Hell's Gate m-1

by David Weber

  "Let's go find out," he said quietly. He turned in the saddle, waving hand signals to the column which had halted instantly behind him. Scouts peeled off from the flanks, spreading out. The precaution was almost certainly unnecessary, but Hulmok Arthag didn't care.

  Once his skirmishers were in position, he touched Bright Wind with his heels. The stallion stepped forward, dainty yet tense, and Petty Captain Arthag rode out from under the trees into a scene of nightmare.

  It was even worse than any of them had been expecting, particularly for Darcel Kinlafia. The Voice really should have been left behind, with Company-Captain Halifu, but he'd flatly refused, and he hadn't been at all shy about it. He might be legally under Halifu's authority, despite his own civilian status, but he hadn't really seemed to care about that.

  Arthag's platoon had only been attached to Halifu's command for a couple of months. The Chalgyn Consortium team's rapid-fire chain of discoveries had the Portal Authority scrambling for troops to forward to the new frontier. Arthag's men had been among the units swept up by the Authority broom and whisked off to an entirely new universe?and attached to an equally new CO?with less than a week's warning. A man got used to that in the Authority's service.

  But although Arthag scarcely knew Halifu well, he didn't think Kinlafia would have been able to browbeat the company-captain into acquiescence if it hadn't been for the fact that he was the Voice who'd received Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr's final message. Unlike Arthag or any of his troopers, Kinlafia had already seen the battlefield through Shaylar's eyes. That meant he might be able to give Hilovar or Nolis Parcanthi, the Tracer and Whiffer Halifu had attached to Arthag for the rescue mission, some critical bits of information or explanation which would let them figure out what had really happened here.

  But whatever Kinlafia had seen through Shaylar's eyes, it obviously hadn't been enough to prepare him for what he saw through his own. He let out a low, ghastly sound as his gaze swept across the killing field where so many of his friends had died. It was pitifully clear that he saw something Arthag didn't?and couldn't?and Parcanthi reached across to grip Kinlafia's shoulder in wordless sympathy and support.

  "Standard perimeter overwatch. Chief-Armsman chan Hathas," Arthag said briskly, pretending he hadn't noticed the Voice's distress. "First Squad has the perimeter. Third has the reserve. Second Squad will dismount and prepare to assist Parcanthi and Hilovar on request, but keep them out from underfoot until they're called for."

  "Yes, Sir!" Rayl chan Hathas, Second Platoon's senior noncom, saluted sharply and turned to deal with Arthag's instructions. For a moment, Arthag envied him intensely. He would far rather have buried himself in the comfort of a familiar routine rather than face the sort of discoveries he was afraid they were going to make.

  "Soral, Nolis," he continued, turning to the two specialists. "Do what you can to tell us what happened here. The rest of the column will remain outside the clearing until you're finished."

  Hilovar and Parcanthi nodded, dismounted?awakwardly, in Parcanthi's case?and tied their reins to fallen branches. Arthag allowed no trace of amusement to cross his expressionless nomad's face?the Septs had their reputation to maintain, after all?but neither the Whiffer nor Tracer were cavalry troopers. They were technically infantry, and Parcanthi looked like a lumpy bag of potatoes in the saddle. Hilovar wasn't a lot better, and Arthag found the two of them about as unmilitary as anyone he'd ever seen in uniform. Hilovar was a tall, solidly built Ricathian who'd been a Tracer for a major civilian police department before the fascination of the frontier drew him into the Authority's service. Parcanthi, a bit shorter than Hilovar but even broader, was a Farnalian with flaming red hair and a complexion which Arthag suspected started peeling about a half-hour before sunrise. On a rainy day.

  Both of them, despite their relatively junior noncommissioned ranks, were the sort of critically important specialists the Authority was always eager to get its hands on. And as critically needed specialists often did, they had a tendency to write their own tickets?often without actually realizing they'd even done it. Which, when it came right down to it, was just fine with Hulmok Arthag. He suspected that both of them would be just about useless in a firefight, but they knew that as well as he did. If it came to it, both of them were smart enough to stay out of the line of fire (if they could), and that, too, suited Arthag just fine, because they were also far too valuable to risk in a firefight. As it happened, and despite their lack of horsemanship or military polish, he liked what he'd seen of both of them?a lot. And if they could tell him anything about what had happened here, he would forgive them any military faux pas they might ever commit.

