by H. T. Kofruk
“What do you mean ‘replaced’?” said Paul with a look of disbelief.
The pudgy face of Colonel Aramian was scrunched up to form an expression of triumph. His beady eyes were gleaming and dimples had formed on his cheeks due to his grinning mouth. “I’m sorry, Camileri” he said in a silky tone that suggested that he was anything but sorry. “You have failed us multiple times. In the past two months, we have not been able to budge the lines. Those mountains in the horizon are supposed to be ours.”
Paul gave the Orthodox liaison officer a brooding look. He was well aware that the Orthodox colonel was trying to discredit the Catholics by not providing sufficient air support. In the past four encounters, no Orthodox Storm fighters had arrived, only swarms of low-AI drones that were quickly destroyed by Peace Alliance Cobras. “Replaced by who? Your own useless ground troops?” he said quietly.
The smug grin hadn’t wiped off as Paul had wanted. “Why, another race of intelligent aliens, of course!”
The expression ‘intelligent alien’ made Paul grip Lordswroth. Everyone in the Grey Catholic Army detested that reference since it suggested that they didn’t belong on Earth.
“Uh-uh-uh” said Aramian wagging his finger. “You have been relieved, General Camileri, as have your comrades fighting in Europe. You will all be sent back to the dirty patch of land you call Constantine.”
Paul had been injured in the last battle for Mount Lebanon. He had decided to leave Magdalena behind since she tended to be noisy and the operation needed silence. It had been a night of heavy snow which made the enemy’s motion detectors close to useless. The Grey Army soldiers had given up their reluctance to wearing camouflage and painted their armour with environment-detecting coating which turned matte white in the snowy darkness. The covert infiltration behind enemy lines had seemed almost successful but for a very surprising low-tech solution: bells. Thin strings had been tied between the giant cedar trees with tiny bells hanging on them. The first bell had been muffled by the snow-filled air. The second had created an explosion of enemy troops when the Catholics were climbing one of the steepest slopes.
The battle had been brief and tragic for the Catholics, once again. Paul scanned amid the chaos the enemy for signs of Adam’s killer but couldn’t be sure of anything. The killer had taken Adam’s sword and had been sighted using it against Grey Monks. The thought enraged Paul. A Saracen using a Catholic blade to kill Catholics!
The Catholic position was tactically disadvantageous, on a steep slope with limited view of the enemy while the enemy could attack them from two ridges on either side of them from elevated positions. His troops sustained heavy casualties in the first few minutes before artillery and gas covered their positions. He was well that the best thing to do was to retreat swiftly with his men. His obsession with confronting Adam’s killer, however, clouded his judgement and he lingered on, hoping to spot him. Finally, the residual impact waves from a pulse rocket explosion were enough to throw him against a foot-thick cedar tree, breaking its trunk in two.
He couldn’t remember how exactly he got off that slope but was later amazed to learn that his thigh bone had been broken in two places. He set the bone himself and then injected a healing solution made of calcium, regenerative compound and other chemicals into his thigh.
Standing in front of the grinning colonel, Paul knew he shouldn’t put too much strain on his right leg for at least another three days until it was completely healed. The bones had fused well but he could still feel a slight pain if he changed directions too abruptly. He seriously considered, nonetheless, enduring the pain as he sliced the fat neck in one quick motion aided by swivelling his torso and knees. Lordswroth would delight in the meal of protein-rich blood of the well-fed officer.
Aramian seemed to read his mind. He stretched his neck out as if to invite the blade. “You want to take a swipe? You want to embed that blade of bacteria in me?”
“I don’t want to embed it in you. I want to cut you in two” replied Paul.
“That would effectively mean the end of you, your men, your families, everyone you knew and loved. The continent of Constantine would become a grey wasteland from fifty nuclear strikes.”
Paul didn’t know what to say. If they indeed intended to replace the Grey Army, Catholic utility to the Earth Campaign was limited. The threat of nuclear annihilation was not farfetched.
Aramian saw the hesitation and frustration in Paul’s face. He decided to soften his tone and coax the knight into giving up without a struggle. “All you need to do is pack up your operation, take your men, your beasts and your weapons and our transport vessel will take you back to Tolsgrad. You’ll be back in your monastery before you know it. There’s no need for you to suffer and die on this planet that you don’t even know.”
Paul thought about going back to his little monastery on the southern peninsula of Constantine. He missed the kindly old abbot who had taken him in when he was a child. He recalled his first meeting with the young Sir Adam Balo who had been only in his early twenties but was already well known for his combat prowess. Adam had tussled Paul’s shaven head when he told him that he would become his squire. Paul the Orphan had become Paul the Squire, a future knight of the Grey Order.
Adam had been a strict but loving master. Like all Grey Knights, he had yearned for a glorious return to Earth, the planet of Jesus. The same yearning had been instilled in Paul, and it gave him reason to train until his hands bled and to pray until he had to be helped up from his kneeling position. Winning back Earth had been a simple enough goal, fighting alongside those the Catholics considered their brethren, the Orthodox. Hard-liners within the Catholic Church and the Grey Army had often argued for more independence from the Orthodox since they were, in a strict sense, heretics, however much the two Christian faiths had in common.
