Cry Havoc

by Jack Hanson

  Laila almost choked in surprise. “You let her cut your hair?”

  Salem shrugged. “I had to. I didn’t have the time to arrange the mirrors, and if she had taken a chunk out I would have clawed her eyes, seriously.”

  The girls laughed a little, but they all knew Salem was not joking.

  * * *

  Jane sat in Spatial Calculus, listening to how the math could be applied in more advanced tasks, especially in plotting navigation courses through the stars. Her hand touched her new hair, more used to the slight weight of the bun at the back of her head. Now it was lighter, unfamiliar, with the pageboy bob tickling the back of her neck. An irritable Salem had set her foot down in the latrine: this was how it was going to be so don’t you dare move.

  She had cut Salem’s hair just as the girl had asked, though the temptation to cut out a larger than ordinary chunk had been there, she wouldn’t lie. Black’s thorough “Come to Jesus” meeting, as she had heard extraordinary ass chewings described before, had imprinted in her that he was serious when he said he would break her. Plus, Jane didn’t think her quest for anonymity would be helped by antagonizing the most popular girl at school.

  Salem had even praised her after she had been done, and part of her loathed the other part that had basked in the compliment. She shook her head, wondering what strange fate had brought them together. Namely, Sergeant Black was forcing them together, and she understood on a logical level what he was doing was simply Team Building 101. Make the group rely on each other, and they’ll bond, generally speaking.

  There were exceptions, like what had happened with the FOSsils, but from what she’d heard there were a lot of other circumstances in that situation. The bits and pieces discussed in her advanced courses weren’t exactly too forthcoming on what had happened to the seven survivors of their own personal civil war in the middle of the Empire-Federation conflict. People knew about them in a general sense – there were still rumors about the Rogue Fleet a decade ago – but what had really happened wasn’t discussed, and no one cared except to murmur about crazies and shake their heads. She’d read the war histories of an Imperial Spymaster, but even then you had to read between the lines for the few details. Those that might have known the full story, the Scytheclaws and the Harvester cult, weren’t taking questions.

  She pulled her mind away from the events of three decades ago and looked at the cadet in the front. He was a tall blonde boy, not overly muscled, but athletic, and had a dimple when he smiled, which was often. Jane knew because she had watched him last year every chance she could. He was smart, charming, gracious, and polite, and had the most incredible grey eyes.

  Jane had been on debate team last year, and her first topic had been whether the Empire’s colonization plans were too aggressive. Jane had argued that indeed they were, and had been countered by a rousing argument from Cadet Hailey that empires couldn’t have borders, that expansion was what kept their life blood flowing and created new challenges for the people. He didn’t only have passion on his side – no, she could have dealt with just passion – but he had the facts. Rome, Britain, America: all were great empires that eventually stopped expanding, turned on themselves and imploded.

  She had brought up China as a counterpoint. They had expanded into Southeast Asia and collapsed shortly afterwards, but hadn’t thought of what he had pointed out a second later: that empires grasped the opportunity when it was presented to them, whereas China had tried to make its own opportunity. Admirable, he conceded, but it failed, and this was the Terran Empire’s opportunity, staring them in the face.

  She had accepted the judge’s decision with grace, and still remembered the smile Hailey’d given her, and the words, “I think you would have had it, but bringing up China just gave me an opportunity I couldn’t resist.”

  She couldn’t think to respond, only smile and nod.

  Hailey felt something pricking on the back of his neck, and turned around, only to see Harper staring furiously into her tablet. He did a double take, surprised to see her wearing something other than her trademark bun. It looked nice on her, he admitted, as he turned around to pay attention again.

  Chapter Six—Cinnamon, Blood, and Grass

  We would not have won at Scylla alone. Remember that when we go forwards, that our allies were as responsible for our victory as we were. That, Senators, was my logic in not crushing the Peace Federation outright: so that we would have an enemy to keep us united until we could hold the reins of power comfortably and without fear of the Other.

