by P. K. Lentz
“Until then, and after I’m gone, will my people continue to be held behind locked doors?”
“You understand I can never give strangers full freedom of movement in my home,” the Baron answered. “However, there are facilities to which you might be given access. A garden and games room, for instance. After your transfer, the remaining members of your band will be moved to another location. I have many nooks on this moon. Most lack the comforts of my Barony, but they are known to fewer.”
“I have faith in your intentions, Baron,” Ivar said. “Thank you.”
“And my brother and I?” Cinnea asked.
“May remain here until I’m able to return you to Nemoora.”
She thanked him, and after a few more niceties, the retainers escorted them back to the Dawn’s accommodation, after which all guests were shown the way to a nearby garden and games room. The former was not nearly equal to the wonder which had been Nemoora’s forests, but it was a warm, pleasant, leafy oasis on an unpleasant moon.
The games room was dominated by a highly polished octagonal floor painted with geometric designs. Around the edges sat various pieces of equipment, some easily movable, others fixed in place. One of the Senek threw a green, head-sized sphere at a Dawner, who batted it away in alarm with one hand. It bounced away wildly, striking the wall and bouncing again and again until it rolled to a stop near the feet of another Scythian, who picked it up and examined it before throwing it back at the floor. The sphere rebounded at high speed, arcing over the man’s head and into the hands of another, who tried bouncing it more gently.
By now the room was filled with laughter, both Gorosian and Senekeen. More of the bouncing balls were distributed.
“We shall show you how to play,” a Senek offered. He was not a retainer or attendant, but one of several unarmed others who had already occupied the room when the Dawn entered.
Teams were chosen, rules explained and translated, and in sport Ivar endeavored to forget that this was in all likelihood to be his last day of life.
* * *
For many hours, Ivar played that game and others. More Senekeen came to play or watch, as word must have spread through the Barony of the Gorosians’ presence. He learned to tell male Senekeen from females by the placement of their eyes and the shape and color of their neck ridges—a bit of alien trivia to take to Valhalla.
After most of the Dawn had retired to the garden, the five chosen to die continued to play. Keeping the body occupied helped prevent an inevitable sense of doom from overtaking the mind.
Ivar was yet pushing himself hard among a small group of Dawners before an audience of highly amused aliens when Plin reentered the games room and urgently approached him. Sweat-drenched, Ivar regarded the youth with annoyance.
The words whispered into Ivar’s ear banished irritation and sent him running for the exit, abandoning his teammates without explanation. “Leimya is plotting to kill some Senekeen,” Plin said.
The guards posted along the bunker’s halls to keep an eye on the Baron’s guests alerted to the sudden movement, but made no move to block Ivar.
Reaching the garden, he roared, “Leimya! Where’s Leimya!”
He continued to shout as he plowed down paths flanked by vegetation.
Tomiris intercepted him. With terse speech in Scythian, Ivar discreetly informed her of the news, and she joined him in the frantic hunt.
They found and cornered Leimya in a grove of fiery orange vines.
“Is it true?” Ivar demanded.
Leimya’s face gave away the truth before her words. “Who told you? Plin?”
Tomiris shouldered past Ivar and delivered a slap to her charge’s cheek that was strong enough to send Leimya down onto one knee, where she remained, holding the side of her face.
“It was only talk!” she said.
“Stupid, dangerous talk!” Ivar spat. “What’s your plan, to force us all into battle? I took this deal because it’s best for the Dawn! You think because of who you share blood with you’re fit to lead? It doesn’t work that way on the steppe, little princess! It definitely doesn’t work that way here!”
Avoiding Ivar’s gaze, she offered neither defense nor apology.
Ivar said more calmly, “No more talk. Understood?”
“She understands,” Tomiris assured. “Don’t you, Leimya?”
Leimya lowered her hand, revealing a cheek that glowed red. She nodded faintly.
“You want those to be the last words Ivar speaks to you?” Tomiris asked.
