Kingdom's Swords

by David Sherman

  "Well, yes... yes. Ahem. Things only happen through the will of Allah, His name be praised." Ayatollah Shammar nodded respectfully at his Buddhist and Hindu colleagues. "But what we have here, I think, is purely a political situation. For many years the Confederation has been dissatisfied with the way we run things on our beloved Kingdom. They are unable, under the rules of their Constitution, to interfere directly in our affairs," he shrugged, "but were we for some reason to ask for their military assistance," he paused, "they would have a foothold on our world. The camel's nose, so to speak, would then be firmly under our tent."

  "Well, that is just what we have done!" Preachintent protested. The request for military assistance from the Confederation had been made during his own chairmanship.

  "Individually, there are many things we cannot see, but collectively," Shammar shrugged, "our vision is clear."

  "Then why didn't any of you speak up during the last Convocation?" Bishop Ralphy Bruce muttered as he went back to drumming his fingers.

  "We will give them the foothold they want," Shammar continued. "We will then direct their forces against the sects that have been giving us trouble." He smiled. "We are not without allies in the Confederation. Once the designs of their government are known, we can lobby for a complete withdrawal of their forces. The Confederation government in Fargo may sometimes operate in violation of its own Constitution, but its Congress is jealous of its prerogatives, and the Confederation is a democracy. Policy set by any democratic power is fickle, subject to the whims of the peoples' representatives. If we stick together in this, we can achieve the goal we all have always wanted—the complete destruction of the heretical sects."

  "Brothers, I hear you and I will go along with you," Bishop Ralphy Bruce said. "Now, brothers, I know you think I'm just an uneducated country preacher"—the others protested this loudly—"but you have seen the destruction, talked to the survivors! This terror is not the work of Confederation military forces! There is something about what is happening out there that is... is..."

  "Otherworldly?" Shammar interjected. "We all believe in the spiritual, Brother Ralphy Bruce, but I assure you, these attacks are strictly of this world. But if they are a sign from Allah, His name be praised, who is He using as His agent, then? Can you answer me that? What force is the Almighty employing that works like armored fighting vehicles?"

  The four men fell silent. Bishop Ralphy Bruce Preachintent stared at his fingers. "I do not know," he answered softly, "and really, neither do any of us."

  "The second best thing Creadence did was to get the hell out of here," Jayben Spears, newly arrived ambassador to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles, told Prentiss Carlisle, his chief-of-station. "And how damned smart was I to take this job, eh?" Spears laughed.

  "Well, sir, I didn't get to know him that well. I was only here a month between the time Harly Thorogood died and Ambassador Creadence was transferred."

  "Ah..." Spears waved his hand and poured them both more Reindeer ale. "I got used to this stuff when I was ambassador to Wanderjahr," he remarked as he poured. "I worked closely with Ted Sturgeon there, as you know. Thirty-fourth FIST is based on Thorsfinni's World, and they drink this animal piss by the gallon. It's pretty good too, once you get by the taste."

  "I've got to tell you, sir," Carlisle couldn't suppress a laugh, "you really stunned old Lambsblood, the way you greeted Brigadier Sturgeon." They both laughed. Carlisle couldn't help remembering the astonished look on the general's face as Ambassador Spears slapped Brigadier Sturgeon on the back and they traded comradely insults like old friends. "Well," Carlisle continued with an effort, "we all thought you were going to retire after Wanderjahr, sir."

  "Me too. But let me tell you something, Prentiss—my rank is Diplomatic Service One. Do you know how much a DS1 earns?" Spears laughed. "But I'm retiring after this assignment, that's for goddamned sure!" They drank. "So tell me, Prentiss, what's the take on this—this goddamned rathole? What are the sky pilots down here up to? I got the full intelligence brief before I came out here, but you've been on the ground. What's your view?"

  Prentiss shrugged and set his mug down. "Thorogood knew something, sir, but he didn't get a chance to pass it on. But from my short time here, my perspective is that, as usual, the powerful sects are trying to wipe out their lesser competitors. They're the ones who've been destroying these villages. Note that none of the places ravaged belong to any of the dominant sects. So they put the finger on some unspecified rogue member world of the Confederation as the culprit, and call us in to wipe out their main competitors, plus anyone else they don't feel like slaughtering themselves."

