by Chris Bunch
The investment had proved to be well placed. Thuy was instantly snapped up by the diplomatic corps, a situation that allowed him to blossom even more. The only arguments any of his superiors had ever had concerning him was who the young Tahn's mentor really was.
And so, when the delicate peace negotiations with the Eternal Emperor were undertaken, Thuy had instantly been assigned to accompany Lord Kirghiz and the other Tahn representatives as a junior diplomatic officer. It was to be a career assignment, which everyone agreed would be just the beginning of a rich career.
The Imperial and Tahn fleets met under the blinding pulsar shadow of NG 467H. The initial negotiations went quickly and well. Everyone believed that an agreement beneficial to the Tahn was only a formality away. The Eternal Emperor had invited the Tahn dignitaries aboard for a treaty celebration. Lord Kirghiz had quickly picked the Tahn who would accompany them. Included among them had been Thuy.
No Tahn knew what exactly had transpired next.
Prek believed the facts spoke for themselves.
Every Tahn who had boarded the Normandie died in a horrible bloodbath as they sat at the Emperor's banquet table.
The Eternal Emperor, through his toady judges and special prosecutors, had claimed that the Tahn had merely been the tragic victims of a plot against himself. As far as any Tahn—especially Prek—was concerned, that was too obvious a lie even to comment on. And the only answer to the lie and the treachery was a war of vengeance. It was a war to the death, to the last ounce of air and the last drop of blood.
It was a war that Prek believed in as intensely as did every other Tahn. But the larger war merely underscored his own private battle.
Prek did not remember when he had learned of his brother's death. He had been sitting in his office at Tahn Intelligence headquarters, and his superior had entered. The next thing he knew, Lo found himself sitting up in a hospital bed. Four months had passed. During that time, he was told, he had been a virtual catatonic. War was at hand, and so Lo had been declared “cured” and sent back to work.
It was then that his private war began. Prek examined every dot of information surrounding the deaths of his brother and the other Tahn diplomats. And gradually he had determined which beings had been responsible. He had not included the Emperor. That would be pointless. To go for the Emperor would be not only impossible but the act of an insane man. No. Go for the possible: the men who had actually wielded the knives or fired the guns. Sten, Prek firmly believed, was one of those men.
He had obtained a copy of Sten's military record, a tissue of lies, he was sure, but at least a beginning point in forming a profile of the man. The official record showed a man who had held a series of slightly above average posts, who had won a little more than his share of military awards and honors, and who had been promoted regularly. Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, his career had taken a sharp upturn. For no readily apparent reason, he had been appointed head of the Emperor's bodyguards. That had been followed by another sudden shift from the army to the navy and a promotion to commander.
Prek believed the promotion was because of special service to the Emperor. Sten's record was a fake. Actually, Prek thought, Sten had been a valued intelligence agent. The shift to the navy and, ultimately, to his command of four tacships had been a reward for services rendered. Those services, Prek was sure, included the murder of his brother.
Prek had tracked Sten forward to the final battle for Cavite City, where enormous casualties had been suffered on both sides. Tahn records indicated that Sten had probably died in that battle, although his remains had never been found. There had been some out-of-the-ordinary official effort to determine Sten's fate because of “criminal actions instigated by said Imperial officer” prior to the battle for Cavite.
Prek did not believe Sten was dead. His profile showed him to be a man who would do anything to survive. Prek also did not believe that Sten was serving elsewhere. He was an officer who would always be in the forefront of battle, and he was also the kind of hero the Eternal Emperor liked to feed into his propaganda machine.
No. Sten was alive. And Prek was determined to run him to the ground. He would find the man and then ... The Tahn brushed that thought from his mind. He could not allow emotion to interfere with the hunt.
Senior Captain (Intelligence) Lo Prek was right.
Sten was alive.
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CHAPTER TWO
TWO EMACIATED, SHAVEN-headed men crouched, motionless, in the thigh-deep muck.
