Enryn

by Gerard Whittaker

  They woke late and dressed Rosa in a business suit, and Enryn offered her a combat knife in a plush leather sheath that looked to match her dress. "If you ever need this, then use it with pride."

  "Then I am not a slave?" Rosa sobbed as she slid the knife onto her belt at her left hip.

  "Whoever said that you were?" Ace laughed.

  They showed her around the base and the rules and regulations regarding the Marines, then the exercising Joint Rifle Company.

  "If you want to understand us," Ace offered, "we can fit you in with the PE classes, and the unarmed combat course."

  "We might even show you how to use that knife," Enryn stated.

  "The exercise I could use," Rosa agreed, "but don't try and turn me into a Marine."

  "Perish the thought," Ace laughed. "We need you here safe and sound to keep the Marines going if we fail to return. One day you might have to recruit, train and deploy our replacements."

  "That is a terrifying thought," Rosa gasped. "Then this is all real?"

  "The survival of the Galaxy might well rest upon the decisions you make," Enryn sighed. "Ace and I are simple soldiers, most of this is beyond us. We know how to fight and how to die. But big business and galactic politics is way out of our league."

  "The Percival family are the best, but even they will need good advice now and then."

  "I'm just a simple girl," Rosa gasped. "I never asked for this."

  "Neither did we," Ace sighed.

  A month later John, Isralla and Eileen came to watch the Rifle Company drilling, as Sal was teaching Fae to act like a mascot in a short military type, double breasted, dress with lots of shiny buttons and gold braid. Gyor and En-eta were watching with silent approval.

  Ace and Enryn walked over after the men had been dismissed, "So what have you got for us?" Ace asked.

  "A new type of carbine," Eileen gloated. "It took us weeks to figure it out. But you can now fire wooden darts that will penetrate the Warrior's shields."

  "Hell," Gyor sighed, "it only took Enryn about two seconds to come up with that idea."

  "And what about having shields of your own?" Eileen snapped. "Then it will be a face to face showdown."

  Enryn sighed, "The Warriors we can handle, it's the ships that are giving us nightmares. Can you tell us how to handle them?"

  "Not yet," Eileen sighed. "That is a problem of an entirely different magnitude."

  "Try putting the Marines in a spear and throwing them at a ship," Fae laughed.

  Eileen struck her head hard, "That's about the best idea we've had to date."

  "Then you must be really struggling," Enryn gasped.

  "No, I mean it. We can build a ship out of wood, or cellulose, big enough to fit you. But with no metal or electronics at all, and that means no weapons or navigation, so I'm stumped again."

  "What about a spear thrower?" Enryn gasped. "Fae, run home and bring the spear thrower."

  Enryn gave a demonstration on the range, throwing a lance with and without a spear thrower. With the thrower the lance went twice as far, was twice as accurate, and hit twice as hard. "Eileen, would that help?"

  "Not for throwing an assault ship, but the idea is sound. I could cobble up a high speed ship with no weapons but lots of shields, something to throw you through the enemy's shields. But you'd still never penetrate their hull."

  Rosa gasped, "Sorry if this is not my place, but I have an idea from back home."

  "We're waiting," Ace laughed.

  "You can't carry normal weapons, but what about a chemical explosive in the nose? A sort of shaped charge?"

  "You're talking about an anti tank shell," Ace laughed. "We'd be riding our way into hell behind a jet of plasma hotter than the Sun, in a wooden ship."

  "Well, I'm sorry Gunny."

  "No," Enryn laughed, "it's a great idea."

  "If we can get inside their ships we can take the shields down from the inside," Ace laughed.

  "Right," Eileen sighed, "and with your own shields you're going to need a better method of fighting through two lots of shields. I'm sorry to bring this up, and I'm sure you'll hate me for the idea, but what about carrying swords?"

  John laughed, "I didn't like the idea at first, but now I never leave mine at home. I'm sure we can whip up some that will slice through their shields without a problem."

  Isralla chuckled, "Just imaging meeting the Warriors face to face, and slicing them to bits without them being able to fight back."

