IronStar

by Hallman, Grant

  “And what are we to make of the ‘curse of heaven’? It has the stink of more Kruss technology,” Kirrah used the Regnum term, which had already made its way into Talamae. “But it could well be a bluff. What do you think, Opeth?”

  “I know not, Warmaster. It would be a poor time to bluff, but the lad is so poor a warrior, he might not know that.”

  “I believe,” Issthe’s calm voice cut across the speculation, “…that whatever the Prince meant by it, he found the idea very satisfying. Yet I see no way to guess what he intends.”

  “Ready the steamships. I want full steam in at least two, day and night. We must be ready to move swiftly. Whatever they plan, they have no weapon that can reach us from outside the range of our ships’ mortars.”

  Chapter 33 (Landing plus one hundred thirty): Plague of Screams

  “If one considers War as an act of mutual destruction, we must of necessity imagine both parties as making some progress.” - General Carl Von Clausewitz, op cit.

  That evening as they sat in the cooling courtyard after dinner, the first screams were heard in the city. Within two hours, there were eight more bodies in Issthe’ infirmary, each with the same sort of tiny wound borne by the dead scouts, each wound beginning somewhere apparently at random on the body, each tracing a bloody track through flesh to perforate the victim’s aorta just above the heart, and out at the nearest point on the chest or back. Eyewitnesses described a man walking in the street falling and screaming uncontrollably, clawing at his leg. A shopkeeper closing his windows for the night, falling in convulsions. A child waking in her sleep, screams bringing frantic parents who were helpless to save her from dying in convulsions in her own bed. A woman working in her garden, and most ominously, a woman slain while coming to the aid of her similarly stricken elderly father. Kirrah was becoming more frantic with each new case.

  “How! How are they doing this! No visible weapon! No projectile! No warning! And no consistency! Men, women, children, at home or in the street! Ahhhh, Issthe! This is Kruss technology, I am sure of it! But how can I fight something I cannot find!” A pale, calm face looked back at her across the body of one of the children, a golden-haired girl about Akaray’s age lying inert and cooling on the table between them.

  “Warmaster, everyone struck down has had two things in common. They have all been south of Slow Water Road. And they have all been somewhere they were exposed to the sky at the moment they were stricken. Even this poor child, her father told me her bedroom window was open.”

  “Issthe, thank you for seeing the obvious for me. If that is the only clue we have, we shall use it. Mastha'cha!” The sturdy bodyguard appeared in a moment, saluted.

  “Warmaster!”

  “Muster four squads of palace guards immediately! Send them to every vai'atho-block south of Slow Water Road. They are to wake every shee’tho’vai, have them rouse their entire vai'atho. They must close every door and window, no exceptions, shut tight until we sound ‘all clear’ from the watchbells. Their lives depend on it, word of the Warmaster. Hurry!”

  The man saluted and left at a dead run. Kirrah made her suit extrude its gloves and helmet, checked its seals were intact and set out astride Whoopsie to see what she could discover. After an exhausting four hours pacing through the dark and deserted city streets, she and her two guardsmen returned only a little wiser. They had found nothing, but three times Kirrah’s wristcomp had reported intercepting a signal, a very short coded microwave burst, all with unknown format but similar to one another, all too brief and too faint to trace. By the time they returned, six more deaths had occurred, two of them among the other palace guards charged with spreading the warning, all struck down while walking in the streets.

  She woke soon after dawn and a brief and thoroughly wretched two hours’ attempt at sleep. Only one more death had occurred, a tower guard near the downstream end of the barracks section, but the city was all but shut down. By noon, when no more deaths were reported, she ordered the ‘all clear’ rung. By mid-afternoon the attacks resumed, four more deaths in the time it took to send everyone indoors again.

