Kingdom's Swords

by David Sherman

  "That's not all," Spears said with a grimace. "I had a command audience with Ayatollah Jebel Shammar this morning—you know, the chairman of Convocation of Ecumenical Leaders. The old boy's unhappy. The Convocation met yesterday and demanded to know why an infidel army is still garrisoned on Kingdom after it defeated the ‘demons.’ I wasn't able to convince him it's a good idea for you to be here until we can be positive the threat is over. He demanded that you depart immediately."

  Sturgeon leaned back for a moment in thought. As commander of the expeditionary force it was up to him to decide when the mission was complete. The Grandar Bay would remain in orbit until he ordered his Marines back aboard or until a higher authority gave him orders to pull his Marines out. He straightened and said briskly, "We don't know how many of them there were, how many might still be out there, or where they came from. For all we know, they're just sitting back, waiting for complacency to set in before striking again. Is it really safe for us to leave now?"

  Spears nodded. "I agree with you, Ted. The Convocation is making a serious mistake, a potentially disastrous one, if they send you away before you're convinced the threat is past. But they're adamant. As the ranking Confederation officer present, I have no choice but to require you to comply with the Convocation's wishes."

  "Fools!" Carlisle snorted. He glanced at the other two. "Not you, them. Kingdom was just invaded by an off-world force," finally saying what he'd been holding back. "Even if you Marines did totally defeat the invaders, who's to say that wasn't just a preliminary raid? For all we know, a larger force is on its way right now. Instead of sending you away, they should be requesting a navy shield to stop an invasion fleet, and an army force planetside to combat anybody who gets through the blockade."

  "Very good thinking," Sturgeon said. "My thoughts are much the same. Whoever they are, wherever they came from, that fight in the swamp isn't the end of it. Battle has been engaged. It hasn't been ended." He shrugged. "The complicator is, we have no idea whether they want to take and hold Kingdom, or if they have other designs that will have them striking elsewhere next."

  Spears chose to ignore the implications of what Sturgeon and Carlisle had said. He didn't want to get into a discussion about the origin of whoever "they" were. "Regardless of what might well be excellent military considerations, the fact remains that the Convocation demands that 34th FIST leave."

  Sturgeon gave a wry smile. "A sign of a good guest is being ready to leave when you're no longer welcome. I'd prefer sticking around for a couple more months, but..."

  "You don't have to leave tomorrow, of course. Take your time." Spears grimaced. "They need to have their noses tweaked." He took a drink. "They also want the string-of-pearls gone."

  Sturgeon's smile became less wry. "They're afraid we'll find out things about how they run their world that'll shock and offend the rest of the Confederation."

  Carlisle barked out a laugh. "It doesn't take spy satellites to do that."

  "True believers are the same throughout all of human time and space," Sturgeon said. "It's their way or be damned. The biggest difference among them is whether they first try to convert those who don't agree or simply kill them. But that's not a problem my FIST can address."

  Spears sensed a reluctance in Sturgeon, a powerful desire to remain. "I've seen your Marines," he said. "They seem unhappy."

  Indeed, morale had suffered in the infantry battalion. Even though the FIST won the fight in the swamp, it was the Raptors that won it while the infantry suffered the casualties. Sturgeon kept them busy enough that they had neither the time nor energy to dwell on their loss, but constant patrolling without result wasn't actually a morale builder.

  "There's no place on Kingdom where they can vent," Spears went on. "They need to raise some hell, get drunk, and get laid."

  "They do," Sturgeon agreed. "They can't do that here, but they can back at Camp Ellis." He sighed. Spears was right. The Convocation demanded that they leave. Since they weren't actively engaged with the enemy and had no proof the enemy was still present, he knew he had no choice.

  "I'll order my people to saddle up and the Grandar Bay to pull in its string-of-pearls. You can tell the Ayatollah we'll be gone in a few days."

  "He'll want to know why it takes a few days to leave when you arrived in a matter of hours," Carlisle said.