  Enryn gasped, "I think we've just put them on the endangered species list."

  Ace laughed, "This will work. But I've had another idea for when this is over. Lady Gyor?"

  "Ace, can't you and Enryn call me Gee?"

  "Right, Gee. I was thinking about your problem with too many refugees, can you tell us more?"

  "All right. We save them by the thousand every day, but we are fighting a war and so don't have a safe place to put them. All we do have is hundreds of asteroids fitted out with millions of stasis tubes in each, and there they sleep through eternity, waiting for us to find a place for them to call home."

  "And you found Rosa and her kids there," Enryn sighed. "That was quite a feat finding just the right person."

  "It was far from an accident," Gyor laughed. "The search program was very specific. I asked it to find a partner you can both love and respect without shame, out of billions. I think it was spot on. Children, you all need each other."

  Enryn, Ace and Rosa looked at each other in shock as Gyor's words struck deeply into their hearts. "We'll talk this over tonight," Ace sighed. "Gee, you were saying?"

  "We save them from across space-time, from thousands of worlds and abuse of every kind. Some of the greatest number come from World War Two, which happened in many realities. The Nazi death camps gassed millions, on twenty or more time lines. So we saved them. The gas chambers were real, but the gas and the guards were not. The victims fell asleep and are sleeping still in stasis."

  "That was what I was thinking," Ace gasped. "Look, we've been finding empty worlds by the hundred. Why don't we start to fill them with refugees? Eileen, could you build a mobile replicator? A ship that can build whole villages across a continent?"

  "You're talking of swooping down and replicating a small village, and dropping off a few hundred refugees?" she gasped in surprise. "And then doing it a hundred or more times! You bet I could. Hell Ace, I could build them a city."

  "You'll need to start with farms," Enryn insisted. "The cities they can build themselves."

  "We've slaves of a thousand kinds looking for a second chance," Gyor gasped. "We even found a whole Chinese fleet full of children that had been sent by their crazy Emperor to find his way to heaven. And when they didn't find it they were too terrified to go home. The fleet was on the verge of sinking when we snatched it up, along with thousands of the most beautiful children picked from across China. And we still don't know what to do with them, you can't build a civilisation with nothing but kids."

  "They we can't help either," Enryn insisted. "But we could build a world that can help them."

  "So we colonise the galaxy," John laughed, "making way for Earth to help out and still keep control."

  "No John," Ace insisted, "this is beyond the Earth now. We colonise the galaxy and you keep control!"

  Enryn sighed, "Your family are the only people we truly trust."

  John sighed, "Ralla dear, I think they are ready."

  Isralla gasped warmly, "Gunny, Enryn, Rosa and Fae, we are about to offer you a prize beyond measure, how would you like to extend your lives by hundreds, if not thousands of years?"

  "Join your family to ours," Gyor insisted, "and you will see the birth of a new galaxy."

  "And my platoons?" Ace gasped.

  "Most of them will follow you into eternity," Eileen sighed, "but it will be up to you who to trust. We are offering you the chance to change the galaxy, to help bring peace to all."

  "I'm going to need more men and women. And I can't s
ee the Marine Corps being too helpful."

  "Leave that to me Ace," Gyor laughed. "I'm sure I can find you some reinforcements, how many do you need for now?"

  "I'd say another hundred," Enryn stated. "Fifty of each if you can manage it."

  "I've plenty of professional Marines who took the wrong side in a war," Gyor laughed. "Nearly all male though, but there are a lot of female bodyguards, the type a rich man would pick to guard his harem, and they are very tough."

  "Sounds good," Ace laughed. "Rosa, are you taking this down?"

  "I'm memorising every word Ace," she sighed.

  "Thanks. Gee, bring me a hundred of the best you have, and a drill instructor. I'm going to be too busy organising our little war."

  Enryn called out, "Eileen, before you go, we're going to need some better shuttles for planetary assault."

  "Then you'd better come with me and tell me what you need."

