by Diane Carey
Sinking deeper on his knees, Dimion’s arms flopped to his sides. He continued to look at the flowers. “You take too many risks. I know you are the only one who can . . . but this is too many.”
“There’s a difference between taking risks and following a path laid out to be taken!” Shucorion kicked at the flowers. Why did there have to be flowers where buildings should be? “Vellyngaith thinks he’s won. Today I have committed a thousand Blood skilled men and laborers to death, to death, all to make Vellyngaith believe for a while what I told him.”
Sharply, Dimion looked up at him. “Death? Why will they be taken to death?” He blinked around at the innocent planet with its waving stalks and buzzing life. “Here? A safe planet with no disasters?”
“Their death is as certain as if I took this blade and cut their brains myself. Millions have died among Blood Many. A few thousand more . . . that will be the price of curing the Blood Curse. I would willingly die myself to lift the Curse. I may be the one who can break it.”
He paced a few steps away, pressing his hand to his lips.
“What will confound us is if we ourselves end up in a conflict with Federation. I must forestall that if I can . . . and make sure it’s Kauld who are forced to spread themselves thin.”
“Why did you say you would go to Federation?” Dimion asked.
“Because Federation is the key to our future, the breaking of the Blood Curse.”
Dimion’s expression worked from frustration to bafflement. “We can’t change our lot. We’re born to a station, a place in the universe—”
“I know,” Shucorion told him. “But if just one time we confront the haunting curse, stare the animal down . . . we can change our direction. I changed my own direction, didn’t I? Why can’t that happen for Blood Many?” He raised his fists to the mighty sky and called to the fresh white clouds. “Finally after generations of Elliptical Wars, Blood will have an advantage over Kauld! We’ve never had one of those before! If I can delay Federation, then Kauld will establish its fortress and most of their forces will be housed on this planet . . . firmly footed in the path of disaster.”
“Disaster?” Dimion’s eyes swiveled in confusion around the utterly peaceful landscape, the soft sky, the silky meadow, the vibrant soil, unscrubbed by quakes and floods. “How will disaster come to a place like this?”
“I won’t tell you. That risk I will not take. Trust me when I say this . . . by the time Kauld recover, we will be the power here.”
Staring down at the weapon in his hand, Shucorion felt unmanageable power bolt through his arms, as if he could cut out the brain of all his enemies with the toll of a few Blood lives.
“A thousand of our workers . . . that will be the cost of winning,” he said. “But the win will be excellent, Dimion. And final. Now stand up. We have an assault to plan. Federation is coming. We will be in space to meet them.”
In the darkness of the trees, sheltered from the bright sunlight and wide friendly skies of this undamaged world, Battlelord Vellyngaith fell to his knees in the grip of convulsive coughing. His men caught him and held him through the spasms, but theirs would come eventually, and he would be holding them instead, were he still alive. No Kauld warrior could get out of it.
This was the future. Coughing, spitting blood, the pain in his lungs, the shuddering of his heart would come to every Kauld fighting man.
Such a shameful waste. More ghastly than having to humble himself before the Blood avedon.
“Do you trust him?” Fremigoth asked him after the initial spasm had passed.
Vellyngaith winced at the moisture in the soil as it seeped into the fabric around his knee. Suddenly he was cold all over. He wiped blood from the corners of his mouth and eyes. “No, I won’t trust Shucorion yet. The idea that he is digesting anything I say is nonsense. He’s planning to destroy me and I’m planning to destroy him and we both know it. Yet we’ve decided to play this game because there’s someone new coming. He’s planning to betray me. I just don’t know how.”
As he began to relax, his lungs constricted and sent him into a fit of gasping—moisture, he needed moisture—
Fremigoth was before him now, pressing a respirator to the battlelord’s face and infusing pressurized chemicals that Vellyngaith breathed hungrily. Around them, the other men waited, twitching and glancing at each other. This was their future. They knew it. Every one of them would cough out his own lungs eventually and nothing could be done to stop it. He was older than most of these men, and that would save them a little longer than it would save him, though fate was set as firmly for all here, and all the Kauld military men.
