The Disinherited

by Steve White

  The ruling council rose to its feet as one in consternation, just in time to be mown down. Sugvaaz, with an inarticulate cry, raised his arm with its implanted laser mount. An adolescent human male—Gromorgh thought he looked vaguely familiar—fired a long burst from his mag needler, and the Conservator of Correctness staggered backwards, his eye seeming to explode and his brains spattering the wall behind him. Lugnaath was down, bleeding his life out from a dozen little holes, and Gromorgh knew he was next . . . .

  "No! Not him!" the leader shouted. He came forward, mag needler in one hand and monomolecular-edged knife in another, walking with a slight limp.

  Tarlann made sure the command center was secured and sentries posted before turning to where Gromorgh waited under the mag needlers of two of those whose torments he had decreed.

  "Gromorgh," he began, "I won't make any promises that you're too intelligent to believe. But you can prolong your life if you tell me where the power controls are."

  The Director of Implementation didn't even reply.

  Tarlann smiled and quoted. "I see that you need more incentive."

  He turned to one of the fallen security guards and took the neurolash from its belt holder. It was heavy, and designed for Korvaash hands, but he could manage it.

  As he approached Gromorgh, he thought he could detect odd motions, almost tics. Was this what Korvaash fear looked like? If so, it answered the question of whether this device affected the Korvaash nervous system.

  At the touch of the lash, Gromorgh stiffened convulsively—alarming in a being his size. His pendant was silent, for it didn't translate meaningless noise. But Tarlann could distinctly hear a sound like a distant, very deep foghorn.

  Interesting, he thought with scientific detachment. The Korvaasha can make a noise that's audible in the human range, if it's loud enough and high-pitched enough.

  "Well, Gromorgh?" he asked, withdrawing the lash slightly. "And I think you know better than to lie."

  Still trembling, Gromorgh pointed to a console. Tarlann rushed to it and depressed a series of Korvaash-scale knobs. The pervasive hum died in a descending whine.

  All at once, the command center was illuminated only by the red lights of emergency life-support power. And the din that filled the fortress began to subside as armored turrets ceased to move up and down into their protective pits and high-energy weapons fell silent.

  "Colonel! They've ceased firing!"

  "I see they have," DiFalco acknowledged the lookout's report. He looked at Raenoli, standing beside him at this forward fire base where they were organizing their next desperate attack. She met his eyes, and no translation was needed.

  "It could be a trick, you know," DiFalco felt obligated to say. The Raehaniv Marine translated for him, but Raenoli's only reply was to heft her Saelarien rifle.

  Oh, Hell, we probably can't stop her and her people anyway. Might as well go along and try to keep 'em out of trouble.

  Rationalization completed, DiFalco activated his suit's communicator and spoke to his unit commanders. "This is DiFalco. Forget the countdown. Commence attack . . . now!"

  In a human wave whose lack of coordination would have brought tears to the now-sedated Thompson's eyes, Marines and Resistance swept toward the barn-door-wide holes that the fighters had blasted in the aboveground structure, streaming past the silent heavy-weapons turrets.

  Tarlann rose from the console and turned grimly to his fellow ex-prisoners. "All right, let's get that doorway barricaded. We're going to have company very soon."

  The floor of the corridor jumped under their feet as the shaped-charge blastpack punched through the massive blast door.

  "All right, let's go!" DiFalco yelled into his communicator, and they were through and into yet another corridor of Hell. Raenoli, he noted, was still with him.

  There had been few Implementers, and most of them were trying to surrender—sometimes successfully, as long as it was Marines they tried to surrender to. But the Korvaasha fought on. Few cyborgs were left, but a lot of ordinary security guards had appeared from branching corridors, and their advance down into the depths had been through nightmarish carnage.

  A grenade exploded in their faces as they approached a turn of the corridor. DiFalco heard a scream from behind him, but his armor shielded Raenoli from the fragments that whined off it. She hit the dirt, or whatever, just as the Korvaash security guards came around the corner. DiFalco blasted one apart and Raenoli opened up with her Saelarien. She was using APHE ammo, and the guards' torsos exploded in blood that was a lighter red than humanity's and guts that were more grey than pink.