  Ace, Enryn and Rosa walked with the Percivals towards Eileen's office over her industrial sized replicator, as Fae scampered after a squirrel, laughing at how simple humans could be. One word from her and they knew how to fight the Lords of All.

  The new craft for the Marines would be far faster than the old Landers, with lots of shields and weapons and a small faster than light drive. They would also be capable of being reconfigured into ground assault vehicles, while swinging their main cannons to a shoulder mounted position for indirect bombardment.

  So they got faster than light armoured personnel carriers with mobile artillery platforms in the same bundle. Eileen had the specs and started to work them into a working vehicle.

  During the conference Isralla offered them the treatment that would extend their lives and make them far harder to kill. She nipped their necks testing them, and then bit deeply, injecting thousands of nanobots onto their bloodstreams.

  Ace gasped as he felt the microscopic robots swirling through his veins, "Is there a reason for this? Or are you trying to make people think you're vampires?"

  "We've done that before today," Gyor laughed. "I once had a whole army sharpening stakes and carrying Holy water, and I'd play along, hiding from crosses and sunlight. That was a lot of fun."

  "Did they see the joke?" Ace gasped.

  "Those I let live, which wasn't many."

  En-eta laughed, "For some reason a seven foot tall Mage didn't scare them, but a vampire did scare them to death."

  "Especially after I started tearing their throats out," Gyor chuckled. "Well, I had to make it look good."

  John sighed, "On that world it is the evil who fear the night."

  Enryn and Rosa were holding each other in shock as the nanobots took up residence in their bodies, analysing the state of health and repairing all damage at a molecular level. It wasn't true immortality, but could extend their lives by several hundred years at least, and heal all but instantly lethal wounds.

  After lunch at the Percival residence, and a chance to get to know them off duty, Ace, Enryn and Rosa walked back to the Base to see a hundred new recruits marching around the parade ground. They all wore black pants and white T-shirts, fifty men and fifty women, who looked very professional. They did march well but it was clear the women used to have other duties than pounding concrete with their boots.

  The drill instructor was a grizzled veteran in his fifties, who called out across the parade ground with a voice that could have been used to warn ship at sea of fog and sharp rocks.

  "We're in luck," Gyor laughed, "I found these in storage, a rich man's private army. I suspect the girls were meant to warm his bed as well as die for him, some people have no taste."

  "So what happed?" Ace gaped.

  "Their master chose the wrong side in a war, and they had to pay for his mistake, they'd all been crucified when our agent found them- hanging on metal crosses waiting to die in agony. Luckily we have a lot of influence on Terra, and our Agent pulled a few strings to save them. You can't blame them, they're Biroids, synthetic life forms. Biological Androids if you like, without the ability to say no to their master."

  Up close most of the women were nearly six feet tall, and the men about seven. But two, a boy and girl, only looked about fourteen, and looked badly abused and terrified. All were muscled in the extreme, attractive and dedicated. "And to think Gyor did this in a couple of hours," Ace sighed.

  "Hell," Enryn laughed, "knowing her she probably had it planned a month ago."

  The two leaders were Favian and Bellona, who had worked together for a long time, as had their troops, both were tall with very short blond hair and steely blue eyes; they were professional and confused.

  "You're working for us now," Ace insisted. "I'm promoting you both to sergeants and giving thought to taking you with us on permanent assignment."

  "My girls sir?" Bellona asked politely.

  "They will all continue training here," Enryn stated, "with our own Marines. But you both need to see the real galaxy, and we need to know we can trust you."

  "Our duties?" Favian asked in confusion.

  "For now we will be conducting hit and run raids against the enemy, while we test their defences and our own technology. So I'm hoping to keep you both busy. You'll have to learn as you go, and teach your own squads when you get back."

  The Tribune in charge of the new troops had arranged to take over one of the barracks, and so he had fifty men sleeping down one side and fifty women on the other, with shared showers and mess.

  Enryn was waiting for the sexual explosion that never came.

