Their Master's war

by Mick Farren

  "First we eat, but we make no fire. We don't want to reveal ourselves until it's absolutely necessary."

  "And then?"

  "We wait until they're on the move. We let them get well ahead of us. If they turn back to confront us, we will have ample warning of any hostile intentions."

  They gave the other party sufficient time to move well ahead before they saddled their own mounts and walked them out of the hollow. While they were readying the mounts, Harkaan found himself standing next to Con-chela. She looked at him questioningly.

  "Why didn't you come to our blankets last night, Harkaan? Are you different from the others?"

  Harkaan stiffened. "Someone had to stand watch."

  "Is that the only reason?"

  "It didn't seem right to break the Law when we're so close to the Gods." body had a word for it. It was a red ball, the height of a man across its diameter, and it hung in the air just above the heads of the riders. It glowed, not with the glow of fire but with a steady rhythmic pulse of color that was bright but had no warmth. The only thing Harkaan had ever seen that remotely resembled it was the glow of the stone when it showed the way.

  The red sphere came closer, as if to inspect the winding procession of mounts and riders. Up ahead, terrified animals wailed. Necks arched and heads tossed while their fear released a rank, heavy smell. One mount reared, and then another. The red sphere just kept on coming, slow and relentless, riding the air. A mount in the party directly in front of the Ashak-ai bucked and screamed. Its rider tried to rein it in, but it lost its footing and toppled backward with its legs flailing. The mounts around it bucked and plunged. Harkaan had to fight down his own mount and, at the same time, his own fear. Was this a God? Somehow he didn't think so; maybe it was a messenger or a servant of the Gods. Except, if this was a messenger, what were the Gods like? He wanted to turn his mount and crash back down the path. He wanted to run, to flee. He wanted to keep on running until he was someplace where the Gods couldn't find or reach him. And yet he had no will. He couldn't do it. It was as if his arms and legs were no longer his own. He was truly and deeply scared, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  The red ball abruptly lifted, rose into the sky, and vanished behind the nearest hill. Harkaan leaned forward and calmed his mount by patting its neck. Its scales were slick with greasy sweat. A strange silence seemed to have settled over the procession, and the only sound was the rattle of the animals' footfalls on the loose rocks. 1 he riders and even the mounts appeared to have passed

  She hooked her foot into the stirrup and swung her leg over her mount's back. "You are different."

  By noon, it was possible to see a dozen or more groups all riding slowly toward the hills. It seemed that every tribe on the plains, and even those from beyond, were sending their tribute to the Gods. The nearest party was now close enough for him to make out faces and even tribal markings. There were no threats, not even signs of recognition or salute. They simply rode parallel to each other, no party acknowledging that the others existed. That night, the fires on the plain were like stars in the sky. All six of the Ashak-ai stood and stared, overawed by the sheer size of this migration.

  Halfway through the next day, there was no longer the slightest doubt that the end of the journey was in sight. Every group of riders was converging on the same narrow pass that wound up and through the first line of hills. There were now so many riders that there was a certain amount of congestion around the mouth of the pass. It was almost the time of single shadows when the Ashak-ai mounts were finally able to start picking their way up the narrow path. The path proved to be little more than a rock-strewn, dried-out watercourse that twisted andj turned between steep barren slopes and around folds in‹ the hillside. Dust and the smell of animal apprehension hung in the air. The mounts stepped gingerly on the un* even surface. Both humans and animals felt very close to something infinitely strange and infinitely powerful.

  There was an alien sound in the air, a high-pitched hum somewhat reminiscent of the nightwhine of the air beetle. Then the noise grew louder and louder, and it was nothing like any sound Harkaan had ever heard. And then the thing appeared around a turn in the trail, and the noise, frightening as it was, became completely secondary. Harkaan had no word for it. He was sure that no the point where they could continue to be afraid. Numbness had descended and gripped them. They had no alternative but to continue up the pass and into the unknown.

