortable wrap that, Njangu knew, comfortably unwrapped. He felt a stirring somewhere south of his weapons harness.

  “Are you staying the night?”

  “Uh, yeh.”

  Deira smiled.

  “With me?”

  “Umm,” Njangu said cleverly, looked at Bassas, who was considering the ground.

  First your men, then yourself, he remembered the adage.

  “The village will be feeding your men if you do,” Deira said. “We don’t have many feasts these days, and we’d surely like to have one in your honor.”

  Njangu noticed Ton and Alei to one side, with an impressively bearded man who had to be the clout in Issus, looking approving.

  Bassas smiled at the idea of a night without issue rations.

  “We thank you,” Njangu said. “But we cannot drink. If the Musth show up, we have to be able to do more’n throw rocks at them.”

  “I’ve already told everyone that,” Ton said. “They’ll go along with the water-and-juice ritual, even though they don’t like it.”

  Njangu looked at the sky, looked at Deira, thought about duty, thought about Deira, thought, Screw duty.

  “We’ll do it.”

  “Good,” Ton said. “Some of our boys were admiring your girls.”

  “And don’t forget about us women,” Deira said. “It’ll be nice, uh, talking to somebody who doesn’t have fish breath.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Ton said.

  “You be quiet,” Deira said. “You’re married.”

  “I know that,” Ton said indignantly.

  “Lupul told me to make sure you wouldn’t forget.” Deira came up, took Njangu’s arm.

  “You, I have a special dish cooking. Just you, me, and Babeu,” she said in a low voice. “That’s her, there. We’re good friends, and I told her all about you, about us. If you like her, it’ll be like it was before, hmm?” Deira indicated a slender blond-haired woman about Deira’s age. “I had a lot of fun then, more than the last time you were here. You think you won’t get bored?”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Njangu said. “I’m worried about getting any sleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” Deira said. “You won’t get any.”

  “Oh Abu running zigzags in the desert,” Njangu murmured.

  “Come on,” Deira urged. “The fish won’t be ready for an hour. And we don’t want to waste any time, do we?”

  Njangu moaned.

  Tomorrow he had another four speeches scheduled, these in mountain villages, recruiting aircraft watchers.

  • • •

  The team landed quietly about half a kilometer from the transmission relay station. The four technicians, helped by their gun guards, turned the antigrav pallet’s power on, and muscled it out of the Grierson’s rear hatch and up the mountainside toward the low buildings just over the crest. Alikhan and Froude, even though their work was finished, insisted on seeing the mission through. Froude had been given a blaster, and someone started to tell him how to use it. Froude got indignant. He might be a civilian, but that didn’t mean he knew nothing.

  Ben Dill, following orders and accompanying Alikhan everywhere, had flown the Grierson in, and now was quietly bemoaning his fate at being once again a crunchie as he took point and led the team upward.

  They saw no one as they approached the site. Two techs, specialists in security devices, examined the fencing.

  “Nothing, sir,” they reported to Froude, not knowing what rank he held, but assuming anyone who could dress as shabbily as he did, and in civilian clothes to boot, certainly outranked them. “Just some buzzers and the fence is electrified to keep critters off. It’s clear now, and we’ve cut the lock off.”

  They muscled the bulky transmitter through the gate, waited while the techs opened the control-room door, brought it inside.

  “Just like I thought, sir,” another tech reported. “Pretty standard, no security devices I can see on the operating net. We’ll need fifteen, no ten minutes to wrap this up.”

  Well within the time frame the retransmission point’s power was shunted through the transmitter, and it was powered up.

  The transmitter was tuned to the Musth’s main watch frequency, and was using the station’s power to blast its message across the planet and into space.

  It was not coincidence that the station was one of Matin’s.

  “Anytime, sir.”

  “Start it up,” Froude said, and the recording hissed on, beaming into a hundred or more disbelieving Musth coms, from ships to stationary units.

  The team left the station, trotting down the path to the Grierson and lifting away from the site before anyone could respond.

  The production qualities of the recording were somewhat lacking, no mor
e than a carefully filtered voice, speaking Musth in a gentle tone:

  “Remember when you were a cub, how you fought, played, looked up at the stars, saw them gleaming promise?

  “You fought hard in your den, showed you were the strongest, the best, the most lert You held your own and more in the warrens, then went out, into the world.