  —Arch Strategos Elaine Young, Victor of Scylla, addressing a secret tribunal

  There had been a short lunch where the three had sat together, not saying a word about their first day. Sitting outside under a blue sky at a living wicker table, Salem nibbled on cheese and fruit, while Jane ate a flatbread sandwich without relish. Paris’s unique anatomy required him to take in raw foods, especially seafood since his specific needs were much higher than what a human would require. His lunch of raw hiath, a giant fish that the Khajalians favored, and uncooked greens basted with a juice medley made the table surprisingly aromatic, smelling of citrus and pepper.

  Jane’s tablet beeped and a digital voice announced “Message Received.” Jane put down her orange juice and club soda and flicked the envelope icon. For privacy’s sake, it displayed the message flat, and Jane’s eyes scanned it. “Black wants us to stop by the infirmary,” she said, the first words that had been spoken at the table.

  Salem’s eyes widened a little. “Is it Sand?” she asked.

  Jane shook her head. “No, it says we have to get shots. A new program the Academy is starting where we all get vitamin supplements three times a week, according to him.”

  Salem gave a little shudder. “I hate shots. I wonder if they’re mandatory. I hope not.”

  “Is stuff usually mandatory around here? I don’t think we get a choice.” Paris said with a shrug.

  “Well, you could ask him,” Salem responded, a little testily. Her dislike of needles was ramping up her nerves.

  Paris took his time chewing on a strip of hiath before responding. “No, I don’t think I will. I don’t believe there’s an argument that would make him excuse any of us from something.”

  “Oh, and you know him so well?” asked Salem.

  Paris shook his head. “I know beings like him.”

  “Like the tutor your parents hired?” Salem asked coyly.

  A muscle in Paris’s neck jumped, and he said nothing in response. Salem began to repeat herself, and then realized what she was doing, goading him because of her own fear, and put her claws away. There was not another word until Paris, the last to finish his lunch, was done. At that point Jane stood up after their trash had gone into the rubbish bin nearby.

  “We’ve got fifteen minutes before lunch ends, but we might as well get going,” she offered. The other two got up and they marched off, Jane singing a cadence about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

  The infirmary was marked with a large red cross, concentric green circles, and multicolored glyphs, all symbols of healing among different races. The glass door slid open, and a janissary wearing a medical brassard on the left arm, her blonde hair done up in the intricate braid work Salem had picked out before, was sitting at a desk. She glanced down at her display, the facial recognition software picking them out as soon as they had entered and declaring what they were here for.

  “Here for your shots?” she asked. “Go on through.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they chorused in return. Going down the hallway, they entered into the medical bay, where silencing privacy curtains ran between each bed. All but two were empty, and wandering out of one was a Bhae Chaw female, seemingly out of place wearing a medical brassard.

  Standing well over seven feet in height, the bear-like Bhae Chaw was covered all over in dense, honey-colored fur. She looked over at the thre
e cadets from the recesses of her bony face, the eyes almost invisible. The sides of her muzzles lifted for a moment, exposing bone-crushing teeth, and in a surprisingly gentle voice she said “Welcome, Cadets.”

  The first species that the Illurians had attempted to recruit into their war with the Naith had been the Bhae Chaw, a species that lived peacefully for the most part but whose ritualistic combat was terrifyingly brutal. They had accepted the Illurian bargain at first, but had turned against them after they realized they were expected to fight again and again. The vengeful Illurians had broken them to the lash, turning them servile through mental conditioning and their psychic talents.

  During the Empire-Federation war, the Illurian Armada had deposed the Illurian ruling castes and declared that they would serve the Terrans. Following this, the Terran Empire had broken the Bhae Chaw conditioning. In gratitude, the monkish warriors of the Bhae Chaw had provided an answer to the overwhelming might of Khajalian warriors in the latter half of the war. It was a good outcome, the FOSsil Corps already shattered and the Harvester cult too small in number to deploy on the battlefield in large elements.

