by Tim C Taylor
“We are lowly Janissaries,” said Shocles. “Speculation is punished severely except in senior officers and design technicians for whom it is a proper requirement of their role. I was once an officer like you, Lance Scipio, in command of several regiments. I was once allowed to speculate. We know nothing of new armies, but we have heard many rumors that Tawfiq seeks to replace us with a new breed of Janissaries with unshakeable loyalty to her and her alone. And we have heard in her own official bulletins that she intends to lead the New Order armies over the tens of thousands of years it would take to win the war against a galaxy, and we have seen her body alter but not age in the natural way. It is said, also, that she is not herself a true Janissary because she has retained her original gender. There, I have spoken a sickening mix of fact and hearsay. Make of it what you will, humans.”
“Oh, I already have,” said Arun. “Let’s say that I have an intuition that this new super army is real, and Tawfiq is going to bind it to her in a ceremony in a few days’ time. You two are going to get a strike team in close enough to kill her.”
“You mean you have foreseers?” asked Shocles. “Why did you not say in the first place? You humans are so inefficient. The solution is obvious. We Janissaries are not like those of the Hardit race whom we saw on the screen – those who ally with your Legion.”
Arun almost snapped back that the Hardits of the 7th Armored Claw were not allies – they were full members of the Legion – but that seemed a little too far for these Janissary deserters to stomach.
“We are stripped of gender and without that, our scent is a flimsy thing compared with the males who talked with us. In natural Hardits, scent is all. It binds us to the group, identifies those with authority. Gives us purpose and comfort. With our scent so weak, the means with which Tawfiq and the New Order impose their loyalty is a complex thing of artifice and fragility.”
“What Shocles is trying to say,” said Wokmar, “is that if you can capture the clothing and carcass of a Janissary officer, we can wear their scent and pass amongst their unit without notice. Only Janissaries such as us can do this. Your Legionary Hardits cannot.”
“Wokmar exaggerates. If the Janissaries loyal to Tawfiq are alert to the possibility of treachery, then we would be discovered. But if we are careful, and if they do not expect strangers in their midst, then it is possible we can accomplish much.”
“I’m just a simple human,” said Scipio. “I don’t understand these maybes and could-dos and possibilities. Can you frakking sneak us in or not?”
The two prisoners linked tails. “Yes,” they said in unison.
— Chapter 38 —
Governor Romulus
Victory Monument
Tawfiq Woomer-Calix was mad.
The hatred Romulus harbored for Tawfiq had burned within him for so long that it was difficult to step outside the pure loathing for the instigator of his torment, and see the Supreme Commander of the New Order from other perspectives.
It had taken this. This megalomaniac hubris. This apotheosis. The sheer spectacle that was about to play out over the grounds of what had today been renamed the Imperial Mall. It had taken all this to make Romulus realize what should have been obvious for years.
Tawfiq was insane.
For this, the most important day of her mortal life, Tawfiq looked west from the top of what had been the Washington Monument at her marble carved image staring back from a klick away. Both flesh and stone versions sat in stone chairs, and both wore identical military-style jackets.
Standing beside Tawfiq was the Janissary general who appeared to have won the battle for survival in Tawfiq’s wave of recent purges. General Dine-Alegg wore a tight-fitting silvered jerkin with a metalized fabric hood on which a traverse mounted crest of precious metals ran from ear to ear. This was the uniform of a senior Janissary officer from the very earliest years of the New Order. Dine-Alegg wore Hardit clothing.
But Tawfiq?
Her jacket was in a human style. Her carved image aped the historical human leader, Lincoln, and sat upon his chair in the memorial that had once been named after him. And Romulus tried hard not to think about the floor covering stitched together from rectangles of human hide.
Humans. Humans. Humans!
The supreme commander was obsessed.
Ever since she brought him here, Tawfiq had imprisoned Romulus beneath the ruins of the White House, which had been the official residence of the president of the International Federation right up until the last holder of that office had been executed by a New Order firing squad.
