So, in the middle of a Karsvoë dark-time, she curled on the bed beside me, on her side, facing away, breathing softly into the mattress, while I ran my hand over her smooth flank, nuzzled my face in her mass of curly black hair, wondering if I wanted to wake her up for more, a little irritated that she’d fallen asleep.
And yet.
Not really wanting to take her and shake her. Wake up, little Mira, I need to fuck you a bit more. She’d be bleary-eyed and confused, rolling onto her back, glancing at the beside chrono, blinking, fumbling around, spreading her legs for me. Maybe she’d fall asleep in mid-fuck this time. It’d happened before, a time or two.
But I’m not quite a man without a soul. Not yet.
Before I went home, I wasn’t conscious of how much she looked like Alix when young. Now, I was. And didn’t want to think about it. I pulled her gently over onto her back, careful not to disturb her sleep, arranging her limbs just so, a position from which she could comfortably waken, when and if. Lay my head down on her abdomen, crisp hair tickling my cheek.
So I’d been calling on Mira more and more of late. So what? Hani’s time is almost up. These have been very nice years. Years to have a small, slim, silent island girl in your bed. But Mira was all right too, and Janice...
I thought briefly about Alix. No. Nothing there to compare with these healthy young women. Nothing, except... No. Nothing.
Leave it this way. It’ll be there when you come back.
They’re all nervous now. The war’ll give them time to calm down. Let the uproar fade away. Moment of shock when you’d grabbed Margie and kissed her in the kitchen, pinning her up against the edge of the sink, her eyes wide, astonished, Fyodor watching, silent, eyes grim, as he sat at the little white table.
Afraid to get up and leave? Fyodor might even be sleeping with Margie. Might be. What would it be like for him, if you pulled up her dress, slipped down her panties and fucked her right here on the edge of the counter? Would he cry? Try to slip away unseen?
But you’d laughed then, slapped her on the butt, given Fyodor a wink, bounced out of the room and gone off to do your job. Time to put all this away. The Xú don’t care how you feel.
Mira sighed in her sleep, stirred under me, put her hand up on my arm, feather light. And in the morning I went away.
o0o
Aboard ship, en route to a place called Hanta Sheqari, some four months flying time away, maybe 5,300 parsecs from Karsvaao, which would be the staging area for the anti-Xú multi-species expeditionary force, the officers of Vronsky’s brigade stood together in her briefing room, silently watching the holos she’d brought us from high command.
Vronsky and her rissaldars-minor, the commanders of her battalions. Their jemadars-major. Our jemadars plain and minor. Kathy Lee and all the other regimental havildars-major, filling the room shoulder to shoulder, belly to back. It gave me a rare sense of the true scale of the Spahi organization — there were 448 of us here, officering a brigade totaling more than sixteen thousand, all told. And the Spahis contribution to the expeditionary force comprised the entirety of Tahsildar MacKaye’s IX Legion Victorious, 512 regiments just like this one.
No need for Vronsky to speak, no need for anything now except looking at the holo beside her. The Xú soldier was something like a big crab, something like a big spider, maybe a little bit like a wolverine when you looked at all that lovely, lustrous brown hair. Eight thin legs, structurally something like horses’ legs, but splayed out from under the fat body. Face hidden by a Norseman’s beard, movement in the hair hinting at mandibles underneath. Two burning blue eyes, eyes the color of crabs’ blood. Two arms up front, thin, hairless, witch’s arms, claw-like hands cradling a long, thin weapon of some kind.
Vronsky turned away from the slowly-moving image, Xú soldier moving uneasily from side to side, turned toward us and said, “Technical specs on the weapons captured during the second Kkhruhhuft raid are available for download and study.” A glance back at the Xú. “I wouldn’t bother. I didn’t understand a thing.”
The summary said they were something like collimated particle beam weapons, miniatures of the big guns you sometimes found on Master Race scoutships, probably a copied design. Copied, maybe improved?
The soldier seemed to be looking right at us now, motionless, seeing something behind us maybe, something we couldn’t see. It lifted its gun, scuttled to one side, took aim... The image jumped as the loop went back to the beginning and started over.
