I had been leading our brief retreat along the darkened hall, and so then found myself at the rear, looking back over the shoulder of my comrades at a sea of masked Cielcin faces as they spilled into the hall. Some of them climbed the walls, moving from rib to rib with their pale, long-fingered hands in the microgravity.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Siran was shouting. The violet shouts of plasma fire answered her—more blue in the alien air than I had ever seen. Sulfur in the air, if I remembered my chemistry. I fancied I could smell sulfur, even through the suit. The brimstone stench of hell.
Granted a moment’s respite behind my men, I said, “Pallino! Signal every unit to link up into groups of three. We need to form larger groups. It’ll make it harder for them to pick us off!”
“Aye, lad!” came the reply.
Dead xenobites littered the floor, but more kept coming, clambering over their fallen brethren or following still more up the walls. I had a sudden impression that we had climbed into a giant anthill, with the rounded corridors and the way the Cielcin moved toward us. But my men retreated calmly now, step by careful step in time with Siran’s orders, giving ground only in exchange for more time to fire.
The Cielcin were undeterred. Their berserkers fought with little concept for their individual lives—and why shouldn’t they? They were slaves, body and soul, servants to whichever prince they called their master, and that master had ordered them to fight. There was no room for disobedience in the common Cielcin soldier. No free will. They abdicated free will to their commanders, who were in turn the slaves of commanders greater still until all served at the behest of an Aeta prince, who alone was free and a god in all but truth.
“ ’Tis an auxiliary unit on its way to you.” Valka’s voice came tense but quiet in my ear, strangely calming. I acknowledged and drew my sidearm with my left hand, aimed the plasma burner carefully. Fired. One of the Cielcin fell from the wall, knocking two of its fellows from their feet. One of the nahute sped toward me, and I waited, let it impact off my shield before I sliced it in two.
They were still coming.
One of the Cielcin fell from the roof above, white sword flashing. The point caught one of my men in the soft spot between neck and shoulder, and he went down. The ceramic blade came out red, and the berserker wheeled, slashing at one of the others. The blade sparked off the hoplite’s armor. The xenobite spun, kicked the soldier in the chest with all its inhuman strength. The hoplite slammed into the wall, the wind knocked out of him. All this in the space of perhaps three seconds. The Cielcin raised its sword, point downward, to skewer the man just as it had the other.
The blade fell.
In two pieces.
I sliced clean through weapon and wielder alike, and—holstering my sidearm once again—helped the soldier to his feet.
“We all should have one of those,” he said, nodding at my sword. If only that were possible. There were not many materials that were hard to come by in the galaxy, but highmatter was one of them. It could not be mass-produced, required careful tailoring of particles at the subatomic level to create the substance of the blade. Few were the artisans with the skill to craft such weapons, and many were the hours and great the energies required. Thousands of miles of particle accelerator might run for months before quantum chance produced the exotic matter that formed the core of such a blade. Each cost more than a starship, which was part of why I’d been so astonished when Sir Olorin Milta had given one to me.
“Were it so easy!” I said.
Just then another cry went up, higher and colder than the last, but stranger. More musical. Such a sound I had not heard in all my days. Then there came a great rushing of air and the beat of mighty wings. A dark shape emerged from the gloom behind the Cielcin, and I saw the flash of steel.
The Irchtani had come.
One of them tumbled through the air, slashing its zitraa through an arc that struck the head off one of the Cielcin and clove another one between its crown of horn. It landed between our line and the advancing Pale, and the Cielcin themselves recoiled in shock, and no wonder. They had never seen an Irchtani before, and the avian creature bristled, the feathers on its great pinioned arms standing on end, making it seem far larger than it was. Then the others hit the Cielcin from the rear, and now it was they who were caught between hammer and anvil.
It was over as quickly as it had begun and with as little warning.
I counted our dead. Six in all, plus two Irchtani. Minimal, under the circumstances.
“Who has the command here?” I asked our xenobites.
One Irchtani, green-feathered and squatter than the rest, answered me. “I am!” I knew him at once. How I had not recognized him when he flew over the heads of the enemy to draw their attention, I cannot say.
I saluted the auxiliary. “Thank you, Udax. You were just in time.”
The bird returned my salute, and for the first time I processed that his combat armor did not cover his wings. I wondered at that. What would happen if the environment failed and the air rushed out? But I supposed the Irchtani could not use their wings otherwise.
We stood a moment in the midst of the carnage while our men stripped the bodies, smashed any unused nahute where they hung on the Cielcin’s belts like coils of rope, and stripped equipment from their fallen brothers.
The darkness yawned to either side, unmapped.
I keyed an order into my terminal, signaling the pilot officer to reroute one of the mapping drones back to our location.
“What now?” Siran asked.
“They want us in the main halls,” I replied, aiming my suit lamps into the darkness behind the doors whence the ambush had come. To the men searching in there, I called, “Do you see anything?”
The response came on our unit channel, “Tunnels, my lord, just like you said!”
