Emerald Sea

by John Ringo

  "Fitness center?" Herzer asked. "I'm getting a sinking feeling. Do people wear bathing suits in here?"

  "Some do, some don't," the girl smiled. "And there are some for sale in the gift shop, which is right around the corner," she added, pointing.

  "I think I'll stop there, first," Herzer said.

  He followed her directions and found a fully appointed gift shop. Not only were there bathing suits, there was a complete line of toiletries, soaps, shampoos, towels with the Raven's Mill logo and even shirts and coffee mugs. He picked one of the latter up and grimaced. "Raven's Mill, Home of the Blood Lords" was baked into the ceramic.

  "Can I help you?" a cold female voice asked from behind him.

  "Morgen!" he said, when he turned around. "I thought you'd run off to another town!"

  Morgen Kirby was about a hundred and seventy centimeters of slim redhead. They had had a very brief relationship just after the Fall, before he had joined the Blood Lords. Very brief. Basically a half a day at the end of which they had a flaming argument. He couldn't, off-hand, recall about what.

  "I did," she said, sighing. "I went to Resan."

  "Oh, shit," was all Herzer could say. The town of Resan had been one of the first that Dionys McCanoc's forces had hit and because the town elders had a policy of "strict nonviolence" his forces had gone through it like a hot knife through butter. And that reminded him what the argument had been about. "I'm sorry. I didn't know. How . . ." He paused, unsure how to go on.

  "McCanoc attacked just before dawn. I was working for one of the established people in the town and had gone out to one of the farms for milk; Mistress Tabitha had to have fresh milk for breakfast every morning."

  "So you got out," Herzer sighed.

  "Not . . . entirely unscathed." She frowned. "After that I went to Washan but after you and Edmund stopped McCanoc I decided the one place I wanted to be was back in Raven's Mill. Even if I didn't have my head screwed on straight, I could at least be somewhere where others did." She paused and shrugged. "You were right. Shilan and Cruz and all the rest were right; this world can't afford peaceful innocence. There are too many bad people in it. I always sort of expected you to turn up and gloat. But after a while I figured out you weren't the gloating type."

  "No, I'm not," Herzer said. "I'm the worrying type. I actually thought of you earlier today; I saw Crystal. She's Edmund's secretary."

  "You were right about that, too," she snorted. "She was being snippy because I was with you. When I got back here I was a bit loopy and she tried to 'comfort' me. Big mistake. She found out how over 'nonviolence' I am."

  "Um . . ." Herzer scratched his chin and frowned. "I . . . well we get briefings about combat aftermath. You know, you really need to talk to a counselor . . ."

  "I have been," she smiled. "For damned near a year I've been going to the post-rape trauma groups. I'm actually bucking for a junior counseling spot and Mistress Daneh thinks I can make it." She suddenly frowned again and looked at his prosthetic. "What the hell happened to you? Where's your hand?"

  "McCanoc," Herzer said with a shrug, raising the prosthetic. "It's okay, it's got a little latch for holding my shield, takes all the trouble out of it. Better than a hand in some ways."

  "I didn't know." She frowned again, looking at the clamp and hook of glittering metal.

  "And you work here?" Herzer said, changing the subject.

  "And I work here." She shrugged, still looking at the prosthetic with a troubled expression. "Three nights a week. And the sawmill during the day. So, were you looking for me, or . . . ?"

  "Actually, I was looking for a suit," he admitted. "I haven't been to the bathhouse in a year or two and it's really changed."

  "Not as much as you might think." She smiled. "Some people use them by the pools, but most don't. And, frankly, I don't think we have anything that will fit you."

  "Story of my life," he grumbled.

  "Well, you never were an off-the-rack kind of guy," she said with a grin.

  "I guess I'll go brave the baths then," he said. "I've been in Harzburg for a year and they're . . . pretty uptight about body modesty. I guess some of it rubbed off."

  "Oh, I'm sure you'll get back into the evil ways of Raven's Mill." She grinned again.

  "Well . . . see you later?"

  "Maybe," she said with a shrug. "I'm . . . not sure it would be a good thing to just pick up where we left off. I'm . . . over it but not that far."

