“I didn’t think so.” Olga Ryzhkova had a stubborn streak as wide as her mother’s. “What I did--what could I do? I have only my body to give. What else is there? Should I have held back and let them murder you?” “Yes.”
“No,” Olga said. “No and no and no. We live. We have to go on as we can. I’d just lost Yuri. I couldn’t bear to lose you, too. This is what happens after wars to those who lose. I would have done the same had the steppe nomads taken Tallinn Town, I’m sure I would.”
“This is what happens to those who lose,” Svetlana repeated dully.
“Enough talk. Too much talk,” Uldor said. He gave his new women a shove toward the higher ground across the river where the Sauron fort would go up. Their heads bowed, they trudged off in the direction he had set them.
Deathmaster Quilland sat at his desk and thought. Nothing moved but the slow rise and fall of his chest, and an eyeblink every thirty-seven seconds. If a fly had landed on his face, the skin would have twitched to dislodge it with equal precision.
“Enter,” he said.
The noise outside his office would have been impossible for a human norm to detect; but despite the age that had turned him bald and gaunt, Quilland was still a Sauron and in complete command of his facilities. When his system finally wore out, it would do so from simultaneous failures and the process would be swift.
Cyborg Rank Marin came through the door and sat. He raised a brow imperceptibly.
“Security level One,” Quilland said. Marin nodded and waited. “You are to proceed to Angband Base and oversee the restoration of discipline and the completion of the facilities.”
Marin nodded again, the same slight jerk of the chin. Angband base was over ten thousand kilometers away, commanding a valley at the far end of the Great Northern Steppe. It was the last and latest of the string of bases the crew of the Dol Guldur and their descendants had built to stake down that area in the two generations since they’d arrived, fleeing from murdered Sauron. It was intended to control Tallinn Valley, one of the rare areas outside the Shangri-La lowlands with air thick enough that women could give birth in relative safety.
“There were grave breaches of discipline,” he pointed out. “Counterproductive actions with regard to the human-norm cattle of Tallinn Valley.”
“You have full authority,” Quilland said. Almost redundantly; Marin was, after all, a Cyborg. He went on: “Furthermore, you are to evaluate the situation in the area to the south. Records indicate that the Eden Valley could be a valuable acquisition, if it can be acquired with a minimal commitment of resources.”
Logistics made a large expedition impossible. Founding Angband had strained the reserves of Firebase Ten, the nearest Sauron outpost to Tallinn. Eden was more than seven hundred kilometers further.
“If Tallinn cannot be held?” Marin said.
“Then it must be neutralized as a possible base for attacks on our positions further north and east. Exterminate the human-norm population, destroy all capital works such as irrigation canals, and evacuate the garrison to Firebase Ten.”
Marin asked a question with a subvocalization. Quilland showed his first expression of the interview, a smile that would have made a human-norm blanch.
“In that case,” he explained further, “I will handle the reassignment of the personnel involved in the failure personally.”
In which case, Cyborg Rank Marin thought, they would probably envy the cattle of Tallinn.
He rose, his mind already methodically reviewing the data.
KINGS WHO DIE . . , S.M. Stirling
“Humans?” the Sauron subvocalized.
His companion raised slightly from his prone position and peered into the truenight.
“Possibly,” he said.
Even to the gene-enhanced vision of the Soldiers, there was little to see in the truenight darkness. Byers’ Sun was down, and so was the Cat’s Eye, the gas-giant planet that Haven circled; not much starlight was getting past the high overcast of ice particles and windborne dust. It was very cold, minus thirty Celsius at least, and what breeze there was was from behind them, so they could not scent the intruders. There was only a set of faint wavering lights, reddish, the IR heat-signature of life. That might be from a pack of stobor down from the foothills and making a try at Tallinn Valley’s livestock.
“Doesn’t matter shit, either way,” Under Assault Leader Uruk said. “We’ll see ‘em off.”
