“Doi’tam- fira’tachk! Well done! No disrespect to your riding skills, Fira'tachk, may I suggest you dismount and take firm hold of your horse’s bridle. You are all about to see something unlike anything you have ever seen.” Baffled, the large Cavalry Major did as ordered. Kirrah’s eyes scanned the sky to the north.
“Any breath now… there! See those lights in the distance?” Peetha was giving her the oddest look. Together they watched a tiny bright triangle of white lights rise above the horizon. Oh good, they’ve got the spotlights on, nice effect! Around her, others were turning and staring at the spectacle of a fifty-meter circle of brilliant white daylight racing toward them in total silence across the starlit plain.
“It’s so quiet, Warmaster,” said Peetha’s hushed voice.
“Not quiet, it’s just coming faster than the sound it makes. You’ll see in a…”
Suddenly the circle of light reached them. Something big flashed overhead and the sky was rent by an enormous BANG! that escalated into an ear-ripping shriek. The sound was so loud it hurt the ears, battered the body and hammered at the mind. It didn’t so much stop, as deepen into a reverberating roar that echoed back from the city walls and filled the night sky with a flowing cataract of thunder. Men afoot were falling to their knees, hands over their ears. War-trained horses reared and danced like unbroken colts under their riders, although Kirrah noticed the Major’s big white animal only skittered a few steps sideways and laid its ears back. Behind them, two rapidly-receding circles of violet-white light marked the exhaust from twin fusion rockets. Peetha’s hungry eyes tracked the thunder as it turned, kilometers to the south, swinging around to the east. Her face shone, fist at her throat in the Talamae salute.
“Captain Og'drai… Captain… Captain!” Take it easy, Lieutenant, that was quite a shock to the uninitiated. There, we have eye contact… “Captain Og’drai. Now that we have everyone’s attention, I will need you to tell the O’dai in their own language, it’s time to surrender. We will board that small sky-boat when it lands in another half-bhrakka.”
True to her word, the LAS came roaring loudly back in from the east and climbed to three hundred meters. More violet-white flame stabbed out from thrusters under its belly, and the thirty-two meter long sleek dark gray shape settled noisily atop four howling columns of violet fire, directly onto the vacant spot indicated by a flick of Kirrah’s beamer. The not-grass flared yellow and orange in the down-wash, leaving behind a thin layer of ash over a patch of bare earth. Landing gear extended and crunched onto the sandy gravel. The flames turned pure white, then orange, then faded to yellow and black retinal afterimages. Cooling metal ticked and popped in the sudden silence. Kirrah signaled her companions forward.
As the four reached the shuttle’s tail, all the external lights came on. The same emblem on the shoulder patches of Kirrah’s suit glowed from the six-meter high tailfin, stars-and-lightning over a winged serpent. Kirrah, Peetha and Og’drai walked around to the front of the shuttle. Just in front of the swept-back delta wing, a section of skin was splitting and rotating downward to form a short ramp. As they arrived, a dozen gray-suited figures in helmets, superficially similar to Kirrah’s survival suit but looking thicker and with more ominous-looking bulges, came stamping down the ramp and formed a double line at the bottom. Another suited individual marched down the ramp and stood waiting at attention while Kirrah’s party drew up at the far end of the line. Seeing her approach helmetless, he keyed his helmet down, revealing a handsome square-jawed recruitment-poster Marine, a Lieutenant according to his suit flashes.
“Heesent… arms!” he shouted, and twelve heavy beamers slapped crisply into gloved hands in a parade-ground perfect present-arms. His eyes locked on hers, and Kirrah had trouble not cheering outright, as they traded her first Regnum-style salute since leaving Trailway almost eleven Standard months ago.
“Lieutenant Marcus Warden, Regnum Marines, at your service ma’am!”
“Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl, RSS, late of the Arvida-Yee. Murphy’s cold butt, Lieutenant, I never expected to be so glad to see a Marine. Look, we’ve got to get this war stopped, it’s just senseless now! Request permission to come aboard with these friendlies and use your external speakers.”
“Lieutenant Roehl, my instructions are to provide you with full assistance. Admiral Dunning was quite emphatic that we help you stabilize the situation, as long as you aren’t at personal risk. You understand that your personal intel is priceless at this point. With that reservation, my soldiers and this shuttle are yours.”