  With her massive claws and powerful jaws, the Bhae Chaw before them seemed like she would be a force to be reckoned with. If her children or her charges were threatened, she would be as deadly as any male, but the caste structure of Bhae Chaw culture placed her, like all Bhae Chaw females, as a healer or caretaker.

  “Cadets, are you here for your shots, then?” she asked, picking up a tablet and looking at the messages the human in the front had sent her. “And your friend I see,” she added. With no small amount of dexterity, she flipped the tablet between her claws and set it down, waving them over to a chair. Jane, the closest, stepped up first, and rolled up her arm as the medic prepared a needle attached to a large gunlike device.

  Salem blanched visibly at the sight of it. “I don’t think I can do this,” she murmured to Paris, already feeling light headed. She steadied herself, placing one hand on his shoulder. Paris almost retracted, probably not used to letting people touch him, but instead bore it stoically. Jane’s arm was swabbed, and, with a small crack, she was injected with the serum, frowning a little.

  “It doesn’t hurt that bad,” Jane said as the Bhae Chaw placed a sealing gel over the wound.

  “Lie down over there, Cadet. You’ll feel light headed in a minute. Next?” she asked as Jane followed her directions, and Paris disengaged himself from Salem. The seat strained to support his bulk as a different solution was drawn, and the process was repeated. Paris’s body sealed the wound left behind. That left only a trembling Salem to swallow heavily and make her way over to the chair.

  “Nervous?” the medic asked, her eyes shining kindly in the depth of her face.

  Dry mouthed, Salem could only nod.

  “Well, we’ll wait a moment,” the Bhae Chaw said, and began to sing a lullaby in her own language. Salem couldn’t make out what she was singing, but the rhythm soothed her enough that her muscles unclenched, and the trembling subsided. After a few moments she felt totally relaxed, and only the crack of the needle let her know that she had been injected.

  She heard the nurse say that she could stand up, but was too sleepy to do so. Instead, she felt herself lifted into the arms of the Bhae Chaw, who smelled so intensely of cinnamon she almost nuzzled into the hairy chest. There wasn’t enough time for that, as Salem was deposited gently into a cot, and imagined she could feel the serum running through her body, doing whatever it was designed to do.

  Minutes passed, and she thought she heard Sand’s voice. She opened her eyes fully, feeling surprisingly rested. There he was, the bruising on his face almost completely vanished, talking to Paris and Jane who sat at the end of their cots.

  “Your face looks better,” Salem murmured, and the three turned to her. She gave a yawn that turned into a full body stretch, and blinked herself awake.

  “Well thanks. I stayed here so that Nurse Cheera could watch over me. I guess a Bhae Chaw does make a difference. No wonder parents are so hot to have them watching their kids,” Sand said.

  With their natural skill at healing and fierce parental instincts, the Bhae Chaw had been in vogue as tutors and guardians for years. Even the docile nurse who had tended them would stop a Khajalian pillager in his tracks if he came in meaning harm to her charges.

  Jane slid off her cot, looking at her watch and trying to speak over the conversation Sand and Paris resumed talking; something about what Sand had missed today in class.

  “Let’s ah… Let’s get to the Ranges,” Jane said.

  The Ranges were the informal name for the area where all the military training was held, but they were more than firing ranges. There were gymnasiums, obstacle courses, classrooms, and whatever else was needed to prepare cadets for the art of war.

  It was a short march, with Jane leading a song about wearing the patches of different units from across the galaxy, before they arrived at an empty clearing. Salem was the first to speak up.

  “Is this where we’re supposed to be?” she asked. “I don’t see anyone.”

  Jane checked her reader again, and nodded. “Clearing seventeen, that’s where it’s supposed to be,” she affirmed, looking over at Salem. They waited a moment, and Salem was about to ask her to check it again, when a slight rumble coursed through the soles of their feet, and then another, with more force.