By now a dozen observers had gathered, a mix of Scythian and Senekeen. The two Eraínn stood watching, too. Perhaps on account of the audience, Leimya had no more to say.
She still had nothing to say later that night, if that’s what it meant when the lights were dimmed inside a bunker, when she found Ivar in the garden, laid her stricken cheek on his chest and gently sobbed.
Seven
“It is time.”
The armed and helmeted leader of a ten-strong troop of the Baron’s guards informed the Dawn of this in the lush garden. Ivar and the rest of the chosen all stood.
Leimya hugged Ivar tightly. “Don’t,” she whispered. “We can grab their weapons and—”
Ivar shushed her. “This is how it is. Don’t make Tomiris hit you again.”
Tomiris’s farewell, delivered over Leimya’s shoulder, was a silent one. She and Ivar had begun the Nemoora expedition rarely seeing eye-to-eye but had ended it something like two faces of the same coin.
Other Scythians said their goodbyes and shared their own embraces, then the guards surrounded the five and began escorting them out of the garden.
Their path took them past the Eraínn.
“Safe passage, Ivar,” Cernach said solemnly.
“Still wish I hadn’t met you,” Cinnea said. “But I won’t forget you.”
“I’m glad I met you,” Ivar replied. “I’ll give your regards to Llyr.”
The escort brought the five to the hangar-like chamber where the crawler sat waiting.
Baron S’tan also awaited. Instead of wearing finery, he was dressed like his retainers in segmented gray armor with attached helmet. His faceplate was open.
“I suppose our weapons are too much to ask for, but I’d prefer to face my fate in my own clothes,” Ivar requested.
“Of course.” The Baron indicated a large metal crate against one wall of the hangar. Ivar and the others went to it and found all of the Dawn’s clothing inside, considerably cleaner than it had been. After a few minutes spent digging to come up with their own gear, each shed their borrowed black silks and dressed in leather, linen, fur, and scraps of captured Jirmaken armor.
The rear hatch of the crawler opened, and the five boarded it along with the Baron and his ten guards. Soon after, a faint sense of upward motion accompanied by humming and rumbling sounds signaled the commencement of their final journey.
Ivar noted the presence of some metal devices which seemed to have a clear purpose, even if they didn’t quite resemble any chains he knew.
“You’ll use these restraints on us?” he asked the Baron.
“I must, to maintain appearances,” the Baron replied. “They can be applied just before the transfer, assuming you don’t intend to cause trouble before then.”
“You’ll probably want to keep them, though,” Ivar mused. “They look expensive.”
The Baron’s squawking laugh said he understood. “Yes, they will be removed.”
“All of us, at once? Quickly? We’ll be harmless anyway, barely be able to see or breathe.”
Worryingly, Baron S’tan paused prior to answering. “Yes, quickly. I shall order it to be so.”
“And after that?”
The Baron spoke some words in a sibilant tongue that must have been the native speech of the Senekeen. His retainers responded briefly and in unison.
“I’ve informed them that in the event the transfer does not go smoothly, they are to return immediately to cover and refra
in from engaging. That would be our strategy, regardless.”
Grim silence settled over the compartment for a while. The Baron eventually broke it.
“I cannot overstate my admiration for your handling of the present situation, Ivar,” he said. “Your willingness to sacrifice calls to mind tales of my ancestors’ heroism. I have always endeavored to live by their examples, but your actions show me how I have fallen short. Going forward, you have set a fresh example to which I shall aspire. I salute you, Ivar Shieldbreaker.”
“It was an easy decision for me,” Ivar said. “The hard ones are Arixa’s.”
“Yes, your Captain. Do you truly not believe she will return for the comrades you’ve saved?”
“She might. She might not. I tried to prepare my people for either case.”
“If Arixa doesn’t come, what shall be done with them?”
Ivar chuckled. “That’s a hard decision. One I’m avoiding by making this easy one. Tomiris will have to take it. I bet we all look alike to you, but just ask for her. She’s female. Lumps on the front.”