“Excellent, Lieutenant! Introductions later, take me to your microphone!” Lieutenant Warden looked back sharply as Kirrah continued smoothly in Talame:
“Doi’tam-fira'tachk, hold these O’dai for me, another bhrakka,” and exchanged the Talamae salute with her cavalry major. Peetha’s slim form fairly bounded up the ramp after Kirrah, Captain Og'drai following at what he hoped was a more dignified pace. The Marines stayed at parade rest below the ramp while their Lieutenant accompanied this utterly bizarre party into the fuselage of his craft. Peetha and Og’drai goggled at the softly red-lit interior, the precise rows of seats, the dozens of controls, panels, fittings, overhead racks - some color-coded, some medium gray but all looking dull and bloody and purposeful in the dim red interior night lighting.
Three paces to their left the hatch to the flight deck stood open. Kirrah nodded to the pilot and flight engineer, both young enough to make her feel ancient.
“Thank you both, that was a wonderful show you put on. Just what we needed to make them stop killing each other.”
“Ensign Piersall, our pleasure, ma’am,” said the young woman with the big grin in the left hand seat. “Hardly ever get to do that on orders, ma’am.” I bet you don’t…
The slightly older woman at the engineering station handed Kirrah a rod about the size of a pencil.
“Just press there, Lieutenant…” She frowned in surprise and vague disapproval to see Kirrah pass the device to the short, tanned, sandy-haired man behind her. Dressed in boots, loose trousers and some sort of linked-ring metal cloth covering his upper body, and with an honest-to-Murphy sword hanging from his left hip, he looked like someone from a period 3V show. So did the lean, quick, tough-looking girl with them. Pretty face, except for that scar on her forehead… was that a Kruss hilt sticking out of the serviceable-looking sheath strapped to the girl’s right thigh? And why were her eyes shining like she’d just seen the Second Coming? Who were these people?
The engineer’s eyes widened even farther as more of that soft, guttural, oddly liquid language flowed from the Survey Service Lieutenant’s lips. Then the short man spoke into the mike-rod, either a different dialect or a totally different language, with more burrs and intonations, punctuated with unexpected stops. This will be fun for the Contact Team, she thought, one eye rechecking that the uplink feed was live. She could imagine them hovering over their workstations in the Argosy, sucking in every phoneme, under the Admiral’s watchful eye five hundred kilometers straight up. From the outside speakers, every word, or whatever they were, boomed out into the night. On her external viewers, several thousand armed men were picking themselves up and forming into bunches. Looks like the party’s over…
“Lieutenant Warden,” Kirrah said. “Do you happen to have any perimeter-posts on board? Good. Here’s the problem. Somewhere out in that mess,” her arm swept in an arc taking in the scattered O’dai forces, “…there’s a spool of nanowire, and a Kruss launcher for smartshot. I think they’re both cobbled together from spares, but I want that damned stuff, we’ve lost too many people to it, and I have no doubt your Admiral would find it interesting. To say nothing of a Board of Inquiry, or a Civilium Scrutineer. So I want to pin these O’dai more or less where they are, until we find their Kruss toys. Then they can walk home, for all I care. So if you could set those posts at seventy-meter intervals and configured to fire sublethal charges at anyone approaching from the north, I think the rest can wait
‘till daylight.
“If you don’t mind leaving your Marines here, that would help too in case the O’dai get adventurous. Because I want to move this shuttle over to the city there, and we can get you introduced to the local leadership. Our, I mean the local forces can hold the O’dai here on the peninsula, all we need to do is drain the lake so they can be on dry land for the night, I just had to flood it to send a burning oil slick into their camp. Now here’s how you tell the friendlies from the bad guys, you see those ribbons hanging from the shoulders? Those are rank insignia. Ours are all orange and green, orange and blue or orange and yellow. In the city you’ll see orange and white, and the orange and blue in the palace, they report to the King, all the others report to, well, me. Oh, and there’s the white and green cloth patches, those’re the Pavattan Cavalry, they’re allies from the north. Also report to me. Basically I need you to… what are you looking at, Lieutenant?”