“Don’t go too far yet!” I ordered. Then to Siran and the Irchtani commander I added, “We need to get out of the parts of the ship they wanted us to be in. We need to move.”
CHAPTER 23
KINGDOMS OF DEATH
WITHOUT MY HELMET AND suit optics, I would have been blind. The suit built a hideous simulacrum of the alien tunnels from infrared and sonar and what little available light there was to see. Or perhaps the simulacrum was perfect, and the tunnels truly were hideous. They felt damp, like the walls of a cave, like the tunnels of Calagah on Emesh. There was condensation on my armor, and my cape hung dank and gray from my shoulders. There were puddles on the uneven floor, and here and there a rough doorway opened on one side or the other.
The tunnel stretched on, carrying us deeper and deeper into the Cielcin ship—though it hardly seemed a ship at all but a series of a natural caves. All that rock and stone was one way to insulate a vessel against the wild radiation of space. The Cielcin did not build. They burrowed. All our human construction: our towers, castles, and fortresses. Our temples and warehouses, even our humble homes . . . all of them reach for the heavens. The Cielcin dig toward hell.
I had been on Cielcin ships before, but never before had I plumbed one to such secret depths. We were not stopped, not accosted by any others for some time, and came at length to a mighty chamber where enormous wheels turned in the dark, clanking and rattling.
“The hell is this?” Siran asked.
“They’re not running this thing on steam, are they?” said one of the others.
“It’s not ship’s systems,” I said, unsure just how I knew it to be so. “It’s a factory.”
One of the Irchtani squawked and pulled his hand away from a vat he’d found, swearing in his native tongue. Moving to his side, I saw what had startled him. The vat contained what looked like bloated white worms writhing over one another. I squinted up at the drum-like wheels turning overhead, saw the thread and sheets of fabric being pulled between them. It was a factory. A textile factory. They were making cloth.
“Valka, you should see this!” I said on our private channel, and told her. Once upon a time, such a place would have been a wonder to me. To see just how it was the Cielcin lived and produced even a thing as mundane as their clothing would have a privilege. Now I felt nothing but trepidation and the desire to be away. The loss of that youthful innocence set a steady ache building in my chest. I had been a very different man when I was young, but a piece of that broken Hadrian—of the Hadrian who had died so long ago—shone through my face a moment.
Silkworms. Once, I would have marked this similarity as a sign our two peoples were not so different. I knew better now. They were not our silkworms. They had a thousand spidery legs that tangled against one another, more like a sea creature than an insect. They were not the same at all.
“We should move on,” I said.
* * *
The faint alarm lights still blinked on the ceiling. To the xenobites I felt sure they must be blinding, better for them than any klaxon. We passed through still more halls and chambers, always with the feeling that the enemy was just ahead of us.
“We’re nearing your location.” Pallino’s voice came over the comm. “There’s a big chamber up ahead. We’ll meet you there.”
The chiliarch’s voice was strained. “Have you seen any more of them?”
“Since the first wave? No.” I followed Udax through a wide, low arch into a new series of tunnels. “They’re preparing for another wave. I can feel it. Be ready.”
The area we’d come from fed into the chamber Pallino had mentioned. The drones had not mapped it completely; the operator had directed the drone to fly on through rather than waste too much time mapping side passages. But this chamber was itself large, and rose by terraced levels to either side, reminding me of nothing so much as one of the tiered shopping malls common in the largest Norman cities. There were no stalls, no storefronts, but there were doors lining the levels above us and opening to either side.
“Let’s risk more light,” Siran suggested, removing a pocket glowsphere from her belt. She twisted it, shook the luminescent chemicals to activate them. White light like a cold and distant star blossomed in her fist and she tossed it high as it would go. It flew far farther than it might in the ship’s low gravity. It bounced off the ceiling, drifted lazily down the hall on its weak repulsor field, shedding its light over the terraced levels.
Here at least were signs of civilization. Metal doors stood sunk into the rough stone walls. Silk banners hung from the rails and formless statues of poured metal beaten into the distended shapes of Cielcin and creatures strange to me stood on plinths or in niches. It had the look of some primitive town.
“Where are they?” Udax wondered aloud.
“Not here,” Siran answered. She was right. There was no sign of the Cielcin. In an open space like that, they should have been visible on infrared. But then . . . there had been no sign of them in the hall.
I chewed my lip, taking a moment to survey our surroundings. “Check the doors on this level. Double quick.” I gestured to a pair of hoplites. “You both, check the main doors there.” I pointed toward a massive bulkhead door that stood at the far end of the lozenge-shaped square. They obeyed, and as they did a small knot of Udax’s soldiers moved off to check the nearest doors, waddling across the narrow plaza. I waited, listening to the comms chatter, watching our battle groups work their way deeper aboard. A few had encountered further resistance, but most—like us—had not. I was starting to wonder if in fact that first bitter wave in the halls had been all the Cielcin had in them.
“Lord!” one of the Irchtani emerged from a side door and flapped a wing in my direction. “You must see!”
I wish that I hadn’t, but in my ignorance I crossed the open space to the door . . . and immediately turned away.
