by David Drake
“I am Imani of Khalia, and I have already killed several of your stupid breed.”
Some of them would have shot him then, but the speaker waved them down. “And you have come to give yourself up to our mercy?”
“No. I offer to fight the bravest of you in single combat. Or are those swords you carry merely for picking the dung from between your toes?”
“You have some point to this stupidity?”
“If I win, you withdraw from our world.”
“And if you lose?”
“Then I am dead and it will not matter to me what you do.”
“And what of your alien friends?”
Imani shrugged. “They are not my concern.”
“You don’t think they would actually withdraw, do you?” Stone said softly.
“Of course not,” Imani answered. “Would you? No, this allows them to carve me to pieces for attacking them. Certainly I would find that more satisfying than shooting someone who slew my comrades. They might suspect some kind of trap, but they want to use those blades. I know.”
“Put down your weapons,” the leader called.
The three of them dropped their guns.
“Are there others besides you three?”
“No.”
“Then come and prepare to meet your end, fool. I will cut you down myself!”
Imani started to take a step. Stone reached out and laid a soft hand on the furry shoulder. “May your gods be with you, Kyodai.”
“I do not recognize the term.”
“It is from an old Terran language. It means ‘brother.’ ” He looked at Berq. “It also means ‘sister.’ ”
Both Imani and Berq nodded, short, military bows.
The Kosantzu had no greater beauty up close, Stone saw, and they smelled like old boots left too long in a damp locker.
“Will you have a blade?” the Kosantz leader said, drawing his own and limbering his shoulders by swinging it back and forth.
“I’ll use these,” Imani said, pulling his knives. He showed his teeth as he backed away from the Kosantzu.
“Form a circle,” the Kosantz ordered his troops.
How had Imani known they would do that? Just because they were herd animals?
“Watch those two.” He nodded at Stone and Berq. “And keep a sharp eye to make certain no one else is out there.”
It was eerie, how right Imani had been. “They will all be watching me fight their champion,” Imani had said, as he disassembled the laser rifle. “No matter what they are supposed to do, they’ll be watching, especially after I draw blood. Be ready. Ten seconds after I cut him. No more.”
Berq and Stone were bracketed by a pair of the soldiers, but all eyes were on the combatants.
They circled, and Stone saw that the Kosantz moved well, almost gliding, his footing sure. From the way he handled the sword, a slightly curved weapon about a meter long, he knew how to use it.
The Kosantz leaped in and slashed. He was fast, but no faster than a man–or a Khalian.
Imani dodged and blocked with one of his knives. Steel clanged on steel.
An excited rumble went up from the crowd.
The Kosantz jumped back and recoveredhis guard position. “Good!” he said. “It will not be mere slaughter!”
“Oh, but you are wrong,” Imani said. He darted in, blocked the downward slash with one knife, and stabbed lightly with his other blade.
His technique was, Stone saw, flawless. It was only a nick, he could have easily buried the blade to its hilt in the Kosantz, but knowing he could, there was no point. The crowd of soldiers rumbled louder.
“Ten,” Berq said softly. “Nine. Eight. Seven.”
The angry Kosantz leader charged. Stone saw that the two guards were watching the fight intently.
“Go,” he said.
They moved back a hair, failed to draw any notice, then turned and sprinted. Stone ran as fast as he could. Behind them, one of the guards reacted, saying something Stone could not make out.
“Three ... two ... one,” Berq called as she ran, easily three meters ahead of Stone.
“Farewell, Kyodai,” Stone said.
The world went black before he heard the sound and Stone lost consciousness. Too close–
* * *
When he awoke, it was to Berq’s birdlike gaze. His head hurt and he was nauseated.
“You were hit by a piece of debris,” she said, pointing.
The severed, pulped head of a Kosantz lay on the ground a few meters away.
“It worked,” Stone said.
“Yes. Several of them survived the blast.” She tapped the knife in the strap on her chest. ”I finished them.”