  He waited until he was confident chan Hathas had the perimeter organized, then dismounted himself with a murmured command to Bright Wind, whose ears flicked in acknowledgment. Until and unless he told the golden stallion it was time to move, Bright Wind would stay exactly where he was. Arthag patted the horse's shoulder gently, then stepped up to the edge of the clearing, rifle ready, and settled in to wait.

  There'd been no rain and little wind, which was a gods send for Parcanthi. Even so, the residual energy had already begun to dissipate. A sense of horror and pain would doubtless linger for years, but raw emotion wasn't what Parcanthi?and the rest of Sharona?sought.

  The Whiffer stepped out into the center of the toppled timber, closed his eyes, and reached out with quivering senses to taste the surviving residual patterns, and images flashed through him. Whiffs of what had been. Smoke. The crash and roar of rifle fire. Screams of agony.

  He turned, eyes still closed, to face the trees where the Chalgyn Consortium's crew had sought cover. He caught a flash of Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl standing up, hands empty. Caught another flash of a uniformed man spinning around, raising a crossbow, firing. Yet another flash of chan Hagrahyl staggering back, throat pierced with steel.

  Other flashes cannoned through him. Barris Kasell dying monstrously inside a massive lightning bolt. Men in strange uniforms falling to the broken ground, as bullets hammered through them. Other Sharonians back in the trees, caught by fireballs and crossbow fire.

  He turned toward the standing trees where the enemy had formed his line, and more flashes came. Shouts in an alien tongue. Men rustling cautiously through the trees, circling around to get at the defenders' flanks. Strange, glassy tubes that belched flame and lightning, just as Kinlafia had described. And bodies. Everywhere he turned, Whiffing the air, Parcanthi saw bodies. Caught in tangled tree limbs, sprawled across toppled tree trunks … lying in neat rows.

  He jerked his attention back to that flash and tried to recapture it, to wring more detail from it. He saw the dead laid out in careful rows, limbs arranged as if they were only sleeping. Other men moved among them, placing something small on each corpse. He could see Sharonian dead, as well as those of the enemy. They'd grouped the survey crew together, it looked like, but the images were so tenuous he couldn't tell for sure how many Sharonians there were. He was still trying to count when an unholy flash of light blinded him. The bodies began to burn with unnatural brilliance?

  Parcanthi let out a yell and staggered back, gasping.

  "What is it?" someone demanded, practically in his ear. "What did you Whiff?"

  Parcanthi jerked around and found Hulmok Arthag standing at his shoulder.

  "W-what?" he gulped, still more than a little disoriented.

  "What did you Whiff?" Petty Captain Arthag asked again, and Parcanthi swallowed hard.

  "They cremated the dead," he answered, his voice hoarse. "With something … unnatural."

  "I'm starting to dislike that adjective," the Arpathian officer growled. He glowered at the clearing for a moment, jaw working as if he wanted to spit. Then he shook himself and looked back at the Whiffer. "What else did you get?"

  Parcanthi gave himself a shake, regathering his composure.

  "Part of the battle Kinlafia described, Sir. Just faint glimpses. The details are already fading, dissipating. They cremated our dea
d, as well as their own, but the images are so tenuous, it's hard to tell how many of our people were burnt."

  "Keep trying," Arthag said in clipped tones. "We need to know if there were survivors."

  "Yes, Sir. I know. I'll do my best."

  "Good man." Arthag put a hand briefly on his shoulder, then nodded. "Carry on, then."

  As Parcanthi got back to work, Arthag turned toward Soral Hilovar, who was searching through the fallen trees where the Chalgyn crew had taken shelter.

  "Anything?" he asked, and the Tracer looked up with a bitter expression.

  "Whoever these bastards are, they left damned little behind. If I could get my hands on something of theirs, I could tell you a fair bit, but they were fiendishly thorough scavengers. I haven't found anything they left behind, and not a single piece of Sharonian equipment, either,for that matter. I've found spot after spot where our people set down packs, or what were probably ammunition boxes, but they're gone. All I've got so far is this."

