“Our Automata were not up to spec.”
“What about their air cover? Why weren’t we ready?”
“We were.” Falkye replied. “We deployed more than double their own deployment in the time it took for them to supply any kind of air support. Every Dominion got their loads away, even those the lasers got. The problem wasn’t in the air, the problem was on the ground.”
Charles turned from the view of the darkening horizon and looked at his brother. He remembered him from when they were boys, when the wars they fought had been only games, computerized displays that took up whole floors and allowed them to send armies against one another or to work together against a common foe, their mother’s preference, that one. There were fewer fights that way, and fewer bruised egos. This was no game though. If there were bruises to the ego, there would be worse if things went badly. “And what went wrong there. I see the numbers, I understand that things went wrong, what I don’t understand is how it happened. The hounds are almost identical to the models used in fighting the Kidawas and they won us that war. What went wrong here?”
“They sent humans.” Falkye said. He stroked a beard he’d allowed to grow down his neck as he studied the horizon the same way Charles had. “I suppose it’s to be expected. Isn’t human empowerment kind of the thing the Kamele were all about when that ambassador was here?”
“But humans shouldn’t have turned a battle like that. Not like that. A Hound should be able to handle a human.”
“It’s their armor.” Falkye said. “I’m certain of it. I replayed some footage. Look.” Falkye shunted some footage to Charles’ implant and it popped up, magnified footage of one of the knights being pummelled by one of the hounds. Tentacles whirled around him as the sword sucked lightning from the hound’s shield.
The sword worked on the same principle as the hounds’ close range weaponry. It was a long blade, possibly as long as the “knight” was tall. It was wrapped in the golden fluorescence that marked it as a “zero point blade”. A singularity chamber in the handle of the blade manipulated a microscopic black hole to actually warp space/time between the two edges of the blade to make space between them, technically, nonexistent. The effect was invisible to the human eye except for the glowing sheath of golden fluorescent light that formed around the blade when active. That kind of blade was commonly used in mining machinery designed to turn a mountainside into thumbnail sized gravel. There was no existing substance that could resist it, except another field of warped space. In contact with the hound’s shield the sword didn’t cut, it just sucked power off of the valence bonded ion sheath molded around the hound by its own singularity manipulator until the battery failed and the ion sheath or the singularity had to be plugged as the manipulator lost power. If the blade had similar properties to the hound’s weaponry, it had, maybe a minute of that kind of power loss before the shield failed, that was if it was fully charged when it met the enemy.
Each time the glowing tentacles of the hound flashed out towards the soldier’s armor the turret on his shoulder, this one also sporting angry eyes, whipped around to spit rounds through the tentacle, cutting off the heads of the attacking hydra while the knight worked on the hound with his sword.
“There’s an AI in there with them.” Charles said. The realization made him cold.
“What was it Darren always called it?” Falkye asked with a small smile.
“A beautiful synthesis.” Charles said. He could have punched Falkye for that smile. Their uncle Darren was the adventurer of the family. He was the youngest of their grandfather’s brood, and when his father offered him a place in the corporation he turned it down, preferring his expeditions to the wild places on the super-continent, bringing back exotic wildlife and fantastic half true stories of the wonders he encountered on the rest of Marain. He was also the one who had taught the boys how to play chess. Charles watched the Hound blow apart as the shield fell and the sword blew through the front half of the automata. Gravel sized bits spat out of the disintegrating machine.
“They’re… automata then.” Charles said.
“And yet they’re not.”
“Superior to both.” Charles choked on a bitter laugh. “We should have thought of that.” He said. “We should have thought to do it. We sent men with the Evangelists. We should have thought to send them on the ground as well.” Those men had all died. They had all been, not forced to go, but they were men who thought they had no better choice. Men with a reason to die. And they had, died, along with thousands on the ships they’d managed to destroy. He shook his head. If they were going to fight these invaders they would need men of their own. He would either have to find a whole lot more women like Sharis Karamaz, or call for volunteers.
He thought of the smoking statue on the battlefield again, a screaming corpse still locked within. Who would volunteer for that kind of service?
Chapter 4: Ephesus // Recruiting
Ephesus Smokoska was running away. At last, he was leaving the Hogan behind. No more stinking Porqine, or weeding the garden. He was going on an adventure, like the ones the people on the cube said were in the Bible. He was going to be like Joshua or David, he was going to be a soldier. He felt, only a little bad that he hadn’t told his parents that he was leaving. They had loved him after all. It wasn’t their fault he found the homestead, well, boring.
The announcement had come a few days before, after the stars stopped swirling with the war machines left over from the dead evangelist spaceships. He and Moses had lain on the roof of the Hogan during those nights and watched the stars wash back and forth, at an infinite distance from their place on the planet’s surface. Ephesus tried to follow the battle lines as the dots swirled and danced, punctuated now and then with the flash of an explosion they could not hear. The big spaceships waded through them like behemoths beneath the waves of an ocean he’d only imagined.
“What do you think it would be like to be up there?” Ephesus asked Moses in a whisper. The roof was little more than tarps of woven sibsig fronds draped over a latticework of thin tree stalks. Voices above a whisper would be easily heard by any light sleeper down below, and Gerard was a very light sleeper. Gerard liked to get people in trouble. It seemed to be a personal crusade for him, to show the whole world that he alone was right about everything.