  Nothing in the world had prepared any of them for what they saw when they crested the top of the pass and started down the other side. There was no doubt that it was the Valley of the Gods. The valley itself was a perfect place, long and broad, with a bright stream meandering down its length and a flat, irregular floor covered with a lush layer of meadow grass. It could have been a paradise except for the God that floated above it.

  The God was huge. Harkaan found that he simply didn't have the language to describe its size. It shouldn't have been possible for such an enormous bulk to hang there in the air, just at the height of a tree. Its vast pair o shadows covered the whole center section of the valle floor. As far as Harkaan could see, the God was predom inantly made of metal-yet that was impossible. There was no way that so much metal could exist in the same place at the same time. The most metal that Harkaan had ever seen were the tiny arrowhead slivers that were kept] in the Lodge of the Spirits. It was all the metal that th Ashak-ai owned, and they considered themselve~ wealthy.

  If anything, the God resembled a giant platee. It was roughly the same flat disk shape as the spinning weapon, but where the platee was smooth except for the jagged cutting edges, the God was covered in all manner of blisters and irregularities. Long complex pylons extende from its outside edge, and lights burned on its dark, underside. Some shone steadily, while others pulsed in! swirling random rhythms. There were a multitude of. colors, and some of the beams looked as if they were; somehow more than light, as if they were solid.

  Harkaan was startled by the sound of impatient mounts; he felt as if he were being jerked out of a trance. The riders behind him were pressing forward. It was much too late to turn back or bolt. He dug his heels into the sides of his mount and started down the track, down Into the Valley of the Gods.

  Three

  "Poor little bleeders."

  Topman Rance leaned back in the angle of two plasma ducts and braced his foot against a third, making himself as comfortable as possible. Over at the far end of Receiving Hold 3, the first of the new intake were starting to emerge from the lock that led to the sterile area. They looked like corpses in the blue light that spilled out from the lock, and they moved as if, to a man, they were demoralized and completely terrified. Arms were wrapped around chests and hands covered genitals, a few fingered their freshly shaved heads, and all peered uneasily into the shadows as if they expected some new awfulness to fall on them at any moment. Back in those shadows, Rance nodded. He liked them like that. Once the fight and the pride had been juiced out of them and they were about to jump out of their skins, they were also ready for him to rebuild them.

  Perhaps the most disturbing thing on any star vessel was the noise. It was never quiet. There was a constant dull cacophony of sighs and booms and deep metallic groans. Discharging energy snapped and crackled, and escaping gases whistled and shrilled. Water dripped, and totally unknown things grumbled and murmured. Those who spent their lives on starships never thought of them as cold machines. It was like being inside, even being a part of, a vast living organism. Receiving Hold 3 on its own was quite enough to awe any newcomer. It looked like a place where gods might dwell, a huge cathedral space enclosed in a frame of arching power conduits like giant pillars and the meshed complexity of the plasma transmission. It was a place of dark, menacing spaces and mysterious blackness. It was also big enough to accommodate a dropcraft or an e-vac. At the opposite end, the towering bulkhead doors opened directly onto the emptiness of space.

  "If those poor bastards knew that, they'd probably shit on
the spot."

  Rance remembered the first time he'd seen empty space. It was a moment he'd never forget. He'd been almost as raw as these suckers.

