Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “I thought you said they were using dummy rounds.” Moses said when he watched a man fall to lay immobile on the ground.

  “They are practice rounds.” His suit corrected. “If they are hit in a limb the suit is programmed to treat the limb as though it has been incapacitated. If the shot is lethal the suit stiffens and falls.”

  “What if they’re hit with a sword?”

  “The managing AI’s know how to keep the blow from being lethal, and again, the suit is programmed to disable itself wherever it is considered dead in the melee.”

  More bodies fell. Three of the defenders eventually faced two of the attackers. The two attackers stood shoulder to shoulder as the other three spun around them, then one of the attackers darted out, gun roaring, and both swords connected with the other’s shield. Lightning blew around them like wind, tracing the line of flechettes that splashed across each bubble of near invisible armor. One of the defenders moved to support his squad mate but the remaining attacker moved between the other two unengaged defenders and the two grappling on the ground.

  Amidst the maelstrom of light one of the shields gave with an almost audible sigh and the sword plunged through to strike the defender in the chest, knocking him flat. The attacker turned to join his team mate just as two lines of brilliant red plasma streaked out of the defender’s shoulder turrets to penetrate his shield at the exposed gash where his sword had been extended a moment before. The sword dropped as the man’s hand stiffened and he backed away, fumbling for something at his hip. The two remaining defenders charged and in a moment both attackers were on the ground.

  “Have you seen enough?” The AI asked as the shield around the field lifted and the men began to stand.

  “So in the heat of battle I’m just supposed to yell for my asshole if I need something from you.” Moses asked, returning to the thought he’d begun before the melee.

  “In time I will be able to anticipate a large percentage of your requests without them being made. Instructions can also be issued verbally, as we are communicating now, or through visual or tactile controls. But in time, interpersonal contact will be unnecessary.”

  “I think you need a name.” Moses said.

  “In theory, after training, there will no longer be any need for us to speak except when you wish for information.”

  “I think I’ll call you Argo.” Moses said, as he turned from the melee field. “Or Butler. What do you think?”

  “I think that if giving me a name satisfies some egotistical inner need for power over me, then I will accept whatever set of syllables you wish to assign me.”

  Moses liked it, even if the machine was right and pride was at the base of the whole interaction. He felt less like he didn’t belong in the armor if the personality that inhabited it with him had a name he’d given it. “The armorer said I would get a sword.” He said.

  “You already have it.”

  Moses looked around at the other soldiers around him, many of them with swords sheathed on their backs, handles rising over their heads opposite the shoulder turrets. Moses reached over his shoulder for the handle and felt the suit stiffen. “You are not permitted to remove the sword until you have passed the tutorial assessment.”

  Moses dropped his arm. “Where do you need me to go?” He asked.

  “I will run you through a tutorial assessment at the shooting gallery. Please follow the blue lights.” A line of blue virtual lights appeared in Moses’ vision running off into the crowds, and Moses followed them. He wondered if Ephesus were following a little asshole of his own.

  The shooting gallery was a crowded row of fences along the North Eastern edge of the camp facing the hills against which the camp was set. When Moses found it a bored sergeant looked him up and down and pointed to the far end where each lane was divided into a much larger swath than the rest of the area.

  “Knights on that end!” He shouted over the thunder of a gun being unloaded through the barrel behind him.

  “Knights?” Moses asked.

  “A designation for soldier’s who’s primary weapon is a sword.” Argo, or Butler, told him. When Moses arrived at the spot another sergeant pointed him to a booth. A shield fell around the booth as Moses stepped inside and the AI beeped at him. “Shall I begin the tutorial now?” It asked.

  Moses flexed his hands there was no use worrying about Ephesus for now. Death would come for them both, they would each have to prepare for it in their own way. He would do his best to master this asshole, and his sword. “Please do.”

  Chapter 9: Irenaeus // The demonstration

  Irenaeus had a decision to make. All week, he and his friends had argued about it, debated it, and sent messages back and forth between their scrolls, and now, the day of the party, Irenaeus had resolved to make up his mind about it.

  He watched Erin Anast as the knight mingled with Marain’s high society. He was bursting with questions he was dying to ask, but too nervous to work up the courage to do so. Every time he attempted to approach the knight he found some excuse to turn aside and watch from some other corner of a room or yard as the man in armor flirted with the young girls and made jokes with the old men.

  “I’ve orders to get out to the battalion by the end of the day.” Erin told a woman when she asked how long he would be staying in Quinn city. “I expect there will be fighting soon.”

  “I should think they would send you on a tour of the river.” She replied. “To whip up support among the settlers.”

  “No, it’s my request. I didn’t join the army to play these games, pleasant as they are. There’s a war on, and I’d like to do my part.”

  Irenaeus liked that answer. He’d listened to the men around the manor talking about the war, his father, his brothers and uncles. He’d even eavesdropped on a few of the women’s conversations without joining their circle. He spent the whole party pacing through the people, listening to what they thought of the war and of the knight, and of the whole situation.