  By the third day of curfew and sudden random deaths, Kirrah called a full meeting of the shee’tho’vai Council for that evening. She paced like a caged tiger in the courtyard of Stone-in-a-River school, as near to the makeshift morgue Issthe’s infirmary had become as she could get without actually looking over the shoulders of the busy priests. Students and guardsmen and the occasional messenger wisely gave her a wide berth, going about their duties and making their reports with barely-concealed eagerness to be out of her irritable orbit. As the door to the street opened and banged shut behind her, she whirled and demanded:

  “How many this… Akaray! What are you doing… sorry, aska, I am not angry with you.” A little cautiously her ‘borrowed’ son came and embraced her. She knelt and wrapped her arms around him and said over his shoulder: “I am afraid for you, that is all. For all of us. Where are you coming from?”

  “From school, Kirrah’sho. Two days each tenday I attend Master Brai'klao’s class in history, he teaches it at the new academy where your Wrth children learn.” The boy gestured somewhat tentatively to the north, where the new school was located in a hastily converted warehouse outside the city walls.

  “Sorry, aska, I forgot which day it was. You are probably as safe there as anywhere. Whatever is killing our people, seems confined to the south part of the city. Why do you look at me like that?”

  “You treat me like a small child. I am not afraid, Kirrah’shu. I am not worth more than the people who were killed last night.” Oh yes you are… and how did I fail to notice when exactly you started calling me ‘Kirrah-mother’?

  “You are alive, aska. They are not. I have already failed them. If I cannot … what!” Again the outside door banged open. Peetha stopped at Kirrah’s exclamation and stood at immediate attention, effectively halting the four Wrth trotting behind her.

  “Peetha! I apologize, my foul mood has been a burden to my loyal soldiers all day. You bring news?”

  “More than news, Warmaster. I bring …this.” The girl turned and gestured to the man and woman behind her, who were supporting a pale-looking Wrth with a tourniquet tight around the stump of his right forearm. The very fresh stump, from the raw, bloody look of it.

  “Where is Issthe? Guard, call for a priest! This man is injured!” The guardsman hurried to the infirmary door, and Peetha added:

  “…and this,” and the fourth Wrth stepped around the trio and carefully unwrapped the bloody severed hand, laying the gruesome burden on a nearby stone bench. Kirrah’s first thought was: On a Regnum world, you would be going into regen to have that reattached. I’m sorry, but you’re just too early. Her second thought was to notice the small puncture wound on the heel of the palm, just like on all the other mysterious casualties… Her hand rose to her mouth and she felt the hairs on her neck rising.

  “…and this!” Peetha finished triumphantly and held out a medium-large cloth bag. With trembling fingers, Kirrah unwrapped the modest package and stared at a jumble of fine metal links and rings - someone’s chain mail vest, twisted and wrapped into a small bundle. In the center of the mass of wires and rings, something moved. Kirrah started and looked more closely. Carefully she unwrapped a few layers of the mail cloth. Ensnared within, tiny eyes stared back at her. No not eyes, sensor heads. She re-wrapped the bundle. One of the priests arrived and made to escort the injured man into the treatment room. Kirrah called to the priest:

  “Ask Issthe to come here when she can spare a moment. Peetha, tell me everything.”

  “Warmaster, this man was at drill in the training field next to the barracks. He reached for a practice-pike, from a stack that had not been touched since yesterday, and suddenly the plague-of-screams was on him.” Apt name, Kirrah thought, wonder who coined it…

  “I happened to be near, and I could see that he was about to die. It was starting at his hand, so I ordered his arm extended, and I severed
it with the Kruss blade. I know you told me to care for your Wrth warriors, it was all I could think to do at the time.”

  “Peetha, you saved his life. You have acted well. How did you acquire this?” She gestured to the contents of the bag.

  “Warmaster, the other warrior continued holding this man’s severed hand, and after a moment this thing fell out of the cut end. First I thought it was blood or a piece of bone, then it moved on the ground. It turned upright like a dung-beetle does when flipped on its back. Then it sprang at him. It jumped two hab’la through the air and landed on the other warrior’s belly. It tried to burrow into his skin, but the chain mail there delayed it. I was able to wrap it between folds of the mail, and stripped off the armor. The thing was struggling hard to escape, but when I wrapped it tightly it was trapped. Did I do as you wished?”