Kathy less raised her hand, and said, “What about the prisoners?”
Vronsky glanced at the holo again, rubbed her hand slowly on her fat chin, pressing in, as if feeling to make sure her jawbone was still there. “Kkhruhhuft managed to take sixteen of them...” She looked at us. “The Kkhruhhuft raiding party was small, one ship, six hundred soldiers. They lost more than two hundred right off the bat. Maybe three-hundred made it back to the LZ for extraction.”
The Xú soldier was jumping around again, dodging whatever was after it, making me wish they’d included background detail in the holo.
Vronsky said, “There was some kind of fight with the prisoners during the trip back. Damage to the ship. Another dozen or so Kkhruhhuft killed. There are two surviving prisoners under lock and key on Hanta Sheqari.”
From somewhere in the crowd, a woman’s voice said, “You telling us these sons of bitches handed the damn Kkhruhhuft a fifty-percent casualty rate?”
Vronsky smiled slightly, an odd light in her eyes, and said, “Well. Fifty percent killed. The survivors were, um, a bit banged-up...”
The official report, when I saw it, stated that eleven Kkhruhhuft made it home uninjured, consisting of the on-board watch-party and bridge-crew for the scoutship.
I raised my hand.
“Morrison?”
“What about their Master?”
She shrugged. “A subset lineage of 6m45. Take a look at the download. The scoutship popped one of its fuel pods over the main Xú base they were raiding at the Master’s direction. It made a real pretty bang. And did a good job of suppressing any pursuit.”
A fully-loaded scoutship fuel pod would hold quite a few kilograms of condensed antimatter, all the energy necessary to project such a vessel across several thousand parsecs of hyperspace. Self-preservation is a many-splendored thing...
o0o
We marched off the lander at Hanta Sheqari to find a paradise trampled under soldiers’ feet. Broad, pastel-coral sun hanging in a pale green sky, wispy gray clouds, like smoke on high, air pleasantly cool, slightly damp, things like yellow palm trees whispering in the breeze...
The Sheqarii, armless, hairless blue quadrupeds with fingers on their lips, had fantasy cities like the magic castles in half the old stories humans once liked to tell. Tall white towers, connected by flying bridges, slim ribbons of highway defying gravity without apparent support. Now sullied with the dirt of a hundred kinds of soldier, because their peaceful little world just happened to be in a convenient place.
They say not a single Sheqar was killed when the Master Race came, maybe ten thousand years ago. The scoutship landed, debarked its Kkhruhhuft. The Sheqarii welcomed them, thought the situation through, discussed it in their councils, and surrendered. Now the Sheqarii could hire out from their beautiful, undamaged world, range the galaxy in the service of their Masters, come home wealthy and retire to peace, security, comfort. Like burdars, I suppose. An entire species of burdars.
So they took the advice the man gave the rape victim: going to happen now, whether you like it or not. Might as well lie back and...
Then again, eight billion human beings died when they fell upon Earth. I couldn’t tell you who made the better choice. Or got the better bargain.
Kathy Lee, Solange and I went to see one of the Xú prisoners, the one they’d used up, on display in some kind of cage in the middle of a big, muddy field in the expeditionary force’s ramshackle administrative complex. The other one was someplace else, still hidden away, still be
ing... questioned, I suppose, is really the best term.
This one huddled like an injured spider in the middle of its cage, crouched down low, squatting on a lumpy red puddle of what I supposed was its own excreta, brown hair matted and shaggy, two legs missing, one arm half gone, livid white scar parting the hair across its back. And a single blue eye glaring out of that hairy face.
It made us stand silent for a while, looking back into the eye. Then Kathy Lee whispered, “What you suppose that son of a bitch’d do to us if we let him out?”
Solange whispered back, “I know what I’d do if it was me.”
None of the Xú prisoners had tried to commit suicide. Fourteen had died on the scoutship, killing Kkhruhhuft bare-handed. These two had had the bad luck to survive, and this one’s injuries had happened when it tried to attack the transit cartridge of its Master Race inquisitor.
I said, “I hear they used some kind of neural probe on this one. Emptied its brain right out into a software stripper.”