  "But the so-called Army of God has taken some heavy casualties, Prentiss. That's beyond dispute."

  "Yes, sir, but each of these sects has its own military force. The place abounds with small armies. I think the five major sects got together, pooled their resources, and then set the planetary army up to be the fall guys."

  "They ambushed their own troops?"

  "Yessir. That's the way I see it anyway. Sir, you have to remember, this place is a ‘theocracy,’ but the only thing these people believe in is power for themselves. They'll do anything to get it and keep it. That's why they're so afraid of dissidents with new ideas. The theocrats, through this Collegium thing—nothing more than a damned inquisition, you ask me—control both the minds and the bodies of their adherents. Then comes along this City of God movement—"

  "Neo-Puritans," Spears interrupted.

  "Yessir. They really believe the crap they preach, say that for them. But they're crazy. And they're a threat to the ruling sects."

  Spears was silent as he sipped his beer. "Well," he said at last, and grinned, "You know what the first best thing was that old Doc Friendly did? He asked for the Marines. Let me tell you, Prentiss, that was the best thing that ever happened to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles, whether they know it or not. Ever read anything by C. S. Lewis, Prentiss?"

  "Can't say I ever heard of him, sir."

  "Well, he wrote somewhere—his Screwtape Letters, I think—that when the Puritans lost their influence, people ceased to believe in the devil anymore, and that was the best thing that ever happened to the devil. Do you think the devil is operating here on Kingdom, Prentiss?"

  "I sure do, sir, and his name is Jebel Shammar."

  Chapter Thirteen

  When contact finally came, it wasn't the battalion's right front corner that made it, it was the center of the formation's rear. All of M Company had followed a stream so sluggish it was nearly stagnant. Some of the Marines waded through it, probing its depths and its banks for anything or anyone hiding in its murkiness. They didn't probe deeply enough through the tangled buttress roots of the trees that lived dangerously atop a deeply undercut section of bank, and so missed what hid there. When the sensors on the sides of the Leader commanding the twenty Fighters who hid within the roots told him the Earthmen were all past, he gave the signal and his Fighters swam into the stream. Some of them stood in the chest-deep water; most slithered up the banks.

  Second platoon, which had lost much of its strength so horrendously when Dragon 3 exploded, was rear guard. PFC Zhaque, the rearmost Marine in the column, wasn't experienced enough for walking backward to be second nature for him, the way it was for experienced rear points, so he was facing front when the Skinks came out of hiding and he didn't see them. Lance Corporal Schindigh, the Marine in front of him, on the other hand, was experienced enough to automatically maintain contact with the column and the rear point. Schindingh was also facing forward when the Skinks emerged from the water, but he turned around an instant before the Leader shrilled the command for his Fighters to open fire.

  "Behind us!" The sound of Schindigh's voice was drowned out in the crack-sizzle of his blaster as he opened fire on the Skinks. He dove for the ground as he fired, and his gaping jaw slammed shut when he hit—the Skink he'd snap-fired at was hit a glancing blow and flared up in a f
lash of fire. Schindigh's shock at the sight had popped his mouth open. When it was jarred closed, he bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood. The shock and pain distracted him just long enough for a Skink to point its weapon's nozzle and send a streamer of greenish fluid toward him. He saw it coming in time and rolled out of the way, but more Skinks were spraying in his direction and he was hit by two streams. He screamed.

  Zhaque, meanwhile, stood frozen for long seconds before he dropped. Five Skinks fired toward him, and three of their streams hit. He died agonizingly within seconds.

  The remaining Marines of M Company's second platoon scrambled to face the threat from their rear. Captain Boonstra, the company commander, raced back to eyeball the situation. As he ran he ordered his other two platoons to maneuver to his flanks. He got there just in time to see a Skink flare up from a blaster hit.

  He'd heard that someone flashed like that the first time his company encountered this enemy, but hadn't believed it.