One of them had been Commander Sten, formerly commanding officer of the now-destroyed Imperial Cruiser Swampscott. Sten had assumed command of the obsolete rust-bucket in the final retreat from Cavite and had fought a desperate rearguard action against an entire Tahn fleet. One ultramodern Tahn battleship had been destroyed by the Swampscott's missiles and a second had been crippled beyond repair, even as the Tahn blasts shattered the cruiser. In the final moments, Sten had opened his com and sent a surrender signal. He had collapsed long before the Tahn boarded the hulk that had been a fighting ship. That almost certainly had saved his life.
Seconds after Sten went out, Warrant Officer Alex Kilgour, a heavy-world thug, ex-Mantis Section assassin, and Sten's best friend struggled back to consciousness. He bloodily registered, on the Swampscott's single functioning screen, Tahn tacships closing in. He foggily thought that the Tahn, barbarians, “ae th’ Campbell class,” would not properly honor the man who had destroyed the nucleus of a Tahn fleet. More likely, Sten would be pitched out the nearest lock into space.
"Tha’ dinnae be braw nor kosher,” he muttered. Kilgour wove his way to a sprawled body, unsealed the suit, and tore away the corpse's ID tags. He checked a wall-mounted pressure readout. There were still a few pounds of atmosphere remaining in the CIC. Sten's suit came open, air hissing out, and his ID tags were replaced. Kilgour heard/felt the crashing as the Tahn blew a lock open and decided that it might be expedient for him to be unconscious as well.
Fewer than thirty gore-spattered, shocked Imperial sailors were transferred from the wreck of the Swampscott to the hold of a Tahn assault transport. Among them was one Firecontrol-man 1st Class Samuel Horatio.
Sten.
Fed and watered only as an afterthought, their wounds left untreated, twenty-seven survived to be unloaded on a swamp-world that the Tahn had grudgingly decided would be a war prisoner planet.
The Tahn believed that the highest death a being could find was in a battle. Cowardice or surrender were unthinkable. According to their belief, any Imperial soldier or sailor unlucky enough to be captured should have begged for instant death. But they were also sophisticated enough to realize grudgingly that other cultures felt differently and that such assistance to the dishonored might be misinterpreted. And so they let their captives live. For a while.
The Tahn saw no reason why, if prisoners were a burden to the Tahn, that burden should not be repaid. Repaid in sweat: slave labor.
Medical care: If the prisoners included med personnel, they had a medic. No supplies were provided. Any Imperial medical supplies captured were confiscated.
Shelter: Prisoners were permitted, on their own time, using any nonessential items permitted by the camp officers, to build shelter.
Working hours: At any task assigned, no limitations on hours or numbers of shifts.
Food: For humans, a tasteless slab that purported to provide the necessary nutrients. Except that a hardworking human needed about 3,600 calories per day. Prisoners were provided less than 1,000. Similar ratios and lack of taste were followed for the ET prisoners.
Since the prisoners were shamed beings, of course their guards were also soldiers in disgrace. Some of them were the crafty, who reasoned that shame in a guard unit was better than death in an assault regiment. There were a few—a very few—guards who had previously been trusties on one of the Tahn's own prison worlds.
The rules for prisoners were simple: Stand at attention when any guard
talks to you, even if you were a general and he or she was a private. Run to obey any order. Failure to obey: death. Failure to complete a task in the time and manner assigned: death. Minor infractions: beatings, solitary confinement, starvation.
In the Tahn POW camps, only the hard survived.
Sten and Alex had been prisoners for over three years.
Their rules were simple:
Never forget that the war cannot last forever.
Never forget you are a soldier.
Always help your fellow prisoner.
Always eat anything offered.
Both of them wished they had been brought up religious—faith in any or all gods kept prisoners alive. They had seen what happened to other prisoners, those who had given up hope, those who thought they could not filter through animal excrement for bits of grain, those who rebelled, and those who thought they could lone-wolf it.
After three years, all of them were long dead.
