by Paula Guran
“Know what they are, Staff?”
“No idea, sir.”
He glanced over at her with exaggerated disbelief, as he activated his com. “Anyone?”
“I think they’re catapults, sir.”
“Cat—apults, Corporal Hollice?”
“Yes, sir, it’s a pre-tech weapon.”
“And they’re going to what? Throw cats at us?”
“No, sir. Probably rocks.”
Franks glanced at Torin again. She shrugged. This was new to her.
“They’re going to throw rocks at us?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not reading a power source, Hollice.”
“They use, uh, kind of a, uh, spring thing. Sir.”
“You have no idea, do you Corporal?”
“Not really, sir. But I’ve read about them.”
Franks took another look through the scanner. “How do the mortars target something with no energy read?”
“Aim and fire, sir. They’re not that far away.”
“Not so easy with an emmy, Staff.” Franks mimed manually aiming one of the mortars and Torin grinned.
Then she stopped grinning as the first of the catapult things fired and watched in disbelief as a massive hunk of ore laced rock arced overhead and slammed into level five. The wall shattered under the impact flinging debris far and wide.
“Cover!”
Then BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Not as deafening as artillery but considerably more primal.
Most of the rock screamed over their heads, aimed at the remaining emmies now beginning to return fire from level four.
Most.
One of the rocks grew larger, and larger, and . . .
The wall bucked under foot, flexed and kicked like a living thing trying to throw them off. A gust of wind blew the rock dust clear and Torin saw that a crescent shaped bite had been taken out of the top of the wall. “Chou?”
“Two dead, three injured, Staff. I’m on it.”
What if they gave a war and nobody died . . . Never going to happen. “Listen up, people, next time you see a great hunk of rock sailing toward you, get the fuck out of the way! These things are moving a lot slower than what we’re used to!”
Only one emmy spat back an answer blowing one of the incoming rocks out of the sky.
“Oh for . . . COVER!” A piece of debris bounced off Torin’s helmet with enough force to rattle her teeth and a second slammed into her upper back, fortunately moving fast enough that her vest absorbed most of the impact.
“Arver!” Spitting out a mouthful of blood from a split lip, Franks screamed the artillery lieutenant’s name into his com. “You want to watch where you’re dropping that shit!”
“You want to come up here and try and aim this thing manually?”
“I don’t think you’re going to have time for that, sir.” Torin nodded out over the wall. Under cover of the rocks, which were probably intended to be as much of a distraction as a danger, the Others had started a second charge, the faster quadrupeds out front once again and everyone else close behind.
The odds of deliberately hitting a randomly moving object were slim. The Marines switched to full automatic and sprayed rounds into the advancing enemy. Bodies started hitting the dirt. The enemy kept coming.
“As soon as you can take out multiple targets, start dropping the carts!”
Out of the corner of one eye, Torin saw Juan Checya, one of the heavy gunners, sling his weapon, flick on a hovercraft, and, as it lifted on its cushion of air, grab the rear rail with both augmented hands and push it to the back of the wall. As soon as he had the maximum wind-up available, he braced himself and whipped around, releasing the cart at the front of the arc. It traveled an impressive distance before gravity negated the forward momentum.
The quadrupeds closest to the casualties keened at the loss of their companions and seemed to double their speed. Torin found it encouraging, in a slightly soul deadening way, that they grieved so obviously. Grief was distracting. Unfortunately, not only distracting for the enemy. “Sir . . . ”
Franks rubbed a grimy hand over his face, rock dust mixing with sweat and drawing vertical gray streaks “I’m okay, Staff.”
“Never doubted it, sir.”
Above and behind them, a fourth civilian carrier rose toward safety.
“One carrier remaining.” Captain Rose’s voice on the command channel. Torin almost thought she could hear screaming in the background. She’d rather face a well-armed enemy than civilians any day. “Lieutenant Franks, move your platoon back to level three and take over stretcher duty from Lieutenant Garly who will hold level two!”
“Captain!” Lieutenant Franks slid two steps sideways and blew a biped off the wall. Although it might be a new species, Torin missed any other distinguishing features—after a while, the only thing that registered was the uniform. “Unfriendlies have broken the perimeter!”
“That’s why we’re moving the perimeter, Franks. Fall back!”
“Yes, sir! Staff . . . ”
“Sir! Fall back by numbers, people! You know the drill! Keep low so the second level has as clear a shot as possible! And Amanda, I want that covering fire thick enough to keep out rain!”
“You got it, Torin!”
The word retreat was not in the Corps vocabulary. Marines fell back and regrouped. In this particular instance it wasn’t so much back as down. The heavies leapt off the wall into the city and then joined in providing covering fire so that those without exo-skeletons to take up the impact could come off the wall a little more slowly. And then it was a fast run up the lowest level of the spiraling street, squads leapfrogging each other as Lieutenant Garly’s platoon swept the first level wall, keeping the enemy too occupied to shoot down into the city.
Given the fire from the second level, a number of the enemy decided that the safest thing to do was to follow the Marines down to the street.
Also, without Marines on the outside wall to keep the sappers away . . .