  Only two Marines from second platoon were still fighting. Boonstra called for his other two platoons to get into position fast-fast-fast!

  Sergeant Janackova and his squad were the first to get on line with the company commander. They couldn't see where the enemy was.

  "Range?" Janackova asked into his helmet comm.

  "Thirty," Boonstra snapped back.

  "Volley, thirty," Janackova ordered his squad. "NOW!" The Marines aimed and fired as one. A line of mud and wet foliage steamed up when the seven bolts hit. "FIRE!" Janackova ordered again. Another seven bolts shot forward, raising more steam and a little black smoke where they hit.

  Another squad from M Company's first platoon reached the line and joined in the volley fire. They were greeted by a brilliant flash as another Skink flared into vapor. In another moment all of M Company was on line, volley firing into the swamp to the battalion's rear. There were more flashes from vaporizing Skinks, and the screams of wounded and dying Marines punctuated the firing. Flames began to flicker in the scorched foliage.

  When he didn't see any more flashes for fifteen seconds, Boonstra ordered the volleys adjusted to forty meters. Then he ordered, "Scatter fire!" and the Marines ceased their disciplined fire in favor of bolts shot in random patterns.

  Soon no more streams of greenish fluid sprayed at them from the front, no more lights flashed. A cloud of steam grew in the canopy as flames from dried foliage licked higher.

  "Cease fire!" Boonstra ordered. He studied his company's front while he reported to Commander van Winkle.

  The fire team and squad leaders gathered their casualty reports and gave them to their platoon commanders, who relayed the reports to the company command element. Captain Boonstra's heart sank when he got them. Second platoon was dead, only one member of it left uninjured. Half of the survivors of the destroyed Dragon were dead, and the rest were wounded by the acid. Most of the wounded needed immediate evacuation. His other platoons were in better shape, but his company was down to half strength.

  "On your feet," he ordered, doing his best to keep the pain of the losses out of his voice. "We're going to sweep that area and look for bodies. If you find anybody alive, try to keep them that way, we need prisoners to question."

  The Marines of M Company rose to their feet and cautiously moved back the way they'd come. They found scorched spots where Skinks had flared up, but there were no bodies to be found, much less live ones to be taken prisoner.

  "Yessir, that's affirmative," Captain Boonstra reported to Commander van Winkle. "I saw it myself, they flashed into vapor when they were hit."

  "You actually saw bodies hit and flare up?"

  Boonstra hesitated for a moment. "Nossir, not exactly. I saw the flashes, but I never actually saw one of the enemy."

  "So you don't know positively that the—" van Winkle hesitated. Who were they really up against? Was it the Skinks Company L's third platoon had encountered on Society 437? What were they doing here? Why did they attack without apparent cause? "—the people you fought were vaporized. The flashes could have been magnesium flares and they dragged off all their dead and wounded." Van Winkle didn't doubt for an instant that the Marines of M Company inflicted casualties on the foe they fought.

  "That's right, sir." But Boonstra was convinced that the flashes he'd seen were made by the enemy, whoever they were, vaporizing when they were hit.

  "All right. The battalion is continuing into the swamp."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  "Dragons are on their way to take your casualties out. Catch up with us as soon as they do. And this time make damn sure your rear point is watching the rear. I don't want any more surprises like that one."

  In a single afternoon one of his companies was reduced to little more than half strength. In all his years as a Marine, van Winkle had rarely seen a company hit that hard in so short a time.

  Four Dragons, almost enough to carry an entire company, arrived. The dead Marines were stacked in one, and the wounded were divided among the other three, where corpsmen kept them stabilized on the way out of the swamp. The remainder of M Company watched the Dragons leave, then hurried to catch up with the rest of the battalion. This time, six alert Marines kept watch on their rear. Halfway to the swamp's edge, with no threat warning, two of the Dragons ferrying casualties to safety erupted.

  It wasn't done officially, but word of M Company's firefight and the flashes from the enemy positions quickly filtered through the battalion.

  "Skinks," Schultz said on the squad circuit when he heard.

  Nobody objected; everyone in third platoon was convinced. Those beings were fanatical fighters with horrible weapons, who attacked for no known reason and never attempted communication.