The Orthodox had given sanctuary to the Catholics from the brutal onslaught of the One God cult. But that didn’t mean the Catholics were servants to the Orthodox; they were their own masters with their own goals. Secret programs had been initiated to gain space-faring technology but were discovered by the Orthodox, sending top Grey Knights and papal emissaries grovelling at Slavic feet. The only technological advances that were permitted by the Orthodox were ground-battle weaponry augmentation.
Paul and Adam had always been critical of the radical movements within the Church. As fellow Christians with the same roots, he had always advocated working with the Orthodox. He was persuaded that focusing on ground military tactics was the surest way of gaining trust and recognition from the Slavs. The glorious cooperation between the two faiths would one day give them the mutual gift of peace in Europe. How naïve he had been.
A retreat from the Earth campaign would mean that Catholic preparation for the past centuries would have been for nothing. They would be discarded by the Orthodox and any hope to regain their ancestral home would disappear like the sun behind dark clouds.
No. He couldn’t just let Earth slip between his fingers. Three hundred years of preparation and blind loyalty to the Orthodox Empire had to stand for something. If the Orthodox couldn’t help them regain a home on Earth, then the Grey Knights of Constantine would have to lead the Catholics to find another way. He could feel Lordswroth shivering slightly as the blade sensed his bloodlust. The organic weapon had not been fed for weeks.
Without actually showing any outside movement, he stretched his muscles and then coiled them like a cobra ready to strike. With one fluid motion to the temple, he would cleave the Orthodox bureaucrat’s head in two.
A split second before he reacted, the ground started to rumble violently. He momentarily lost balance but regained it straight away as he watched the ground suddenly move like a tidal sea. Out of instinct he jumped back a few paces only to see a large hand emerge from the ground where he had just stood. He quickly scanned his surroundings and saw one of the Catholic soldiers being pulled down into the ground while another was dragged and then thrown by an impossibly fast enemy. The
emerging hand a few paces away soon became a brown blur as its owner exploded out of the earthen ground.
Paul had already drawn Lordswroth, humming quietly from hyper-vibration. Whatever had emerged from the ground was now running – or flying- at him with blurry speed. He jumped aside and swung his sword in an upward arc. The brown alien, visible now that it was no longer moving, had stopped ten feet from Paul. He realized that he was at last encountering the mysterious alien used by the Chinese. He smiled at the irony of finally meeting his Chinese counterpart; both of them were ‘intelligent aliens’ being used as slave-soldiers. We finally meet, brother.
He noticed that the alien was missing its left forearm and purple-brown blood was flowing from the clean amputation. Lordswroth seemed to be relishing the strange new blood and vibrated faster. The alien shrieked and leapt in the air. When it came down with the force of several tons, Paul had already moved several paces to his left. He swung his sword at the alien’s knee, hoping to be able to slow it down. The alien jumped and dodged the swing and attempted to kick Paul’s head. His gauntleted hand became numb at the force of the blow after narrowly blocking it.
The kick was just a fake, however, and the alien’s second vicious blow came from its intact right fist which was as big as Paul’s head. He managed to duck but the punch caught the top of his helmet, enough to send him sprawling twenty feet away. Struggling to get back on his feet but dazed from the glancing blow, he slipped and found himself on his rump. He shook his head quickly to get the stars out of his vision and searched for the alien who had disappeared. All he could see was Colonel Aramian surrounded by his soldiers grinning at him. Carnage was occurring around them as hundreds of Grey Monks struggled to fight off an almost invisible army, more often losing. Amputated limbs and disembowelled stomachs littered the Catholic camp.
Again through pure instinct, Paul gripped Lordwroth and pointed it in the air. A brown blur caught the corner of his eye and soon materialized into the brown alien. It had pounced on him, only to find the geratinium blade go through its chest and back. At first, the alien looked surprised. But then it looked as if it had just come into consciousness, only to discover that it was soon going to die. A look of profound confusion and sadness spread on the alien’s brown face. Its yellow eyes drooped and Paul was suddenly aware that despite their appearance, the aliens were mere children. As soon as the thought occurred, however, the alien’s expression turned to a murderous scowl and it lifted its right hand to deliver a blow.
With all his might Paul pried out the sword, the action giving acute pain to the alien who gave a loud shriek. As he expected, the alien swung its right fist in a deadly but clumsy hook that Paul avoided by arching his back. When he straightened his torso, he swivelled on the ball of his right foot, twisted his waist and brought down his sword with his strong shoulders in a final two-handed swing. If the alien had been human, it would have suffered a broken collar bone followed by a slice through the heart, rib-cage, lung and liver. He couldn’t be sure that the blow fatal to any human would have the same effect on an alien with a completely different physiology. Upon seeing the alien groan painfully and kneel on the ground, he knew it had.