He stood, clicking the safety on his assault rifle. There was no reason to be more cautious. The Soldiers here had marched all the way from the Citadel, the great fortress of their people at the eastern entrance to the Shangri-La Valley. That was better than ten thousand kilometers, fighting all the way--and nobody had been able to seriously hinder them. First Citizen Diettinger himself had seen them off, drawn up in field-grey ranks. Nearly two thousand, then; most had been dropped off at the bases along the northern slopes of the Atlas mountains as they marched west. Fifth Company was the last and best, selected to found Angband base and tie down the westernmost end of the line.
Uruk brought his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and stroked the trigger.
Crack. A scream of pain; humans, then. Uruk had not expected to miss.
He had not expected to take return fire, either. Few humans had firearms any more, and none could see well enough to shoot accurately in this dark. Muzzle flashes spat out of the night at them; he dove for the earth a fractional second before the first bullet hit. One pounded into his shoulder, another into a hip, a third into his side. He willed away fear and pain, commanded blood vessels to clamp down, took an inventory. Collarbone and pelvic bone broken. Major internal injury, kidney gone. A glance over at his companion; one of the hollowpoint bullets had removed the top of his skull, and another had smashed their communicator. Well, the noise would bring reinforcements. There was a whistling in his ears as he took cover behind the body and raised his rifle one-handed. Whistling, and shooting stars.
“Rhodevick’s hit!”
“Shmuel, patch him up--come on, get that firelighter working!”
Miriam van Reenan snapped the orders lying on her back, holding out her arrow. A bullet pecked at the crumbled adobe of the sheep-pen wall above her as the Sauron assault rifle fired again. The man beside her was pumping a hardwood plunger in a cylinder that held tinder and punk. He shook the embers out on her arrow. Flame blossomed, caught on the wad of oil-soaked muskeylope underdown wrapped about it below the head.
“And keep that bliddy arse-cutter Sauron’s head down, Yigal!” The fire felt indecently warm on the eyeholes of her facial mask, where frozen breath clung to the down around her mouth.
Rhodevick van Reenan lay curled about himself, the night-sighted rifle lying beside him. Miriam felt a stab of grief and anxiety at the sight of her half-brother; if Rhodevick died . . . Mother and Aunt Ruth will both kill me. Then Pa will do it again. Shmuel was busy with bandages. He could help if anyone could, he was son to old Allon himself. Ten meters down the wall her brother Yigal duckwalked to a new position and then came smoothly to one knee. Crack-crack-crack-crack, and he fell back to slap a fresh magazine into his New Aberdeen 7mm. At least all the ancient ammunition was still working. . . .
Miriam rose. Pushed out of her mind the thought of a Sauron prefrag assault rifle round punching into her, tumbling through flesh and cutting bone. The bow rose in her hands, the bright beacon of the fire scorching her gloved hand as she drew to the ear. The pulleys on either end of the stave clicked; four hundred meters, very long range, but she was half of the blood of Frystaat, and the bow was a heavy one. So were the other six archers on either side of her, her brothers and sisters.
whirt. whirt. whirt. whirt. whirt. whirt.
The fire arrows arched through the night. Miriam’s eyes were nearly as dark-adapted as a Sauron’s, even if she could not see heat. To her the shafts were bright as beacons, outlining the huge conical shapes of the grain-stacks as they descended. Whunking sounds as they thudded home. Another
arrow was pressed into her outstretched hand. It slid through the cutout in the center of the handle, smooth pull of cold-stiffened muscle as she drew, waiting had been the hardest--whirt. Again, again, and the fire was catching in the straw now. Little reddish caverns of fire, broad-winged scarlet birds taking perches on the top and flapping. No use thinking how much human sweat had gone into that barley; only Saurons would eat it now, if they left it.
“Enough!” she shouted. “Gut genoegh! Good enough, now move it. Trek.”
“Well, the young sklem will make it, eh?” Piet van Reenan said with relief, sinking back in the hot-spring water. Or so Allon thinks. If anyone knew, the gentle old mediko would. Rhodevik would limp, perhaps, which was cheap enough when you considered what one of those Sauron bullets could do to a man.
Piet had seen that, more times than he liked to remember. Back when the Saurons landed his first wife Sarie had been killed in the initial strafing; he had seen her dead, with their twin daughters. Sarie, the girls, too many friends. Now my son.
“Oh, but they owe me a debt,” he whispered.