  Sturgeon looked at him levelly. "When we arrived, we had to be ready for immediate action. We don't have that same time pressure now. We can take enough time to make sure we leave in good order."

  The Great Master was old. The covers of his gill slits had partially atrophied from lack of use since the last time he breathed water. When he chuckled, the sound rasped from his sides as well as from his mouth. No one dared say where he could hear it—or hear of it—that they found the rasping disturbing. The Great Master knew the underlings found it disturbing, so he chuckled more frequently than he would have had he not rasped. It was good to keep underlings disturbed and frightened—it made it easier to keep them firmly under his control.

  The Earthman Marines were departing. His scouts reported the jubilation displayed by the Marine fighters as they boarded their shuttles. He looked forward to reports of their dashed hopes when they discovered they were not leaving after all, that they had to face more death at the hands of his Fighters.

  "Launch Moonlight Stroll," he rumbled.

  "It is done, Great Master." The Over Master in command of that phase of the operation bowed low and backed away from the Grand Master's presence.

  Hetman Bulba looked out over the fields of his host, saw his people working them, and knew they were good. Most of the vegetables were already harvested. In a few more days it would be time to harvest the grain. This harvest was so rich they could stint on their tithing and the Convocation would never guess.

  As soon as the grains were reaped, they would celebrate. In his mind he already smelled beeves roasting over fire pits. Already he could taste the fresh baked breads and pastries the women of his host would bake. He thought of the fresh beer he would drink. And the women. Ah, the women!

  Yes, the valley of the Pripyat—he was glad he'd led his host to this place. It would do for another two years, then he would lead the Yar host of the Kzakh to a new land. Just then, the Pripyat was as near to Paradise as he wished to imagine.

  He turned his pony and gazed at the village. His chest swelled as it always did when he saw what his people had built in so short a time. It was not only their own houses and silos and craft shops that made him proud, but the magnificent church with its colorful onion domes, and the priest house, which equaled his own in size and splendor. God smiled on the Yar when he caused Bulba to be made hetman. Hetman Bulba would see to it that the priest celebrated a fine High Mass to begin the harvest celebrations. Everyone would receive the bread and wine of Our Savior's body and blood. Then to the beeves and the bread and the squash. And the beer and the women. Ah, the women!

  Distant cries and rifle shots came to his ears, and he turned his pony toward them.

  The raid into the valley of the nomads was commanded by a Senior Master. Under him were four Masters, a dozen Leaders, and more than two hundred Fighters. It was small enough a force that a senior among the Masters could have been in command, but there were strictures the Over Master was most concerned about, so he deemed a Senior Master should command the raid. Even lacking swamps and caves, infiltrating the valley was child's play. The nomad guards, prancing so proudly on their ponies, presented no obstacle to the Senior Master and his force. The guards' eyes were set on the horizon; they could easily see anyone who approached on horseback or walked openly across the hills. They paid scant attention to the small copses that dotted the hills and the valley floor, and almost none to the narrow streamlets that drained those hills into the river. Had he chosen to, the Senior Master could have led his raiders down the river, and the nomads would be none the wiser until his Fighters arose in their midst. But the strictures could be better met if he came from
the side of the valley and struck the outskirts of the settlement first.

  The Senior Master smiled when he considered the confusion and fear his Fighters were about to unleash on these transplanted Earthmen. He briefly studied the data display his aide held before him, tapped a spot on the schematic, and said, "Now."

  Fifteen dun-uniformed Fighters hunkered in the shadows of a copse. They watched a group of mounted Earthmen parading nearby and waited patiently for their Leader's order. If he commanded them to kill the Earthmen, they would do so immediately. If he did not so command, they would remain patiently hunkered until he ordered them to do otherwise. The Fighters didn't mind—they were bred to have little will of their own.

  The Leader watched almost as patiently. He did have will of his own, but he knew well how limited was his freedom to act in the absence of orders. The order for which he waited came at last. He looked at the passing parade and saw that the nomads were already almost within range of his Fighters' weapons. He shrilled a command, and the Fighters bounded to their feet and ran in pursuit of the nomads.