  “Thank you Peetha! Your quick wits and that man’s bravery have given me our first real clue. Let us see what you have brought. Everyone back, this may be dangerous.”

  When the others had moved back several meters, Peetha held the wrapped object and Kirrah pulled a probe from her suitpack’s analyzer. She studied the readings for a few moments, maneuvering the pickup into the jumbled mail until she could get a clearer view. On the wristcomp’s screen was a greatly magnified scene of two or three bits of shiny metal, a pinhead-sized bead of black plastic, two tiny rods one or two millimeters long and as thin as a thread. Another tiny piece of gray material was shaped in a four-millimeter helical spiral. Issthe arrived.

  “Issthe, look! Peetha has caught our killer! Look at the screen on my object-which-speaks. See, there,” she indicated the magnified view of a tiny sensor head, “and there, this is a machine. This tiny thing is what is killing our people! It is a Kruss device. I cannot say certainly, but it looks like the tip of one of their field probes, like the one I used to look inside an injured body.

  “And see this little green cylinder at the other end. My analyzer tells me the device is powered by a Kruss microcell,” Kirrah realized she was using the unfamiliar Regnum term for their enemy’s high-density energy storage technology. “They have given the device a supply of strength so it is not tethered to a suitpack like mine is, and they have simply reprogrammed it.” At Issthe’s quizzical look, Kirrah continued:

  “It is like training an animal. The whole device is about this long and this wide,” her fingers framed a five-by-fifteen millimeter space. “They trained it, no doubt to seek human scent… no reports of animals dying? No… so it is somehow thrown across the river, and wherever it lands, it either lies waiting for a person to pass near, or it moves and seeks a human body.”

  Suddenly Kirrah’s wristcomp beeped, indicating another of the mysterious microwave burst transmissions, but this time clearly emanating from the tiny object. Ok, that’s enough of that… She reconfigured her probe and lanced the thing with a short, intense pulse of microwaves. It ceased moving, and several of the probe readouts on her wristcomp screen dropped to zero. She unwrapped it and continued her explanation:

  “Now it is safe, dead. When it touches human skin, it burrows underneath like my medprobe does, the part of my suitpack used for healing, and follows the blood to the heart. After killing, it leaves the body and probably seeks another target. How very …clever.”

  “Made from a device for healing. How very wicked.” Issthe closed her eyes, and held one slim white hand a few centimeters over the ruined device. “It tastes like those bodies we have been collecting, a faint, cold, distant hate. Is this another weapon from the ‘greater Civilium’?”

  “Your question carries a deserved condemnation, Issthe. But by Civilium law, no weapon can be active within the body of a sentient being. There is an outlawed weapon which throws a similar device. But this thing, I believe, was improvised from a medical probe’s design, and manufactured for this specific job. When word of this gets back to the Civilium court, the Kruss will be punished.” Issthe’s eyes looked bottomless and very disappointed, somewhat sad, as though some student had failed a critical test.

  At the pause, Peetha asked, “Warmaster, how do we fight it?”

  “We cannot, Peetha. There is no good defense. I alone would be safe in my suit, until I opened the helmet or got out to sleep or urinate. But unless you happen to see it land, it will seek you by breath and scent. It will crawl over your armor and find skin. Then you die. That man you brought is the only one to survive an attack, and that only through luck and at a terrible cost. I want him honored as one injured in battle, for that is exactly what has happened to him.

  “They must have a launcher, something to throw these cursed things from their camp all the way over the lake and halfway across our city. If they had longer range, they would be striking us here. I must think how we respond to this. Thank you, both of you. Please come with me to the shee’tho’vai Council meeting tonight. I need to meet with Lord Tsano and Armsmaster Opeth for an hour, before the Council. Please excuse me.”

