Scythian Dawn: Book One of a Barbarian Space Opera

by P. K. Lentz

  “Zhi,”she said, “could you show us what the Jir look like?”

  With a few swipes of Zhi’s fingers, the insectoid Kephis blinked out and was replaced by something more human in shape, yet not human at all.

  The ghostly Jir stood on two thick legs which supported a squat torso from which hung two thick arms. The shoulders, however, were hunched forward, and supported between them on neck that projected forward, rather than up, was a hairless head proportionally much larger and rounder than a human’s. Its skin was all dull gray, and its eyes were blue-black and large.

  Unlike the other races Arixa had seen, the Jir resembled no Earth animal but rather were fully alien in their appearance.

  The Earth-born warriors gazed at the image in silence for a long while.

  Tomiris broke it. “Looks kinda like you, Dak.”

  A few of the six chuckled.

  Arixa did not. “These are the beings who have slaughtered and enslaved countless humans,” she said. “Soon their sky-horde will visit us again, bringing Devastation. I have no certainty that we can stop them. But even if we do, I want to make them pay. In blood. I want them to take notice. I want to tell them that humans are not sheep. We are wolves.”

  The members of the Dawn met this pronouncement initially with more silence of a somber variety.

  Finally Ivar drew a deep breath and declared, “I’m in.”

  “Let’s kill them,” Tomiris said.

  When Dak and the remaining three issued their own affirmatives, Arixa’s heart soared. The rest of the Dawn, if those present were any indication, were likely join her in accepting the Jirmaken as their enemy.

  Zhi caused the image of the Jir to vanish. Arixa’s eye was drawn then to the wall which displayed the landscape passing underneath them. Had she not been strapped in, she would have gone to the window-like screen and pressed her hands to it in amazement.

  “Is this the desert beyond the Southern Sea?” she asked breathlessly.

  Zhi confirmed it was. All eyes beheld a vast, windswept expanse of sand over which the sun had just begin to rise. Some Scythians had been to the desert’s edges, but most had only ever heard of its existence.

  “Is this where we’ll find the Kephis?” Arixa asked.

  “No. To the south of the desert, there exists quite a different ecosystem.” Without waiting for Ivar or another to ask what she meant, Zhi explained, “A green and lush forest.”

  The desert yielded to grasslands which looked somewhat familiar to Scythians, even if this land was flatter with oddly colored grass and far more and stranger types of tree. They spotted unfamiliar animals, too, although the running herds were too distant to make out their precise forms.

  “Are there people here?” Arixa asked. “Cities?”

  “People, yes,” Zhi answered. “No cities by Article 18 standards, at present. But there must have been in the past, since the distinctive physical traits of this continent exist among non-native Gorosians.”

  “She means the Jir have visited here before,” Arixa clarified for the rest.

  The grasslands yielded to the promised greenery, all lit fiery orange by the rising sun. Here was a forest so dense that no space at all appeared to exist between trees.

  “This Earth of ours holds more variety than I ever imagined,” Arixa said quietly, speaking to herself as much as anyone else. “More than a person born on it could imagine. It’s worth fighting for.”

  Nineteen

  Zhi flew low and set the shuttle down on some high ground that was covered just as thickly in vegetation as the surrounding land in all directions. The hatch opened, and one by one the occupants disembarked.

  Setting foot in a bed of leaves, Arixa stared transfixed at the green canopy above. Strange sounds reached her ears: warbles and shrieks and screeches. Some were identifiable as birds, if without certainty, while others must have been something else. The broad, brilliantly green leaves and hanging vines of the strange, twisted trees seethed with constant, gentle movement, occasionally erupting into violent shaking as unseen creatures darted about.

  Zhi pointed through a gap in the vegetation. “The Kephis ship is there. It’s cloaked so as barely to be visible to the naked eye.” She handed Arixa a small, lightweight object of black metal, a sort of blunt cylinder. ‘This will enable you to see it. Put it to your eye.”

  Arixa did as advised, found the gap, and stared through it at the forest. Where before there had been nothing but green leaves she now saw a sharp-edged red and yellow mass.