  "Believe me, I understand," Herzer said, frowning. "I've never had that particular experience, but I've seen the aftermath enough times. Take care of yourself, and . . . I'm here. Shoulder, bed, sword, okay?"

  "Okay," she said, dimples appearing on her cheeks. "Go have fun."

  "Fun, right," he said, throwing the bag over his shoulder.

  The changing room had altered as well. There were closed stalls for changing; before it had been totally open. And there were two attendants waiting for his clothes and gear. From prior experience he knew he could trust them to not pilfer anything out of the bags so he added his money pouch after a moment's thought. That done, he tucked a towel around his waist firmly and headed through the door marked "Showers."

  More changes. The showers were individual stalls; before they had simply lined one side of the room. There were males and females in the room and when one of the latter, a tall, lithe blonde, came out of a shower stall stark naked he actually started to feel more at home. He still put the towel back on before leaving his own stall.

  Beyond the room was cross corridor with several doors. One was marked "Baths, Male" another "Baths, Female" and a third "Pools." He pushed open the male bathing room and saw a line of large wooden tubs, much like he remembered. There were a few guys in the far tub but the room was otherwise empty. He didn't recognize any of them so he headed for the room marked "Pools."

  He wasn't sure what to expect but it wasn't what he got. The room was long, apparently one large building, the walls made of paneled wood and lined with oil lamps. More oil lamps were hung throughout the room and in several spots there were round fireplaces with metal covers and chimneys to let the smoke out through the roof. The floor was tiled and the "pools" were just that, nine pools of varying sizes scattered around the room. There were benches and low tables as well and most of the people who had been coming in and out apparently gravitated here. The conversation was loud and echoed across the room.

  He stepped through the door and looked around trying to decide what the standard mode of dress was but there didn't seem to be any. Some of the people had on light bathing suits but the majority were naked and there didn't seem to be any discrimination. A blonde in a suit so sheer she might as well have been naked was talking to a male who was. Two guys in bikini bathing suits were talking to the woman who had walked out of the shower starkers. He finally recognized one of the instructors at the Academy and had started across the room when he heard his name screamed and the next moment found his arms filled with naked female.

  He was having such a hard time trying to figure out where to put his hand, and hook, that it took him a moment to recognize her.

  "Shilan!" he yelled. "Damn, it's good to see a familiar face." Hsu Shilan had been part of his apprenticeship class, a lovely trim brunette with whom he'd had an "off-again" relationship until he joined the Blood Lords and basically lost track. Last he'd heard she was a textile designer at one of the mills. She'd put on a bit of weight since then, but since she had been skinny to the point of anorexia it looked good on her. Too good. Herzer found himself stroking her back and wished he had more clothes on.

  "Well, if you'd stay in town for a while," she said, sternly. If she noticed the stroking it was only to lean into it a bit.

  "My master's voice," he replied, carefully removing his hands lest he get a little too enthusiastic. "I go where they tell me. This time it was Harzburg for a year and a half."

  "You haven't met my husband, David," she said, dragging him to one of the pools.

  "Hu
sband?" he squeaked.

  One of the bathers had risen out of a nearby pool and held out his hand.

  "So you're Herzer Herrick," the man said. Herzer noted as he took the hand that it was soft and that he out-massed Shilan's husband by at least twice. So if it came to cases, he could probably punch David through the nearest wall. He still intended to be extremely correct and punctilious. Damnit. The mission in Harzburg meant that he was trying to uphold the reputation of the Federal forces. And although an ancient general had said "A soldier who won't fisk, won't fight," the Harzians were such stuck-up pricks that he'd had to play saintly soldier boy the entire year. It had been a looong year.

  "Shilan has told me an awful lot about you," David continued.

  "It's all lies and damned lies," Herzer said, squatting down as modestly as he could with a towel on. Shilan had slid back into the pool but her breasts, which were noticeably rounder and fuller than the last time Herzer met her, were fully exposed.

  "Come on," Shilan said, waving at the pool. "Jump in. The water's fine."

