Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  It was smaller bore than the Vashin’s portable cannon, and shorter than normal, with a pistol grip carved from wood and a barrel barely thirty centimeters long. It held only five shells, and kicked like a mule, but it had one saving grace—as long as you held the trigger back, it would fire with each “pump.”

  Poertena demonstrated that capability to the Mardukans picking themselves up off of the floor in the room beyond the demolished door. There were clearly more of them than shells in the ammo tube, but he didn’t let that stop him as he furiously pumped and pointed, filling the room with ricocheting balls of lead, smoke, and patterns of blood.

  The hammer clicked on an empty breech, and he rolled out of the doorway and back into his original cover. He lay there, licking a slice on the back of his hand where one of the ricochets had come too close, then reloaded while the second wave of Vashin finally made it up the slippery stairs.

  “I t’ink I leave it up to you line-dogs from here,” he said to the Mardukan cavalrymen as the last round clicked into the magazine.

  “What? You mean leave some for us?” Honal asked. He stopped by the hole and glanced in. “So, how many were there?”

  “I dunno.” Poertena glanced at the far tower as shots rang out from its top floor. “Not enough, apparen’ly.”

  He’d decided not to stare at the muzzle of the medium bombard pointed from the top of the other tower to sweep the wall. It had fired once—carrying away the entire first wave of Vashin who’d been supposed to cover his own approach with the demo charge—and he’d fully expected it to sweep him away, as well. But the bombard crew had apparently had more important things on their minds after firing that first shot. Now the gun shuddered for a moment, then rolled out of the way to reveal a human face.

  “Birkendal, what t’e pock you doing up t’ere?” Poertena called. “Get you ass down here and do some real work!”

  “Oh, sure!” the private called back. “Expecting gratitude from a Pinopan is like expecting exact change from a K’Vaernian!”

  “What is t’is t’ing, ‘exact change’?” Poertena asked with a shrug, and followed Honal through the hole.

  Roger thrust the blade of his sword through the doorway, then moved forward. There was a hole in the base of the opposite tower, which was apparently the inner side of the main gatehouse, and he could hear shots from the upper stories. But the top of the wall was momentarily clear.

  There was more fighting to the south, back into town. It looked like the Diasprans and Vashin were being used to hold off the Kirsti forces. From the looks of the locals, there were more of the city guards, armed only with staves, and a sprinkling of the formal “Army.” They were distinguishable by their heavier armor and heavier spears. The weapons were something like the Roman pilum, and the soldiers wielded them well, holding a good shield wall and pressing hard against the human-trained infantry.

  The Diasprans and Vashin had been pushed back by force of numbers, and now they were so compacted they could barely use their firearms. It was obvious, however, that neither group had forgotten its genesis as cold steel fighters, for the Diasprans had brought forward their assegai troops. That elite force had started as city guards, similar to the locals, and had since smashed two barbarian armies in its travels with humans. Side-by-side with the Vashin, who had drawn their long glittering swords, the Diasprans held the Kirsti forces at bay. More than that, they were probably killing at least three of the locals for each of their own who fell.

  But the locals had the numbers to take that casualty rate, and Roger could see more moving up the roads to reinforce the attack. It was only a matter of time before the Vashin and the Diasprans were overwhelmed. Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Or Kirsti, or wherever this was.

  “So many cities, so many skirmishes,” he muttered as the remnants of his own party poured through the door behind him.

  Sergeant Knever was the last through, and the Diaspran closed it behind him.

  “We’ve sealed the doors on the other side and set a slow fuse on the gun powder store,” the sergeant said with a salute. The nice thing about Mardukans was that they could salute and keep their weapons trained at the same time, and Knever was careful to cover his prince even while saluting. “Shaman Cord is being evacuated back to the company, and all live personnel are clear of the building. We had three more killed in action, and two wounded, besides Shaman Cord. Both of those have also been evacuated.”

  The sergeant paused for a moment, then coughed on the harsh, smoky air.