  “Strange,” she remarked. “But by now I expect nothing else.” She handed the device to Ivar, who was impatiently waiting his turn. “Is it inside the ship?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Zhi answered. “There’s no technology detectable to my scanners outside of the ship at present. But that is not conclusive. Go to the ship, shoot a few arrows at it and look as if you seek a challenge. If nothing happens, conceal yourselves and wait. The nearest villages are to the east, so that is likely the direction she’ll come from. Remember, she may have a smaller male thrall with her. Less deadly, but still plenty dangerous.”

  “Are you not coming with us?” Arixa asked while the ‘looking-tube’ was passed around.

  Though Zhi’s expression remained impassive, Arixa detected subtle shame in her reply. “I will monitor from a distance and intervene if it seems prudent. The Kephis must not suspect a plot involving off-world assistance. For that reason, do not activate the ILA, and speak only in Scythian.”

  “Understood.”

  The eight of them together began a trek down a steep hill in single file, with Dak and Ivar in the lead hacking a path through dense vegetation. Treading carefully behind, Arixa touched every leaf and flower petal, tugged every vine, ran her fingers over bark and moss. She alerted at every movement, less out of fear of attack than from interest.

  She glimpsed at one point, briefly as it fled the noisy intrusion, a creature resembling a long-tailed gray lynx swinging from branches by thin forepaws.

  She hoped silently to return here one day on peaceful terms.

  Making slow but steady progress, they hacked their way toward the Kephis vessel, using Zhi’s device intermittently to catch a glimpse of red and remain on course.

  Before long, Zhi separated from the party. Taking the looking-tube with her so it could not be discovered, she veered off into the thick forest while the members of the Dawn finished the trek alone.

  They emerged into an area by a stream where the trees were not quite as thick. They knew instantly that they had arrived, for even if the ship was invisible, the signs of its presence were not. A number of trees at the edge of the clearing were unnaturally bent, broken or crushed, and the air above them writhed and shimmered strangely as if one gazed up at the sky from beneath the rippling surface of a pond.

  Arixa took her bow from its case and nocked an arrow. Aiming it at the shimmer and signaling for her comrades to wait, she released the string.

  The arrow flew some twenty feet and stopped short, tumbling to the ground.

  She watched the shimmering space intently, waiting for an insect-like form, the stuff of nightmares, to appear. All hands were tight on bowstaves or weapon-hafts, all breaths stilled.

  Nothing happened. The warriors began to breathe again. At Arixa’s word, four more arrows were loosed. Two of them snapped in mid-air. Then they waited again, ready—hoping they were ready—for a fight and a foe like no other.

  But the foe didn’t appear.

  That was for the best, for it allowed them to lay an ambush, which Arixa began to do, following Zhi’s advice that the Kephis’s hunting ground was likely to lie to the east. Normally, when ambushing a body of troops, she would post a lookout with instructions to race back and warn the main body, but this was no normal ambush. This target was an individual or two of such nature that she could never ask any of her warriors to lay eyes on it alone.

  She positioned her two best archers in the boughs of leafy trees (hoping
that the tree-lynxes weren’t dangerous) while she and the remaining four concealed themselves in dense foliage to the east of the broken trees and wall of shimmering air.

  They waited. In spite of the new sights all around, Arixa didn’t let curiosity to distract her, although she did examine every sign of motion lest it prove to be a giant alien bug.

  One time she saw dark fur and large black eyes and aimed her nocked arrow, but whatever the creature was, it didn’t attack and could not have been the Kephis.

  An hour passed. The sun climbed, glaring in their eyes. The moist heat grew stifling.

  Finally Arixa’s comm tone sounded. She accepted the incoming transmission from Zhi, who whispered hurriedly, “They are coming! I can see you. You are well positioned. Zhi out.”

  She signaled enemy approaching to her two archers and to Ivar and Tomiris, who passed the signal to the other ambushers out of Arixa’s line of sight.

  After several tense minutes, the pair of black forms came into view through vegetation.

  The sight was blood-chilling.

  Even though their appearance matched what Zhi had shown them, nothing could prepare one to see in person the huge, bulbous eyes set in tiny, triangular heads, the glistening, segmented torsos, the spindly, multiply-jointed limbs moving in a smooth, inhuman gait. It was impossible to see such a thing and not desire to stomp on it with boot heel. But this bug was far too big for that, and so the next native instinct was to flee.