  Most Marines of Company L, however, knew firsthand about one alien sentience, a culture whose existence was kept secret. But that sentience's culture, which they'd come across on Avionia, was birdlike, primitive, a thousand years behind human development. It was no threat, and unlikely to ever become one. But the Marines of third platoon had encountered a different sentience, one that did attack with neither warning nor reason. The Skinks. And they knew in their bones that they were up against that menace again.

  When a wave radiates out from a point and hits something, it reverberates back to everywhere it's already been, but it somehow changes character on the bounce. So it was now. Company L's third platoon took the telling of M Company's firefight and changed it into a fight with Skinks. "Skinks" radiated back through the battalion. And turned to fear.

  Kilo Company's rearmost Marines were hyperalert, the last two men in each platoon walking backward to cover their trail—they weren't going to be surprised like M Company. Not to be outdone, the Marines on Kilo Company's left flank were equally alert; they knew that if it was possible, they'd hit an enemy unit from the flank. So, uncharacteristically, it was Kilo Company's pointmen who were least alert. The points were slow to recognize as threats the relatively faint, man-sized heat signals their infra shields picked up. By the time one of them remembered that the Skinks were supposed to have a lower body temperature than humans, they were within range.

  Again the swamp echoed with the screams of Marines whose flesh was being eaten away. Again steam billowed and rose from mud and wet foliage struck by the plasma bolts of the Marines' blasters. Once more the darkness of the swamp was lit by brilliant flashes when plasma bolts struck home.

  When it stopped, the Marines found no bodies to show they'd had an impact on the enemy. Eight Marines from Kilo Company were down, dead, or hideously wounded.

  "Hold where you are," Brigadier Sturgeon ordered Commander van Winkle. He had to evacuate the casualties without losing more Dragons, and he couldn't commit hoppers for the mission. Not with whoever was in the swamp—he wasn't yet ready to say they were Skinks—able to kill his aircraft without warning. What made the situation worse was that the string-of-pearls satellites weren't providing the information Sturgeon needed to direct his FIST. The swamp's canopy was dense enough to block the s
tring-of-pearls infrared scanning. It picked up his Marines, vaguely, but didn't show who they were fighting. This was another datum in favor of Skinks being present; on the ground they showed up faintly in infrared. Sturgeon was, effectively, operating blind. That blindness was costing Marine lives. It was time to use his heavy weapons. But where do you shoot when your target can be hidden anywhere in a large area?

  Within minutes the remaining Raptors began using Jericho missiles to clear a path to the infantry battalion's location for Dragons to evacuate the M Company casualties. Simultaneously, the six guns of the FIST's artillery battery commenced what was once called "harassment and interdiction" fire to the front and sides of the infantry battalion. Classic H&I dropped rounds onto routes known or suspected to be used by the enemy to disrupt movement. But there were no known routes through the Swamp of Perdition, and the enemy was known to pop up anywhere. The battery used scatter munitions—rounds that burst open above the target and scattered large numbers of smaller munitions that exploded just above the ground. Later, when the infantry moved out again, the battery would drop delayed action scatter munitions behind the battalion. Those would explode at random intervals after dropping to the ground, or into the water, or when their built-in motion detectors picked up movement by a man-sized body within the killing radius.

  Nobody had any idea of the range of the undetectable weapons that had killed two Raptors and three Dragons, but they hoped they were line of sight. The Raptors stayed behind a row of hills and locked their Jerichos into the string-of-pearls guidance system and fired them into the swamp. Jerichos weren't tactical nukes, but except for the lack of radiation, there wasn't much difference in effect. They were named that because they "brought the walls down." They cleared a half-kilometer-wide swath of swamp of all vegetation and animate life. The barrage stopped only a few hundred meters from the infantry position. The Dragons waited for the temperature in the cleared area to drop to the boiling point of water before they went in. The traumatically dried ground crumbled and crackled under their fans and flew wide in chunks. This time the Dragons carrying the casualties made it back out. Sturgeon ordered the battalion to continue its advance. The artillery battery dropped scatter munitions a safe distance to the front and sides of the infantry.