More silence, then Kathy Lee said, “Wonder what that felt like?”
The huddled and broken Xú soldier looked like it might just enjoy showing us.
o0o
I finally ran into Shrêhht in a special compound up in a low range of sparkling mountains, bare rock peaks towering against the pale green sky, glittering as though the gray stone was a conglomerate inhabited by gem-quality crystals. We were gathered in a little bowl-shaped valley that had been stripped of its lemon-colored vegetation, bare dirt scorched bare, furrowed and ploughed, soil turned over and over.
They were showing us how to operate the new weapons. Training us, so we could go back and train our troopers, all of us dressed in full combat armor, for safety’s sake, if nothing else. The Kkhruhhuft looked like robot dinosaurs from some low-budget Twentieth century Japanese monster movie.
Vronsky standing on a big boulder in front of us, standing patiently while some Sheqarii technicians strapped a pair of little black boxes to her armored wrists, torches sparkling blue-violet as the straps were annealed shut. No power takeoff from the suit, they said. No charging system. No reloads. No maintenance. No breakdowns.
And how does it work?
The chief Sheqar techie waved his fingerlips, something I guessed was a shrug. Master Race doesn’t say. Just says how to use it.
Vronsky turned suddenly, fat woman become mechanized ballerina, raised her right arm toward the sky...
There was a slight flicker...
My optical and audio sensors shut themselves off for a fraction of a second, came back to a strange, fading lambent glow, a distant grumbling of thunder.
Someone’s voice whispered into my ears over the command circuit, maybe a man, maybe a woman, I couldn’t tell: “Fuck me...”
One of the mountain peaks was sliced away at an angle, a hundred thousand tons of solid rock maybe, gone to who knows where, nothing left behind but a mirror-bright surface, reflecting clouds, reflecting sky.
I glanced up at Shrêhht. Motionless in her armor. Maybe communing with those other Kkhruhhuft, over their private command circuit.
Vronsky’s voice said, “OK, that’s the sidearm you’ll be carrying. Now, for the, um, portable artillery pieces they’ve decided to give us...”
I cycled over to the inter-species hailing frequency we’d decided on, and said, “So. Why didn’t your folks have this stuff for the raid?”
Silence, a bit of static, then Shrêhht’s vocoder voice said, “They’ve never armed us before. Not before this.”
No. Before this, all we ever had was slave weapons, things devised by the technologies of the conquered races, traded back and forth, to be sure, even manufactured, close to perfection, using Master Race industrial facilities, but...
“Maybe they’re worried,” I said.
“Maybe so,” said Shrêhht. “Or maybe they trust us.”
o0o
A world without a name, a sun without a number, fat black ice-moon circling a gas-giant out on the edge of space...
We crouched in shadow now, letting the twelve-Kelvin ambient temperature hide us as best it could, waiting for the battle to resume. Overhead, the ringed planet hung, a flattened blue crescent, lightening aflicker in its night-time sky, aurorae like a tilted, filmy corona over the magnetic pole. Rings like a silver platter slicing the planet in two, casting a shadow back down on blue clouds, dusty, then solid-looking, then dusty again, brighter stars shining right through.
Out on the icy plain, old black craters mingled with new white ones, circles of water here and there boiling away in the vacuum as their edges closed in, wisps of steam forming ephemeral clouds, here, gone, renewed, gone...
A few kilometers away there was an armored Kkhruhhuft stuck head down in a circle of white ice, motionless, tail sagging just a little to one side, legs splayed.
No one I knew.
Kathy Lee’s voice whispered over my command circuit: “Jemadar-Major.”
“Here.”
“Shagetzsky just went off line. That brings my platoon down by six.”
“Logged and noted, Jemadar-Minor. Heads up. Six minutes. Mark.” Her promotion had come through just hours before we broke hyperspace and arced into the here and now, so this was her first official action as a junior officer. Hoped she was enjoying herself. I’d have to appoint a new regimental havildar-major shortly, but that could wait. She was used to the duty anyway, had the job down pat.