Sten and Alex had survived.
Both of them wished they had been brought up religious—faith in any or all gods kept prisoners alive. They had seen what happened to other prisoners who had given up hope; those who thought they could not filter through the animal excrement for bits of grain; those who rebelled, and those who thought they could lone-wolf it.
After three years, all of them were long dead.
Their previous training in the supersecret, survive-anything Mantis Section of the Empire's Mercury Corps might have helped. Sten also knew clotting well that having Alex to back his act had saved him. Kilgour privately felt the same. And there was a third item: Sten was armed.
Years earlier, before he had entered Imperial service, Sten had constructed a weapon—a tiny knife. Double-edged and needle-sharp, hand-formed from an exotic crystal, its edge would cut through any known metal or mineral. The knife was sheathed in Sten's arm, its release muscle-controlled. It was a very deadly weapon—although, in their captivity, it had been used mostly as a tool.
That night it would assist in their escape.
There had been very few escapes from the Tahn POW camps. At first those who had tried had been executed after recapture, and recaptured they almost always were. The first problem—getting out of a camp or fleeing from a work gang—was not that hard. Getting off the world itself was almost insurmountable. Some had made it as stowaways—or at least the prisoners hoped the escapees had succeeded. Others escaped and went to ground, living an outlaw existence only marginally better than life in the camps, hoping that the war would eventually end and they would be rescued.
Within the last year there had been a policy change—prisoners attempting an escape were not immediately murdered. Instead they were purged to a mining world, a world where, the guards gleefully told them, a prisoner's life span was measured in hours.
Sten and Alex had made four escape attempts in the three years they had been prisoners. Two tunnels had been discovered in the digging, a third attempt to go over the camp wire had been aborted when their ladder was found, and the most recent had been abandoned when no one could come up with what to do once they were beyond the wire.
This one, however, would succeed.
There was movement in the reeds nearby. Alex pounced and came up with a muddy, squirming, squealing rodent. Instantly Sten had the small box he held open, and the water animal was popped inside and closed into darkness. Very good.
"You two! Up!” a guard's voice boomed.
Sten and Alex came to attention.
"Making love? Sloughing?"
"Nossir. We're hunting, sir."
"Hunting? For reeks?"
"Yessir."
"We shoulda killed you all,” the guard observed, and spat accurately and automatically in Sten's face. “Form up."
Sten didn't bother to wipe the spittle. He and Alex waded out of the paddy to the dike, into line with ten other prisoners. The column stumbled into motion, heading back toward the camp. There were three guards, only one of whom was carrying a projectile weapon; they knew that none of those walking dead were a threat. Sten held the box as steady as possible and made soothing noises. He did not want his new pet to go off before it was time.
The reek—an odoriferous water animal with unusable fur, rank flesh, and spray musk glands below its tail—was the final tool for their escape.
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CHAPTER THREE
THE PRISONER OF-war camps had two command structures. The guards were the most visible. But the camp was actually run by the prisoners. In some camps the commanders were the strong and the brutal. Those anarchies were deathcamps, where a prisoner was as likely to die at the hands of his fellows as by a guard.
Sten's camp was still military. He and Alex were at least partially responsible for that.
The two had fought their way back to health during long delirium months. Then one day Sten was well enough to make a major discovery—not only was he known by the rather clottish name of Horatio, but Warrant Officer Kilgour outranked him. Somehow, he knew that had been carefully plotted by Alex back in the CIC of the Swampscott.
But regardless, rank would prevail. Those who felt the “war is over” or they “don't have to listen to any clottin’ sojers who got us in the drakh in the first place” were reasoned with. If that did not work, other methods were applied. Sten might have been a skeleton, but he was one who knew many, many degrees beyond the third. And Kilgour, from the three-gee world of Edinburgh, was still the strongest being in the camp—even including the camp executive officer, Battery Commander (Lieutenant Colonel) Virunga.
