War World IV: Invasion

by War World IV Invasion v2 Lit

  Homeworld had been next. A Cyborg’s memory allowed no softening forgetfulness; he remembered green-blue skies turned red and black as the enemy fleets pushed inward against the last defenses. The mad scramble to launch, with the precious stores of ova, rendezvous with the Fomoria--Dol Guldur, as it became later. And one last glimpse of Sauron as the ship accelerated at eleven gravities for the Alderson point where they could go FTL, with the Imperial fighters in pursuit. Black cloud from pole to pole, with a long glowing slit where magma showed at the edge of a continental plate broken open to the core. Like the Lidless Eye we adopted as our banner here, he thought, with a complex of emotions. They were there, but his brain refused to analyze them. Odd.

  “No,” he said aloud. “We will continue for the present.”

  Neither spoke further as they sought the stairs and the waiting women.

  “These proposals,” Piet van Reenan said slowly, tapping the two sheets of paper, “are not actually that different. Both involve a temporary truce; amnesty for those Tallinnaskaya who wish to return to their homes; our sale of foodstuffs for the next two years--” Haven years, better than three T-years “--and then the resumption of normal relations.”

  Normal meaning hostile, of course. From the glares some of the other Bandari gave him, and even their own leader, Marin knew they would prefer to resume the war right now. He sees more deeply than they, the Cyborg thought. The pendulum of success was about to swing back to the Soldiers. Perhaps the prestige effects would be worth ... no, Angband Base was the maximum priority now. Tallinn was as far as the resources and numbers of the Citadel would reach. Even if the garrison could destroy the Bandari, they could not occupy Eden and would probably be too weak to hold Tallinn itself. The frontier line would fall back as far as Firebase Ten, nearly a thousand kilometers northeast, allowing Fate-knew-what to brew down here. A strengthened Angband Base could deal with these troublesome cattle sooner or later. If nothing else, they would lose purpose and unity eventually, while the Soldiers would not--such was the nature of their respective breeds.

  He waited patiently; then more alertly still, as the Bandari founder spoke. That overtone was in his voice again, as it had been on the first day. A bard’s tone, or a priest’s; the tone of someone speaking of a mystery.

  “Let Fate decide the terms,” Piet said quietly.

  “You propose to flip a coin?” Marin said.

  “No. Let it be a matter of blood and honor. Single combat to the death, without weapons, between our champion and yours. If we prevail, our draft becomes the binding treaty. If yours, then yours. And if ours wins the first fight, you shall choose one more champion, and if he falls--then you withdraw from Angband Base to your Firebase and trouble us no more.”

  Is he insane? was the Cyborg’s first thought. No ordinary human norm could stand against a Soldier in unarmed combat. Then he checked, pulse, pupil dilation, hormonal scents. Nothing but the hint of ill-health he had detected before. Exalted, yes, but not insane. A crawling feeling started in the pit of his stomach, until he banished it. The jaws of a metalogical trap seemed poised about him, but--

  Ah. Prestige factors indeed; he could not refuse such an offer. Psychological domination was the Soldier’s true weapon, more potent than fusion bombs.

  “Who will be your champion?” he said.

  Piet van Reenan stood, a slight smile touching the heavy square face. His hands went wide, came together to touch his own chest.

  “I will stand for my people,” he said quietly.

  Silence echoed, harsh with the sound of breathing. Marin stood.

  “Agreed,” he answered dryly. “Twenty Haven days from now, at the border marker agreed.”

  He turned on his heel and left, the other Soldiers tramping solidly in his wake. The Bandari waited until they collected their scant baggage and rode out the gate before the uproar started. Marin could still hear it as his horse paused, panting, at the summit of Bashan Pass.

  “You’re being a bloody fool, Piet van Reenan,” Ruth said to her husband, voice steady despite the tears streaming down her face. “A bloody fool!”

  Piet sighed with a weariness that seemed to reach bone, turning and looking at his wives. The warmth of the fire at his back seemed to reach no further than his skin, leaving the cold in his marrow. The bedroom was bright with dyed wool, slightly shabby with the comfortable ease of long occupancy . . . and as unreachable as Frystaat. This was home, he thought, looking at the angry faces of the women who loved him. And I will never be home again.