  Gyor finally explained that as they were artificial life forms, they were not built to interact in that way. And so Enryn told the Mage to fix it.

  Gyor did fix the problem, but not the years of training they had gone through, so it was months before the sexual tension began to boil over.

  Following Gyor's declaration that she had selected Rosa to serve them because she was the only one out of billions who they could love, the family was living on tender hooks, constantly thinking they were being set up.

  It wasn't Rosa's fault, she was a genuine woman who needed love badly, she'd been designed that way. She was as much a Biroid as Favian and Bellona, but had spent far longer learning to think for herself in a war zone, and with a synthetic IQ of nearly three hundred she could think very well indeed.

  Enryn, Ace and Rosa were walking back home across the lawn outside the Base and saw Gyor sitting cross legged on the grass as a cloud of hornets flew around her head, she snapped her fingers and they vanished. Then Gyor started to call up a new spell.

  En-eta sat a hundred meters away, reading an old leather bound tome on a picnic bench. She called them over to sit with her.

  "Okay," Enryn sighed, "what's she up to this time?"

  "Just housekeeping," En-eta laughed, "there's no need to panic on this occasion. Gee's only casting her favourite spells and saving them. You know, just like a computer program? Open the program, do whatever you want with it and then save the result. So all she needs to do is open the file to cast the spell."

  "Sounds simple," Ace sighed. "Do all Mages use the same system?"

  "Not on your life, Isralla and Ison are only just getting the hang of it. And no other that I know of have even heard of it. This is a Gyor special."

  "I'm still getting used to the idea of magic," Rosa gasped. "How powerful is lady Gyor?"

  En-eta's face lit up with a mysterious grin. "The first time I saw her she was walking through the market at home in the town and country of Orissia, and an entire army of the Soomish Lagar Empire of the High People came marching through in the opposite direction. They were taking a short cut to pacify another small kingdom, so they were on a war footing.

  "The General, he was nearly eight foot tall, covered in enchanted armour and medals, surrounded by a squad of combat Mages and trailed by ten thousand of Yag-Urth's finest warriors; well, he took one look at lady Gyor and pulled his army to one side to let her pass.

  "She just smiled politely and forgot about it."<
br />
  "That sounds like Gyor," Ace laughed.

  "If you don't mind me asking," Enryn sighed, "how did you become Gyor's slave?"

  "Not at all like you think, and not at all like she thinks either," En-eta laughed. "Can you keep a secret?" she asked with eagerness. "I've been dieing to tell the truth for four years."

  "I'm listening," Enryn gasped.

  "I'm not a slave, or at least not in the way you think. How old do you think I am?"

  "You look seventeen or eighteen," Ace laughed. "But I'm sure you're way past that."

  "Put another zero and a few more years on that," she laughed.

  Rosa gasped, "A hundred and eighty- two hundred!"

  "That sounds about right, but we don't keep count like your kind. Could you have a birthday every day? We are as old as we feel, and I feel like a teenager. Anyway, I told you about first seeing Gyor facing down the army, so I became fascinated with her. She was a hobby. I talked to her few friends, followed her two marriages. And saw her buying slaves to heal a broken heart when they both failed. When I first saw her buying a slavegirl I was shaken, knowing to what use a virgin could be put. I'd some crazy idea of spell components or sacrifice.

  "I watched her for years in fascination and disgust, and finally met some of the slaves she had freed and married. Ace, you remember the shop where we first met? The twin women who owned it? She had bought them years ago, when they didn't even know the other sister was still alive. And taught them to please her, and each other wearing blindfolds. It was only when they had both learned how to please each other very well that she removed their blind folds that they finally realised they were sisters. They have slept together every night since.

  "I was outraged at first. But they loved her, and each other. When she freed them she also married them, gave them two slave children to adopt and a dowry big enough to start their leather business. She did the same with most of her former slaves. They were so grateful when their business started making money they tried to send her a percentage, which she returned every year. I got to be good friends with them, and started to envy them. Then I had a bright idea! I offered to let them give me to Gyor as a slave.