  He stole a glance at her. She clenched her teeth tightly as she held the trigger down, and the tears that she was finally letting out made runnels in the blood and soot that covered her face. She must be going deaf in here, and she would require antirad treatment after this was over. Unarmored personnel had no business in this combat environment, but DiFalco hadn't brought it up, mindful of the First Principle of Military Leadership: "Never give an order you know won't be obeyed."

  Then the firefight was over, and they resumed their advance through the darkened fortress, down a ramp to the next level below. DiFalco activated his holographic HUD and consulted the schematic Intelligence had provided.

  Let's see . . . can't be much further to the command center.

  The blast was deafening in an enclosed space, even one as vast as the command center. When Tarlann raised his head and peered over the console, he saw that the improvised barricade lay scattered. Then he ducked his head again, pulling Iael to him, for a shower of grenades was preceeding the Korvaash security guards into the center. The series of explosions seemed to roar on forever. Afterwards, for just an instant, there was quiet. Then the Korvaasha loomed in the smoke.

  Tarlann stood up and opened fire. But the Korvaasha could carry weapons that made nothing of the consoles and command chairs his people sought to shelter behind. Just to his left, a hypervelocity slug crashed through one of the consoles, and an ex-prisoner was hurled against the wall behind them. He sagged to the floor, leaving a smear of gore on the wall.

  Then one of the terrible projectiles smashed the mag needler from Tarlann's hands, breaking fingers. Another ripped through his thigh, shattering the femur. In an excess of pain, he crashed to the floor.

  With a cry, Iael flung himself atop his father, trying to shield him with his boy's body. Tarlann smiled faintly, and awaited death.

  Gromorgh stood forth from behind the pillar that had sheltered him. He spoke to the guards, but his translator continued to translate, not having been told otherwise. "Take those two alive. They must be saved for extraordinary punishment . . . ."

  There was a sudden uproar from the corridor outside, and the guard nearest the door turned to investigate, only to be flung back into the command center in flaming ruin as a plasma gun spoke. Suddenly, the entrance held a figure that caused Tarlann to wonder if the pain had cracked his sanity: a towering suit of powered combat armor from out of history's worst nightmares of slaughter, blackened with smoke and splashed with blood. Tarlann's neck hairs prickled, for his primitive ancestors would have known themselves to be in the presence of the god of death.

  For less than a heartbeat, the tableau held. Then the newcomer's plasma gun flashed and thundered again, and Gromorgh's upper half burst asunder in a ball of flame. Others entered, some armored and others—like a Raehaniv woman who darted recklessly ahead, Saelarien rifle yammering—in ordinary combat dress. They all poured fire into the stunned guards.

  But the guard who had wounded Tarlann kept coming, and with Gromorgh's order now in abeyance he swung his weapon toward them. And Tarlann knew that nothing could save them, for even if one of the rescuers fired and killed the guard, he and Iael would be in the line of fire.

  With surprising speed, the power-armored figure who had first entered bounded toward them. With a metallic snick, a long blade sprang from under the armor's left forearm. Just as the guard started to tur
n to face him, the newcomer swung the blade backhanded in a long sideways cut with all the force of which powered armor was capable, and the guard's head thudded to the floor. For an instant the body stood. Then, fountaining blood from the stump of its long thick neck, it toppled over toward Tarlann and Iael, drenching them with the warm stickiness.

  Abruptly, the firefight ended, and in the sudden silence the armored figure approached and opened its viewplate. The man within looked down at them and smiled.

  DiFalco wondered what a boy—he looked fourteen or fifteen, tops—was doing here. (Hell, what were any humans doing in this chamber, fighting a battle?) And the man was badly wounded; he'd have to send for a medic. He opened his mouth to try to speak to them, then decided to stop kidding himself about his aptitude for languages. He called a Raehaniv Marine over to translate.

  "I'm Colonel DiFalco, leader of your Terran allies. We and the Resistance have taken this installation, and you're safe now."

  The man smiled through his obvious pain and began talking.