  The justification for the war was clear enough to Irenaeus. Everyone said the Kamele were there to destroy the corporation and wipe out the dynasties, his family first among them. Some people seemed to think they had decent enough reason to do so, but no one said they should capitulate. “Not when they’ve come to take what they want by force.” His sister told a man clearly more interested in her than in the war. Irenaeus had sensed a subtext there and hadn’t stuck around to hear more. What no one was asking, was precisely the question he wanted to answer.

  To join, or not to join?

  Jonathan Quinn gave each of his children a career for their sixteenth birthday, a place to build themselves a dynasty of their own, since only Charles’ direct descendents two or three generations down the road would have any guarantee of a share in the corporate wealth that defined their way of life. Their father called the careers their “inheritance”. Irenaeus’ future was secure, but was his future too secure? He supposed there was a possibility that the Kamele invaders could destroy the corporation, but everyone at the fete seemed to think there was little possibility of that happening, and if that was so, then going to this war was likely to be the only opportunity he might get for the adventures he felt life should hold.

  He and his friends had discussed the possibility when the announcement of the recruitment had first gone out.

  “These aren’t nice people.” Aeneas said. He was a dark boy, his heritage as the Kidawa heir made visible in his unusual olive skin and hair the color of the night sky. “Most of the men I’ve seen signing up are the poor and dispossessed. People who need money, or want money. You’ll notice the prisons are pretty empty. Any charge is punishable with enlistment these days. I expect we would be among the only people with halfway decent motives or backgrounds.”

  “Not everyone can be a criminal.” Turqmos said. “There’s too many of them, and the knight on the cube said that lots of people are signing up.” Where Aeneas was the oldest of their band at a few months from sixteen, Turqmos was t
he youngest at a few months past twelve. He wasn’t the heir to the Knopf dynasty, but he was forever complaining about the grooming he had been subjected to in preparation for taking over the Knopf’s newest operation, a brewery where they extracted a heady wine from a type of grass shipped on the river from the Pampas. He stacked barrels, counted bottles, made deliveries, and was forever complaining that his wrist hurt from filling out paperwork. “It’s stuff we should be leasing automata for!” He complained hotly.

  “We could die.” All three of them had nodded to the fourth boy’s statement. Mason, of an age with Irenaeus and his oldest friend as the son of an old executive who lived in the family valley. He was the quiet one in the group, and as a consequence, the one they always listened to.

  Death was a possibility. Irenaeus knew that, they all knew it, but somehow, it didn’t seem real. He tried to process the possibility as he mingled at the party but whenever he looked at the knight and his armor what he saw was not the possibility of death but a man filled with confidence, a man who was approached by girls and talked with the adults like equals. He saw Sara, a pretty girl of Irenaeus’s own age, all curls and smiles as she looked up to him and chatted with him about something Irenaeus couldn’t hear from across the room. “If I had a suit of armor like that.” He thought. “Then I could be brave too.”

  What stood in his way was the uncertainty. What would they ask of him? What would he be required to do? Would he have to make polite conversation with pretty girls or would they send him to one of the camps? Would he hate it there and regret ever signing up or would he regret it more to miss this chance?

  His mind was still not made up when he climbed into the bleachers with his mother and father to watch the demonstration. This was among the last events of the party. It would not last long afterwards, people would make their goodbyes, a few with children would stay a little longer while they played, and there would undoubtedly be other informal gatherings of people who’d met at the party and wanted to continue whatever dialogues they’d begun, but Irenaeus was almost out of time. If he wanted to make a decision it would have to be soon. He hoped something in the demonstration might prove the deciding factor.

  He watched Locana squeeze his older brothers next to the knight to snap a picture with her lenses then something huge and black hurtled over the fence which enclosed the lawn of lichen plates and skidded to a stop just above the three men while the audience, still milling around on the lawn at the base of the bleachers, screamed and ran up into the cement seats.

  Falkye never blinked, even as the knight’s sword swung in a shimmering arch to bear on the manmade monster standing over him. The knight’s shield snapped on around him and the gun turret on his shoulder swiveled to life. The machine was a Hound, black as sin, all artificial muscle and armor plating and what seemed a thousand flurrying arms like the heads of some mythical beast, each glittering with weapons and sensor blisters and towering above the three men still on the lawn.

  Falkye laughed as the screams and shouts of warning died down and the rest of the high society still on the grass scuttled into seats across the stands. “Thank you all for coming.” He told the audience, his voice booming over the speakers in the stands. “If you haven’t met him yet, I’d like to introduce you all to Erin Anast, one of Marain’s many, brave defenders.” He gestured to the knight who planted his sword back in the lichen and bowed to the stands at their applause. “And this,” Falkye gestured up to the machine still arched above them. “Is one of our other defenders. Combat automata, or as we call them in the command center, a hound.” The hound prowled towards the bleachers its synthetic muscle growling as it moved. Three of its many rubberized arms turned to whips of golden light in imitation of Erin’s sword while its other arms probed the air as if studying the members of the audience.