“He was dedicated to his art, our brother,” Stone said. “I could have learned much from him.”
“You have learned how to die. What is more important?”
She was right. “What now?” he said.
“I return to my home world. I have responsibilities. And you?”
Stone shook his head. “I have nowhere I must be.”
She sat silently for a moment, gazing, at the still-smoking crater behind them. “I have been thinking about expanding our Guild,” she said. “As my father did when he admitted females to it. He recognized that change was needed, that talent lies where you find it.
“There have never been any aliens in the Guild With No Nest.
“Would,” she said, “you like a job, Kyodai?”
“Sure. What exactly is that you do, Sister?”
Why, he wondered, did she find that so funny?
THE NAVY of the Families didn’t have the Articles of War. In its stead they had several hundred years of traditional behavior that was every bit as rigid and unforgiving. The extreme concentration of authority in the senior family members also meant that summary execution was the rule and it was necessary for a senior officer to merely make his case for the record. A record he controlled and presented.
As the full strength of the Alliance was being gathered near Khalia, the family heads began to realize the need to make use of every resource. Among the many options they chose was the extensive use of those robotic sciences retained from the collapse of the empire. While immensely costly, many of the robot warriors proved devastatingly effective. Another option was to attempt to recruit allies from other nearby clusters. This ploy failed due to a combination of annoyance at occasional Khalian raids and a lack of desire by potential allies to become embroiled in a war on a side that was far from assured of victory.
Controlling an entire cluster, one of the most important sources of reinforcements for the Family Navy and Marine units were the numerous nonhuman races already under their sway. Many of these were found to have been too badly repressed to serve in any combat capacity. Other races’ physiologies were too dissimilar to be effectively included in the Syndicated forces.
The success of the FIeish family in developing the primitive Kozantzu pressured the more established families to emulate their efforts. The result of the Schline family attempt to prepare the Dashanks, a short, powerfully built race of humanoids, proved particularly disastrous, in an effort to counterbalance the success of other families in recruiting primitive warriors. The Dashanks were technologically more advanced than the other races recruited. This meant that the Shanks could be used to man much more sophisticated weapons and even service ships. While once restive, the entire race seemed to enthusiastically support the Schline family war effort. The Shanks’ leaders produced highly qualified recruits in large numbers. Schline prestige was restored. When the great armada gathered for a “neutralizing” strike against Khalia, a Schline admiral was in command.
Unknown to the Families, the culture of the Dashanks was based upon honor and revenge. It was also a most practical race, whose heroes were the members who gained their revenge and lived to enjoy it. One of their most powerful myths was the tale of the Seventeen Rogiers. The Rogier family was displaced from their lands and nearly destroyed by another clan.
Seventeen generations later, the Rogiers had recovered its strength. Then, and only when ready, it struck.The displacing clan was completely slaughtered. The ancestral lands were restored.
It had been, coincidentally, seventeen generations since the Schline family ships had first arrived on the Dashanks’ world. Of the ships carrying Dashank Marines, less than fifty percent reappeared. Most of these were those which carried mixed detachments of Shanks and Kozantzu. In most cases what remained of both units was unfit for combat.
THREE MORE months, which here meant seventy-eight days. Then there would be no more class-4 Syndicate station with the amenities of a freight terminal, no terrible planet with disgusting natives that almost never ate human beings. Keane Travers stared out his station window at the landscape he had come to loathe; a featureless expanse of lichen-covered slate interrupted with sudden, close outcroppings of spiky things that looked like plants but were in reality colonies of symbiotic life-forms existing somewhere on the biological scale between animal and vegetable. In the distance there was a sawtooth range of mountains with the usual evening thunderstorm piling up behind them, hurling the first of night-long lightning bolts through the clouds. Travers sighed, and asked himself, as he had from the day he arrived two years and seven months ago, how he could stand it.