  He held up a handful of spent cartridge cases, and Arthag gazed at them through narrow eyes.

  "They mean to learn all they can from our gear," he said flatly, then inhaled and grimaced at the Tracer. "Nolis says they cremated the dead. I know it won't be pleasant, but try reading the ash piles."

  He nodded toward the most open portion of the clearing, where Parcanthi stood in the midst of fire scars the length and shape of human bodies. Hilovar's jaw muscles bunched, but he nodded with the choppiness of barely suppressed anger. Not at Arthag, the petty-captain knew, but at what he was going to find out there.

  "Yes, Sir," he bit out. "I'll do whatever it takes, Sir."

  The normally cheerful Ricathian stalked toward the fire scars. At least he wasn't a novice when it came to crime scene work. His ten-year stint as a homicide Tracer in Lubnasi, the city-state of his birth, had inured him to mere human cruelty and suffering. He understood that people did violence to one another, even in a world of telepaths. But this …

  The ash pits, while macabre, were less horrifying to a former homicide Tracer than they would have been to a civilian. Not that they didn't bother Hilovar anyway, of course. But that was because he could already tell they were tainted with something not quite right, something profoundly disturbing. Whatever it was, he'd already encountered it when he Traced the survey crew's actual death sites.

  He put that memory out of his mind, focusing on the immediate task as he knelt beside the first human-sized scorch mark. There wasn't much left, not even bone. A few twisted, melted bits of metal glinted dully in the ashes, but there wasn't even much of that. Not enough to tell if the bits had been buttons, or buckles, or something else entirely. Just a few droplets, where something had melted and dripped away until it coalesced into ugly, formless flakes and bits too small even to call pebbles.

  Simply touching the ashes and splashes of metal sent vile prickles up his arms. Everything he touched gave off the same feeling as the death sites had, only worse. More concentrated. The vibrations of the energy he would normally have sensed in a place where humans had been incinerated?a house fire, say?had been warped by something uncanny in these ash pits. The residues crawled along his skin uncomfortably, like being jabbed with thousands of microscopic pins.

  When he doublechecked with Parcanthi on the location of cremation sites that were almost certainly Sharonian, then cross-referenced with sites which had definitely contained the enemy's dead, he found exactly the same residues on both, which led to an inescapable conclusion. Whatever they'd used to cremate their own dead had been used to burn the Sharonian dead, as well, so the odd residue wasn't a signature given off by the enemy's bodies. And whatever it was, they'd used something similar to kill the Chalgyn Consortium's people in the first place, because that weapon had left behind the same unsettling energy residue, all over the death sites. It was exactly the same residue as whatever they'd used to ignite the funeral pyres, and he couldn't make any sense out of it at all.

  "How were they burned?" he muttered to himself without even realizing he'd spoken aloud. "Whatever it was, it was damned odd."

  It's certainly hadn't been any fuel Hilovar had ever encountered. There was no wood ash, so it couldn't have been a traditional, archaic funeral pyre. It hadn't been kerosene, either, or some kind of flammable vegetable oil, or anything else he could think of. Besides, each of these fire scars was exactly the size of a single body… and they'd been burned out of the surrounding leaf mold without touching off a general conflagration. He saw the proof of that right in front of him, but the very idea was still ridiculous. He'd never heard of any fire intense enough to totally consume a human body … not to mention one that burned a neat hole out of drifts of dry leaves without spreading at all!

  He furrowed his brow, trying to identify the elusive, disturbing sensation. It was more like the energy patterns near portals than anything else he could think of, but it wasn't the same as that, either. It was … different.

  He growled in frustration and stood, looking around until he spotted Acting Platoon-Captain Arthag and Parcanthi. They were standing together to one side, and he strode briskly over to them. When he tried to explain his confusing impressions, the cavalry officer looked baffled, but the Whiffer blinked. He frowned for a few seconds, then nodded vigorously.

  "I think you're onto something, Soral," he said. "I kept getting a Whiff of something really odd in this clearing. It was pretty strong where our people died, but it was even stronger over there." He pointed into the standing trees opposite the clearing where the crew had made its fatal last stand. "I got the strongest sense of it where I caught the flashes of those weird, shiny tubes Kinlafia described."