Ruth nodded, the smile-lines on her face turning bleak a moment. There was scarcely a living human on Haven who could not make that claim, and no need to say who the debtor was.
She sighed. “I’d never have thought Rhoddie would do something that stupid,” she said.
“He’s my child as much as yours,” Piet said sourly, caught between pride and anger. “I was certainly an idiot at his age. And Miriam put him up to it--put all of them up to it--or I’m a hotnot.” He drew a deep breath and controlled his anger; rage brought on the chest pains, nowadays.
“How are you, darling?” Ruth asked in sudden anxiety.
“Not bad, for a dying man,” Piet said. His wife winced and turned away, swallowing.
Piet stood, shrugging to hide his own pain. That was more of the spirit than the body, as yet. There was no mirror in the fieldstone room that held the bath; just a small window covered with thin-scraped stretched hide.
Faint winter light came through it, pale and cold in the steam-mist rising from the hot-spring’s water. But he needed no mirror to see the first signs, or to feel them. He was a tall man for one of Frystaat’s race, 170 centimeters, thick in the arms and legs, massively broad in the shoulders. The folk who settled Frystaat had adapted well to their planet, to crushing gravity and poisonous metal-heavy winds, to the flaying heat of the F5 sun and the constant menace of an alien ecology older and more energetic than Terra’s.
So it was normal for him to look gaunt, little subcutaneous fat over the strong thick bones and massive muscles. It was not normal for him to look this gaunt, nor for the heavy spatulate fingers to tremble. Even slightly, even occasionally. His heart pained him sometimes, when he exercised hard. The hair of head and close-cropped beard was nearly all silver against the teak-dark color of his skin, only streaks of the original butter-yellow . . .
And Frystaaters do not live long lives, he thought grimly. If the planet did not kill them young, the adaptations did. Hearts beating too strongly, swift nerves slipping over into filibration . . . and this is not even Frystaat. Haven was an easier world in some respects; only .91 standard G’s, as opposed to his birth-planet’s 1.75. The climate was miserable--Haven was the chilly moon of a gas giant planet, barely terrestroid--but too cold rather than too hot. Frystaaters had little defense against cold; they lived in the polar zone, which was the only area cool enough for Terran life. On Frystaat, the equator went over the boiling point of water every day. So it was a minor miracle he had lasted this long, nearly sixty full T-years.
“It’s the way of things, my heart,” he said to his wife, gentleness in the tone if not the words. “And a miracle I’ve lasted this long, considering all the people who’ve tried to kill me.”
Ruth gave him a shaky smile and handed him the towel. Piet smiled for a moment, lingering over the contact of their hands. Quite a woman, he thought. Thirty T-years, and still as straight and slender as the girl of sixteen he’d taken down from her father’s iron cross. Lines around the eyes and streaks in the seal-brown hair simply made the face look lived-in, a better home for the spirit within. There had been little romance in their union to start with; he had saved her life and helped her to power among the Edenites, because his own followers needed the Eden Valley, fertile and low enough that women could bear to term there. They had married to unite ex-marauders of the Band and the Edenite farmers; much the same reason he had earlier taken Ilona ben Zvi to wife, when the Band took in the survivors of Degania.
Thirty years and seven children had made it more than a political match. Three decades, hard work and fighting, quarrels and reconciliations, famine and war and shared grief at two small graves . . .
“Well,” Ruth said, brushing the back of her hand across a cheek, “it’s going to be a busy enough day. There’s Miriam’s case to decide. That girl takes after her mother--only much worse.” Ilona van Reenan’s work of choice had always been with the Band’s military side, and her daughter had quite a following among the younger hotheads. “Unless you think I should disqualify myself. People might misunderstand.”
Piet grunted as he finished with the towel and pulled on fleece-lined sheepskin trousers. Nobody had ever appointed Ruth as Judge ... it had just happened, with more and more people bringing her their quarrels and troubles.
“Nie,” he replied. “Nobody will think you’re partial. Hell, Ilona wanted to burn her butt,” Piet said, smiling again.
“Piet, this is serious,” Ruth said, crossing her arms and glaring at him. “She may have started a war.”
“Maaks nie, my love, we’re already at war with the Saurons,” he said. “It’s attacking them against orders that bothers me.”