Everywhere, around the planet, Tawfiq had ordered human symbols to be preserved, but in corrupted forms. She wanted every human to look out on their world and know that it had been violated personally by Tawfiq Woomer-Calix.
The New Order had fought other races, but for Tawfiq that had been the tedious practical matter of eliminating lesser species from the galaxy. Her presence on Earth was personal. She was obsessed with humanity.
And above all else, she was infatuated with Arun McEwan.
This whole spectacle, Romulus realized, was her ultimate expression of flipping the bird to the human who had thwarted her so often. Her way to mark his ultimate defeat.
The flesh and fur version of Tawfiq shifted around in her stone chair to regard Romulus through her two good eyes.
“That won’t do,” she said. “I want him to properly observe the proceedings.”
She gestured with her tail to the ring where the golden collar around his neck was chained to the wall. The Janissary guard nearby give a salute and began to free him.
This was an opportunity.
He wouldn’t get another.
Romulus had been secured to the north wall. Escape through the spiral ramp to the south seemed impossible and pointless. Tawfiq’s seat had been placed to the west, beside a table set with a tasseled black cloth on which sat audio-visual-scent recording equipment that Dine-Alegg was poised to activate. Other than the two Janissary guards, the only other occupant was a Night Hummer in its cylindrical capsule. Shepherdess had warned him not to attempt mental contact with Hummers. Any of their kind who were Legion aligned would reveal themselves to him as required.
The Janissary unhooked Romulus from the wall, holding the end of the chain in its meaty paw.
Romulus grabbed his chain in both hands and pushed it down, hard.
The chain slipped out of the Janissary’s grip, allowing Romulus to flick its links. Sprinting with all his might at Tawfiq, he caught the end of the chain and readied to tighten it around her neck until her vertebrae cracked. Then they would learn just how immortal she really was.
Dine-Alegg was reaching for her side arm, the guard he’d given the slip was reaching for her rifle, and Romulus was counting on the other guard to hesitate because Tawfiq was in her line of fire.
As for Tawfiq, her only reaction was to give a toothy grin, as if the onrushing former Marine bent on murder was the perfect entertainment.
Romulus raised his arms to bring the chain over Tawfiq’s head, deciding at the last minute that once he had hooked her neck he would cross arms and drop to the ground, snapping Tawfiq’s neck over the back of this copy of Lincoln’s chair.
With a little stutter of his feet to time his jump perfectly, he threw his chain at his target, and the warmth of courage that he’d not known for so long entered his breast.
She was divine, and he was a human, the most despised race in her universe. Of course she didn’t feel any threat – she was mad.
And he was… floating. His arms had frozen and he was hanging there in the air with his feet off the ground, arms outstretched just inches from Tawfiq’s neck but locked in place. Even his momentum had disappeared.
“Perfect,” said Tawfiq. “Dine-Alegg was convinced you still had some fight in you, Governor, but I wasn’t sure. Watching the hope die in your eyes one last time is a fitting overture for the events that will now unfurl.” She glanced at the Hummer. “Release him.”<
br />
Romulus felt himself float above the hideous carpet of human hide, the metal chains in his immobilized hands rustling gently, until he was dropped to his feet at the north edge of the viewport. His muscles regained their freedom.
“You’re welcome to try again,” Tawfiq challenged. “In fact, I urge you to do so. My ally will sense the impulses in your head before they reach your muscles and will stop you with ease. Go on, Romulus, let me sense the hope flare in you one last time.”
Romulus didn’t give her the satisfaction of a reply. Instead, as Dine-Alegg ran the final tests on the equipment that would bind Tawfiq to her new army, Romulus rested his arms in the viewport and looked out on the scene below, anything to take his mind out of this room and its sickening occupants.
During his long-enforced idleness in his prison below the White House, Romulus had learned the history of this area, research Tawfiq had encouraged for her own amusement.