  “What about the dead?” Roger asked.

  “Per your instructions, we loaded them in the Marine disposal utilities and burned them, Sir,” the sergeant replied.

  “I’m really tired of this shit,” Roger said, checking his toot. It was barely ten a.m., local time. In a day which lasted thirty-six hours, that made it barely two hours after sunrise. “Christ, this is going to be a long day. We need to didee, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Knever agreed, and waved towards the far tower. “After you, Sir.”

  The sergeant took one more look to the north, into the mysterious darkness of the valley. As far as the eye could see, there were thousands, millions—billions—of scattered lights, lining the darkness of the valley floor. What created the lights was unclear, but it appeared that the city continued for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers. He gazed at the vista for a moment, then shook his head in a human gesture.

  “This is not going to be good.”

  “Now, this is not good,” Honal said sharply. The upper compartment of the tower was a mass of wheels, belts, and chains. “We need some Diasprans up here, or something.”

  “Nah, you gots me,” Poertena panted as he made it up the last stairs. He grabbed the wall and his side. “Jesu Christo, I t’ink t’ose step kill me!”

  “It wasn’t the stairs; it was your pack,” Honal said. “But now that you’re here, we need to get the gate open. You have any idea what any of this stuff does?”

  Poertena took a look around, then another. He frowned.

  “I . . . t’ink t’at big wheel in front of you is t’e capstan.”

  “You think,” Honal repeated. “And what is a capstan?”

  “It what you turn to open t’e gate,” Poertena replied. “Only one problem.”

  Honal looked at the wheel. It was, as far as he could tell, devoid of such minor things as handholds.

  “Where do we grab?” he asked.

  Poertena shoved himself off the wall and walked forward. There were embrasures on the northern side of the room, and he walked over and looked down through them. They were clearly for pouring stuff on attackers, but he felt quite certain that they functioned very well for disposing of unnecessary equipment, as well.

  “Took you a little bit to get in here, huh?” he asked. He turned back to the great drumlike wheel.

  “Yes, it did,” the Vashin nobleman admitted.

  “Looks like t’ey had time to strip out the actual capstan,” the Pinopan said, gazing at the capstan thoughtfully. It was nearly four meters across, clearly impossible to turn without a massive lever. On the other hand, there was a very convenient nut right at the top. “I jus’ need a lever. . . .”

  “Big enough to move the world?” Roger asked, stepping through the door. “Time to get the gate up, Poertena. What are you waiting for? A metaphysical entity?”

  “No, You Highness,” the Pinopan said, stooping to pick up a long baulk of wood. “A physical notion.”

  The dowel was wide, nearly ten centimeters, and longer than Poertena—probably a replacement for an interrupting rod. The armorer contemplated it for a moment, then dropped his pack and dove in.

  “Okay, first you get out the metaphysical entity extractor,” Roger agreed, and glanced at Rastar’s cousin. “Honal, is this room secure?”

  “Well, we haven’t been counterattacked,” the cavalryman said. “Yet.”

  “Hell, on t’is pocking planet, t’at t’e definition of secure,” Poerte
na said as he extracted a roll of tape from the pack. “And of course I wasn’t going to get a metaphysical extractor!”

  “Of course not,” Roger said as he went down on one knee and picked up the dowel. “I should have known it would be space-tape. That, or drop cord. What else? And what, exactly, are we going to do with it?”

  “Well,” Poertena replied, reaching into the top of the pack. “You know when we first met.”

  Roger eyed the wrench warily, remembering a recalcitrant set of armor and the armorer who had gotten him out of it so quickly.

  “You’re not going to hit me with that, right?”

  “Nope,” Poertena said as he laid the haft of the wrench along the dowel and began to apply tape, “but we going to see if it can move t’e world!”

  Doc Dobrescu shook his head as he ran the sterilizer over his hands. They had over two dozen wounded, but of the ones who might survive, Cord was by far the worst.