“You’ll be back on Danegeld soon,” said his proctor, who stood to be promoted to manager as soon as Travers was gone yet was not too eager to see him go, since he was as fond of this place as Travers was.
“Good,” said Travers, listening to the sound of a nearby Tarnhelm striking at one of the uglies, the creatures that constituted about half the Tarnhelms’ diet: they looked something like a cross between a porcupine and a stag beetle and were about half the size of adult humans. Uglies usually had the sense to stay under cover, especially in the late afternoon when the Tarnhelms were most active.
“I suppose you’ll be glad to go home,” said his proctor, trying not to sound too anticipatory. “Who wouldn’t.”
“I’ll be glad not to be here,” Travers corrected him.
No one liked Siggirt’s Blunder: the name said it all. It was a small, miserable excuse for a planet out at the edge of the Cluster, a minor addition from the days when Haakon Siggirt had been trying to pretend the Syndicate was an interstellar Hanseatic League. Everyone on the Board of Directors said Siggirt’s Blunder was generally useless, having few minable concentrations of minerals and almost no other significant exports to speak of, nor any position of trading advantage.
Except, of course, there were the Tarnhelms.
“We’ve got a meeting with the head of the Waxy Tarnhelms set for tonight,” said Regan Keir, the programmer for the station. “The senior Waxy Tarnhelm agreed to it yesterday. At least you’ll have that to your credit.”
“Well, if they actually show up, it’ll be a first,” said Travers, folding his arms over his chest. He looked at his proctor. “Waxy Tarnhelms would be the best, though, wouldn’t they? If they arrive for the meeting, it will be a feather in all our caps. What do you think the chances are, Croydon?”
“Who knows?” replied the proctor. “Waxy Five and Waxy Nine have made pacts with us, and Waxy Six and Fourteen are considering it, which might turn the tide in our favor; that would account for half of the squadron leaders–if they call their rabble squadrons. They know about our dealing with the Sandy Tarnhelms, and the Dusties, too, and for the most part, I’ve been informed that they are satisfied that we have fulfilled our part of the bargain, at least to the satisfaction of four of the Waxies, who think themselves superior to the Sandies and the Dusties. So we can figure the officers are in our favor, but I don’t know about the senior Waxy Tarnhelm.”
“I hope we find out,” said Travers, and stared out the window.
Of the twenty identifiable independently mobile life-forms on the planet, the Tarnhelms had proven themselves the only ones of interest or value. They were solitary predators, looking–when you could see them–something like the mantas from the seas of Old Earth, but much bigger, nearly the height of an average man when their fans were down and not extended, with a double array of spines on either side of their dorsal crest. Their small faces, nestled in a ruff of hooked tusks, were soft and puckered like rotting apples. They possessed a complex language composed almost entirely of adjectival phrases and subscribed to a rigid code of conduct that appeared to be: kill everything but your blood, your boss, and your boss’s blood, and eat it if you can. They stank of burned lentils.
“It’s promising, their interest,” said Keir.
Travers turned back toward the window and squinted at the sky. “Do you think they’re watching us?”
“Who knows? Why bother to look?” asked Croydon. “Even if they are, it doesn’t mean much. You only have to worry about Tarnhelms when you can see them.” He sat down with his back to the window. “Come on. It’s almost time for supper. Staring at shimmering spots in the air–if you can find them–won’t help.”
“I don’t trust them,” said Travers, as he had since he had first accepted his post on Siggirt’s Blunder. “They make me nervous.”
“They probably feel the same way about you; most primitives are like that,” said Croydon, punching in an order for high tea. “Scones or cakes?” he asked.
Regan Keir shoved her springy deep-red hair back. “Cakes, the little ones without the frosting.” She drew up a chair and sat down next to Croydon.