  Then, leaping out of the stream of rapid-fire Raehaniv, came the syllables "Tarlann hle'Morna."

  "What?!"

  The Marine grinned. "That's right, Colonel. He's Varien's son!"

  "Ah, tell him we'll get him medical attention soon. And . . . tell him he and I have a lot to talk about!"

  * * *

  The sun was high in the sky, a red ball shining faintly through the smoke of the many fires, by the time they stumbled up out of the depths of the subterranean abattoir that was the fortress and emerged into the light.

  Got to get Raenoli to put her people to work on fire control before all the blazes coalesce and we get a firestorm, DiFalco thought in his fatigue-sodden brain as he was assisted out of the powered armor's access hatch. He was just remembering that it had already been done when a shuttle came over the ruined buildings around the landing zone and set down in a swirl of dust.

  As the hatch opened, a rift parted in the smoke and glorious golden sunlight seemed to ignite the flame-like colors of the woman who stepped out and ran toward him.

  No, DiFalco thought, weariness and horror lifting from him like an insubstantial fog. Her fire comes from within, not from the sun. She brings the light with her, and the darkness cannot stand against her.

  Then they were in each other's arms, oblivious to those around them, even to Varien, who walked slowly down the ramp and set foot on the world of his birth.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They stood in the ancient chamber, gazing across the ages into that inexplicable stone face that had been carved out of the stuff of this asteroid a light-millennium from Earth in an age when Earth's humanity had gotten no closer to spaceflight than a thrown flint hand-axe.

  "The maps in the Terranova system. This face here at Tareil." Aelanni's voice was hushed. "In both cases, the same perfectly logical explanation for why they were left behind: they were relief sculptures, part of rock walls. And yet . . . no maps here, no faces there. Why?"

  DiFalco shook his head slowly and continued to study the face. It could have passed for Raehaniv, which meant it was within the range of Earth's races and mixtures of races, though not really like any of them. And who really knows what Cro-Magnon's facial features looked like, beyond basic bone structure?

  Aloud: "I don't know, Aelanni. It's as if they were two parts of a puzzle."

  "But it still doesn't add up to a complete picture, does it? We're still mystified. Are there, perhaps, other parts?"

  "There must be." DiFalco was grim. "I'll tell you this: when we get back to Sol, I'm going to advocate a thorough search of the asteroids and the outer-planet satellites for more of these bases, or whatever they were."

  "But that would be an overwhelming task! Remember, the two we know of were only discovered by blind chance."

  "Yeah—at almost exactly the same time. That's another thing that bothers me." He shook his head irritably. He hated mysteries. "Anyway, we have to start somewhere. For now, shall we get back?"

  At her nod, he reached up and took off his virtual-reality headpiece. Aelanni was doing the same, here in their suite in the Provisional Government's headquarters in Sarnath. By now he had gotten used to the way the universe, as reported by his senses, abruptly changed.

  They regarded each other in silence for a moment and then, by unspoken mutual consent, walked out onto the balcony. The building—secondary government offices before the war—stood on a hill with a fair view of the city, and Sarnath lay before them under lightly-overcast skies, its wounds visible but the pulse of life somehow perceptible. Already the work of rebuilding had commenced.

  DiFalco thought back to the first days after the liberation, when the populace had come hesitantly out of the places it had taken shelter. As the shock had worn off, a long-pent-up reaction had erupted with irrepressible force—even after all he had seen during the battle, he still shuddered at the memory of what the crowds had done to the ex-Implementers they had hunted down. He and Thompson—sans left arm, but with the replacement growing nicely in the tank—had tried to protect the ones who had surrendered by posting a heavy Marine guard on the prisoner compound. Then they had toured the lowest levels of the fallen fortress, and listened to tales of what had been done there from those who had been freed. Afterwards, he and Thompson had exchanged a long look—and Thompson had given his troops the afternoon off.

  Finally the cathartic insanity had run its course, leaving the Raehaniv drained, stunned by the realization of what they were capable of. Rosen had speculated that centuries of social harmony had left them without antibodies against mob psychology. At any rate, the habits of civilization had returned, perhaps even deeper for no longer being taken for granted, and the Provisional Government was having an easier time of it than DiFalco would have expected.