  “All I wanted to be was a pilot,” he muttered, kneeling down beside the shaman. He looked across at the local female, who had shed her enveloping disguise somewhere along the way. “I’m going to need six arms for this, so you’re elected. Hold out your hands.”

  “What is this?” Pedi asked, holding out all four hands as the human ran a wand over them.

  “It scares away the demons,” Dobrescu snapped. “It will reduce the infection—the gut-fever, you’d call it. He’s hit bad, so it won’t stop it entirely. But it will stop us from increasing the infection.”

  “He’ll die,” Pedi said softly. “I can smell the gut. He will die. My benan. What can I say to my father?”

  “Screw your father,” Dobrescu snarled. He tapped the female, who seemed about to drift off into la-la land, on the forehead. “Hey! Blondie, look at me!”

  Pedi snapped her head up to snarl at the medic, but froze at his expression.

  “We are not going to lose him!” Dobrescu barked, and thumped her on the forehead again. Harder. “We. Are. Not. Going. To. Lose. Him. Get that into your head, and get ready to help. Understand?”

  “What should I do?” Pedi asked.

  “Exactly what I say,” Dobrescu answered quietly. He looked at the mess in Cord’s abdomen and shook his head. “I’m a goddammed medic, not a xeno-surgeon.”

  Cord was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Dobrescu had intubated the shaman and run in an oxygen line. He didn’t have a decent anesthetic for the Mardukans, or a gas-passer, for that matter. But he’d given the shaman an injection of “sleepy juice,” an extract of one of the most noxious of Marduk’s fauna, the killerpillar. If he had the dosage right, Cord wouldn’t feel a thing. And he might even wake up after the “operation.”

  “Here we go,” the warrant muttered, taking the spear by the shaft.

  He started by using a laser scalpel to elongate the opening in the abdominal wall. The shaman’s muscles had bound around the spearhead, and it was necessary to open the hole outward to extract the weapon. He applied two auto-extractors that slowly spread the opening, pulling away each of the incised layers in turn.

  He finally had a good look at the damage, and it was pretty bad. The spear was lodged on the edge of the Mardukan equivalent of a liver, which was just about where humans kept one. There was a massive blood vessel just anterior of where the spear seemed to stop, and Dobrescu shook his head again at the shaman’s luck. Another millimeter, a bad drop on the way back, and Cord would have bled out in a minute.

  The spearhead had also perforated the shaman’s large, small, and middle-zone intestine—the latter a Mardukan feature without a human analog—and ruptured a secondary stomach. But the damage to each was minor, and it looked like he wouldn’t have to resect anything.

  The worst problem was that a lesser blood vessel, a vein, had been punctured. If they didn’t get it sewn up soon, the shaman would bleed to death anyway. The only reason he hadn’t already was that the spear was holding the puncture partly closed.

  “I’m going to pull this out,” Dobrescu said, pointing to the spearhead. “When I do, he’s going to bleed like mad.” He handed the Mardukan female two temp-clamps. “I’m going to point to where I want those while I’m working. You need to get them on fast, understand?”

  “Understand,” Pedi said, seriously. “On my honor.”

  “Honor,” the medic snorted. “I just wanted to fly shuttles. Was that too much to ask?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  For the first time in a career that had seen the term used more times than he cared to remember, Armand Pahner had just discovered what “having your back to the wall” really felt like.

  It was a much more powerful metaphor, under the circumstances, than he had previously believed. But that was because it was unpleasant to literally stand with his back to a closed gate while more and more enemies closed in on the humans and their allies. The Basik’s Own was being pushed back into a broad “C” around the gate, and he knew that unless they got the gate opened—somehow—they were all going to be killed.

  And eaten.

  That was more than enough to convince any CO that he was in for a bad day. In Pahner’s case, however, it was only one minor, additional item. Armand Pahner was widely known as a man who got steadily calmer as the situation got worse. Which was undoubtedly the reason his voice was very, very calm when Sergeant Major Kosutic turned up to report in.