Indeed the man was staring at Kirrah with the vaguely hunted expression of a civilian who’d wandered by accident into one of Professor Stanglee’s Advanced Astronautics and Navigation classes.
“Sorry, ma’am, our briefing said you were helm on the Arvida-Yee… you did all this?” He nodded toward a display at the engineering station, currently showing a night-vision view of the smoke and carnage to the north. The oil was still burning fitfully. Most of the patches had been swept downstream. One or two had made it up into the riverfront blocks of the city itself, on the still-rising water.
“Well,” she replied a little defensively, “I had to, the Kruss just kept attacking my, my friends.”
“I… see.”
“Look, Lieutenant, my cavalry and archers will be able to handle this. We can send relief forces from the city to guard the prisoners until morning, about six hours from now. Basically I need your Marines to support my cavalry and archers. With those E-5H heavy beamers and combat suits, one private could stop a regiment. Can we detail six to help hold the perimeter and six to help with the search for Kruss tech?”
“Very well, ma’am. Um, how do we coordinate with ‘your’ forces? That sounded like an interesting language, but…”
“Oh, right! Sorry, Lieutenant. Ahh, P.O.?” this to the woman at the engineering station with the Petty Officer’s star-and-wings shoulder patch. “Could you let me upload my language files? I’m not a contact specialist, but my wristcomp has a pretty good set of vocabulary and syntax… in fact why don’t I just upload the thing’s whole memory, and you dump the language files into the troopers’ suits out there, and we can all understand one another.” The woman pulled a thin cable from her console and attached it to a tiny port in Kirrah’s wristcomp.
“Would you like a top-up for your suitpack while we’re at it? Says you’re down 30, beamer’s down too. In fact, we have a spare combat suit if you’d like it…”
“Yes on all counts, thank you. I’d also appreciate about a dozen wristcomps, to help keep everyone in touch. One to that man on the big white horse, and one to this gentleman who’s about to go back to that steamship by the riverbank over there. Thank you.” Kirrah handed him one of the slim nine by fifteen centimeter panels.
“Captain Og’drai, here, put this on your wrist. At need I can cause my voice to come from it, and if you put your lips about here and speak, I will be able to hear you as well. To call me, press this button, yes, that’s right. Good, now as soon as the fire’s burned out, I want you to bring all the steamships back to their docks, except leave two on patrol so none of our prisoners escape across the Geera. Take shifts, patrol until after dawn. Understood? Good.” Back to Standard…
“Lieutenant, if I may ask, where are all your men?” Kirrah nodded to the empty rows of seats in the main cabin.
“All my - ? Oh, this is it, Lieutenant Roehl. The Argosy is just a destroyer, there’s only room for a single squad of Marines.”
“A destroyer! With an admiral on board?” It was Kirrah’s turn to raise eyebrows.
“Ahh, Admiral Dunning came on ahead with three destroyers, ma’am. Her main task force, and reinforcements for it, are following. She thought it was important to get here soonest.”
“She was right, too,” Kirrah replied. “I still don’t know how many Kruss are on-planet, or where, or what else they’ve got in-system, or en route.”
“I believe I can relieve you a little on that score, ma’am. We’ve had this system saturated with probes the last two weeks, no sign of anyone. And if the Kruss aren’t here with at least a squadron of heavies within another six weeks, they might as well pack up and go home. There’s serious Navy iron following behind us.”
“That is comfort indeed, Lieutenant. Do you suppose we might beg the help of one of the other ships’ Marines for a few days? It would be a big boost getting things stabilized here.”
“I’ll ask, ma’am. The Utterson might be able to help, although I know the Attila is over the other side of the planet right now, picking up the other survivor. There were only the two of you, right, ma’am? Ma’am, are you ok?”
Chapter 38 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-six): Another
“Therefore, the element of chance only is wanting to make of war a game, and in that element it is least of all deficient.” - General Carl Von Clausewitz, op. cit.
No I am definitely not ok! Kirrah’s mind reeled as though she’d been sandbagged. Another! Yes I am ok! As ok as I’ve been since landing! Oh my God! Her breath drew in sharply and she swayed like a feather in a breeze, suddenly pale as a ghost.
“Warmaster! What has happened? Are you attacked?”
