Allies and Enemies: Fallen
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ALLIES AND ENEMIES: FALLEN
Amy J. Murphy
Copyright © 2015 by Amy J. Murphy.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Amy J. Murphy
www.amyjmurphy.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout ©2013 BookDesignTemplates.com
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Allies and Enemies: Fallen/ Amy J. Murphy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Allies and Enemies: Fallen
Acknowledgments
PART I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
PART 2
9
10
11
12
13
PART 3
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Connect with Amy J. Murphy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible
without the significant assistance of
Barb
Karl
Barry
Alex
My backers
Fred & Jackie
Sean
Michael
Karl
Clinton
Barb
Alejandro
Brooke
The world’s most patient editor:
Pat Dobie
My thanks to you!
PART I
1
“Clear! In here, sir!”
Commander Sela Tyron followed the voice of her sergeant through the inner shadows of the building. Strength waning, she half-carried Atilio, her team’s injured meditech, up the stairs into an oddly shaped room. Around her, the seven remaining members of her team called out as they cleared the structures beyond this one. So far, no hostiles.
Sweat stung her eyes and trickled between her shoulder blades under the restrictive harness of her field armor. The heat was palpable, collecting in the stagnant air. These things barely registered with her. For Sela, there was only the chaos of staying alive and keeping her people that way.
She tightened her grip around Atilio’s waist. The young man had lost a lot of blood. Too much. His arm, slung over her shoulders, had become a limp weight. His head rolled forward.
Her heart clenched. I cannot lose him.
“Valen!” she bellowed for her sergeant.
She spotted a long waist-high table near the room’s center covered with tiny clay oil lamps. It looked sturdy enough a place to get a better look at Atilio’s injuries.
Wordlessly, Valen appeared at Atilio’s other side. Clay pots shattered to the stone floor as they heaved the injured man as gently as possible onto the table. She snapped open the hidden clasps to his field armor and suppressed a gasp.
“Stay with me. Stay with me, Atilio.” Her plea was a frantic hush as she peeled away his blood-soaked shirt. The bleeding seemed to be slowing. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. “What was the first damned thing I told you, sub-officer?”
“Try… try not to get killed,” Atilio wheezed.
His attempt at a chuckle turned into a wet bout of coughing. His hand, sticky with blood, weakly clasped hers. He was fading. His eyes slid shut once more. His skin was so cold, despite the nearly killing heat.
“Stay awake. That’s an order,” Sela snapped, digging her knuckles into his sternum. To her relief, the pain roused him and the young man’s eyes opened.
Not him. Not him. Not like this. A stupid mistake, a lucky shot with bad timing.
“What is this place, boss?” Valen asked under his breath. Sela had forgotten he was there.
Planting her hands on the table, she finally looked around. Sconces lit the circular chamber in intervals but the flickering light did nothing to dispel the shadows of the high domed ceiling. Low benches lined the walls. The floor was dotted with threadbare cushions. The cloying smell of sabet incense permeated everything. On the wall closest to them, a crude pictograph of three female figures dominated the room. Natus. Metauri. Nyxa. The mother, the maiden and the crone. A ribbon of colored paint flowed over and around the trio. It was the type of room that commanded reverence.
“A temple to the Fates.” She purposefully spoke at a normal tone. This was all rubbish. It was only a room, nothing more.
Valen blinked. “Never seen such. Is that why they’re not coming in here, because it’s their shrine?”
He panned a torch over the image of the three women. In the cast-off light he looked just as Sela felt, shredded and raw.
“I don’t know. We’re alive. That’s what I know. Understood?”
“Understood, boss.” He still sounded spooked.
“It’s just a room, Valen.”
She turned her attention back to Atilio, trying to dismiss the hairs standing on end on the back of her neck. Considering the building’s use it would not have been her first choice for a shelter, but it was a fortified location, easily defendable, with only one point of access barred with a heavy iron-banded door. Good vantage of the town’s lower streets from a walled courtyard. Despite all that, it felt wrong to be there. The reasons slipped her scrutiny at the moment. She had more pressing issues.
The other members of her team had dispersed throughout the structure and their shouts punctuated the heavy perfumed air. So far, it was all clear. There were no priests or worshipers here. If Deinde Company’s presence in this place angered the Tasemarin, eventually they might summon the courage to attack. But for right now, this would do.
Small arms fire popped in the distance, echoing in the valley of the tiny ruined hamlet outside. Valen and Sela turned to each other with the unspoken question hanging between them: If we’re all here… then who was that?