  For the Dawn, running in fear was never an option. Today, for Arixa, it was even less so because this thing, this Kephis, stood between her and her ability to lash out at humanity’s unrightful masters.

  And so she drew back her bowstring, sighted on the large female Kephis and worked to steady her nerves—no easy task when looking upon something so instinctively repulsive. She peered down the arrow shaft at the two alien creatures, one large, and one smaller by about a third. They advanced in a swift, forward-leaning crawl which employed their double-hinged legs as well as the lowermost of the two pairs of thinner appendages, the ones that ended in spikes.

  The smaller Kephis, the thrall as Zhi called it, carried in the skeletal hands of its upper appendages some amorphous, metallic object which was close to its own size.

  The dense vegetation meant that by the time the Kephis were in sight, they were also well within bowshot, yet Arixa held. These targets were thin of body and limb, making even a well-aimed arrow as likely as not to pass through open space. Besides, their skin itself was sleek, rounded armor.

  Arixa waited, waited, until the Kephis hunter and her thrall were terrifyingly near, as near as her body’s revulsion would allow. Then, as if insistent on keeping the monster at bay, her fingers refused to wait longer. They sprang open, and the arrow flew.

  It narrowly missed. The Kephis halted and squatted, emitting a high pitched chitter. Arixa nocked a fresh arrow as the rest loosed their own from tree and ground. Several hit, but none pierced. The alien chittering intensified, and the mantis head swiveled wildly. It took only seconds for those huge eyes to lock onto the source of at least one of the arrows and embark on a low, four-footed run in the ambushers’ direction.

  Arixa fired again, and the others kept up their barrage. She aimed for its eyes and hit one, but even there the arrow glanced off. When the Kephis was heartbeats from reaching Dak’s position, Arixa threw down her bow, hoisted her war-pick and charged into the open.

  The others did the same. Dak, the hunter’s target, burst out of hiding, screaming, with his long-handled Scythian cavalry ax, the sagaris, raised overhead. Seeing their imminent collision, Arixa opened her own mouth in a combination of war cry and distraction, but it was not enough.

  One of the Kephis’s long, spike-tipped middle limbs drew back and then darted forward. The spike pierced Dak, driving all the way through to emerge blood-covered from his back. Dak’s battle cry turned to a choked groan, but his momentum carried both combatants. In spite of being impaled, Dak brought down his sagaris in a powerful arc.

  The Kephis jerked its mantis head aside, and the blow landed where upper limbs met segmented body. It shrieked in inhuman pain. Its barbed limb pulled free of Dak, who yelled and released his grip on the ax, which remained embedded in the Kephis.

  Arrows continued to rain down from the trees. Most clattered, but one buried itself to the fletching in a joint between the Kephis female’s body segments.

  Arixa arrived just as Dak hit the forest floor trailing a spray of blood. Ducking a swipe by a clawlike hand, she swung her war-pick. It struck home with a sharp crack, the sharp tip of its heavy iron head sinking through shell in the middle of the Kephis’s back. As she ripped it free, another alien limb flew at her in a broadside. Arixa blocked that blow with an arm, but its force was still sufficient to knock her back.

  Falling, she saw Ivar grab hold of one of the Kephis’s limbs on the far side and hack it off with a stroke of his ax. Beyond him, Tomiris fell bleeding from one leg as she and another woman engaged the smaller thrall.

  The instant Arixa hit the ground, she rolled, sprang up and rejoined the fray. She and Ivar landed blows at the same moment. Hers sank into its intended target, the box on the side of the Kephis’s face which allowed it to breathe Earth’s air. Ivar’s landed lower, penetrating armored skin in a shower of yellow blood.

  Ivar groaned and fell as a spiked arm descended on him from behind. Arixa pulled her pick free and turned in time to dodge the same swipe-from-behind maneuver that had just felled Ivar, then ducked low and drove her war-pick into the hinge of an insectoid leg. Instead of tugging it straight out, she twisted and dragged the head in an effort to create a larger wound. Another arrow fired from cover lodged in the Kephis’s abdomen. The missiles didn’tt penetrate easily, but when they did pierce, they sank deeply.