Hope Shagetzsky had enjoyed himself too. Always an excitable trooper. Good soldier, but too excitable, treating combat like it was football, eyes crackling with joy before every drop. Probably lulled by the fact that it was so damned hard to get hurt, popping off the native scum.
Not like a football game now. Her report said the Xú who jumped their asses as they bounced down out of the sky knew just what to shoot at, taking aim at our wrist-mounted external weapons, trying to make us drop the damned cannon.
In our old armor, that wouldn’t have been necessary. Little bits of exploding neutronium, artificial heavy nuclei if you like, would’ve taken our asses apart. As it was, ole Shaggy just lost both his arms. Even then it was all right, the suit’s self-healing properties kept him from boiling out, even kept him from bleeding much. But the internal temperature went up to 680K, stayed high for three or four minutes while the backpack dumped excess energy overboard through its laser.
Kathy Lee said when she cleared his faceplate and took a look inside, his eyes looked like worn out little tiny basketballs, looked like they needed a bit of pumping up. Nice blisters on his lips and tongue too, because his drinking tap boiled and sprayed live steam in his mouth.
Nice of the Master Race to provide us with upgraded armor. Too bad they couldn’t think of everything.
I said, “All right boys and girls, time to go. Five, four, three, two...”
For once, Kathy Lee didn’t have a musical selection for us to play by.
o0o
Underground. Far, far underground.
Lightning flashing in a dark tunnel, gouging black holes out of the icy ground around us, air displaced by rushing clouds of superheated gas, winds roaring along at mach seven, slamming us against each other, armor ringing, people shouting over the command circuit, scraping along ragged walls.
Getting myself braced, wedged in a corner, some other trooper beside me, his breath whistling in my ear, “...fuckingsonofabitchgoddamn...” almost crying.
“Take it easy, soldier. See if you can help me with this fuckin’ thing.”
“Yes, sir.”
We used to tease Mbongula about his name, because he was an English-speaker from someplace down on the tip of Africa. Yessiree, Mbongula the Juju Vampire. Didn’t matter to any of us that Juju came from a part of Africa 2500 miles from where he’d grown up, and damn-all centuries in the past.
He got wedged with me now, as best he could, helped me unclip the cannon from my shoulder mount, get it wrestled around in the wind, pointing back up the tunnel, back up to where ruddy fire
still burned, where men and women and nonhumans still screamed, at each other, at nothing, at the fact of death.
“OK. Steady...”
I logged the firing command out through my suit’s link, felt its power pulse under my hands...
Ball of hazy white light suddenly in front of us, shadows blazing backward down the tunnel, rolling away at one-tenth cee, compressing gasses in front of it, scooping up everything in its path...
I heard Mbongula scream as he was sucked out of our little niche, heard him go on screaming as he was pulled away in the fireball’s vacuum wake. No diminuendo, no sense of him getting farther away, because it was a radio link, just yodeling, “...ohjesusjesusohgodoh...”
The white light, far away now, turned a bright, lurid, aching blue, then my external sensors turned themselves off.
I heard my heart beating in the darkness. No more than a second’s lag time, yet long enough for me to hear six distinct, hard beats, then I blacked out as the return pressure wave came and punched me into the wall.
o0o
Regiment reconstituted as two whole companies now, and we caught the last of them in a big, open cavern, a pocket in the ice seven or eight kilometers down.
Flashes of light from firing weapons. Pulses of energy flying about, red-orange masses of molten metal sailing in long, slow arcs, splashing on the wall behind us, crackling as they melted on in, cooling, dimming, growing still.
Some trooper down in front of me, trying to get glowing hot stuff off his suit, “Jesus Christ, Hav, my armor says its on redline. Getting God damned warm in here...” Armor supposed to be better than this. Bath of molten steel like a dip in some summery ocean. But you take six or seven hits from things like five kiloton tacnukes...
Something exploded down in front of us, and I saw an armored Kkhruhhuft rise up, up in the air, flailing, thrashing. She came apart, five or six big chunks, fell back down into her squad.
Bang.
Big flare darkening the world for me, then stillness. Fading glows here and there. Weapons popping, flashing, slowing down as officers and noncoms went out on the command circuit.
When Heaven Fell Page 29