Everything had gone skew so quickly. The moment their boots hit the ground that morning, air support was withdrawn. “Sandstorms,” came the terse response to her inquiry over vox. Strykers were vulnerable in denser atmo and Fleet was not willing to risk the resource. Right off, the four teams deployed to government center had begun to fall victim to guerilla attacks that separated them in the unfamiliar terrain.
A nagging thought weighed on Sela: Tasemarin were being aided somehow and had been prepared for the Regime’s arrival. There was organization here, something remarkable in a settlement that had, according to intel, few armaments and a negligible populace with no military training.
Whatever the reason, before the first o
f Tasemar’s dwarf suns had slipped into the horizon of the stagnant red sky, her team had been forced into street-to-street fighting with no hope of gaining control of their target, the government complex.
She felt Valen’s silent stare. He was waiting for orders.
“Get the lay of it. Check on other wounded.”
“On it, boss.”
“Munitions check too,” she called after him, although she could have guessed the response on that: not good.
In the distance and conveyed by her vox, she heard him relay the orders to Simirya, one of the two heavy-gunners.
On the table, Atilio coughed. It was a weak sound. His eyes were open again and a thin froth of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. She grabbed the depleted medistat kit. She had watched him employ its contents three times today on lesser injuries to his fellow soldiers, before becoming a casualty himself.
“Here.” She leaned down, trying to keep her voice even. It wouldn’t do to have him sense the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. “I have the medistat. Tell me what you need.”
“You worry… too much.” The young man gave a feeble grin, showing bloody teeth. This seemed to set off more coughing. He shut his eyes.
Stubborn, too much like me.
“Look at me. Look.”
After what seemed an eternity, he did. His eyes glazed with agony.
“Good. That’s good,” she said. “You feel pain? That’s good. That means you’re still alive. You’re afraid, right? Use it. It’s fuel. Stay alive.”
He shook his head, slowly. Then, once more he shut his eyes.
“Atilio,” she whispered, watching the uneven rise and fall of his chest.
But he did not stir.
She slammed the kit onto the counter. The noise was explosive in the oppressive silence of the sanctuary.
“Sela.”
Valen had returned. His hand squeezed her shoulder. The closest thing Sela had ever had to a friend, he had been her sergeant for six campaigns. In all that time he had never touched her or used her name in such a familiar way within earshot of the others until now.
Things were bad, steadily falling away to irrevocably skewed.
With arms as thick as runner bulkheads, Valen easily stood a full head taller than Sela. Although he looked lumbering and slow, his reflexes had saved her life more than once. He granted her a staggering level of loyalty that, at times like this, made her feel so unworthy. She had always suspected he harbored some sort of misguided romantic attraction to her. To her relief, he had never acted on it. Decca prevented it: the list of rules all breeders like Sela lived and died by. The cresters and commoners had the Fates. Breeders had Decca. Every booter knew Decca by heart. And every conscript had the rules drilled into place.
“Something is wrong.” His voice was quiet, strained. “We should have done something by now. Fleet had to have a reason to just… withdraw.” He did not say the words, but she shared his fear. Sela, having survived through many campaigns, had come to develop a trust in her instincts for danger. That sense now told her something dire. We have been abandoned.
When they’d reached the extraction coordinates, they had found only an empty field. Her team had been exposed there and had no choice but to withdraw. The hump up the hill to find their present shelter had cost Atilio along the way when he set off a jury-rigged trigger wire near a doorway.
“You don’t know that,” Sela said.
“Commander. They’re overdue—”
“Shut it.” She grabbed the yoke of his armor.
“Yes, Commander.”
She released her grip.
“Maybe we can rally up with another team that’s been cut off too. Is there anything at all on vox? Other chatter?” she asked, removing her helm. She ran a hand through her short, sweat-damp hair. Valen frowned his disapproval at this, but her skull felt like it were baking.
He leaned against her, pulling the throat mic away from his neck so the others would not hear.
“Vox is a mess. Insurgents got some kinda scrambler, can’t make out a thing. I think Tertius and Quadra teams got extracted. Captain Veradin and his detail were first out.”
“So it’s just us, then.”
At least Veradin was safe. There was a flutter of relief to know that, although Sela had been the one to point out to him his strategically unsound decision to join a ground attachment at all. Protocol dictated he should have used the remote command node, the RCD, on the Storm King, their Fleet transport carrier. But Veradin could be incredibly stubborn. All cresters were like that. Sela surmised it granted them a certain level of cred among the other higher ups to be seen throwing themselves into the fray. But not Veradin; Sela knew him too well for that. He had come onplanet because he did not want to put others at risk, even if they were just breeders, while he called orders from the safety of the ‘King.