The N'Ranya were not particularly civilized-looking primates who had developed as tree-dwelling carnivores. They had recently been recognized as the Empire's preeminent artillery experts—their ancestry had given them an instinctual understanding of geometry and trigonometry. Their 300-kilo-plus body weight did not hurt their ability to handle heavy shells, either.
Colonel Virunga had been badly wounded before he was captured and still hulked around the compound with a limp and a cane. Very few people who survived Sten and Alex thought it wise to argue with the colonel's orders. The Imperial camp commander was a thin, wispy woman, General Bridger, who had reactivated herself out of retirement when her world was invaded and led the last-ditch stand. Her only goal was to stay alive long enough to see the Imperial standard raised over the camp, and then she would allow herself to die.
At dusk, after Sten and Alex had forced down the appalling evening ration, she and Colonel Virunga said their good-byes.
"Mr. Kilgour, Horatio,” she said, “I hope I shall never see either of you again."
Kilgour grinned. “Ah hae th’ sam't dream, ma'am."
Virunga stepped forward. It took a while to understand the N'Ranya speech patterns—they thought speech mostly a waste of time and so verbalized only enough words to make the meaning clear.
"Hope ... luck ... When ... free ... do not forget."
They would not. Sten and Alex saluted, then began their moves.
Under orders, without explanation, other prisoners had begun what Sten called “two in, one out, one in, three out.” In small groups they filtered toward one of the camp's few privies, one that “coincidentally” sat less than three meters from the inner perimeter. Sten and Alex joined them; the small box with the reek inside hung around Sten's neck, concealed by a ragged towel. It would be impossible for either of the guards in the towers nearby to keep track of how many prisoners went into the privy and how many came out.
The privy sat over a deep and dank excrement-filled pit. The building itself was a shed, with a water trough down one side and the privy seats—circular holes cut into a long slab-cut lumber box—on the other. Sten and Alex clambered into one of those holes. On either side of the box, on the inside, they had hammered in spikes a few days earlier.
Both of them had root fiber nose plugs stuffed in place. The plugs did no good whatsoever. Just hang on, Sten thought. Do not faint. Do not think whether that arach
nid that's crawling up your arm is poisonous. Just hang on.
Finally the curfew siren shrieked, and the prisoner sounds subsided. Footsteps thudded, and one privy door opened. The guards, for olfactory reasons, only checked cursorily.
It would have been best for Sten and Alex to wait until the middle of the night before moving, but they had kilometers to travel before dawn. At full dark, they levered themselves out of their hiding places and grimaced at each other.
The next step was up to Colonel Virunga.
It started with shouts and screams and laughter. Sten and Alex saw the searchlight sweep over the cracks in the privy roof, toward one of the barracks. They slid out the privy door.
In theory, they should not have been able to go any farther. The camp was sealed with an inner barrier of wire, a ten-meter-wide “no-go” passage, and then the outer wire.
The tower guards swept the compound with visual searchlights, far more dangerous light-amplification scopes, and focused-noise sensors. By assignment, one guard should have been on each detector.
But the guards were lazy. Why, after all, was it necessary for three men to work a tower, especially at night? There was no escape from the camp. Even if one of the Imperials managed to get out, there was nowhere for him to go—the peasants surrounding the camp were promised large rewards for the return of any escapees in any condition, no questions to be asked. And even if an Imperial managed to slip past the farmers, where would he go? He was still marooned on a world far inside the Tahn galaxies.
And so a bright guard had figured a way to slave all three sensors to a single unit. Only one guard was required to monitor all three of them.
So when Virunga ordered the carefully orchestrated ruckus to start inside one of the barracks and a guard swung his spotlight, all sensors on that tower pointed away from the two scuttling blobs of darkness that went to the wire.
There were three strands of wire to cut before Sten and Alex could slip through into the no-go passage, three razored strips of plas. Sten's knife would make that simple. But those dangling strands would be spotted within a few minutes. And so, very carefully, Alex had collected over the past several cycles twelve metalloid spikes.