  “I haven’t six months more, my dears,” he said to them both. “Allon’s certain.”

  “Then you should spend those six months here,” Ruth said. “And if you ... if you must die, die here in your own bed, with us and our children around you!”

  “Ruth, Ilona--it wouldn’t be clean. Strokes, before the end, massive blood clotting. I’d rather not die a vegetable, or leave that as the family’s last memory of me.”

  “So it’s pride, is it?” Ilona said, throwing into the chair and speaking to a corner. “Your damned pride. The founder of a nation can’t die like an ordinary man, no-- he has to go out in a blaze of glory.” She turned back and spat on the rug, almost crackling with her anger. “Glory.”

  “Partly,” Piet said softly. “I won’t lie to you two, never have, won’t start now. But it’s more than that. It’s for the People, for our children.”

  “For the history books, you mean,” Ruth said.

  “No.” They looked up at the emphatic tone of his voice. “Not that . . . we’ll never be in history again.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruth asked, after a moment when only the flames spoke.

  He held out his arms and they came to him, embracing all three together.

  “I need your strength,” he said at last. “It’s a very lonely thing that I must do. Because--”

  Kidmi Kasteel--Front Fort, in the slang of the Band’s younger generation--hardly deserved the name. There was a well, and a few crude stone huts, set amid tumbled rocks that rose from the northern grazing lands of the Pale. Now it was crowded, with folk from the ranches and the Eden Valley, with half the Saurons of Angband and folk from further still, a babble of tongues and a milling beyond the broad oval where the combat was to take place. Byers’ Sun was behind Cat’s Eye, drowning the reddish light in a white glare that made the gas giant a blazing corona-clad presence hanging across a quarter of the sky. The light painted faces the color of blood, as the milling and the voices subsided. Only the wind remained, hooting thin and barely chill across the great emptiness that rippled around the settlement, wind on the sea of grass.

  Piet van Reenan threw back his head and tasted the moving air, as his party rode toward the edge of the field of death. How far I’ve come, he thought, looking at the brightness above for an instant. He could remember Frystaat’s sun, a blue-white point that would kill your eyes in a moment, and the shadows it cast, edged with black diamond they were so sharp. The metal taste of his home planet’s winds, and the blue sands’ eternal hissing. Sparta’s sun, so gentle on the green world that was almost another Earth. Fire-shot air of landing fields in his soldier years, crouching sweating in a bunk as they dropped out of Alderson Drive into a new system; a swamp on Tanith and knowing that the Saurons were in the jungle too, the heavy clammy feel of an Imperial chameleon suit and the bonephone meshing its machine knowledge with his mind.

  Haven. Hate and love and wandering, a home at last from the work of hands and mind, the slow grind of age that you did not notice and then it was accomplished . . . And for all that travelling, I’ve made only the same journey that every man makes, he thought with a sudden lightness of heart. Every world where our children are born is Earth. It’s time for me to rest with you, mother.

  He swung down from the saddle and ran a hand along the horse’s neck; a simple action, done ten thousand times. Yet for everything, there had to be a last time. Old Allon was beside him for a moment; they shook hands.

&nb
sp; “Don’t take it too hard, Doctor,” Piet said. “We all have the same long-term prognosis, hey?”

  Something small and square passed from the mediko’s hand to Piet’s. Another thing I’m getting the last of, he thought. The last dose enclosed in its soluble plastic casing, preserved decades from an Army field-kit.

  The family were silent; this was the Kapetein’s goodbye, their father had taken his leave of them in private. Piet paused once by Andries, drawing the sheathed saber from his belt and handing it to the younger man.

  “Just so everyone knows, son,” he said quietly. “Use it well and only as needed.”

  Andries nodded. Beside him Miriam was fighting to keep her face still, and her cheeks jerked a little.

  “Go out there and win, Pa,” she said. “And . . . and if you don’t, I’ll avenge you. Am Bandari Hai!”