“There isn’t anyone up there.” Moses replied, also in a whisper. “It’s all automated.”
“How do you know?” Ephesus asked. He liked to imagine the sorts of men who would be among the stars, biblical heroes, and fairytale warriors like the summer marine etched into the night sky, his rifle of lined up stars pointing back towards the winter hurricanes that cameto blot out the sky when he’d sunk below the horizon. In the stories the constellation and the storms were locked in an immortal battle for the sky which would only be won when the world was destroyed and the Marine had nothing left to defend. Ephesus only ever wished he could try to fight the storms with him.
“There were only four people that died on the Evangelists.” Moses replied. “But they had thousands of ships. You could see them flying around when they blew up. If there were people on each of those, don’t you think we’d have heard about all of them?”
“I guess so.” Ephesus said. It was disappointing though. The sight had been far more romantic to imagine each dot of light piloted by another human being, maneuvering and shooting and ultimately dying among the stars. “It would still be cool to be up there.” He whispered.
“They don’t need us.” Was all Moses said in reply.
Then the day the cube couldn’t bring up the religious channel when they turned it on in the evening, or the corporate channel, or any of the other functions the cube was supposed to have. The next morning when they turned it on again, just to see, they were greeted by an announcer calling for “any men of an age capable of growing a beard and interested in serving their planet or of making a wage” to submit themselves to a military recruiter at one of the locations and times listed.
Carmichael had been one of the locations, and a few days later Ephesus stood atop the ridge which formed the boundary between his family’s valley and the long stony descent to the wider valley Carmichael was nestled into, watching the sun set. He would not make it until the next day, but the journey was begun and he’d never felt so excited. He fell asleep dreaming of the adventures he would have.
He dreamed of monsters, and machines that hurled howling storms, and maidens in distress. He knew they were fairytales of course, that machines would not fight by throwing storms and that there would be no maidens in distress, but it was all he knew. He couldn’t imagine what the monster machines would look like except for that square of empty stars he’d glimpsed in the hurricane season between storms. It was a figure from the fairytales his mother sometimes told, old stories of the homeworld and the marines who fought the monsters that lived there.The thought that he might meet some enemy of man, of Marain, excited him. And he’d never been paid anything before. Money might be an interesting thing to have too.
Carmichael was not a large town, though for all of Ephesus’ fifteen years of life it had been the largest population center he’d known. Mud streets with subterranean boulders popping through here and there ran between stone cottages and cabins with walls made of stacked cordwood, a few with metal roofs, or repurposed hogans behind them. A stone house with an oubliette under its floor served as the town prison and a large house made of machine printed and placed bricks across a cobbled square from the Church served as the county Lease Lord’s home when he toured his investment, an infrequent enough occurrence that most people called it “the housekeepers home” for the family that kept the place in readiness for its intended occupant. The jungle across the valley floor around the small hamlet had been cleared to make way for acres on acres of colony guild oats and the stone and wooden steeple of the Church stood proudly at the center of the whole town beside it’s small plot of dying grape vines.
Ephesus found a woman hanging clothes on a line as he came in from the fields and asked her if the recruiter was in town.
“Oh, aye. And busy enough today I’d say. Been ten or twelve others passed just this way since morning asking for him. You look a bit young to be joinin. Your parents know where you got to?” She peered at him suspiciously.
“Where is the recruiter?” Ephesus asked with a frown. He was an adult after all, past fifteen, no need for people to ask about his parents.
The woman shrugged and poked a thumb over her shoulder along the road. “He set up shop in the Sheriff’s place. I heard the recruiter offered to take anyone he had locked up in that hole of his, but he said he didn’t have no one needed exilin. You know where it is?”
Ephesus nodded and thanked her then made his way into the town by the muddy streets.
Ephesus had never spent much time in Carmichael, no more than a few days scattered across a lifetime, when he came with his father to receive the sacraments at the Church. He remembered Easters and Good fridays with their candlelight vigils, and Christmas trips at the heart of summer when they’d stood and sat and knelt as they sweat and listened to the three person volunteer choir sing through the huge Christmas Allelluia. He knew where the merchant’s house was where they bought the oats with tarps of woven sibsig fronds and pottery flasks of porqine oil, and he knew the midwives cottage where his mother stayed whenever her time of birthing came. He could remember a very long ago winter looking out a window in a small warm house. It was full of other women and he remembered watching lightning play across the mountain peaks through glass windows that kept the wind and rain outside while a woman screamed somewhere deeper inside the house. The memory was so old he couldn’t remember any other details. His only knowledge of the sheriff’s house was his brother Cardino pointing it out to him after a mass.
“See that house there?” Cardino asked. “There’s a pit underneath the floor, all sealed up with metal where they keep bandits and thieves. Don’t ever do something to deserve spending time in there.” Ephesus hadn’t, and he’d never planned to except a brief stint when he’d dreamed of being a bandit in the mountains like the Corrigan brothers he heard about at the outpost once, before they were caught and hung by the sheriff. Hanging seemed an awful way to go, and that put an end to his daydreams of a life on the run.