  A plasma throwoff crackled and flowed down the wall. The whole intake cringed. Rance knew that it was almost time to show himself, but he held off for a few moments to give the debris in their minds a little longer to settle. As if it wasn't bad enough that they'd been ripped from their families, their culture, and their planet — from everything that might give them a familiar bearing-they'd also been given the datashot. The datashot may have been ultimately efficient, a complete education and military training in a single electric moment, but it was also ultimately cruel. Even the longtimers didn't like to talk about their moment of datashot. Men who'd spent a lifetime in combat and seen a dozen sets of friends killed, men who needed only the slightest of excuses to wade knee-deep in blood atrocity, still feared the memory of the datashot. All that one needed to know to be a ground trooper of the Therem Alliance was fused into the brain in a single jolting instant. The horror was a side effect of unimaginable pain. The machines that made the interface and the creatures that operated them had no idea that the agony they caused was quite literally unbearable. The illusion was one of the body being exploded into fragments. The spine would snap in a thousand places, the skull would be shattered, and bunches of nerves would be torn out by the roots as waves of burning images seared the passages of the mind. After the pain there was another horror. Suddenly, there were pictures inside each recruit's head like a new mind. They seemed to come from nowhere, memories in which the rememberer didn't exist, memories to which he had no right. The troopers knew things that there was no reason for them to know. They prayed that they'd go mad and that they'd stop trying to make sense of it all. Rance shook his head. After twenty years, the memory was still too close.

  An atmosphere line valved off an excess of pressure with a shriek. The intake moved closer to each other as if looking for some kind of mutual protection. That was also good. It was never too early for them to start banding and forming ties. No one else was going to look after them. They were all out of the lock now, all twenty replacements, shaved and sprayed and irradiated. Even the bacteria of their home planet had been taken from them.

  Rance swung down from his vantage point. His boots crashed on the steel floor, and the echoes bounced around the vaulted roof of the hold. The intake started to back away, back toward the blue-lighted sterile lock. What did they think they were going to do? Did they think the lock was the way back into the womb? He rapped out his first command.

  "Stand right where you are!"

  Without thinking, all of the intake halted. Some even came halfway to attention. The datashot had taken and was already starting to shake down into the normal brain patterns.

  "Does everyone understand what I'm saying?"

  It was actually too much to expect any of them to answer. They had the new language in their heads, but the use of it would require a little practice.

  "If you understand what I'm saying, I want you to raise your right hand. This is a very simple order. If you understand what I'm saying, raise your right hand."

  All twenty of them raised their hands. Two, however, raised their left. They would have to go in for testing. If the flip-flop persisted, they'd finish up on disposal. Rance tapped the switchbox on his belt. More lights came on in the hold. It made the place a little less intimidating. The intake still had their arms in the air. They probably wouldn't lower them until they were given the countermand. Rance assumed control. After the data-shot, they were like blank slates. He was the first thing that would be imprinted on them. There was nothing like a little discipline to help their minds shake down and start functioning.

  "Stand right where you are! You don't have to run away from me. You're going to grow to love me before we're through. And while we're at it, why don't we lower those stupid hands. We don't want to look foolish, do we?"

  The hands dropped. Rance gave a satisfied nod. He walked forward and indicated a white line that had been painted across the floor of the hold.

  "This is very simple. You will all move up to this line here. You will all face in this direction, and you will stand with your toes touching the line. And when I say touching, I mean touching. I want the toes of both your feet exactly on the line. Not behind it and not in front of it. Now, move!"

  They jumped. Rance was reasonably pleased. It shouldn't take too long to shake this bunch into combat readiness. Rance walked slowly along the line with deliberate steps, his boots ringing on the floor. In every way he was the complete opposite of the dazed naked men in his charge. His black suit was glossy, his harness gleamed, and the steel tips of his boots were buffed until they shone like mirrors. In his twenty years of fighting for the Therem, the life of a ground trooper had thrown everything at him that it was possible to take and still survive. His eyes were hard, narrow slits with deeply etched, humorless lines radiating from their corners. His mouth was a tight-lipped line with few signs that it ever let go and laughed. His hair was cropped short in the style of the longtimers and was rapidly turning to an iron-gray. A network of scars ran from his right ear to the point of his jaw and bore testimony to the ravages of the unending war.