“Husband, the granaries she burned were all that stood between the Tallinnayska and starvation. Do you think the Saurons will hesitate to collect their taxes twice, because she destroyed the first set?”
He pulled the heavy wool tunic over his head and shrugged into his jacket, a whole sheepskin with the fleece turned in. Saber and pistol went over that, the feeling as natural as the shiny places the belt had worn on the glazed leather.
“Letting them consolidate in the Tallinn Valley is a menace to the People, Ruth,” he said with rare formality. “Mercy for the Tallinnayska may be . . . more than we can afford.”
Base First Rank Shagrut did not pace. He would have liked to pace, but one did not waste energy before a Cyborg. The visiting panjumandrum from the Citadel was not expected to be at Angband base long; he was on a general tour of the outposts. While he was here, his authority was as absolute as that of First Citizen Diettinger himself.
They were seated in the temporary commander’s quarters of Angband Base. The square stone fort was still a-building, mostly by gangs of forced labor from the Tallinn Valley to the west. Through the unglazed window he could see the rolling benchlands of the valley floor, grey-white with sparse snow or loess soil, speckled with pale barley straw; it was bright trueday, with the sun and a full Cat’s Eye both up. Sauron vision was sharp as binoculars; he could see the eternal snowpeaks of the Iron Limpers beyond it. Much of the snow would be C02 . . . The air had the absolute purity of midwinter on Haven’s steppes, too cold to bear moisture or much scent.
“Resistance has been much greater than anticipated by Intelligence,” he pointed out to the visitor from the Citadel. It was not an excuse--Soldiers did not make excuses--but it was an accurate observation.
“This is often the case,” the Cyborg replied.
The face above the totenkopf collar-tabs was nearly as skull-like as the insignia. Cyborg Rank Marin did stand, turning and looking out through the unglazed gap where double-panels of glass would one day stand. The temperature was minus 10 Celsius in the warmth of midafter-noon sixty hours after sunrise, nothing either of them was much bothered by, given wool field uniforms.
“Nevertheless, this base is seriously behind schedule,” he continued.
“Cyborg,” Shagrut acknowledged.
Maybe he’s past it, he thought. Even the biomechanical implants and extra genetic engineering of a Cyborg Rank had to fail sometime; entropy won all wars. Marin was one of the old ones, the generation that had come with the Dol Guldur to Haven, fleeing ruined Sauron. He had been born on Homeworld, the only one of the Soldiers at Angband Base not born locally. Shagrut had been nurtured in a Havener womb, although the fertilized ova had been produced on Sauron; most of his command were crossbred, part of the eugenics program that was to turn Haven into a new Sauron in time.
Time. We need time.
“Time,” he continued aloud. “Destruction of supplies and foodstocks has altered the time parameters. More Soldiers will not cure the problem; we cannot feed them. Likewise, we cannot increase levies of either food or labor from the cattle tribes without counterproductive losses from famine and increased rebellion.”
“Amplify your report,” the Cyborg said.
“Initial conquest was within estimate,” Shagrut said; not without a trace of pride. A battle that went according to plan was a considerable victory. “Examples were made at the first sign of resistance. The cattle became convinced that further struggle was futile, and we made it plain that enough resources would be left them to ensure survival.”
Just barely, but anyone who had lived through the past thirty-four T-years on Haven was a natural-born survivor.
Seventy percent of those living when the fleeing Sauron ship Dol Guldur arrived had died in a single decade. Some quickly in a blaze of nuclear fire, others more slowly of famine, disease and the chaotic violence as the lucky ones fought over scraps.
“The cattle to the south were the causative agents,” Shagrut continued, clamping down on a dull blaze of anger. “They slipped in a party of infiltrators and burned much of the stocks.” Grain was usually stored still in the straw, and threshed as needed. “The sabotage was confined to stocks already levied as tribute. Their replacement required pushing the cattle to the edge of starvation; many escaped and are being harbored by the cattle to the south, in the Eden Valley and surrounding areas. We have had to allow others arms in order to hunt native wildlife for supplemental food, but some of these have deserted to the enemy.”
War World IV: Invasion Page 28