Which meant he could put a name to the original human incarnation of what had become today the Imperial Mall. He’d seen images too of passionate humans massing here to listen to political speakers, or simply to let their numbers speak of their support for a great cause. The last great crowd – well over a million of them – had gathered here to listen to President Horden speak, and to show their support before he flew to Vancouver to sign the Accords that would admit humanity to the Trans-Species Union under the patronage of the White Knights.
Two days later, a rival crowd had begun gathering, in protest at the same Vancouver Accords. But the protesters had been quickly dispersed, and the National Mall had not seen further mass gatherings until its Imperial successor hosted the Apotheosis of Tawfiq Woomer-Calix.
Ranks of Tawfiq’s new army stood in silence facing their goddess to be in the classical Greek temple where Abraham Lincoln had once looked out from his cold seat. From the steps of the memorial, the ranks of blank Hardits stretched in a column around the reflecting pool and all the way back to the ruins of the old Capitol building. Tawfiq had claimed over a million were paraded here, and Romulus didn’t doubt it.
And they weren’t alone. Giant 80-foot high viewscreens had been erected to the north and south of the Washington monument, angled to look upon the giant marble statue of Tawfiq. Romulus had to lean out to get a good view, but he could see thousands of tessellated images showing more ranks of blank Hardits paraded in underground caverns around the world.
The only gap in the ranks was a hundred-meter perimeter around the base of the obelisk, which was guarded by a ring of the standard model of Janissary.
A pair of Janissary officers was parading the outside of their ring of guards. Did they realize they were about to witness the birth of their replacements? Would any of them even survive the day if Tawfiq decided she no longer had use for the unreliable old model?
For a moment, Romulus almost believed the tiny Janissary officers 200 meters below had heard his thoughts, because they appeared to falter.
But it wasn’t Tawfiq high above them that attracted their attention, nor the Mark 2 Janissaries massed along the Mall, but a flowerbed about 400 meters to the northwest.
Romulus stared at the large circle of well-tended dirt in which a Hardit eye trio was painted in alien flowers.
He still remembered the morning when he’d been shaken awake by the bombs cutting through the ground in an attempt to kill Tawfiq in her bunker. They’d failed, of course. And there was nothing there now except for a deep hole that had been filled in and topped with flowers, Tawfiq’s gesture of defiance to the species who had tried so many times to kill her, and yet here she was alive and about to unleash the army with which she would war against the universe forever.
Mad she might be, but Tawfiq was very accomplished in her insanity.
Today was the day she would become a goddess.
And there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.
— Chapter 39 —
Arun McEwan
Imperial Mall
“Stop looking at us,” snapped Arun. “You’ll give us away.”
“We were trained for battle,” said Wokmar, “not spying. This is a coward’s way of war.”
“There’s nothing cowardly about pulling yourself through the dirt beneath your enemy’s feet in a digger Trog’s wake, not daring to stop for an instant – no matter how much your arms cramp – because if you fall behind, the dirt will solidify around you and trap you until you suffocate.”
Through the camera stem hidden in the flowers overhead, Arun watched as Shocles gave a half-step to the left and stamped her foot down sharply on Wokmar’s, bringing an alien yelp from her companion.
“Ignore Wokmar,” said Shocles, “she’s lived a very sheltered life. Trust me, McEwan, the Janissaries here have no idea that they’ve been divulging the secrets of this place for the past hour.”
Trust. Arun bit his lip. It was easy for Shocles to ask Arun to have faith in her, but for the CO of the Human Legion to stake almost everything in these two deserters was damned hard. Arun’s trust was draining fast. What had he been thinking of to rely upon Janissaries?
“If you can’t trust them, trust your instinct,” said Springer, the interior light of her helmet making her facial scales gleam. Like Arun, she wore an ACE-series helmet without the rest of the suit. Tubes connected the helm with her air cylinder and power cell; a coiled wire hooked it into Saraswati via the port in her neck. Did he also look like an undead cyborg?