  "You are all very confused now, but the confusion will not last. You have been recruited as ground troopers attached to the fifth ship of the Anah battle cluster of the Therem Alliance. You are already twelve licks out from your home planet, and you will never see it again. In our language, the enemy we fight is called the Yal. It's doubtful that you will ever come face to face with them. The war in which you are now involved is almost completely fought by proxies. We are some of theiii. All the information that you need to make the adjustments to your new situation has already been placed in your memories. You simply have to accept it and make use of it. Once you do that, your confusion will diminish."

  One man's toes protruded over the white line. Rance paused beside him and brought his steel-shod boot down hard on them. The recruit screamed and fell to his knees. This one would have to be put in for reexamination.

  "On your feet, damn you!"

  The man struggled painfully to stand. It was likely that at least one of his toes was broken; Rance had stamped on them with considerable force. It wasn't that Rance was a sadist. It was that he simply didn't have the time anymore. If the individual trooper was going to survive, if the squad was going to survive, indeed, if the whole damned army was going to survive, orders had to be obeyed immediately and precisely. Approximation could mean death or worse. There had been a time when Rance had questioned, when he'd even railed against the system by which the Therem held them all in total bondage. Now he neither raged nor wanted to know why. There was no percentage. He just lived. In a war without reasons or answers or even passion, and certainly without an end, survival became everything. Rebellion had been replaced by a dry bitterness.

  "You may be wondering why you should have been snatched up into space from your idyllic and primitive little planet by what you thought of as a god and pressed into service in a war you never heard of. You may feel that it's extremely unfair." Rance looked coldly up and down the line of men. "From this point on you can forget about fair. This is a vastly unfair universe. The best you can expect is a good deal of variety."

  Static arced with a sharp whipcrack. The intake jerked. Rance didn't even look around. They were starting to settle down. The sooner the better, as far as he was concerned. His sense of order was offended by their stumbling around like zombies after the trauma of pickup and datashot. He took these details only because pickups were ten times worse. Rance always did his best to avoid pickups, fixing it so that he could stay on the mothership, up in the cluster. Pickups could become messy. Even with the mind control cranked to redline, the primitives could still serk out and cause a great deal more trouble than they were worth. He'd heard that this lot's culture had been based on a symbiosis with some kind of riding lizard. Animals could also be a p
roblem. Apparently a number of these couldn't be driven off after their riders had been taken, and were pulped by the backwash as the pickup shuttle lifted.

  It was the eyes that he had to watch. When they came out of the sterile area, their eyes were like those of children, wide and frightened, unmarked and unknowing. It was all too easy to forget the bodies of these men. They were sinewy and lean, hardened by deprivation, some bore the scars of knives or the goring of animals. These men were hunters and fighters. They were able to adjust to the situation and their new, imposed memories with great rapidity. Sometimes the adjustment could be so rapid that more than one topman had lost his life when a recruit used his new skills and knowledge in an attempt at an old-fashioned, take-a-few-with-him kamikaze.

  "You may wonder why a species like the Therem should bother with primitives like yourself. The truth of the matter is that our masters find us valuable weapons. And make no mistake, the Therem are precisely that. Now and again, you may hear them referred to as our allies. That's shit. They own us. We're clever violent little monkeys, and we make great planetside shock troops. Why do you think that they'd go to all the trouble of maintaining an accessible supply of us close to all combat sectors? Somewhere in your brand-new memories, you'll find the phrase 'planet forming.' There are hundreds of worlds just like yours, planned environments to keep you primitive but also to make you tough and resourceful, worlds from which you can be harvested any time they need replacement battle fodder."

  Rance halted. He looked up and down the line of men.

  "You have been harvested. You're battle fodder, and you might as well make the best of it."

  Rance noticed that two of the intake seemed to be shaking down. Their eyes were starting to harden and focus. It was time to get them under his control before they got ideas of their own. He stood in front of the nearest one, a young man of medium height, in his late teens or early twenties, with the high forehead and the hooked bird of prey nose that seemed to be common to this colony. He looked capable enough, and recent extensive bruising on his left shoulder tended to indicate that he was a fighter.