The explosion smelled like scorched iron and filled the street with smoke and dust. Swearing for the sake of swearing, Torin ducked yet another rain of debris.
“They’re in!”
Squad one made it through the second level gate. Torin and the lieutenant crouched behind a rough barricade as squad two followed. As a clump of the enemy rounded the curve of a building, a hovercraft sailed off level two, plummeted downwards, and squashed half of them flat.
“I think that’s our cue, Staff.”
“Works for me, sir.”
They moved back with the squad, Torin keeping herself between the lieutenant and the enemy. The largest part of her job was, after all, keeping him alive.
They were no more than four meters from the gate when a pair of the quadrupeds charged over the wreckage of the hovercraft, keening and firing wildly as they ran. Their weapon was, like the KC, a chemically powered projectile. The rounds whined through the air in such numbers that it almost seemed as though they were being attacked by a swarm of angry wasps. No choice but to dive for dirt and hope the distinctly inadequate cover would be enough.
Shots from the second level took the quads out just before they reached the squad.
Torin scrambled to her feet. “Let’s go before more show up.”
No one expected the quads to have riders: smaller bipeds who launched themselves from the bodies. One of them died in the air, the other wrapped itself around Haysole and drew its sidearm. Haysole spun sideways, his helmet flying off to bounce down the street, and got enough of an elbow free to deflect the first shot. Between the frenzied movement, and the certainty that taking out the enemy would also take out Haysole, no one dared shoot. Torin felt rather than saw Franks charge forward. He was a big man—because he was a second lieutenant she sometimes forgot that. Large hands wrapped around the enemy’s head and twisted. Sentient evolution was somewhat unimaginative. With very few exceptions, a broken neck meant the brain was separated from the body.
T
urned out, this was not one of the exceptions.
“You okay?” Franks asked as he let the body drop.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s go . . . ”
They stepped over the body, which was when pretty much everyone left on the street noticed that harness strapped to the outside of the uniform was festooned with multiple small packets and what was obviously a detonation device.
Rough guess, Torin figured there were enough explosives to take out the gate to the second level. The high ground didn’t mean much if you couldn’t keep the enemy off it.
Franks gave Haysole a push that sent him stumbling into Torin. “Move!” Then he grabbed the body by the feet and stood, heaving him up and into the air. The explosion was messy. Loud and messy.
It wasn’t until Franks slumped onto her shoulder as she wrestled him through the gate that she realized not all the blood soaking his uniform had rained down out of the sky.
He’d been hit in the neck with a piece of debris.
As the last squad through got the heavy metal gate closed and locked, he slid down her body, onto his knees, and then toppled slowly to the ground.
Torin grabbed a pressure seal from her vest but it was too late.
The lower side of his neck was missing. Veins and arteries both had been severed. He’d bled out fast and was probably dead before he hit the ground. There were a lot of things the medics up in orbit could repair; this wasn’t one of them.
“Damn, the lieutenant really saved our asses.” Sergeant Chou turned from the gate, ignoring the multiple impacts against the other side. “If they’d blown this sucker we’d have been in a running fight to the next level. Is he okay.”
Torin leaned away from the body.
“Fuck.” Haysole. The di’Taykan had a way with words.
Chou touched her shoulder. “Do you . . . ?”
“I’ve got it.”
A carrier roared up from the port, its escort screaming in from both sides.
“That’s it, Marines, we’re out of here!”
“Staff . . . ”
“Go on, I’m right behind you.”
They still had to make it up to the port but, holding the high ground as they did, it shouldn’t be a problem. She spread the body bag over Second Lieutenant Franks and sealed the edges as Lieutenant Garly’s platoon started spending their heavy ordinance. From the smell of things, they’d dropped something big and flammable onto the street behind the gate.
This wasn’t the kind of war people made songs about. The Confederation fought only because the Others fought and no one knew why the Others kept coming. Diplomacy resulted in dead diplomats. Backing away only encouraged them.
But perhaps a war without one single defining ideology was exactly the kind of war that needed an infinite number of smaller defining moments.
Torin smoothed out the bag with one bloody hand then sat back and keyed the charge.
Maybe, she thought as she slid the tiny canister that now held Lieutenant Franks into an inner pocket on her combat vest, maybe it was time they had a few songs . . .
In Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe® series, one of the primary missions of the ace-pilot Scouts is to seek out odd, lost, or hidden knowledge and old technology. Scout Montet sig’Norba inadvertently finds herself on a quest to find the one “warrior” who can truly wage cosmic “battle.”
Naratha’s Shadow
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
“For every terror, a joy. For every sorrow, a pleasure. For every death, a life. This is Naratha’s Law.”
—from Creation Myths and Unmakings, A Study of Beginning and End
“Take it away!” The Healer’s voice was shrill.
The Scout leapt forward, slamming the lid of the stasis box down and triggering the seal in one smooth motion.
“Away it is,” she said soothingly, as if she spoke to a child instead of a woman old in her art.