  “I can’t emphasize enough how important this war is going to be.” Falkye went on. “When I say, everything is at stake, I really truly mean it. The Kamele are not here to claim the wealth of the corporation, nor that of the dynasties. They are here to see everything we’ve built over these last centuries destroyed and the dynasties reduced to the same level of wealth as the meanest pauper. This war is going to be a planetary effort, that, if we win, will leave us far far richer. But if we lose, well, the Kamele don’t build or support dynasties or corporations. So I leave it to your imagination what they would do to your families. I don’t expect any of mine would survive. Now, the nasty business over, how about a little demonstration?” He grinned as the audience cheered.

  Falkye waved to the Automata and detailed its workings to the audience. They were details Irenaeus was already as familiar with as he was familiar with Erin Anast. Erin was a prominent figure on the cubes in the week since the enemy’s army had landed on the Pampas, as well as in the city society’s soirees and public parties where he’d been drumming up new recruits and fresh support for the army being thrown together by Charles and Falkye. “Erin has kindly agreed to participate in a demonstration of the necessity of having men in arms for this war, a necessity we had not anticipated at the beginning of our build up three years ago.” Falkye told the audience. Erin lined up across the lawn from the automata as a shield machine dropped from the invisible dome over the Quinn estates to encase the lawn in a glimmering warp shield.

  “Goodness, he’s going to fight one of those?” Irenaeus heard his mother gasp as the man flourished his sword.

  “They’re going to be fighting hundreds of those.” Charles said beside her. “And turning them into slag too. Expensive slag.”

  “Shall we make a wager my friend?” Falkye asked the knight as he was fitting his helmet to his head.

  “You can bet all you like, but you’ve a whole lot more to bet with than I have.” The knight replied.

  “Fair enough, fair enough.” Falkye replied. “A friendly wager then?”

  “All’s fair that’s friendly I always say.” The knight replied. The helm went on but the voice still carried to the audience through speakers somewhere in the suit.

  “Good man, then the bet is this. If you win, and by win I mean completely obliterate the machine now before you. If you can destroy it in, shall we say, what length of time do you think it will take for you to destroy it?”

  “I think if you gave me all day, i could win.” The knight replied. There was nervous laughter in the stands.

  Falkye grined. “In all seriousness.” Falkye said. “I’ve seen you fight these before, remember I am the general, so I know that your best time so far has been three minutes.”

  “Two minutes and forty seven seconds.” The knight replied thumping his sword in the lichen.

  “As you say. So I think you can beat that number here.”

  “And if I win this wager of yours?” The knight asked.

  “Then you can win the kiss of any of the ladies in the stands! Any lady, what do you say ladies? Would any of you mind being chosen as this man’s paramore for the space of a kiss?” Peels of laughter greeted the wager. There were squeals of excitement from the single women in the audience (and a few married ones) while a few of the men jeered or made ribald jokes. “What do you say sir? Think you can find one to your taste in that crowd?” Falkye asked the knight through the shield.

  The knight swung his sword a few times over the spread of lichen on the ground then switched it off and planted it before him. “Oh, I don’t know. You say I can pick any of them?”

  “Any that you’d like.” Falkye replied with a laugh. “Provided they agree of course.”

  “Would i have to pick now?” The soldier asked.

  “If you wish.”

  “That include your wife then does it?” He asked.

  Falkye laughed along with the crowd as his wife jumped up in the stands beside Charles.

  “Only if the lady accepts!” She shouted over the audience. Her voice was drowned but a moment later she yelled again and the house AI picked up her voice and ported it over the speakers this time. “Only if
the lady accepts!”

  Erin looked between her and Falkye as the audience fell silent.

  “Well, don’t look at me.” Falkye said. “I’m only your superior officer. Even the Commander has a Commander, if you take my meaning.”

  More laughter but Erin turned back to Locana, the blank faceplate of his helmet disguising the grin they could hear in his voice. “What do you say lady Quinn? Shall we find some nice private place if I beat your husband or are you going to tell him the bet is off?”

  There was a chorus of “Boo! Boo!” at the suggestion the bet be turned down.

  “What in return!” Locana shouted.

  “Yes, what in return?” Falkye said, eyeing the knight.

  “Well, you’re the one making the wager.” The soldier replied. “You’re the one going to tell me aren’t you.”

  “Well, seeing as I’ve put up my wife.” Falkye said, blowing her a kiss and a wink. “Or she’s put herself up, as it were. It seems only fair that you put up your one and only as well.”

  Erin tapped the sword point in the ground. “You don’t want a kiss from my Anastasia.” He said patting the sword hilt. “She’s got sharp teeth.”

  “No, I’m sure that I don’t.” Falkye replied. “However, I can make you a different offer. If you lose. You give that sword to my wife, to hang up as a trophy in our home, and you get a new girl, as it were, from the armory to replace her.”