He would never forget the all-too human expression of the alien in the seconds before it died. Adam had told him a story when he was an adolescent five years into his status as squire. A couple years after being knighted, Adam had been walking in the metropolis of New Volgograd on Nazaret, the largest continent on Tolsgrad. New Volgograd had been and still was a tough city with gangs of colonists constantly at war with each other. A group of men attacked Adam, not knowing that he could easily kill all of them with his bare hands even if they were armed to the teeth. It had been dark and Adam hadn’t known that they were just young boys. He immobilized two of them with well-placed pressure point strikes and knocked out a third with a non-fatal punch to the temple. He hadn’t anticipated the fourth who came out of the dark shouting curses at him. His reflexes kicked in faster than his judgment as he fatally struck the boy with a fist to the throat, instantly dislodging his windpipe. The boy had cried and begged as he suffocated and died with a blue face. The guilt of killing that boy had haunted Sir Adam Balo. Paul knew that killing the brown alien would haunt him too.
***
The transit from Tolsgrad to Earth was a journey that technically covered four thousand light years. With wormhole creation, a tunnel was drilled through time-space that made the journey almost instantaneous. Sir Clovis Unther didn’t understand at all the science behind wormhole manipulation; all he knew was that creating one required the full energy from a fusion reactor and that despite improvements in recent decades, travelling through wormholes was still potentially risky.
The Orthodox Navy had the highest accident rate due to wormhole travel in spite of having some of the most advanced warships. In fact, it was almost double the accident rate of the Atlantic Alliance Navy, which was about one accident every two thousand wormhole transits. What was even more striking was the severity of the accidents in the Orthodox Navy; last year they had lost one cruiser and one destroyer including all crew members. The number of smaller transport vessels and freight ships destroyed was in the low teens every year. Safety standards were not stringent and recklessness was abundant in the Orthodox military. Clovis often wondered whether this general contempt for any safety measure was a cultural trait. All it took really was staying clear of the edges of the wormhole, which would rip apart any vessel no matter the size, and waiting for it to be sufficiently large before entering.
The second highest-ranking Grey Knight and General of the Grey Army was being transported in the Orthodox Navy transport vessel, the Pristina, with two hundred other knights and almost one hundred thousand Grey Monks. Transport vessels were not for long journeys and were in fact just large flying boxes, unlike cruisers or other warships that were designed for deployments that could amount to several years. Hence, the Pristina wasn’t a comfortable ship and the thousands of Catholic soldiers only had cots to lie on and footlockers for their belongings.
Despite the fact that a wormhole transit took less than one minute, the entire journey would take eight days. The Orthodox Navy had a hub-and-spoke system where all wormholes would lead to one of the thirteen hub-stations, and then travelling ships had to take another wormhole to go to another hub, and if the destination was remote, a final wormhole would take them from the second hub to their final destination. Even though Tolsgrad was the most Earth-like of all the Orthodox-colonised planets, it was not a hub so the transport vessel had to take one wormhole transit to the Khmelnytsky System and then wait seven days before a second wormhole would take them to Earth. The fact that a war was underway didn’t seem to matter to the bureaucrats in charge of scheduling wormhole openings.
The Khmelnytsky System had fourteen planets orbiting two suns. None of the six rocky planets were habitable but two of them were home to the some of the biggest mines within Orthodox territory. Clovis never learned what they mined exactly even though he had taken part in a small war with the Pacific Federation over control of the mines. He touched the scar that ran from his right brow to left cheek. Coming back to the Khmelnytsky System seemed to make the scar feel raw again, after almost three decades. He would never forget the battle fought in one of the six wormhole stations in the system during which he acquired his most physically distinguishing trait.
Despite the Spartan conditions on the ship, the Grey Army soldiers were not permitted to leave. But Clovis knew that the Knights of the Grey Order and the Grey Monks were not unused to lack of facilities. Most would pass the time strengthening their bodies or their faith. Clovis picked up his own tattered leather-bound Bible. He had received several new prints of the Holy Book but was partial to the old one that had been given to him by his own master when Clovis had been just a young squire.
Unlike most of the Bibles in circulation among the Catholic population, Clovis’ was in Classical Latin. New Esperanto, a language constructed on Lati
n but with a much simpler grammatical structure inspired by a twentieth century constructed language, was the main medium of communication on Constantine. Very few of the clergy and Grey Order spoke any form of Classical Latin due to its devilishly difficult grammar. But Clovis particularly appreciated all the subtleties that could only be conveyed by such complication.
God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
The pages of the Book of Genesis were particularly worn out since they happened to be Clovis’ favourite. They renewed his sense of purpose. Regaining their home from which they had been chased like frightened mice was all that mattered.
Further reading was made impossible by the sudden veil of darkness as all the lights went out. The darkness was total and he could only hear the voices of the other knights with which he shared a room. Despite being in his late fifties, Clovis had excellent hearing and hid his alarm at not being able to hear the ubiquitous whirring of life-support systems. He got up from his cot and felt his way to his footlocker from which he took out a small but powerful flashlight. The eleven other knights, two of whom had been knighted just weeks earlier, flinched at the sudden light.