  One of the nomads heard the Leader's shrill command. He didn't recognize the sharp sound as the cry of a bird or beast of the Pripyat valley, so he casually looked back. The sight of the racing men who didn't quite look like men startled him, so he didn't react immediately. When he did, it was to ask one of the other riders, "Who do you think they are?"

  By then the Fighters were in range of the rearmost nomads, and the Leader blew a signal on his whistle. The Fighters pointed the nozzles of their weapons at the nomads and fired. The rearmost nomads screamed surprised agony when the greenish fluid hit them, and fell from their mounts as the ponies reared and bucked and fled in their pain.

  The rest of the horsemen scattered forward several meters before they spun about to face the unexpected danger. They would have laughed at the small manlike figures with tanks on their backs and hoses in their hands had not their own companions been writhing in agony in the grass—those who were moving at all. They snapped their rifles to their shoulders and fired. Six of the strange manlings tumbled to the grass, but the others continued their charge, firing as they ran. The horsemen fired again and again, but by then the strange creatures were close enough for their weapons to reach, and their fields of fire were very effectively laid out.

  In seconds the horsemen were all down, dead or dying. The Leader snapped a command, and his six remaining Fighters ran back to the copse to await his next order. Careful not to burn himself, the Leader went about the area of the fight setting fire to the grass. Then he raced to the copse, led his Fighters to a nearby streamlet, and followed it back into the hills.

  Hetman Bulba heeled his pony to a gallop and began shouting as soon as he saw the fighting, but the fight was over before he'd covered much more than fifty meters. He looked about and saw a score of men converging on him or on the fight. He hoped they reached it before the fire spread so they could get the wounded and the dead away from the flames. Whether they did or not, he needed them to go with him in pursuit of the bandits. His pony faltered and almost fell when a brilliant flash flared up in the burning grass, but he managed to keep control of the animal so it retained its balance. More flares went up, so fast he couldn't get an exact count, but more than half a dozen.

  The fire spread rapidly after the flashes.

  The Senior Master allowed himself a brief smile of satisfaction at the chaos growing around the grass fire, then spoke into his communicator. Two kilometers distant, another Leader led twenty Fighters in an attack against the Earthmen working the fields. Once they killed the workers, the Leader fired the ripening grain. At the same time, a Master and thirty Fighters triggered an ambush on a band of horsemen speeding to the first attack. When those horsemen were dead, the Master fired the grass in which their bodies and those of several Fighters lay. Another Master with a Leader and forty Fighters assaulted the settlement. They killed half of the Earthmen and fired the church and priest house, then withdrew.

  The Senior Master granted himself another slight smile when he received the reports. So far he'd committed fewer than half of his force and suffered no more than twenty dead. Fifty or more of the nomads were cremated in the fires. Phase one of the raid was complete. Now to wait for the strictures, then commit phase two, in which the Yar host of the Kzakh would die.

  At the same time, a thousand kilometers away, another farming community was attacked by a force of two hundred. This attack was also in two phases, with a pause between them. Three hundred Skinks attacked a mining community in yet a third remote location. The miners fought valiantly enough to cancel the pause between the two phases, but to no avail. Like the farmers, the miners all died most horribly. Skinks rampaged through a mountain monastery and destroyed sacred relics and tomes, a loss many felt was greater than the lives of the monks. Isolated homesteads were leveled in so many locations, it would be a month before the full extent of the slaughter was known. The Army of the Lord outpost in a provincial town was massacred. That massacre was followed by almost complete slaughter of the citizens. The town was burned to the ground.

  "What do you mean, we're going planetside?" PFC MacIlargie demanded. "We're going back to Camp Ellis."

  "I mean we get aboard the Dragons and go ‘high speed on a rocky road,’ that's what I mean," Corporal Linsman said.

  "Back down to Kingdom?"

  "Back down to Kingdom."