Even in the middle of his struggle, Vellyngaith managed to straighten his shoulders and raise his head a little, hoping to give them a feeble hope that they could suffer with dignity and die noble deaths. But they were not accepting his deception any more than Shucorion had.
He pushed away the respirator as his lungs opened finally and he could breathe almost normally. Eventually, the treatment would stop working. For today, though, he could breathe.
He stared at the respirator hovering before him in Fremigoth’s hand.
“What can we do?” he said. “Tell Blood that we’re dying? Tell them that every military man among Kauld carries a lethal dose of contamination? That we condemned ourselves by making experiments on dynadrive? That soon there will be no one to defend the innocent Kauld?”
“Someone like Shucorion might understand. He seems amenable to a truce.”
“You are the physician, Fremigoth! You’re supposed to make me understand first, and you haven’t done that.”
“I’ve tried,” Fremigoth complained. “You don’t understand science any better than I understand why Shucorion would truce with us so willingly.”
“Submolecular levels and antimatter shifts? Cell desiccation and tissue fissures? I’m not a man of science. These are mysteries to me, that these things happen. But it’s no mystery to me that Shucorion is not trucing with us. He’s pretending.”
“He is?”
“Of course. He knows I haven’t told him everything. He’s wondering why our home planet is all at once not good enough for us. He’s right—it makes no sense to move if we have a perfectly good planet. Why would we build another base? To him, now that we have star-drive, all we Kauld have to do is wait, and we’ll win. Blood can’t prevail over us now, not with dynadrive preventing them a resting period. Neither of us speaks of it, but one civilization or the other will end up dead. Because of dynadrive, we must completely destroy Blood or they will destroy us. If they find out that all our military men are soon to die—”
His own voice drummed in his head. The truths, the ugly facts, the unavoidable fate were needles boring into his skin. Add to that the humiliation of having to approach Shucorion at all, and he felt he was convulsing his own pride away.
Still wheezing, he choked, “What can I tell him? Can I say that our army has condemned itself with experiments that caused leakage? We breathed in our own doom? That one day Fremigoth of the Physicians came walking in and told us we were all going to die? Can I tell Shucorion that we need Blood navigators to lead our fleet so we can face Federation soon, while we have the strength?”
Fremigoth had no mind for tactical matters and only frowned at Vellyngaith’s words, not knowing what to say to make his battlelord feel better. “This is the way of nature sometimes. Sickness, mistakes, mutations . . .”
“Not even a battle,” Vellyngaith miserated. “Soldiers should die in body-wrenching action. Battles, explosions, warfare. Not like this, not cell mutation . . . altered reality on the submolecular level . . . you’ve explained it to me again and again and still I can’t envision the thing that will kill me and every one of my men. I always thought I would understand the thing that finally killed me, that I would be fighting it at the time. How can I fight this?”
With a shake of his graying head, Fremigoth said nothing more, but held the respirator in front of the battle
lord for another lung treatment.
Lung treatments. What a pitiful way for a battlelord to live.
Vellyngaith pushed away the physician’s ministrations and glared into the trees, through them, beyond them.
“Shucorion could see I was desperate. He would never digest such a one-sided truce. I expected him to come back with conditions, but he turned out to be more reasonable than I anticipated. Something about his agreeableness ...”He turned to Fremigoth. “Does this thing affect our minds?”
Fremigoth scowled. “No, unfortunately. We’ll all be aware to the last. We’ll start losing men in larger numbers very soon.”
“So early?”
“Some. More later. All of us by two cycles more.”
In a bolt of fury and anger he shoved himself to his feet and threw off the support of his men.
“The misery of it! We had this star-drive! We were going to destroy them and be done with conflict! Finally finished! Now we have this!”
“We have all faced death,” Fremigoth told him. “All Kauld understand that conflict is the way for us and Blood Many. What else can there be but trouble and trial?”