  “You became a warrior, knew the ways, the sacred krang. You fought your brothers on the training grounds, proving yourself again. Or perhaps you listened to the blood singing within, and came to Redon without your claws blooded.

  “You were proud, brave, with all your lert, all your honor.

  “But what has happened since then?

  “You have seen your brothers die, killed from behind or from a burrow. You fought back.

  “Against what?

  “Cubs? Females? Nothing?

  “Is this honor?

  “Has your lert grown?

  “Many, too many, of your fellows are gone, with only the death ceremony for remembrance. Some lie rotting on a jungle path, others’ bones are turned, swept by the tides, others … others are simply vanished, with no one to know their deaths.

  “Will their dens remember them? Will their clans? Will cubs thrill to their honor?

  “What about you?

  “Will cubs pray to inherit your lert?

  “Or will you be like so many, many others, die here on this forgotten end path, this green nightmare of a planet?

  “Dead.

  “Forgotten.

  “Without honor.

  “Or is it time to leave, to return to worlds that are as they should be, to find proper brahda for yourself, for others, for your clan?

  “You can make your own decision about that.

  “You are a warrior. You know how to think.

  “Don’t you?”

  A continuous low growl came from Wlencing as he listened to the recording twice through.

  “I am assuming that transmission source had been taken over by these worms.”

  “It must have been,” Daaf said. “I cannot picture this Kouro person being that far removed from reality to allow it.”

  “No, he is not,” Wlencing said. “I assume you sent a team out to secure the location, and make full analysis.”

  Daaf hesitated.

  “You did not?”

  “No,” Daaf said. “An aksai flight commander located the source of the transmission, and he and the other craft destroyed it.”

  Wlencing’s growl grew larger.

  “I want his guts … no. I cannot punish bravery. But make sure he does not enter my sight for a time, until my anger is gone. Also, deal with this Kouro. He may not have anything to do with this filth, but it is still his fault. Punish him in some appropriate way. Take some of his credits. I would think that would hurt him more than anything physical.”

  “It will be done.”

  Wlencing touched a sensor, listened to the ‘cast again. What did the bandits hope to accomplish? There was no call to change sides or mutiny. Just that bleak promise of eventual death and nothingness.

  It would not be good for warrior spirit to listen to it. Wlencing was about to order that anyone caught listening to this would be punished, caught himself. That was stupid, and would do nothing more than make it a forbidden, and therefore attractive thing.

  He listened again.

  The language was perfect. No human could have made the recording. Certainly whoever created it understood Musth thinking. But no human could understand Musth honor. But no Musth would work with worms. And there were no reports of a prisoner having been taken …

  Who, then, was responsible?

  • • •

  Jasith walked back and forth on the finger dock outside the Shelburne. She kept looking at her watch finger. Garvin, if he was going to show up, was half an hour late.

  A brisk wind that tasted of ash from Camp Mahan was coming off the bay, so in spite of the sun there was nobody on the docks except a fisherman sitting with his back to a bollard, using a glue gun to repair a net; and a small dark ‘Raum boy, scrubbing lazily at the gangway leading down to the docks.

  She didn’t see the bulge of a pistol hidden in the dock boy’s shorts, who was actually about fourteen, and had been a courier for the ‘Raum during the rising; or the gleam of the blaster hidden under the fisherman’s nets.

  She started to get angry, remembered that whatever Garvin was doing, it was probably something that could get him killed. And things didn’t always happen the way they should in that business, she had learned from the ‘Rising. She decided to give it another half hour.

  A sleek water runabout, all gleaming wood and chrome, which looked like it was two or three centuries old, cut sleekly in from the bay, leaving a great rooster tail as it drove toward shore.

  Jasith thought the boat was about to ram the dock when the whine of its engine died, and the boat’s course straightened. Water churned at its stern as the engine reversed, and the runabout drifted to a stop exactly next to the dock.

  Garvin Jaansma, immaculate in white shorts, shirt, and a cream-colored sweater, jumped out of the boat’s cockpit and deftly moored it to a piling.

  Jasith’s eyes were wide.

  “My-oh-muffins,” she managed. “Where did you get that boat … and that outfit?”

  “Some of your fellow Rentiers donated them for the afternoon,” he said. “Rather dapper, aren’t I?”