  "That's interesting." Arthag rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking from one spot to the other. "You sensed it at the point of impact, and at the point of origin. But not between? Shouldn't there be a parabola of residue between them, along the trajectory?"

  "You'd think so, Sir," Parcanthi agreed with a frown. "Let me Whiff this again."

  He moved slowly and carefully across the open ground between the two spots, again and again. He quartered the area meticulously, but when he came back, he shook his head.

  "There's not a damned thing between them, Platoon-Captain. Nothing."

  He looked perplexed, and Arthag's frown deepened.

  "That's impossible!" the officer protested. Then grimaced. "Isn't it? I mean, how can something shoot without following a trajectory?"

  "I don't have the least damned idea, Sir, but that's what it looks like they did. There was some kind of powerful energy discharge at the enemy's gun emplacement." He pointed. "There was another one where the weapon's discharge struck." He pointed again. "But I'm telling you, Sir, that there's nothing between those two spots. Not even the ghost of a signature. And this energy feels so damned weird it would be impossible to mistake its signature if it was there in the first place."

  The three men exchanged grim glances.

  "Just what in hell are we dealing with?" Hilovar asked for all of them in an uneasy tone, and Arthag scowled.

  "I intend to find that out." He glanced at Parcanthi. "Can I send the men in to search the site yet, or do you need to take more readings first?"

  "Keep them away from our people's death sites, if you don't mind, Sir. I do want to take more readings there, see if I can pin down more information about who died and who might not have. And stay clear of that area for now." He pointed to a spot under the standing trees. "That's where they tended their wounded before evacuating. I want to take a close scan of that, as well. You can turn them loose anywhere else, though."

  Arthag nodded and strode across the clearing to Chief-Armsman chan Hathas.

  "Spread them out, Chief-Armsman. I want every inch of this ground searched, from there?" he pointed "?to there." He indicated the two off-limit sites Parcanthi needed to scan again.

  "Yes, Sir. Any special instructions on what we ought to be looking for?" chan Hathas asked.

  "Anything the Tracer
can handle, Chief. We're looking for anything he can get a better reading off of. As it stands, we don't have enough surviving debris to give Hilovar a decent set of readings. Find something better for him."

  "Yes, Sir." chan Hathas looked out across the clearing, his jaw clenched, and nodded sharply. "If it's out there, we'll find it, Sir," he promised grimly.

  "Good," Arthag said, and then turned to face the sole survivor of Chalgyn's slaughtered crew.

  "Darcel." His gruff voice gentled as he called the man's name.

  "Sir?" The civilian's question was hoarse, his expression stricken and distracted.

  "Pair up with Nolis, please," Arthag said quietly. "Compare what you saw through Shaylar's eyes with what he's picking up. I know that's going to be hard on you, but we've got to know precisely how many of our people were killed."

  "Yes, Sir." The words should have been crisp, but they came out as a shadow of sound, barely audible, and distress burned in Darcel's eyes. He turned without another word and headed out across the broken, fire-scorched ground, stumbling over the rough footing.

  It wasn't just the debris that was responsible for his unsteady gait. Just being in this clearing was agony, but he also had trouble distinguishing between what his own eyes saw and what he'd Seen through Shaylar's eyes. The memories kept superimposing themselves over what he was seeing here and now. He kept trying to step over branches that weren't there, and stumbled over ones that didn't exist in the view Shaylar had transmitted. He blinked furiously, trying to clear his distorted vision, and cursed himself when he couldn't. He needed to be clearheaded, not muddled between past and present. He had to be if he was going to help spot something that would provide clues for Parcanthi and Hilovar.

  He stopped, turning in place, looking for the exact spot where Shaylar had crouched, where the agonizing memories in his mind had been born of fire and thunder. There. It was somewhere in that direction, he decided, and started forward once more, moving with grim determination through the confusion of reality and remembrance. If he could find the spot, he and the others might dredge up something they could use. Darcel had little hope that anyone had survived, but he needed to know. One way or the other, he had to know, because anything would be better than this dreadful uncertainty. This doubt.