  The faint smell of Old Blood, coppery and metallic, wafted in first, and then, looming over them was the Bladejaw they’d seen yesterday, looking directly down at them. Hunched over and not fully upright, it was still an imposing sight. Feathers ruffled slightly in the wind, and its nostrils flared as it breathed them in.

  “Cadets,” intoned the Bladejaw, his voice deep and distinctly male. “Welcome to my class. I am Ripper,” he said.

  Shock filtered through the team in varying degrees. Ripper was a hero of the war, renowned as the tip of the spearhead that had broken the Arcturus Gate, and had been among the strike team that had saved Arch Strategos Young from the Peace Federation when her shuttle had been shot down over Halcyon III.

  “You’re our instructor for Tactical Warfare?” asked Jane, a little shakily. Having a massive carnivore looming over her wasn’t doing anything good to her nerves.

  “What else would I do? Retire peacefully to Pandora? No, you quick ones change all you touch, including us Old Bloods. I believe I have inherited some of your ways. And who better to teach you history, for to understand tactics, you must first understand how we came to fight the way we do,” said Ripper, walking through the clearing and heading down another path, motioning with his massive head for the cadets to follow.

  As they walked, Ripper began with the history of the old bloods. Reconstituted from fossils that had been discovered in roughly 5,000 BCE, when the Illurians first visited Terra, apparently the Illurians had come across no other life-forms like the massive reptiles. As a challenge to the race, which had brought back extinct forms of life before, the Illurians modified the genetics of the dinosaurs, making them intelligent enough for true sentience.

  Explaining the circumstances of their rebirth and the extinction of their race millions of years ago, the Illurians had afterwards been surprisingly benign towards their new charges. They fitted them with the vox amplifiers so they could communicate, and gave the Old Bloods several garden worlds to live on. The carnivorous old bloods had been content to feast on wildlife imported to their planets, hunting other animals instead of each other.

  When the war came with the Naith, whose religion and culture mandated cannibalism and devouring other intelligent life, the Old Bloods were ready to stand at the side of their Illurian allies. Fitted out with weaponry, the smaller Old Bloods acted as skirmishers while the larger ones were living tanks. The massive sauropod thunderers were able to be equipped with artillery capable of bringing down orbital spaceships.

  Yet eve
n these were not enough to deal with the quick breeding Naith, who in spite of cannibalism and their harsh political purges numbered in the trillions.

  “And it was at this point, after their failure to persuade the Bhae Chaw, that the Illurians returned to Terra to enlist your species in its war,” finished the Bladejaw.

  “Yes, quite a choice they were offered: servitude or annihilation,” came another voice from a different path. It was a Triceratops , the smell of fresh cut hay and Old Blood mingling in the clearing.

  “Ah, Brokehorn, still breathing and being contrary I see?” asked Ripper.

  “Unfortunately, since it means I have to inhale what you ate two weeks ago,” riposted the Lancer. “They do offer sand baths here. I don’t know how you hunt successfully when I could track you by scent.”

  “At least my food moves,” retorted the Bladejaw. “I’ve never heard of someone needing skill to run down a bush. Why were you tracking me?”

  “I saw you had a class, and thought I’d come along to fill in anything you missed,” Brokehorn said with a toss of his head. He filed in on the other side of the squad, and Ripper began moving again. For all their bluster, there was a friendly familiarity that the team picked up on between the two that confirmed Ripper’s observation that being around humans had changed them. Most Old Bloods were just as alien as any other culture, but these two seemed familiar, right down to their bickering like two old war veterans on a porch.

  “As usual, you are late and I am done for today. I don’t know how you were as lauded as much as you are,” Ripper pointed out.

  If there was an Old Blood hero equal to Ripper, it was Brokehorn. He too had been with the strike team that had saved Young, and held the record for killing the most enemy Khajali in the entire Imperial Forces.