  “You are. Where did you learn to handle a boat like that?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you about the time I ran a water show for my circus?”

  Jasith looked at him closely, couldn’t tell if he was lying or not.

  Garvin looked at an old-fashioned wristwatch.

  “It’s a bit late for lunch,” he said, behaving as if he were Erik Penwyth’s unknown brother, “but perhaps a glass of wine or some tea would go well. Care to?”

  He extended an elbow. Jasith took it.

  “What happens if we run into some Musth? They come here sometimes,” she asked.

  “That’d be unfortunate,” Garvin said. “For the Musth.”

  He didn’t explain that the runabout was loaded with close to a ton of Blok explosives, and he had the detonator in his pocket; nor that the fisherman and dockboy were only two of the platoon of gunmen in and around the Shelburne.

  Jasith studied Garvin. He’d changed since she’d last seen him. His face was harder, his eyes seemed to look a little beyond or through what he was seeing, and were never still. He was leaner, and moved more quickly, as if anything his foot touched might explode.

  “I didn’t know if you were going to go inside the hotel when you showed up,” she said. “But I had two of my security men check two tables in the restaurant, and make sure they didn’t have any listening devices.”

  Garvin half grinned. That was the reason he was a little late — his own men had seen the security team at work, and had snatched them as they left the hotel, found out who they were, and then made sure they hadn’t planted any bugs.

  “And you don’t have to worry about my husband showing up and asking embarrassing questions.”

  “I know,” Garvin said. “He’ll be busy with War Leader Wlencing the rest of the day.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you? I mean, picking a Matin tower to do that from?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t.” Honestly, Garvin hadn’t, but he thought Hedley’s idea a capital one.

  “I wish you had,” Jasith said. “I thought it was funnier than all hell.”

  Garvin grinned, a real grin, and the two laughed. It was a nice sound, he thought, remembering when it’d come at better times.

  Jasith’s laugh stopped suddenly.

  “Loy and I … aren’t getting along that well these days.” Without realizing it, she touched her face, where Kouro had struck her. “Next time, if there’s a next time of one kind or another, do have something to do with it.”

  The maître d’ escorted them to a ta
ble near a window, and didn’t show by the slightest lifting of an eyebrow that he knew the man with Jasith Mellusin most certainly wasn’t her husband. The Shelburne wasn’t the best hotel and restaurant on D-Cumbre because the staff gossiped.

  Jasith ordered the same white cordial she had the last time; Garvin asked for an herbal tea.

  “Are you living the clean-cut life now?” Jasith asked.

  “I’m working,” Garvin said.

  “Which, of course, means I should get to the point of why I wanted to talk to you,” Jasith said. “Did you manage to get away with the money I arranged?”

  “We did,” Garvin said. “And thanks. It’s being put to very good use right now.”

  “Don’t tell me how.”

  “I hadn’t planned to.”

  She reached in her belt pouch, took out a small, blue-plastic chip, gave it to him.

  “Mellusin Mining is very, very big. Not as big as it was before everybody started shooting, but still big.”

  “I’d kind of understood that already,” Garvin said. “Seemed fairly obvious to me.”

  “One thing my father had, which he never told me about, was a handful of people who’d do just about anything for him. Hon Felps, he was Daddy’s first assistant, had to tell me about them.”

  “A lot of very rich types seem to need their own private muscle,” Garvin said. “You’re not shocking me.”

  “I’ve still got the people. Maybe, the way things are going with the Musth, I’ll need them, sooner or later. But that’s not why I brought them up.

  “Look at the chip.”

  Garvin did.

  “Looks like an old-fashioned hotel key fob,” he said. “With a number on it.”

  “The number’s the thing. GT973. Remember that.”

  “ ‘Kay.”

  “Every one of my key executives has been told if anybody contacts him and uses that number, give him or her anything they want,” Jasith said. “I mean anything.”

  “That’d sure make embezzlement an interesting proposition.”

  “I guess it did a couple of times, Hon said. Or maybe some other ways some people wanted to take advantage. He said it didn’t happen more than twice, and I didn’t ask him for the details.”

  Now it was Garvin’s turn to consider Jasith. She, too, seemed to have grown up, her expression older than it should be at twenty. There were little wrinkles at the corner of her mouth. Garvin wished he could make them into smile lines, ignored the romantic thought.