  "Um . . ." One hundred twenty-eight times three is . . . three times eight, carry the two . . . By the time he was barely a quarter of the way into the equation he'd gotten to the point he wouldn't embarrass himself and he pulled off the towel.

  "See, told you he was hung like an ox," Shilan said with a chuckle.

  So much for not being embarrassed.

  "Yep, the reason we never had a relationship was she saw me in the showers and fainted," Herzer replied with a growl.

  "With excitement, maybe," David laughed. "I see some of us got 'enhanced' before the Fall."

  "Natural genetics," Herzer replied, tightly. "I had the muscles built on, but that was because I had a degenerative condition. I'd worked for them, they just wouldn't stay. When I got cured, I had a bod-mod, but it was only for the muscles. Then I maintained them. The rest is genetics. The size overall and . . . in places."

  "Big hands," Shilan chuckled. "That's what you meant."

  "Hand," Herzer noted, holding up his prosthetic.

  "Sorry," Shilan said, suddenly contrite.

  "Not a problem, it's great for opening beers," Herzer replied with a shrug.

  "You're Herzer Herrick?" The woman from the showers slid into the pool, looking at him with a quizzical frown. She looked to be in her twenties but her movements were so smooth and precise she had to be nearing her first century. "I was expecting someone . . . older."

  "At your service, Mistress . . . ?"

  "Miss," the woman said with a smile. "Stephanie Vega." She held out her hand, reaching across the pool to do so.

  She was blond, a natural apparently or at least with either transformed genetics or very ready in her use of dye, long and slender in the hipless, bustless look that was fashionable pre-Fall. A face that was a little too perfect to be natural. Herzer wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Well, maybe if she was really messy about it.

  "And, yes, I'm Herzer Herrick," Herzer said, giving her his patented big-dumb-goofy grin. To most women big seemed to equal dumb and if dumb was what they wanted, he was their man.

  "The Blood Lord?" she continued, her eyes widening, as if she still didn't quite believe it. Her pupils were dilated so far it was hard to tell she had green eyes.

  "You might say the Blood Lord's Blood Lord," Shilan said somewhat cattily. "When they recruit they ask 'Do you think you can be as good as this?' "

  "I wasn't disbelieving you," Stephanie said, smiling disarmingly as she leaned back against the wall of the pool. "But the stories that you hear . . ."

  "We only eat babies if they're particularly tender," Herzer said. The woman was oozing charm, which suddenly set off alarm bells.

  "Fight until you die and drop and all that," Stephanie said. "You've been out of town?"

  "Harzburg," Herzer said. "Great place to visit, wouldn't want to live there."

  "What were you doing?" Shilan asked.

  "Tarson had declared for New Destiny," Herzer shrugged. "They were raiding Harzburg. Harzburg screamed for help. They got me."

  "One war, one Blood Lord?" Stephanie asked.

  "One minor little campaign," Herzer said with a frown. "They had some issues with their 'support.' They got over it in time."

  "How?" Stephanie asked, leaning forward again and putting her hand on his knee, under the water.

  It had been a long year so he recited some more multiplication tables.

  "Tarson had been sending parties to raid the outlying farms," Herzer said. "Look, do you really want to hear this?"

  "I want all of it," Stephanie said, throatily.

  "I want to hear it, too," David replied when Herzer just looked at her, his face blank and hard.

  He looked up at the ceiling when he realized other people, including the Blood Lord instructor he had seen across the room, had gathered around. He thought about the blood, the hacked remnants of what had been human beings scattered across a farmer's field. He realized what his face must look like so he, with difficulty, slid a friendlier mask onto his face.

  "Tarson had been sending raiding parties out," he repeated, turning to look at Shilan. "They'd burned a couple of the farms in the area that wouldn't, or couldn't, pay their 'taxes.' I took to riding around . . ." He paused and shrugged.

  "Blood Lord training is designed for formation; fighting as an individual is entirely different. But we cross-train." He looked over at the instructor from the Academy who nodded at him. "I'd . . . done more cross training than normal, for that matter. Anyway, I was out at one of the farms, just visiting. I'd been riding around to them, helping out sometimes, meeting people. And there was a scream from outside and Diablo was whinnying." He closed his eyes and tried to smile but it just wouldn't come.

