by K. J. Coble
“Fifteen seconds, Major,” Reese said in a voice tight with concentration.
The words snarled through Crozier. Death took on a blow-to-the-abdomen immediacy. His body tightened, focus on task forced the fear he wasn’t supposed to be feeling to a lower corner of his consciousness.
The intercom snapped and hairs stood up across Crozier’s body in tingling ripples as Reese pulsed her energy weapons. A tight pattern of jolts slammed through the hull, through Crozier, startling with their violence even though he recognized them as the conventional missiles firing. Another chain of blows rattled him, more muffled and somewhere aft, chaff and electronic decoy pods releasing.
“We’ve been acquired!” Reese said, gritted teeth audible. Crozier’s eyes flicked about the hologram. New waves of missiles rose from the planet, fired from ground installations. A trio of the newcomers bore down on the blinking icon of Reese’s craft. “Major, request evasive maneuver!”
“Denied,” Crozier replied evenly, though a scream lodged at the back of his throat. Only a tiny window existed through which the insertion could be carried out. Last second deviation meant failure. “Stay with the pre-programmed approach.”
“Sir.” Interference might have hidden fear-tinged anger. “Ten seconds.”
Crozier’s eye caught the double halo of a corvette. The captain of the ship was bringing his command down into a lower orbit, perhaps in the hope ground launched missiles might drive off its assailants. Its course would intersect Reese’s.
“Five seconds!” Crozier heard proximity alarms sounding behind Reese’s voice. The drones tracking her tail hounded closer.
The chill came, always did when events escalated beyond worry, beyond any control of his making. Nerves slipped into detached numbness, like it was happening to someone else.
He had felt the same sensation years before in the trembling hold of that dropship landing his platoon on Weyland IV. The same iciness as the hatches fell and piercing cyan flashes ravaged his platoon—Sergeant Elton wailing as charred skin crumbled from her face; that kid, Esposito, charging a Korvan plasma cannon position though both his arms were blown off.
A single note rang through Crozier’s pod. He heard his breath escape as the hologram across his helm visor blipped out, plunging him into darkness. He had a moment of free fall queasiness as the insertion module drifted free of the starfighter’s envelope of inertial dampening. Then a shattering body blow of acceleration and sound as the thruster kicked in, driving Devin Crozier down on Lurinari with no more subtlety than a bullet. A groan escaped his clenched jaw. Vision began to gray. He pinched his eyes shut but the color of approaching blackout did not fade.
Another crushing impact, this one punching him into his restraints as the fervor and attitude of his descent changed. The thruster module had completed its burn, had broken off and was fallen away to burn up along with the compact computer that had guided his last millisecond course corrections. Crozier felt a gentle chain of thumps, knew they were bands of foil shedding in reflective clouds meant to add further to the illusion of the module breaking up, simple battle debris slagging away in the atmosphere.
Shuddering increased, worsened as air grew thicker, produced more drag. Crozier found himself able to swallow. He tried not to think, tried not to feel the heat growing around him, bringing a new sheen of sweat. This was the worst part, the part he’d dreaded.
Ablative shielding boiled away in a bath of incandescent plasma. The designers had included a secondary shell against catastrophic failure but Crozier had little faith in the thrown-together technology and the ramshackle plan whose flaws he realized only now when it was far too late.
He had to stop volunteering for this madness.
He’d volunteered to take point in that anti-matter minefield on Weyland IV, even after his platoon had taken forty-percent casualties in the previous one, the day before. He’d volunteered for the second tour of duty, even though it meant missing the birth of his second daughter and his wife begged him not to. He’d volunteered for the Pathfinders because, by then, he had nothing else to lose.
The first charges lit with a bang, cracking the seared eggshell of the insertion module. Crozier tensed, hadn’t been aware of the passage of time. Secondary charges split the outer shell, cast it fluttering away in symmetrical pieces. He pinched his eyes shut, ground his teeth as the banshee’s howl of wind filled his existence.
Just like a jump. Arch your back and kick yourself in the ass.
The final strip of explosives crackled, jarring flashes and sparks. The backup shell and support frame disintegrated, tumbled away and he was falling through the Lurinari night.
Crozier opened his eyes. He was perhaps three kilometers up, darkness and stars vast around him, wisps of cloud and the unlit mass of Lurinari’s largest, most populated continent below him.
A holographic counter flashed in the upper left corner of his visor, seconds since separation from the module, an estimate of time left to the surface. Active sensors, the radar in his helmet, were forbidden for gauging descent, would point him out to Korvan observation like a bonfire.
Seconds howled by. Lurinari’s higher mean density gave it a gravitational pull 1.06 times that of Earth, meaning that when he hit, he would hit so much harder. Calm held, but the sudden nearness of the ground brought on a moment of dizzying uncertainty.
Above, eye-piercing boils of light scarred the sky as the space battle raged on, brief stars of nuclear fire. A part of Crozier wondered if Reese had made it.
The helmet gave a pattern of chimes and the counter blinked red. On the final note, automated ripcords snapped loose, opening the compact parachute with a sound too much like cloth tearing. Crozier felt the slam of sudden deceleration, the bite of straps into shoulders and crotch.