Another voice joined in from the back of the hollow the digger Trogs had scooped out from the dirt. “Hardits will break their word, murder their allies, and rob their own mothers,” said Scipio, “and all before sitting down to a hearty breakfast. But what they won’t do is tell you a lie to your face. You need empathy to fool other people, and Hardits have as much empathy as a lump of damp basalt.”
Arun also struggled to feel empathy for the Janissaries, but he saw something Scipio didn’t. It was obvious to him that Wokmar and Shocles had been fashioned as tools designed for a purpose but had been discarded by their maker. Declared useless. Arun was offering them a chance to feel a sense of purpose once more, to kill Tawfiq. Since recruiting them in Brompton Road Station, their fur had become glossier, and they held their heads and tails erect.
“Let us move to a more shielded location before reporting our findings,” said Shocles.
“Better make it sharpish,” Arun replied. “My people are getting restless, and you know how reckless humans get when they’re unsettled.”
“Violently so,” Wokmar acknowledged.
The two spies hurried away into the ranks of Ultra Janissaries where they rapidly disappeared from Arun’s view.
“We’ve been spotted,” said Dranjer, the missile specialist who’d been part of Nhlappo’s operation to thaw the Sleeping Legion from beneath the ruins of Detroit on Tranquility-4.
“I see it,” confirmed Hunter. “Human looking out from the top of the obelisk.”
“It’s Romulus,” added Ree, who crewed the GX-cannon with Hunter. “He’s watching our position.”
The cramped confines of their burrow had produced a suffocating effect on the strike team, making them whisper and hold themselves still as if they needed to conserve their rather than breathe through their masks and helmets.
Now the dimly lit underground pocket seethed with motion. A dangerous, restless urge to break free.
“Stop it!” Arun commanded them. He looked around to see who was losing their nerve.
Scipio and Kraevoi were coiled springs, waiting with supreme coolness to deliver death to the Hardits overhead. As for the Marines they’d brought with them under Marchewka’s command, Hunter and Ree ignored Arun, their gun assembly to hand and ready to move out, while Dranjer was lost in her own thoughts.
It was the Nest Hortez contingent who were twitching with nerves, all of them.
The four Trog dragoons – Gretel, Leon, Bwilt, and Hansel’s replacement, Dane – were shaking their enormous armored heads from side
to side. Their two clone-children riders – Escandala-351 and Hyper – were trying to calm them, but were only reflecting their unease back at them. And the four digger Trogs were snapping their dirt-eating mandibles as wide as a Marine’s outstretched arms.
“It’s you,” said Springer. “They’re sensing your doubt. You’re their Queen of Battle, don’t forget.” She tapped him on the shoulder. “Look at me, Arun.”
He did. But her beautiful face couldn’t distract him today.
“What’s wrong with me?” he said. “Am I going the same way as Indiya?”
“Not on my watch. There’s nothing wrong with you, Arun. You’re just placing a lot of trust in those unnatural spawn of Tawfiq. After all you’ve been through I’m not surprised you’re finding that difficult. Don’t overthink it. Trust your gut. Trust your children. They’re the sons and daughters of Phaedra Tremayne – Springer as she once was – and did she ever let you down?”
“Maybe. Once.”
Springer’s face grew fiercer than he’d ever seen.
“But the making up afterwards.” He whistled. “It was a long time coming, but by Tyndall, as the Jotuns might say, it was epic.”
“Idiot,” she snapped.
He grinned back. “Don’t deny you love it.”
Around them, the Nest members had calmed. There was even a smile on Escandala’s face, though she couldn’t seem to work out why.
“McEwan!” came a voice inside his helmet “I repeat, do you copy, McEwan?”
“Well?” Springer gave him a wink. “Don’t keep your new friends waiting.”
— Chapter 40 —
Governor Romulus
Victory Monument
General Dine-Alegg leaned in close to her boss and whuffed down her long snout.
A moment later, the translator built into his golden collar translated for Romulus. “The equipment is ready for you now, Supreme One. We’re still experiencing connection difficulties with a handful of the African loom galleries. Approximately 178,000 vessels still await the connection to your presence.”