“I pledge to honor your courage and sacrifice by doing what I can for them.”
“I’m betting my life on it,” Ivar said.
* * *
They drove on for what felt like hours. Then, at the Baron’s word, the guards placed bulky, black restraints onto the wrists of the five Gorosian prisoners.
The rumbling of the crawler ceased. The guardsmen and the Baron shut the opaque faceplates of their helmets, and the hatch opened, flooding the compartment with stinging wind. Ivar shut his naked eyes to preserve his vision for when it mattered, if it mattered. Gauntleted reptilian hands guided him to rise and move along the compartment toward the exit and down the metal ramp until he stood on uneven, rocky ground.
“Saulis, Gnorus, Attar, Lykis...” Ivar said, naming the four set to die with him. Thorns ripped his voice. “I’ll be in... Valhalla. Join me if you can... We do battle all day, drink all night... wake none the worse... then do it again.”
“Dumb... Norther...” Saulis said. “Why would I... wanna see you again?”
The insult was good-natured, and Ivar took it as such. “Farewell, friends...” he said. “Die well, but... most importantly... die.”
With eyes shut tight and wrists encased in metal restraints behind his back, Ivar was led with the others around one side of the crawler and instructed to stop. He cracked one eye and saw a great, shimmering bulk about thirty paces off in the purplish light.
It was a spacecraft, smaller than the landers from the Sagaris but similar in form. The gray, blurry bulks standing in front of it were surely Jir fighters—soon to be his killers, if all went to plan.
He heard mask-filtered voices speaking the Jir variant of Nexus. The Baron replied in the Senekeen strain. Ivar comprehended the words, but they weren’t important.
Swiftly, as had been promised, the Senek guard behind Ivar removed the wrist restraints. Faint sounds from either side indicated that the other four were likewise being released for transfer.
Ivar opened stinging eyes again and saw the dark bulks in front of the lander advancing over the purplish terrain.
“...found them in hiding,” Baron S’tan said from far back. “Just these five. It is my honor and pleasure to return them to the Pentarchy for justice.”
The Baron’s retainers could be heard receding toward the crawler.
The Jirmaken troops came closer, closer. The long barrels of weapons extended from their blurry forms.
“Not yet...” Ivar advised quietly. “Wait...”
The four Scythians to his left and right knew only to attack when the Jir were almost upon them.
The moment came.
“Now!”
Bellowing a war cry, Ivar charged across the few paces separating him from the Jir. The others did, too.
Sharp bursts of light and sound spat from the aliens’ weapons, which evidently were not the same slug-throwers the Jir used aboard ship and station. Searing pain filled Ivar’s shoulder just seconds before he collided with a hard-shelled gray mass, knocking it back.
From elsewhere, amidst the weapons fire, arose a human death-moan.
Ivar’s hands found the muzzle of his opponent’s weapon. Screaming, he wrenched it hard away. He failed to free it on the first attempt, but he kept trying whilst twisting his body and staying low, ramming his injured shoulder into the alien’s waist.
Pain laced through Ivar’s leg—a fresh hit.
Another Scythian let out the kind of scream that meant death. Ivar broke his opponent’s grip and fell onto his back with the gun clutched in his hands. Scrambling up, he righted it, finding the handle, and began firing.
His first target was the weapon’s owner, and at this range, he didn’t miss. Whirling, screaming razors in the moon’s noxious air, he sent an unbroken stream of fire in all directions.
Through bleary eyes he glimpsed Attar, the only other of the five besides Ivar who was augmented, running towards the Jir lander. He was likewise armed with a stolen weapon which he fired with abandon.
Ivar spun to support him, aiming at gray blurs.
Seconds later, in a silent burst of red, Attar’s head all but vanished. What remained of him rolled over the moon’s rocky ground.
Attar had done what he came to do. So had the rest. Ivar was the last.
Time for Valhalla.
“For the Dawn!” he cried hoarsely. “For Odinn! For Goros! Die!”