The door had opened on what I took for a Cielcin dwelling: ceiling just high enough to accommodate its xenobite dwellers, walls of roughly chiseled stone with little decoration save the circular carvings they used for writing in imitation of the Quiet’s anaglyphs. Papery hangings flapped from the walls, disturbed by our presence, and there was no sound save the distant, hushed beeping of some electric system. There were no cushions, nothing that spoke of comfort, only of the spartan order by which the beasts lived their lives. It might have been a barracks chamber for all I knew. The Cielcin often lived communal lives, particularly toward the bottom of their social hierarchies. Their proles did not know the dignity of family life.
None of this came to mind to mind at the time. I held my breath, used a scholiast technique to calm my breathing and slow my beating heart. I was glad of the suit’s environment layer. It wicked the cold sweat from my hands and the back of my neck.
The room’s occupants must have fled at the alarm. The signs of recent use were everywhere in evidence: a drinking bulb half-filled rested in a tripod holder on a side table above a gentle gas flame. Scattered papers littered the floor. There were bowls on the dining slab—low on the floor, there were no chairs—each holding a half-gnawed portion of what looked like raw meat.
The man lay naked on the slab. What was left of him. Both his legs were gone—and what was between them—and one of the arms as well. What remained of those missing limbs was spread between the bowls, I guessed. I saw the missing hand discarded, the meat stripped from the thumb and fingers.
There was surprisingly little blood, but I knew the reason for that at once.
“One of our lost legionnaires?” I asked.
The Irchtani nodded. “He had a 3-3-7 on his neck here.” The bird tapped the right side of his neck with a clawed finger. One of the lost legion indeed. The Irchtani shuddered. “It is not right. Eating one of you. You are not food.” It was strangely comforting hearing that from another xenobite.
I risked a second look. The man’s eyeless sockets watched me upside down from the dining slab. The rest of the face was untouched as yet. One of the Cielcin had gone for the eyes out of preference. Because it liked them. I turned away, and remember now as I write these words the way the fellow’s one remaining hand had reached out for help that would never come.
“Torch it all,” I said to the soldier. “They’ll have no more of him.” Then over my communicator, I said, “Pallino, where are you?”
“Nearly there, Had. What’s the matter?”
“We found our missing soldiers.”
* * *
“Those doors won’t open?” Pallino asked, gesturing at the heavy bulkheads at the end of the plaza. “Airlock?”
“Looks like it,” Siran said, and by the odd tilt of her head I guessed she was panning through the three-dimensional map of the tunnel system on her helmet’s entoptics. “You could try cutting through it, Had.”
The thought had already occurred to me, and I nodded. We were wasting time. We’d been aboard the ship already for the better part of an hour. The Mintaka was still in enemy hands. But our men were still sweeping the area around us—the neighborhood, I supposed it was. I misliked the idea of cutting through the door. Any door I cut open could not be closed again, and I could think of a hundred reasons why it should stay closed, but beyond that door was a massive empty space—only hinted at by the mapping drone’s sonar pulses, since it hadn’t found a way through.
A hold.
The whole rear section of the Cielcin vessel—the part that extended behind the hollowed-out moon for half a hundred miles—seemed to wrap itself around this central hold. “If our ships are still anywhere,” I said, and pointed, “they’re through those doors.”
“We can try and find another way around,” Udax suggested.
Pallino was well ahead of us. As chiliarch he could broadcast to every soldier in our strike force—just as I could—and that was precisely what he did. “Has anyone found a way into the central hold? Over.”
A moment passed. “No, sir.”
“Not here.”
“Negative.”
It made sense. “That space is too big,” I said. “They won’t have filled it with air. All the doors are sealed.” And we didn’t know a thing about Cielcin computational devices.
“We could just blow the door,” Pallino suggested.
“Same problem as my cutting through it,” I said. “The minute there’s a leak here other doors will shut behind us. They won’t risk all the air getting out.” I keyed my terminal to signal only the men in my group and Pallino’s and Udax’s auxiliaries. “Spread out, search the levels. There ought to be an emergency hatch. Might be all mechanical in case of power failure. Double quick!”
As I watched the soldiers all hurried about their work. I watched them go, both with my eyes and on the map, tracking beacons showing each man and Irchtani as a blue point against the red wire-frame of the ship map. Absurdly, I thought of the bees in the Tamerlane’s hydroponics section. Changing topics, I rounded on Pallino. “Are we nearer wiping out any of their critical systems?”
“If it’s built like the other ones, Cade’s boys should be near the warp cores.”
“Not yet, then,” I mused. “Siran, order the rest of your century up here, fast as they can. We’re spread a bit thin at the moment.” I thought of the dead man again and his empty eyes. I shut my own, glad my face was hid behind the mask. We were going to find worse before we made it out of here, I just knew it. I had seen some of the footage from our suit cams when Crim’s team planted the bombs on Ulurani’s ship. The bodies, the shrines made of bone. The ietumna inferiors scarred and mutilated to make them more attractive to their akaranta masters.
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