  “The People live,” he agreed, smiling and touching her cheek. “Nie, nie . . . myn mooie meisie, give me grandchildren instead. And don’t mourn overmuch if I fall. Only a parent grieving for a child should do that.”

  He turned to Ilona and Ruth. “Take care of each other, my loves . . . and thank you. Thank you very much.”

  Aloud, to the gathering of his followers, he spoke with words that were heritage to Edenite and Ivrit alike:

  “To every thing there is a season;

  And a time for every purpose under heaven.

  A time to be born, and a time to die—

  One by one, they joined him.

  When the Kapetein strode out onto the boulder-studded sand of the fighting ground, he was naked save for a rag loincloth twisted around his waist. That showed his body as few there had seen it, almost squat despite his height, legs like pillars on broad flat feet, body the same width from hips to meter-wide shoulders, arms seeming longer than was natural. Oil glistened on the huge knotted muscles of his limbs and torso, veins writhed over their surface, and the white hair was like a silver cap on his head. A dozen yards into the staked-out circle he stopped and raised his fists to Cat’s Eye. He planted his feet wide, filled his barrel chest and shouted, an inhuman sound like the bellow of an aurochs that went on and on. It was almost shocking when it turned to words.

  “Saurons!” he shouted. Twice a thousand listeners were crowded around. Every one could hear him, and every one could see; the ground was on a rise above the spectators. “Thieves, murderers, invaders!

  “Saurons! Hear me! The land of the People sickens with your tread. Its hungry winter ghosts cry out for vengeance--send me your champion, that I may appease their anger with his blood!”

  The crowd had murmured at the first sight of Piet. Now they fell silent with a hush that built like a wave, breaking in a sigh as the Sauron fighter walked in.

  Piet was the old bull, swinging his frayed horns and flaring nostrils for the scent of challenge. The Sauron was a young leopard; taller, slimmer, cropped blond hair above an eagle’s face, like a statue of ancient Greece come to life. He moved like a dancer, like a ghost himself, and not a single watcher was deluded in to hopefulness by his slighter build. Those long-fingered hands could rend metal, and to the mind that directed them mercy was hardly even a name. In the manner of his people the gene-engineered warrior wasted no time in words or challenge. One instant he was poised and still; the next he was charging in a blur of movement so pure that its speed seemed leisurely.

  Five meters from Piet he left the ground in a leap that stretched him parallel to earth, right arm out and fingers curved back almost against the wrist to present the striking surface of the palm-heel. It was the ancient flying crane of dead earth’s martial schools, executed with a speed and power beyond human rivalry. An oak-staved cask would have shattered under that blow, much less bone and flesh.

  Only a handful of those watching understood what happened next; Marin was one, and those among the audience with the experience to see the individual strokes of a ribbon-saber duel. There was only one counter to the Flying Crane attack, and few men--few Soldiers, even--were fast enough to use it. Piet van Reenan was not one; but he began his move before the young Soldier leapt, just after the moment of full commitment. Even then the inhuman reflexes of the attacker nearly saved him; he was jackknifing in midair and raking a bladed palm down towards his opponent when it happened.

  For Piet had gone over, over until all his weight was on one foot and palm, pivoting diagonally from the Soldier’s path. The other foot was driving up with every ounce of force concentrated behind the heel. That drove into the young warrior’s pubic bone with a shattering crack that made every man in hearing wince in reflexive sympathy, with all the joint momentum and the power of the tree-thick leg behind it.

  Piet swung upright with the same motion and charged at a pounding run, the side of his head streaming blood where one ear had been ripped loose. Ten meters away the young man writhed on the ground; still like a great jungle cat, silent and striving to swing himself around to face his enemy. The Kapetein seized him by shoulder and thigh, swung the twisting body above his head. They froze so for an instant, and then Piet threw him down on a jagged basalt rock, hard enough that the corpse bounced and rolled before it came to rest. Piet knelt by its side to close the staring blue eyes, still set in astonishment and anger. Then he climbed erect and turned to face the orderly grey ranks of the Soldiers.