  Corporal Doyle looked around the squad. They'd started with ten Marines. Now there were seven—and four of the seven were hobbled by wounds. How could they go back? And the rest of the platoon wasn't in any better shape. The whole company was pretty badly shot up. Why were they going back?

  Corporal Kerr looked uncomfortable but said nothing and checked his men—mostly Doyle; Schultz didn't need much checking. Schultz seemed to be his normal, quietly ready self on the verge of a planetfall.

  Corporal Chan closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered Waygone, where all the Skinks had been in one place. He'd hoped that was true this time as well. It looked like he thought wrong. He gathered himself and asked PFC Longfellow, his lone remaining man, how his wound felt.

  "Good enough, I guess," Longfellow said. It hurt like hell, but he wasn't about to say so, not when others had been wounded so much worse.

  Linsman looked at Kerr. "You're number one now, you know."

  Kerr nodded. He was next in line to take over as acting squad leader if Linsman was killed or badly wounded.

  Linsman looked at Chan and said, "You take MacIlargie."

  "What?" MacIlargie yelped. "What's the matter, don't you like me anymore?"

  "I never did like you." He looked at him. "I'm acting squad leader. That leaves you as the only man left in the fire team. Chan's shorthanded. Go with him."

  MacIlargie swore. Well, at least if he was with Chan, two members of that fire team were all right—neither he nor the corporal had been wounded. In Kerr's fire team only Doyle was whole, and he wasn't all that much use on a good day.

  The Marines were somber as they boarded the Dragons waiting in the Essays for the return planetside.

  Archbishop General Lambsblood glowered at the oncoming Dragons. He'd hoped the Marines had destroyed the demons. Instead, they'd merely crushed one coven. How many more were out there? There hadn't been enough Marines to begin with; now there were fewer. His own Soldiers of the Lord, numerous as they were, were no match for the demons. The Marine commander had to call for reinforcements, call for an entire army. All he could hope for was that the Army of the Lord and these few Confederation Marines could survive until that army arrived. If Brigadier Sturgeon hadn't already requested the reinforcements... Lambsblood sighed. If he hadn't, they were all damned. He didn't even glance at Ambassador Spears or Chief-of-Staff Carlisle, who stood talking next to him.

  The lead Dragons pulled up. Brigadier Sturgeon was one of the first Marines out. He marched directly to the trio.

  "Mister Ambassador, General..." He nodded at Carlisle.
"My operations people are already working on the information you provided. As soon as my squadron is operational, my infantrymen will search for the enemy near these strikes." He took two sheets of paper from Lieutenant Quaticatl and handed them to Lambsblood and Spears.

  Spears merely glanced at the paper and handed it to Carlisle. Lambsblood shook with barely restrained fury.

  "Ted"—Spears's voice was strained—"this is no good. They hit too many places simultaneously. There must be too many of them. You don't have enough Marines to find them all."

  A corner of Sturgeon's mouth twitched in what could have been the beginning of a smile. "I hope the Skink commander agrees with you. An awful lot of opposition commanders over the centuries who thought that way found out the hard way they were wrong."

  Lambsblood couldn't hold back any longer. "You fool!" he erupted. "Hubris! Do you know the word? The arrogance that goes before a fall. I only have partial reports, but a rough tally indicates that there were at least—let me emphasize that, at least—ten thousand demons involved in those monstrous attacks. Ten thousand! How many Marines do you have left? Nine hundred? They have weapons that can kill your aircraft and armor before they even know there's a threat. They have weapons they can use against your infantry at a greater range than your infantry weapons can effectively fire. How long do you think your Marines can hold out against them?"

  "General," Sturgeon replied in a calm voice, "we don't have to go against all ten thousand at once. The reports indicate they are widely dispersed. My Marines can find them and defeat them in detail."

  Lambsblood snorted. "This," he shook the sheet of paper, "tells me you plan to strike in five different locations. They will defeat you in detail."

  "Not today they won't."