“Nuh, no, Peetha, it is well.” Kirrah took in a deep breath and put out her hand, partly for support and partly so Peetha would have to support her, thereby getting the fierce young Wrth’s hands away from her own weapons, which she looked ready to draw in an instant in defense of her Warmaster.
“It is good news, only unexpected. Another of my friends has been found, one from my ship when I thought all were lost. Only unexpected. Um, Peetha, it would embarrass me if you were to …misunderstand anything here. If I need your assistance I will ask. I thank you for your loyalty.” Peetha nodded understanding, looking a little unsure. Or reluctant. Another deep breath, another switch back to Standard:
“No, Lieutenant Warden, I did not know, I thought I was the only one. Who? Who is it?”
“Gods, Lieutenant, I am so sorry, I assumed you’d’ve heard from Argosy already! And no, I don’t think we have the name yet, the Attila found them, she was maneuvering for LAS insertion when we did our jackdrop to your position. Petty Officer Thornlea, please pass on the word to Argosy, ask them to advise name and status, soonest.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Warden.” Kirrah shook her head and straightened her shoulders. “Ok, I’ve waited five months to find out, I guess another few hours won’t kill me. I’ve got a few things to clean up here, starting with, the city is beginning to flood and burn. Do you suppose we could put a few joules from the bow cannon into a very precise place? I’d like to hover about fifty meters upstream from the waterfall that’s developing, see where that city wall comes down to the far side of the lake there… and if you could let me have one of those wristcomps with my language file loaded, I won’t have to keep talking past my young Lieutenant here.” Peetha accepted the wristcomp almost reverently, and listened carefully while Kirrah repeated the instructions for intercom and translation mode.
Irshe shu’Kassua stood in the torchlit darkness just above the rising water, watching the Flowerpot II being pulled up to its half-submerged berth. Steam hissed and gurgled, smoke rose from the central iron flue. Sailors tossed heavy mooring ropes to waiting dockhands, the gangplank ran out, and the Captain’s face appeared at the rail.
“Ho, Irshe-ro'tachk! Another victory for our Warmaster! The O’dai have thrown down their arms!”
“I am not surprised, Captain Og’drai! What was the thunder?”
“That, my friend, was the Reg’num arriving! Right in the middle of the battle
, our Warmaster’s suit began speaking, it was the men on the iron-star, speaking to her. Then she called them and they descended for her from six hundred doi’la in the air! And they seem to be at her bidding, too!”
“The Reg’num! Kirrah Warmaster must be very happy! She thought it would take another five tendays! Is she on board?”
“On the Flowerpot? No, she rides a better vessel now. When I left, she was in that ship that made the sky roar. She said she’d be moving to outside the northwest wall, by the Sun gate. Peetha was still with her when I left. Perhaps if you went…”
The Captain’s suggestion was interrupted by a staccato series of muffled coughs and a thin, high screaming sound that climbed rapidly into inaudibility. Out on the plains south of the O’dai, the ex-O’dai position, a sound like a wind grew rapidly past hurricane-force to a steady roar. Light flared bright yellow and faded as the brightly lit shape of the alien craft became visible climbing into the sky on four columns of that fantastic violet-white light. Well above the O’dai survivors, the shape swept westward down the lake, directly away from the dock where Irshe stood.
Like a giant hovering kae'rruckh, the apparition paused over the far end of the lake. A brilliant yellow shaft, like the Warmaster’s not-sword but thicker, clearly visible even at the two and a half doi’la distance, flashed down from the bow of the vessel and a geyser of water leapt into the air, about where the barges were sunk to block the outflow. Another yellow flicker, another geyser. The echoing boom! from the first blow arrived just as the third struck. Apparently satisfied, the sky-boat moved north over the city, settling somewhere to the west.
Irshe was aware of a complicated brew of feelings: exaltation at another victory for his Realm, fierce pride in his friend and commander and lover, and a sense of foreboding and loss at the thought that their ‘time between times’, was already past. As he mounted his barely-rested horse and began the ride through the city to find his Warmaster, a pair of green eyes floated in his mind: bright, warm, vulnerable, intelligent, and fierce and free as the plains-raptor. And likely as far from any future reach, a part of him noted, and began the process of accepting what-is.
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