Valen shrugged. “If we hold out till nightfall, we should be able to see if our ride’s still in low orbit.”
“Of course he’s still there.” She didn’t remark on his lack of faith. Although protocols for subordinate-superior interaction were drilled into any breeder from day one, Sela seldom curbed the speech of those serving under her.
In her time as a platoon commander, she had developed her own philosophies of leadership. There were no parade grounds or inspections out here. There was life and death. The line between the two was only as good as your trust for the others that racked in the squadbay around you at night, and their trust of you. The cresters never seemed to grasp that.
“They’ll come for us.” She hoped Valen could not hear the unevenness in her voice. “Veradin is up there. He won’t forget us.”
“You believe that, boss?”
Her smile was grim. “As if there’s a choice.”
2
“Commander.”
Sela glanced up from her vigil at Atilio’s side. He had stopped grimacing. Perhaps that meant the pain pharms were working.
Rheg shoved a robed figure into the center of the altar room. The amber lights shone on the shaven head and sun-ravaged skin of his prisoner.
“Found him hiding in a chamber on the spinward side. Says he’s a priest.”
“I’m not a priest.” The newcomer grimaced under Rheg’s heavy grip, actually managing to sound appalled. “I’m a minor sacerdos. I’ve not been joined in the Order yet.”
“Imagine my embarrassment,” muttered Rheg sarcastically.
“Sacerdos?” Sela viewed the newcomer skeptically. “You have a designation then, Citizen?”
“Citizen!” He scoffed, plainly insulted. “I am a free man. Not a slave for your Council of First.”
The man’s accent was slight, but evident to Sela. The stranger used Commonspeak, the expected standard language for any citizen of the Known Worlds, but his intonations were those of someone who had grown up speaking Regimental Standard. Much like a soldier. Sela had developed an ear for it. On a nearly daily basis she listened to crester officers slaughter Common and Regimental with their sing-song, affected Eugenes accents.
Rheg clamped down more tightly on the priest’s shoulder. “Commander Tyron wants your name!”
“Lineao… Jarryd Lineao,” he grunted.
“Where are the others?” she said. “There must be others here.”
Lineao drew his chin up and drew his shoulders back. “I volunteered to remain and care for the sanctuary. My brothers have fled to safety.”
“Bricky.” She snorted. “I’ll give you cred for that.”
He had to be lying. Only one remaining priest for a compound that seemed to sprawl well past the sanctuary? Whatever his reason to lie, she would deal with it later. For now there were more pressing matters.
“We have no directive for prisoners.” Valen reached for his sidearm. He spoke now in Regimental to Sela, as was protocol in hostile presence. “He’s a liability.”
She stepped between them. “No. We need him.”
Valen gaped. “Commander?�
�
But Sela was watching the expression on Lineao’s face. He understood Regimental. Had to. Yet there was no call for a common citizen to speak Regimental. Her suspicions flared.
“If you’re a priest, you must have healer’s training.” Sela returned to Commonspeak, continuing this newcomer’s ruse.
Lineao looked from Valen to Sela. When he noticed Atilio’s body on the altar, his eyes widened. “Yes… some.”
“My meditech took a hit. Lost a lot of blood.” Sela shoved the medistat kit against Lineao’s chest. “Help him.”
Valen snarled in protest. “Boss, you’ve got to be—”
“Sergeant, if you’ve discovered a miraculous means to restore Atilio, produce it now,” Sela snapped.
Valen squared his shoulders and sneered at Lineao.
“I’ve sworn an oath to help those that the Fates guide into my Path,” the priest said quietly as he took the kit from her.
“Well. They’ve dropped this one on your lap.”
------
The altar room, although it had appeared primitive at first glance, was constructed with a holo-clear ceiling. As the light of the powerful suns sank below the horizon, Sela could now see the purple shimmer of the night sky through its electric scrim. A single bright star hung heavier than the rest. Solid, unblinking, it drew a slow graceful arc. The Storm King. Still there. Veradin would not leave us. The knot of her heart loosened the slightest bit.
Lineao closed the case of the medistat kit and made another inspection of the bandages covering Atilio’s torso. Much of the bleeding had stopped. The young man continued to breathe in ragged hitches. But breathe nonetheless.
The priest shuffled over to her and extended the case. When Sela did not move to accept it, he left it at her feet like an offering.
“Well?” she asked. Will he live? Please let him live.
Lineao ran a grimy hand over his face. Without invitation, he collapsed beside her on the bench.
“I’ve done all I can,” he sighed. “His injuries are too great for the supplies you have here. I am only one. Another healer might do better.”