  A third Scythian’s ax split shell from behind while Ivar rose to charge again. The alien shrieked constantly now—whether in anger or pain or an effort to intimidate, Arixa didn’t know or care as she adhered to the enemy’s leg, twisting her pick in its yellow-oozing wound. A spike came down and pierced Arixa above her left hip, but she grit her teeth and endured, finally removing her weapon only to slam it again into the same joint.

  The Kephis toppled forward, taking Ivar with it. Arixa scrambled to her feet and wasted no time delivering blow after blow to the alien’s head. The shell cracked, and yellow blood spurted while insect limbs lashed out wildly. Ivar leaped up and joined her in delivering what seemed they must be finishing blows. Meanwhile the third Scythian who’d helped them fell the huntress ran over to assist a limping Tomiris defeat the thrall. The male Kephis’s exoskeleton must have been thinner than the female’s, for it was riddled with deeply sunk arrow shafts.

  As the female’s head turned to black and yellow pulp beneath blows from ax and pick and its flailing limbs settled to the earth, Arixa felt the exhilaration of victory. It rose up from her lungs and escaped in a triumphant scream. Staying her arm, she raced to the site of the second fight. Before she reached it, the thrall crashed to the ground, leaving Arixa only to deliver a few posthumous, head-smashing blows.

  Breathless, she sank to her knees and looked about. Nearly every one of the warriors of the Dawn on the ground had been wounded. Arixa herself clutched a cut that had torn through the scales of her armor and bit flesh on her left side. Tomiris lowered herself awkwardly on a hurt leg. Ivar was hunched over, panting, bleeding from his back.

  And Dak—! Raising herself on the haft of her war-pick, Arixa hurried over to where Sandaksatra had fallen. She found him on his back with face twisted in pain. Thank the gods, he emitted a low, continuous groan. The sound meant he lived.

  Arixa dropped down beside him. “Dak!” She laid a hand on his punctured armor. “Can you hear me?”

  “Are the...” he gasped, “bugs... dead?”

  “They are, Dak. You did good. We all did.”

  Arixa initiated a comm and seconds later heard Zhi’s voice, not inside her head but from be
hind, in person, as she arrived in a rush at Dak’s side. Stretching out an arm, Zhi held a small device over the rend in his armor. A cord snaked down from it and entered the gore-covered hole. There were some soft beeps and a faint hiss while Zhi examined a display. She held the device thus for several moments, during which Arixa opted not to distract with questions, since it seemed clear enough that her aim was to save his life.

  Rising, Arixa looked over the rest of her warriors. No one else’s wounds appeared immediately life-threatening. She smiled at them in triumph, pride and relief, receiving similar looks in return.

  It was then that she took note of the silver burden that the thrall had dropped a dozen paces away. Cautiously approaching it, Arixa found it to be some sort of sack with no visible opening. She prodded it gently with her war-pick. The feel and weight of it, combined with the shape and size, was familiar.

  As she stooped and felt it with her hands, she began to understand. Gripping her war-pick right up under its iron head, she brought its point to bear on the shiny material. It resisted piercing, but at last Arixa managed to make a hole, which she then enlarged by dragging the pick in a careful line. When the tear was as long as her arm, the sack’s contents stood revealed and her suspicion confirmed.

  A man was inside.

  His skin was the color of night. He was well-muscled and unclothed apart from a rather ornate loincloth and some jewelry made from twine and animal bone.

  “A shadow-man!” Ivar exclaimed, having limped up behind Arixa.

  She put her palm to the man’s chest for a moment and was pleased to declare, “He lives.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “If not for us, he would have been better off dead.”

  This remark came from Zhi, who had left Dak’s side to kneel by the side of the dead female Kephis.

  “Is Dak—” Arixa asked her urgently.

  “He will be fine.”

  “What do you mean better off dead?” Ivar inquired.

  Zhi put her hand to the insectoid corpse and came away with an object coated in yellow, slimy blood. Arixa resumed cutting away the silvery fabric from the unconscious, dark-skinned male.