  It was headed by a troika of Arduin, Tarlann and Raenoli. (Varien had firmly refused any formal position.) Some had suggested that they establish their headquarters in some relatively unharmed city like Norellarn, but Arduin had set his face against it: Sarnath had always been the capital, and so it would remain, as a gesture both of continuity and of defiance.

  DiFalco and Aelanni clasped hands as they gazed over the city, drawing on its quickening life. I've been able to see some of Raehan over the last few weeks, he thought, remembering his hurried visits to various parts of the planet. This lovely world—Aelanni's world—will live, and heal. That is enough.

  The door chimed for admittance and DiFalco spoke a command, as he could do by now without having Raehaniv computers turn up the noses they didn't have at his accent. Levinson entered, dressed like DiFalco in service dress blacks. (During the years on Terranova they had gotten around to standardizing uniforms, and the Russians wore the black too. At the same time, all the Marines wore dark-green uniforms with Russian-style shoulder boards; it was one of the concessions Thompson had had to make in exchange for calling them "Marines." And the system of rank insignia showed historical Raehaniv influence, courtesy of Miralann.)

  "Well, as much as I hate to break this up," Levinson drawled, "it's time for our final meeting before departure. Of course, you realize they'll try one more time to talk us into staying longer. And they'll probably load us down with some more honors—especially you, after all your dirtside feats of derring-do." It was a subject on which he still hadn't forgiven DiFalco and, as usual in moments of agitation, he reverted to vintage American popular culture. "The CO landing on the dangerous planet and plunging into high adventure! Gimme a break! Who do you think you are? Captain Kirk?"

  "I keep telling you, Jeff, I had no choice! It was the only way I could get out of Guadalcanal before she blew."

  "Yeah. Right. I believe that about as much as your wife does!" Aelanni smiled demurely.

  "I swear it's the truth," DiFalco insisted. "Thompson corroborated it." But he knew that wasn't much help. The Marine had taken a sadistic delight in recounting the story with complete truthfulness . . . and with the intonation of a man u
nder orders to lie like a trooper. He'll pay, thought DiFalco, not for the first time.

  Suddenly, Levinson's mercurial face went serious. "Of course it's the truth," he said gently. "It may even be what history will record. But you and I both know what legend will say. Legend and, eventually, myth."

  Acutely uncomfortable, DiFalco looked to Aelanni for rescue. But her face wore exactly the same expression as Levinson's.

  "Aw, Hell," he said roughly. "If people are looking for a hero, Tarlann's their man. If it hadn't've been for him, we'd all be up shit creek without a paddle! Speaking of Tarlann," he continued, relieved to change the subject, "it's time to go meet with him and the others."

  * * *

  "Are you quite sure you must leave now?" Varien asked, fulfilling Levinson's prophecy. "There is much left to do in preparing our defenses against the inevitable Korvaash return."

  They were seated around a large oval table in a conference room redolent of the light airiness of classical Raehaniv architecture. Varien sat beside Tarlann, who still needed artificial aids to walk but whose face had lost the grayness that had come with his premature plunge into the work of the Provisional Government. Arduin and Raenoli were at Tarlann's other side. Beyond them sat Yarvann, who in his capacity as military C-in-C had been persuaded to adopt a less flamboyant and more nearly regulation version of the old Raehaniv space fleet uniform.

  "I know there is, Varien," Difalco replied. "But you don't need us for it. Isn't that true, Yarvann?"

  "Yes," the Raehaniv said reluctantly. He needed no interpreter; Korvaash translator software had by now been adapted, and a device resembling an old-fashioned hearing aid repeated his words into DiFalco's ear in English. "Colonel Golovko should be in position at Seivra now with most of our combatant ships—he departed just after this planet was secured—so the displacement point leading to Korvaash-occupied space is very well-guarded. And our strength is already increasing as we turn out more and more ships and weapons, using"—a wintery and ironic smile—"the industrial plant that we've inherited. The Korvaasha must have an inkling by now that something is wrong at Seivra, but it will take time for them to mount an attack."