  “Saurons,” he shouted again, and the bull below was louder still, hoarse and demanding. “Send me no more boys to do a man’s work! Send me your champion! Your Cyborg!” Perhaps only Marin saw him move a hand quickly across his lips, and his throat move in a swallow.

  A murmur swelled to a stunned ecstatic shouting from the crowd. Then it fell into a rhythmic stamping chorus:

  “Piet!”

  “Piet!”

  “Piet!”

  “Piet--”

  Shagrut was startled into protest when he saw Marin begin to unbuckle his gunbelt.

  “Sir!”

  “I am going to end this . . . this mummery, and that immediately,” Marin snapped. “That Frystaater has been playing us like a violin, whatever his purpose is, and this is entirely enough. Silence in the ranks!”

  He was coldly angry as he strode forward, but the anger was with himself. A Cyborg could not forget--but he could neglect to connect ideas, to realize which datum was relevant for recall and further analysis. Piet van Reenan had been an officer in Jarnsveldt’s Jaegers, the Imperial special-forces unit. Who else would know Soldier battle-psychology well enough to risk his life on a guess at an opponent’s opening move? And the Soldier had been selected for youth and reflex and strength, for his personnel file’s records of skill at unarmed combat. Not for two lifetimes’ experience of deadly struggle in all its forms.

  I thought it would vitiate our propaganda victory if a Cyborg was selected as our champion, he thought bitterly. Cyborgs were demons to the ruck of cattle on Haven; it would be like sending in a tank or an automech battlesuit. Better for a rank-and-file Soldier to triumph, to show that the most ordinary of the Race was the master of the pick of the cattle. If van Reenan had not insisted on second round, he would have walked away from here with a considerable psych-war victory. More grimly still: But his arrogance is my opportunity, as ours was his.

  The chant ended as Marin took the ring. If the first Soldier had been a young leopard against Piet’s bull, now Death faced the Minotaur. The Cyborg was thinner than wire, flat straps of muscle like an anatomical diagram stretched across a skeleton with a shrunk-on covering of skin, below a grinning skull. Piet faced him, pivoting slightly as they circled.

  “Aha, angry now, aren’t you, my walking battle-computer,” he said lightly. “You still don’t understand, do you, Sauron?”

  Marin’s unwavering gaze never left him. “I understand that you will not leave this field alive,” he answered. His nostrils flared, seeking an elusive difference in his opponent’s scent. Under the iron-clad tang of blood, the muskiness of blood heavy with adrenaline and testosterone.

  “I knew th
at. And I knew my purpose was accomplished, even if that youngster broke my spine--and he was good, very good. My apotheosis, Sauron.”

  Marin checked for some fraction of a second. “You are irrational after all,” he said with a hint of . . . was it disappointment? “Another of the myth-besotted cattle.”

  Astonishingly, Piet laughed; it was genuine amusement, soft and incongruously charming in the blood-streaked oiled skin of his face.

  “Poor Saurons. Poor ultimate rationalists; you designed for utter utility. All you managed was to make was a caricature of your ancestors’ ideal. Which is why you’re strong only to destroy. Out in space you destroyed the Empire and your own world, and here on Haven you destroyed civilization--and ended history. So dooming yourselves, for what are Saurons if not the end-product of civilized history?”

  Kill him now, instinct urged Marin. Pride was stronger, and curiosity.

  “We are strong to master the chaos--”

  Piet interrupted him, quoting softly:

  “The ultimate chaos of man’s existence

  Is the human endeavor called War

  By mastering War, we master the Universe.

  “--yes, of course I know your Homeworld’s songs, and your poetry. But you, poor self-blinded ones, you don’t know their own power--or the power of another’s songs.”

  “Songs?” Marin had to admit he was puzzled now. “You are engaged in music?”

  “What comes after history, Sauron? Or before it? Why, the time of heroes; and before that, the time of legends. You destroyed civilization here--and now this is the time of legends once again. I made a treaty with you, but there’s no glory in a treaty--no tragedy, no power. That’s what I’m giving my people here. A legend, a myth, a dream to dream their dreams by, and to make them strong.”