Ephesus followed the vague memory to the Sheriff’s house and found the door open. When he stepped inside he found himself in a small room, bigger than the hogan, but occupied by two big metal desks on a floor of metal planks that echoed with each footstep, and filled with the smell of persaga tea.
“You here to sign up?” A man at one of the desks asked. There were only two men there. A gristled old man Ephesus recognized from going to Church who must be the sheriff, and a heavily bearded man in a black jumpsuit with two big white stripes at his shoulders.
“Yes sir.” Ephesus replied. In the stories that was how the marine always answered when the CEO asked him questions.
The man in the jumpsuit eyed Ephesus. “A bit young aint ya?”
“I’m an adult.” Ephesus scowled.
“I don’t doubt it.” The man said. “How old are ya?”
“Seventeen.” Ephesus said. The lie only gave him two years.
“I’ll bet ya are.”
“I can find out for you if you want.” The Sheriff said from behind the recruiter. He held a cup of steaming tea in both hands to enjoy the warmth. “Do blood like with the other one.”
“No, the other one had a mustache, this one doesn’t. Broadcast called for kids can grow a beard son, ya got any whiskers on you?”
“My family doesn’t grow whiskers.” Ephesus said. True, as far as it went. Gerard was the swarthiest of them. His father could only grow a stubby thing on his chin that his mother insisted he shave. “We don’t hardly grow hair anywhere.” He added. What did it matter anyways. He wouldn’t fight with his beard.
“Where are ya from boy?” The recruiter asked.
“I came here to sign up for the army.” Ephesus said. “If I thought you’d all be so suspicious then I wouldn’t have come.”
“Ya don’t know what yer here to sign up fer.” The recruiter said. His accent furred the words, distracting Ephesus, who had never heard anyone talk different than they talked in town. “Did the broadcast tell ya what ye’d be doing for the army? I could consign ya to a life of washing dishes for the army if I wanted to boy. What’s yer name, where did ya come from?”
Dishes. The thought left him thunderstruck. How could they? Soldier’s fought! They didn’t do dishes. “Names Ephesus.” He replied in a more subdued voice. “I’m from a homestead out in the mountains.” Better to appease them now so he could join. He could always quit if they made him do dishes for the whole war.
“Yer parents plot no doubt.” The recruiter said.
Ephesus didn’t reply.
“What are you here for Ephesus?” The recruiter asked. “Do your folks need the money? Is that it? Or are you running away from home?”
“I didn’t run away.” Ephesus scuffed the floor and felt childish all of a sudden.
“No, I’m sure if we were to call your family’s cube right now they’d tell me to sign you up right away.”
Ephesus mouth hung open. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen. He was supposed to be stepping into an aircraft, or learning how to shoot a rifle or something by now. Not arguing with the recruiter over his age.
The recruiter smiled kindly at Ephesus. “Tell me yer real age son.”
“Fifteen.” Ephesus said dumbly. Then kicked himself for giving truth to the lie. Better to hold the lie and make them force the issue if they wanted to.
“There you have it.” The Sheriff said.
“Youngest we’re taking is sixteen.” The recruiter told Ephesus.
“But that isn’t fair!”
“Why not?” The recruiter asked. “Because you were looking for some adventure? Hoping to escape yer parents rules and get a taste of the world? Whatever
ya were looking for, war won’t give it to ya. Do you know what the war will do? Kill ya. Yer parents deserve another year of work out of ya at the very least before yer killed for a corporation they’ve never met. They raised ya son. Don’t that mean something to ya?”
Ephesus stared at him.
“Go home Ephesus.” The sheriff said. “We appreciate you coming out to serve your planet, but we want you serving your parents first. Go home and if we’re still looking for people by the time you’re sixteen the army will take you then.”
Another man appeared in the door behind Ephesus while he was paralyzed in front of the older men. “Is this where we go to sign up for the army?”
“This is.” The recruiter gave Ephesus a significant look and the next thing Ephesus knew he was wandering down the muddy street, unaware of where he was going or what he would do now. How would he explain his disappearance to his parents if he went back? What would he do for another year while other people got to go and fight and chase off the invaders? What would he do if the war was over in a year?
When he reached the edge of town he stopped and stared out over the newly sprouted oat crop to the edge of the jungle that clambered up the encircling mountains to enclose the valley. Beyond it was home. He shook his head. He couldn’t go back there. He would have to explain it to the recruiter. They had to let him join. He couldn’t go home. Not if this was his only chance. The recruiter might never come back to Carmichael.
“Ephesus!”
Ephesus jumped and turned to find Moses bearing down on him from the heart of town. “I’m not going back!” Ephesus shouted. He started to back away. His first thought, to run from the home he’d thought he escaped.
Moses frowned and stopped in front of the boy. Four years might have separated them, but some fluke of genetics had turned Moses into a much taller man than any of his brother’s had been, thicker around the shoulder and with eyes set deeper into his browbone than the others, giving him the look of a mountain when he frowned down at Ephesus from a few paces away. “What are you doing here?” He asked.
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