Vellyngaith closed his eyes tightly and gritted his teeth. “My death is not the problem. I am the most lauded battlelord in seven generations. Didn’t you see the fear behind Shucorion’s eyes? Yet I am a loser.”
“How can you say that, Battlelord? No one is as great as Vellyngaith in the eyes of All Kauld.”
“Vellyngaith is a failure in the eyes of Vellyngaith. I am responsible for protecting All Kauld and I have not done that. Things are bunching up before me. Somehow I must kill all Blood and all Federation. Either I die a failure or I die a slaughterer, but I will die. And so will you. All of us here, and thousands more soldiers who were at the base that month . . . that horrid month when we lived in ignorance as a simple leak was marauding us, making us sick. All the soldiers we have. All we have!”
Around him the eyes of his men, their pity and stiff-jawed acceptance, caused him more pain than the convulsions and coughing and bleeding from the eyes. They were brave men, faced with the prospect of dying in a sorry and hopeless way.
Furious, he threw the cloth to the ground. The moist blood instantly attracted several tiny insects who lit and feasted. His eyes blurred as he stared down at the little gathering swarm of blue wings and happy pincers.
Blood. They were like those insects. Work, work, even when there is no hope. Work, until your enemy has no hope, until something turns your way.
“Nauseating,” he grumbled, “to shame myself, to ask that Kauld and Blood join to keep Federation from gaining a toehold in our cluster. What a lie, Fremigoth. I’m not used to lying. For the army of the Kauld, though, we have no fear anymore. We are an army of the dead. All we can do is make sure there is an army of the young to protect our people when we’re gone. We must build off our world, Fremigoth.”
He gripped a low-slung branch from the nearest tree, lacerating his hands on the spiny bark, and shook it. The pain did not register except to sharpen his awareness. Above him, the tree’s crisp silver leaves laughed.
“What if our mistake had been bigger?” he thought aloud. “We might’ve wiped out our entire race instead of just our military men. We must build a new place for the young and strong to be trained. Build a new army to replace us, in a place where another disaster like this will not threaten the populace. And I must make sure there is no Blood army and no Federation army to threaten All Kauld after we’re gone. From this day on, I will work as hard as a Blood. I will be like Blood until I die.”
Having made that decision, convinced himself that this was the best course, no matter how distasteful or against tradition, Vellyngaith drew a sustaining breath now that he could get one and stomped past Fremigoth and through the other men to lead them out of these woods with only one cursory comment that would echo in his mind for his remaining months.
“Life is butchery.”
Chapter Nineteen
“WHO IS THIS? Who are they? Tell me they belong to you!”
Tu of the Orions grasped Billy Maidenshore by one arm and shook him physically.
Maidenshore also gawked out the viewport on the Orion ship and knew they all had good reason to be afraid. They had approached the Federation beacon at the lightship Hatteras, ignoring hails from the lightship keeper, who demanded they identify themselves. Much depended upon their not identifying themselves. The lightship probably had limited analytical abilities when it came to ships, since that wasn’t its primary purpose. Unless they told him who they were, the lightship keeper would have no way to identify them as Orions this far out.
Even now the lightship was beyond visual range.
Not so the twenty or more alien ships that had come out of Gamma Night and surrounded them.
“How did they come to us during the Dark period!” Tu demanded. “Who are they? Tell me now or die now! Twenty against two!”
He was mad. He’d been mad for weeks, always on the edge of slaughtering Maidenshore for no particular good reason. Only quick thinking and dangling that carrot had kept Maidenshore’s neck in one piece.
Now he had to think fast again. He peered out the viewport at the flock of unrecognizable blue-hulled enemy vessels.
Obviously battle-oriented ships—small, quick, built for agility, lots of round or tubular construction, but maneuverable on an axis. Those weren’t freighters or transports, or any other kind of utility ship. Even from here the weapons ports showed, and the size of the engine chambers displayed that thrust power was important.
Maidenshore digested every possibility and picked the one that worked for him. He looked at Tu and puffed up like a bird.
“Still think I didn’t have a plan?”