Ivar fired and fired the alien weapon until pain put his body on the ground and stole his sight.
Eight
She had flown in spacecraft quite a few times since learning of the great ocean of void beyond Scythia’s sky, the world beyond her world. She had flown over the mountains and forests and oceans of Earth and through the space between stars.
Until now, it had always been another’s hands on the controls.
This day, to use a habitual measure of time which held little meaning here, Arixa flew herself. They were her hands and her mind that guided the spherical shuttle through the black, airless void while others—Zhi, Phoris, Trisma and Baako—were the passengers. Arixa’s fingers manipulated the holographic displays that set the vector and velocity and a dozen other things which she had not, and could not have, comprehended just a short while ago.
Then Dr. Fizzbik had imprinted her with the ability to pilot spacecraft, as he had done to Vaspa and Tomiris on Earth. Now she looked at the controls of a craft such as this shuttle and knew what to do as though she had done it a thousand times before.
Exactly like that, for such was the nature of imprinting: the brain and body could be made to possess the result of another’s training or experiences without possessing the memories of those experiences. In effect, she now had flown spacecraft thousands of times.
She just didn’t remember doing it.
It was the same manner by which she and the rest of the Dawn were able to speak and understand Nexus, the common tongue of the stars. The uses for imprinting were vast—but not without limit. The more one was imprinted, the greater the risk of damage to the mind. For that reason, not all of the Dawn would be imprinted as pilots. Some would become healers and others experts in useful skills that hadn’t existed on the steppe.
If they wished to, of course.
Arixa used her newly given skill to pilot the shuttle away from the Sagaris. It was her first time leaving her prize since having seized it the near-equivalent of a season ago. She didn’t like leaving the Sagaris for fear that it might somehow slip away, but this day—she couldn’t help but measure time that way—leaving was an easy choice to make. She’d had no thought of skipping this journey.
Its objective was visible on a gently curving viewscreen designed to look as if a quarter of the shuttle’s spherical shell had become transparent. It was the same display on which Arixa had been granted her very first glimpse of Earth from orbit.
Now she looked upon a new world, Tabit-1.
If Arix
a believed, as she chose to, that the Sun Mother herself had sent the Dawn to this planet then she could hardly leave to another the task—the privilege—of first setting foot on it.
Zhi started to say, “This trajectory is—”
“I know,” Arixa replied and took the needed corrective action.
The passengers other than Zhi occupying the round cabin gazed in silent, wide-eyed wonder at the planet ahead, suspended in a starfield and marbled with yellow-white clouds.
Tabit-1 had huge seas, and dotting them were many islands. A large one of these had been chosen as the shuttle’s landing site in the hope that their visit would go unnoticed by the other thing which Tabit-1 possessed: intelligent life-forms.
Arixa had seen images. The Tabitans bore little resemblance to humans. Walking on four double-hinged legs, their torsos were likewise hinged, enabling them to fold defensively in a way that protected soft bellies with hard-shelled backs. Unfolded, they stood taller than humans; folded, they were, on average, waist-high.
Back when she’d lived in her father’s palace, a lifetime ago, a slightly softer Arixa had been privileged to dine often on lobster. The Tabitans didn’t look exactly like that shellfish, not nearly. They had no giant, saw-toothed claws, for one thing. But their smooth shells and the way they folded their segmented bodies gave a not un-lobster-like impression.
A great many generations ago, before the Jir achieved hegemony, this species had destroyed its own advanced civilization and ravaged Tabit-1 in a way which rendered it inhospitable to life.
Time had healed to some degree, and life had managed to persist, but scans conducted from the Sagaris showed a population much lower than Earth’s and even less advanced technologically.
It was Arixa’s hope to encounter none of the natives, not simply because they were strange to look at but because they would share no common language. Dealing with them would constitute yet another complicating factor, too many of which already existed. The Dawn had come to this ruined planet for simple reasons: to bury its dead and plan for war.