  “And where,” he asked her, “is Roger?”

  The same circumstances which produced monumental calmness in the captain produced a sort of manic humor in the sergeant major, and Kosutic swept off her helmet and cocked her head at him.

  “Feeling a bit tense, Captain?” she inquired, and Pahner gave her a thin smile.

  “Sergeant Major,” he replied quietly, “I have known you for some years. And we need every gun we can muster. So I will not kill you. If . . . you tell me where Prince Roger is. Right Now.”

  “Up there.” Kosutic pointed upward as a sound of releasing locks echoed through the gate tower. “Opening the gates.”

  “Great,” Pahner said with the grumpiness reserved for the moments when he found himself with no option but to depend upon his rambunctious charge’s talent for surviving one near-suicidal bit of mayhem or another without him. “Now if we can just break contact, we’ll be home free.”

  Poertena winced as the breaching charge blew in another heavy wooden door. The tower’s internal defenses required double charges, and the overpressure slapping at the Marine caused his suit to go momentarily rigid yet again.

  There probably wasn’t much of a threat left on the other side of the portal, given the hail of splinters the charge should have blasted into the room. But Momma Poertena’s boy hadn’t made it this far on the basis of “probably,” and he wasn’t about to take chances when they were this close to home. So he thumbed the tab on a concussion grenade, tossed it into the room beyond, and waited until the weapon had gone off before following it through the shattered doorway.

  The room was filled with a haze of propellant residue, but two Krath were still partially functional on the far side of the room. One was hopping up and down, clutching a piece of shrapnel in his leg, and the other was just climbing back to his feet after the dual explosions. Two shotgun rounds sufficed to deal with them, then Poertena took a closer look at the room and grunted in satisfaction as he spotted the large barrels stacked against the wall.

  “About pocking time. CLEAR!”

  “That what we came for?” Neteri asked as he entered behind the Pinopan and swept his rifle from side to side.

  “Yeah,” Poertena replied. “Get some of t’em Vashin up here; we gonna need some muscle.” The armorer pulled the wrench he’d reclaimed once the gate was raised out of his pack and looked at the chocks holding the barrels in place. “I hope I don’ bury myself doing t’is.”

  Pahner stepped through the second set of gates, looked around, and nodded. At least there wasn’t an immediate threat on the far side of the walls.

  The area beyon
d the gate was open for about a hundred meters—an obvious cleared defensive zone. Beyond that, however, a solid bank of buildings stretched as far as could be seen in the gloom. Obviously, the city continued well beyond the walls.

  The heavy ash-fall seemed to be easing, and a little light was starting to peek through. Both of those changes were—probably—good signs. The ash was a misery for everyone, and some additional light on the battle would be helpful.

  “Okay,” the captain said to Kosutic. “We’re through the gates. Now all we have to do is collect our charge and get him safely back under our protection, instead of the other way around. Oh, and somehow break contact with several thousand screaming religious fanatics. Any suggestions?”

  “Well,” a disembodied voice said from the darkness overhead, “I think using the plasma cannon is right out.” Roger hit the release on his descender harness to flip out of his head-down position and dropped the last few meters to the ground. “Morning, Captain.”

  “And good morning to you, Your Highness,” the Marine said tightly. “Having fun?”

  “Not really,” the prince replied. “I seem to have gotten my asi the next best thing to killed, I lost a Marine and four Vashin, and I seem to have really pissed off the Krath. Other than that, everything is peachy.”

  “Yeah, well,” Pahner said, after a moment. “We’ll talk about it later. I doubt from the brief bit Eleanora told me that you could’ve done much different.”

  “I’m of the same opinion,” Roger admitted. “But that doesn’t make me any happier about it. And the fact that I keep having to shoot my way out of these situations is becoming . . . annoying.”

  “I’d say that it was ‘annoying’ for your enemies as well, Your Highness,” Kosutic observed with a bark of laughter. “Except that they don’t usually survive long enough to be annoyed.”