“Liar,” Tu accused. “Look at them! They’re not hailing us!”
“They don’t need to. I can signal them from a device implanted right here in the palm of my hand. See this birthmark? It’s not a birthmark. It’s an embedded signaler. Don’t touch it. Still think I didn’t have this all arranged? You don’t understand humans.”
I meant for the ship to burst into flames. It’s my burst-into-flames plan. Your head is falling off? All part of the plan.
Doubt, suspicion, desperation played in Tu’s excuse for eyes. Maidenshore had learned to read those milky orbs over the past weeks.
“I move my thumb just right,” he went on, wiggling his fingers, “and it signals them, and they destroy you.”
Thousands of light-years from his home, the Orion commander shuddered. No Orion had ever come so far or ever wanted to. He had come out of fear, out of temptation, and because Billy Maidenshore had seemed to deliver most of what he said he could, with only the little problem of Jim Kirk having come in to botch the success. The thunderous din of events spinning so fast around him had Tu by the face. Maidenshore just kept feeding him whatever he wanted to hear, or expected to hear.
“Let me go talk to them. You got a universal translator on this bucket? Give it to me and beam me over there. Once they find out it’s me, everything’ll be fine.”
Assuming, of course, there was air over there. Right now that was his biggest risk. If he stayed here much longer, he wouldn’t need to breathe anyway.
Threatened beyond reason, Tu and his men asked no more questions. They wanted action after weeks in space, heading toward a thready signal beacon from a Federation source, possessing no clear idea of what would come to them from this line of action, knowing only that they could not go home empty-handed. Maidenshore had found his salvation in their fear. By telling them only select parts of the truth, he had been able to manipulate them completely. All his life he had used the simple trait that, generally speaking, people didn’t want to think for themselves. These Orions were no more a special exception than the colonists had been. The formula still worked.
Incredible. They’re beaming me over. I can’t lose.
A swirl of activity, a bubble of Orion transporter technology, and Maidens
hore was whisked from the cusp of danger to the unknown alien ship, the lead ship of the twenty surrounding them.
It was the wrong ship. At least the aliens weren’t spiny blobs or some kind of wagging eyeball hanging from the roof. Human-looking, give or take some color changes. A little fast talking brought Maidenshore to the blue stooge running that ship, and pretty soon there was a docking maneuver.
And pretty soon after that, the leader of the alien fleet was walking toward him on some kind of curved deck.
“Who are you?” the perplexed leader asked.
“Depends,” Maidenshore told him. “Who are you first?”
“I am Shucorion. Are you Federation?”
“Me? One of those plundering demons? Never!”
“Then who?”
“My name’s Maidenshore. I came here with those two ships out there to head off the armada.”
A strong-looking thug with dark brown eyes and hair like a mahogany bannister, Shucorion didn’t even try to hide his surprise. “Armada? You mean the fleet from Federation? They come to settle in the cluster, we hear.”
“Settle?” Maidenshore gave him a façade of affront. “Oh, you poor fools . . . you’ve believed the lies, haven’t you? I thought if I came out far enough, I could escape the misguidedness. I guess I was wrong.”
“There is another explanation?”
“Is there! It’s all a deception. All set up to deceive those poor people on the transport ships. They think they’re coming out here to settle a planet, but it’s all a lie.”
“Explain further,” Shucorion invited. “What about settling a planet is a lie?”
“All of it!” Maidenshore exclaimed. “That armada is led by one large fighting ship, two other warships, and four hired killer ships. They’re bringing over sixty thousand slaves with them in transports. The story of settling a colony is all a ruse to get those people out here without a struggle. They’ve all been hypnotized, drugged into submission. All the tapes, all the broadcasts and emissions, files and logs are set up to fool the people on those ships and anybody else they run into. This is the work of the most corrupt, oppressive force in our part of the galaxy. They’ve destroyed or enslaved every planet they’ve come upon, and now they’re coming out here to take over your star cluster. They’re moving out here because they’ve raped and plundered their way across our side of the galaxy. You people, you’re next!”