  "The farmers had a daughter, just about eleven. When I got outside some of the Tarson had her on the ground. Others were headed for the house, torches in their hands. I . . . well, it gets pretty blank in that kind of combat. My shield was on Diablo but I was in armor. They weren't." He stopped talking.

  "That's it?" Stephanie said after a long pause. "What's the rest of the story?"

  "The rest of the story is in the after-action report," the instructor said. "Fifteen raiders, motley weapons. Axes, swords, spears. One Blood Lord. You did us proud that day, Lieutenant."

  "Thank you, sir," Herzer said, modestly, trying very hard not to remember. "I don't really remember most of it," he lied.

  "What happened to the girl?" Shilan asked.

  "She's never going to look at slaughtering the same for the rest of her life," the instructor said, grimly.

  "She was fine," Herzer said. "Shaken up, but fine. They hadn't had time to get their pants down much less get stuck in. I talked to her a few times afterwards; she needed to talk it out and she didn't feel like she could with anybody else. She's fine."

  "You're not much of a storyteller are you?" Stephanie asked.

  "It's hard to talk about some things with people who haven't been there," Herzer admitted with a shrug. "The . . . feel of your sword crunching through a rib cage is difficult to describe. What it feels like to have your sword stuck in a corpse's spine while someone is hammering on you with an axe. What a field looks like after you've chopped a dozen human beings into their constituent parts. Having to decide whether to try to save someone's life or just give them mercy."

  "I take it back," Stephanie said, leaning back. "You can feel free to leave out the little details."

  "I didn't care about the ones headed for the house," Herzer said, suddenly loquacious. "If I raised enough of a ruckus they would either run to help or run off. I do remember bowling a couple of them over as I went through, and . . ." He looked up and his right hand made a motion like a butterfly drawn in air. "And a bit more to a couple of others. I made a mistake with the girl, though. I was so angry. The guy who was trying to rape her . . . his teeth chattered on my sword blade like a toy. Chit-chit-chit-chit-chit. That was when it got stuck, in the back of his b
rain really." There were grimaces in the audience but he didn't notice, being somewhere else.

  "I'd kicked one of the guys holding her down on his face but another one was hitting me on the back with an axe. It was just bouncing off my armor so I turned around and punched him and took his axe away. I chopped a space around me and got my sword freed up." He shook his head and shuddered.

  "What?" Shilan asked.

  He shrugged and made a stomping motion as his gripped hands moved back and forth as if he was trying to free something. More grimaces, including from Shilan who clearly wished she hadn't asked the question, and a few of the audience wandered off, hurriedly.

  "Diablo had turned up by that time and I made sure he didn't step on the girl. The ones who had been planning on burning the house were headed back by then and some of them threw spears. I remember one of them bouncing off the armor and another stuck. That just gave me another weapon. I hit them with that for a while, until it broke, then went back to the sword. When there weren't any more people bothering me, or the girl, or my horse, I went over to the spring and cleaned up."

  "Tired?" the instructor asked, professionally.

  "Not really," Herzer said. "A bit of a case of the shakes, but it hadn't taken five minutes, all total." He stopped and shrugged. "It was more like a not particularly intense drill. They weren't very good."

  " 'Nah, fifteen of 'em,' " Stephanie mimicked. " 'Wasn't really what you'd call a fight.' Lord! Brag for God's sake!"

  "Why?" the instructor said, lightly. "I'll admit that it was a tough fight. There are few among the Blood Lords who would have done as well. I doubt that I would have. But for Herzer, yes, it was child's play. He is the Blood Lord's Blood Lord, the icon that we hold up to the students, just as this young lady said. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name," he added.

  "Shilan," Shilan said. "I hadn't realized that you heard."

  "I'd moved over. The point is that the Blood Lords train to do one of three, or all of three, things to their opponents. Outmaneuver them, chop them to ribbons and if all else fails outlast them. We do that partially by being able to rotate units, but the individual Blood Lord is trained to fight, literally, for at least an hour without being significantly fatigued. A five-minute fight—he shouldn't have broken a sweat."