“Away it is not!” Master Healer Inomi snapped. Her face was pale. The Scout could hardly blame her. Even with the lid closed and the seal engaged, she could feel the emanation from her prize puzzle—a grating, sticky malevolence centered over and just above the eyes, like the beginnings of a ferocious headache. If the effect was that strong for her, who tested only moderately empathic as the Scouts rated such things, what must it feel like to the Healer, whose gift allowed her to experience another’s emotions as her own? The Scout bowed. “Master Healer, forgive me. Necessity exists. This . . . object, whatever it may be, has engaged my closest study for . . . ”
“Take. It. Away.” The Healer’s voice shook, and her hand, when she raised it to point at the door. “Drop it into a black hole. Throw it into a sun. Introduce it into a nova. But, for the gods’ sweet love, take it away!”
The solution to her puzzle would not be found by driving a Master Healer mad. The Scout bent, grabbed the strap and swung the box onto her back. The grating nastiness over her eyes intensified, and for a moment the room blurred out of focus. She blinked, her sight cleared, and she was moving, quick and silent, back bent under the weight of the thing, across the room and out the door. She passed down a hallway peculiarly empty of Healers, apprentices, and patrons, and stepped out into the mid-day glare of Solcintra.
Even then, she did not moderate her pace, but strode on until she came to the groundcar she had requisitioned from Headquarters. Biting her lip, feeling her own face wet with sweat, she worked the cargo compartment’s latch one-handed, dumped her burden unceremoniously inside, and slammed the hatch home.
She walked away some little distance, wobbling, and came to rest on a street-side bench. Even at this distance, she could feel it—the thing in the box, whatever it was—though the headache was bearable now. She’d had the selfsame headache for the six relumma since she’d made her find, and was no closer to solving its riddle.
The Scout leaned back on the bench. “Montet sig’Norba,” she told herself loudly, “you’re a fool.” Well, and who but a fool walked away from the luxury and soft life of Liad to explore the dangerous galaxy as a Scout? Scouts very rarely lived out the full term of nature’s allotted span—even those fortunate enough to never encounter a strange, impulse-powered, triple-heavy something in the back end of nowhere and tempt the fates doubly by taking it aboard.
Montet rested her head against the bench’s high back. She’d achieved precious little glory as a Scout, glory arising as it did from the discovery of odd or lost or hidden knowledge.
Which surely the something must carry, whatever its original makers had intended it to incept or avert.
Yet, six relumma after what should have been the greatest find of her career, Montet sig’Norba was still unable to ascertain exactly what the something was.
“It may have been crafted to drive Healers to distraction,” she murmured, closing her eyes briefly against the ever-present infelicity in her head.
There was a certain charm to Master Healer Inomi’s instruction to drop the box into a black hole and have done, but gods curse it, the thing was an artifact! It had to do something!
Didn’t it?
Montet sighed. She had performed the routine tests and then tests not quite so routine, branching out, with the help of an interested if slightly demented lab tech, into the bizarre. The tests stopped short of destruction; the tests, let it be known, had not so much as scratched the smooth black surface of the thing. Neither had they been any use in identifying the substance from which it was constructed. As to what it did or did not do . . .
Montet had combed, scoured, and sieved the Scouts’ not-inconsiderable technical archives. She’d plumbed the depths of archeology, scaled the heights of astronomy, and read more history than she would have thought possible, looking for a description, an allusion, a hint. All in vain.
Meanwhile, the thing ate through stasis boxes like a mouse through cheese. The headaches and disorienting effects were noticeably less when the thing was moved to a new box.
Gradually,
the effects worsened until even the demented lab tech—no empath, he—complained of his head aching and his sight jittering. At which time it was only prudent to remove the thing to another box and start the cycle again.
It was this observation of the working of the thing’s . . . aura that had led her to investigate its possibilities as a carrier of disease. Her studies were, of course, inconclusive. If it carried disease, it was of a kind unknown to the Scouts’ medical laboratory and to its library of case histories.
There are, however, other illnesses to which sentient beings may succumb. Which line of reasoning had immediately preceded her trip to Solcintra Healer Hall, stasis box in tow, to request an interview with Master Healer Inomi.
“And much profit you reaped from that adventure,” Montet muttered, opening her eyes and straightening on the bench. Throw it into a sun, indeed!
For an instant, the headache flared, fragmenting her vision into a dazzle of too-bright color. Montet gasped, and that quickly the pain subsided, retreating to its familiar, wearisome ache.
She stood, fishing the car key out of her pocket. Now what? she asked herself. She’d exhausted all possible lines of research. No, check that. She’d exhausted all orderly and reasonable lines of research. There did remain one more place to look.
The Library of Legend was the largest of the several libraries maintained by the Liaden Scouts. The largest and the most ambiguous. Montet had never liked the place, even as a student Scout. Her antipathy had not escaped the notice of her teachers, who had found it wise to assign her long and tedious tracings of kernel-tales and seed-stories, so that she might become adequately acquainted with the Library’s content.
Much as she had disliked those assignments, they achieved the desired goal. By the time she was pronounced ready to attempt her Solo, Montet was an agile and discerning researcher of legend, with an uncanny eye for the single true line buried in a page of obfuscation. After she passed her Solo, she opted for field duty, to the clear disappointment of at least one of her instructors, and forgot the Library of Legends in the freedom of the stars.