  The two women, healer and warrior, and the young boy stood watching the change in their Warmaster’s gait and body language as she trudged back to her quarters. Changed from impatient and energized to something they had not seen in her before. Akaray recognized it as well as the others: defeated.

  Chapter 34 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-two): Accident

  “I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.” - G. K. Chesterton, 20th century A.D. author-philosopher; Britain, Terra.

  The Council chamber was eerily quiet considering the number of people presently seated in it. Every shee’tho’vai was present, over two hundred of the block-leaders. The last of the setting sun’s rays through the high windows painted the far wall a glowing, molten orange. At the raised section along the back wall, Lord Tsano, his four Masters, and Kirrah waited until the scribe struck the small chime and called the meeting to order. Lord Tsano rose and proclaimed:

  “Citizens of Talam, hear your Warmaster. What she tells you has been discussed and agreed among the Realm’s Masters.” Kirrah rose a bit unsteadily and cleared her throat, which had somehow gone dry since the sip of water she had taken three seconds ago.

  “Citizens of Talam.” A pause, Kirrah’s eyes scanned the faces of the people whose future she was about to alter so drastically. “We are faced with great danger. The Kruss have given our enemies a weapon, two weapons, which together I cannot fight.

  “Many of you have seen the effect of their nanowire, in the field against us. Against this weapon alone, we can fight. They cannot advance with it against our archers, if we know it is there. But we cannot safely push them back. The nanowire is a perfect weapon to ambush moving forces, right in the open. Its use at the wrong time could, in the fifth part of a bhrakka, destroy Talam’s entire military force. We dare not risk our soldiers in any great numbers against its possible use. We do not even know whether they have more than one such weapon.

  “The river is a natural defense which has served us well these past tendays, because we have mobile weapons with longer range than theirs. But now they have brought up a second Kruss weapon, the plague-of-screams. They have shown they are able to throw this weapon into the center of our city, from well back behind the far shore. In fact we have not ever seen them launching it.

  “Their second weapon alone I could also fight. They seem to be unable to throw many of the small devices. Thus by attacking their positions with archers and cavalry we could kill or capture whoever uses it. But I see no way to fight against both their weapons used in combination, no way that does not risk all our forces.

  “I - we,” she turned and included the King and Masters in a gesture, “…see no alternative to evacuating the city below Slow Water Road.” Kirrah waited while the hubbub of moans and cries built to a crescendo and abated.

  “We realize this will deny us the use of the shipyards, the military barracks and most of the walled fields. We will continue to work the fields north of the ci
ty, and I have asked for and received volunteers to man the watchtowers along the river, and sailors to crew the steamboats we have already in service.

  “We also realize this will put two thirds of the city’s people out of their homes and jobs. I know that the city cannot live very long like this. But if we do not take this action, our citizens will be killed at the rate of a dozen or two every night. More, if they deploy more similar weapons. We believe our lives are worth more than the buildings in our city.” Another pause, while the block-leaders began to deal with their new reality.

  “Two more things. You deserve to know what I know about the second weapon, the plague-of-screams which has caused so much grief and death these last two days. It is a small device, no larger than a dappa-seed, but very strong. It is not alive, but a machine which acts as alive. It is thrown across the river, probably one or two at a time, and it settles to land on whatever roof or courtyard or wall or tree it may. Then it waits for the scent of a human, or it may crawl or jump about and hunt. It is patient and good at hiding. When it senses a human, it attacks. It quickly penetrates the skin and burrows its way through flesh until it reaches the heart. Once it has killed, it leaves the body and may attack more persons, five or even more, depending on its strength.

  “The second thing. If my Navy arrives soon, it will be easy to eliminate both threats using Regnum technology. But I do not expect them before another fifty-two days at the earliest. Worse, they may be much later, or they may never come. The only hope I can offer Talam, indeed for all humans on this planet, is that my allies arrive before the Kruss receive reinforcements. Because without Regnum help, I promise you the Kruss will send more and better weapons, until this entire world is theirs and every human on it.