The manager allowed himself to be persuaded. “Why not?” he asked the air, and hoped that some of the snoop systems would not be set off by his remark. Discontent was regarded with suspicion back home, where no one had seen the mind-numbing desolation of Siggirt’s Blunder. Travers chose one of the deeper chairs and moved it near the table in the entertainment grotto. “High tea. Think of the tradition.” He gave them a negotiating smile. “Do you ever wonder what these high teas used to taste like?” he asked the other two. Station etiquette required that he have at least one meal a day with them as they were his closest assistants; the other fifty-three residents of the station had less call on his attention.
“Like this,” said Keir, dismissing the question.
“How do you know?” Travers asked. “Those high teas were back on Old Earth, and they weren’t the same all over then. So this might be entirely different from the real high teas.” He rarely got into arguments, and now he wondered why he was bothering. It was something to take his mind off the Tarnhelms, he reckoned.
“There is no way to find out,” said Croydon, “And probably the taste was different, because the substances were not the same as what we have now. They speak of milk and cream, but do they mean mares or cows or camels? They don’t bother to tell us that.” He tapped a few more buttons. “We will have to trap a few more uglies for the Tarnhelms; they’ll want a snack.”
“I hate those things,” said Keir with a shudder.
“I hate them,” Croydon said with sudden passion. “Deadly, stinking, hideous, appalling things. Sometimes I think I’d do anything to get away from them and this place. Why don’t we just load them into ships, seal them, and send them on dead courses for their sun–or any sun.”
“The Tarnhelms?” Travers asked, turning his head as the chief butler of the station appeared with his enormous rolling cart. He did not want gossip going around the station about Keir’s or Croydon’s attitude, though he supposed it was too late to stop all speculation. It was not possible for him to change how they felt, and it would be a mistake to try it.
“No, the uglies. And the crawlies. And the wigglies.” She touched her hair again, which was a sure indication of nervousness. She glanced once over her shoulder toward the window, then resolutely put her attention on the tea cart. “I think I’ll have lemon with mine, Harrington,” she said, as she always did. “And ask Chambulo to bring his reports to my office before the change of shift.”
“Very good, Programmer.”
“This is the worst place for wildlife,” said Travers, tryin
g to make a joke of it and failing. “Uglies, crawlies , wigglies, nasties, scurries, ookies, horrids–what a zoo of unpleasantness.”
“Let me have some of that Sinquet-Kway coffee, Harrington,” said Croydon. “With sweet Immeric cheese.” He had a decided preference for the produce of the gaudy and hedonistic planet that grew almost a third of the groceries for the Syndicate. I think the Sinquet-Kway coffee is better than any other, don’t you?”
“Of course, Proctor,” said Harrington, setting about serving their tea.
“We’re having Tarnhelms in later,” Travers informed Harrington, although the chief butler obviously knew this already. “We’ll need some uglies for them to devour and perhaps a scurry or two, if they’re not too ferocious. It won’t do having a scurry tear this place up before we get the cooperation of the Tarnhelms. They don’t eat ookies, do they?”
“I don’t believe so, sir,” said Harrington, “More’s the pity.”
Travers sighed. “Yes.”
Keir was handed her tea first, served in a cup the size of a soup plate. “How do you want to conduct the discussion?” she asked Travers, her voice faltering only once.
“That will be up to the Tarnhelms, I should think,” said Travers, his tone quite level. He had to fight an impulse to laugh, keeping up this ancient tradition so far away and under conditions like these. If the Syndicate did not put so much store by forms, he would have abandoned high tea as a waste of time. “I’d like a few of those nut-crusted milk balls,” he said to Harrington. He had a weakness for nut-crusted milk balls.
“Three or four, Manager?” asked Harrington.
“Four, if you will,” said Travers. “And while we’re dealing with the matter of this evening, I think Kasagio ought to be warned that his security crew will have their hands full. We don’t know how many Tarnhelms will be here, and how many we will be able to see most of the time.” The day before Kasagio had warned him about protecting against a covert Tarnhelm attack, but Travers had not listened. Now he was having second thoughts.