Trees and blackness rushed to meet him. He experienced a moment of panic. Then he was passing through the upper canopy, boughs snapping, a rain of pine-like needles, the flutter of startled animals. And one blow after another until he hit ground with bone-hammering force.
He was down.
CHAPTER TWO
Sunrise spilled across the jagged line of the Coreal Mountains and underlit the lingering tatters of last night’s storm in gold. As Lurinari’s sun began a new twenty-seven-hour day, it drew dazzling streaks across the hazy vastness of the Coreal Valley nestled neatly between the distant Karahks and the near and familiar Coreals.
HaustMarshal Tan-Ezatz watched daylight’s stately birth with more emotion than was properly Korvan. But the glory before her, seen from a sentry’s post near the highest point of the pyramid of Korvan headquarters, awoke sensations older even than the Korvan race’s human origins.
Younger Korvans, pure in the idealism of the racial Quest, sought with religious zeal to purge emotion. But at seventy Terran years, weary with time and war, a spark of non-rational feeling was a gift Tan-Ezatz granted herself.
Sunlight touched the skyline of Mondanberg below her, glinting across the gaudy spires common of Grak architecture, casting long shadows across the cooler brick and marble of human structures and the lower dome-shapes of Shmali buildings. Tan-Ezatz took a long breath, cybernetically perfected sense of smell taking in the redolence of the District Capitol. The bite of sulfur from coal mines, the more rustic tang of wood smoke, the hot, synthetic stink of the fusion plant and below it all more subtle nuances of sweat, skin, unclean bodies, rot, poverty.
Fear.
Worms, the HaustMarshal thought with disgust. Disgust at the mismatched chaos around her, the ill-fitted parts of worm society. They spread their disorder wherever they went, reveled in it, even flourished in it. The worms brought living entropy to a Universe already harsh, violent and unpredictable without them, the antithesis of the Korvan ideal.
Only the Korvans stood firm, a pure light of order in the hostile sea of existence.
Standing over the city, Tan-Ezatz tried to feel the heady days of the early victories again. Memories of battered worm worlds, their skies
filled with Korvan battle fleets, their streets choked with the vanquished, played across her mind, the details clear, sharp as if happening now. But the essence, the reality of them was thin, slippery and elusive.
Momentum had slipped away, far-flung supply lines and dogged worm defenses had ground the offensive down, dragged it into a slugging match where lives were spent by the millions—just as they had bogged Tan-Ezatz down on this world, this Lurinari. Strike and maneuver gave way to attrition and such a war was one the disciplined, precise but terribly outnumbered Korvan race was doomed to lose.
Enough. Tan-Ezatz turned from the panorama before her and strode along the ramparts that ringed the pyramid at alternating levels. Mondanberg was already awakening with sounds of vehicles in the street, animals stirring amongst trash in back alleys, the murmur of worm conversation, plant whistles announcing shift change. She experienced another wave of revulsion, this time at the racket the worms made, their primitive animal verbalizations, grunts that barely suggested sentience.
Distaste brought more memories, of cities slagged by fire rained from orbit. Thermonuclear sterilization. But, no. This world they had to take intact, life-supporting planets being in limited supply. Wealthy ones, even more so. And they needed the worms, too, after a fashion.
Heavy weapon emplacements lined the ramparts at even intervals. Tan-Ezatz passed one in her wandering. A pair of battle armored figures stood still as death with plasma rifles held across their chests, flanking the weapons turret entrance. Chill wind whipping down out of the north did not cause them to shiver just as insects humming about them in the summer would not draw a swatting hand in response. Their eyes held a disinterested emptiness.
Minrohausts. Beings harvested from any of a hundred worlds, perhaps this one, to service the Korvan Imperative. Lobotomized, enhanced and reprogrammed along strict parameters that left them no memory of their life, of individuality, only the will of the Korvan race.
Tan-Ezatz stretched out her consciousness let her mind merge with the Awareness until she found these particular Minrohausts’ harmonics. She found minds as blank as the gazes that lay over them.
Disappointing. Occasionally, a Minrohaust’s mind—especially the particularly long-lived ones—held a hint of self, a fragment of personality emerging. Some officers discouraged such development, even feared it. A Korvan could kill with a thought, send a jolt across the Awareness and slag the brain of an offending slave.
Tan-Ezatz rather preferred Minrohausts with a touch of animation to them. It gave them better survival instincts, occasional aggression, even tactical imagination.
A new presence whispered through the communal intellect that was the Awareness. Tan-Ezatz did not have to turn to see the young Korvan Fanrohaust approaching to relieve his comrade in the turret. She heard the youth’s crisp acknowledgment of her, sensed the mix of obedience and apprehension and felt the boy’s questioning of her presence.
As he stepped by into the weapon emplacement, she sought deeper, heard thoughts of discomfort at the cold, soreness from repeated and rigorous drill, a fleeting fantasy image of some worm female seen on Mondanberg’s streets, and a fragment of longing for home. The Fanrohaust did not know for certain the HaustMarshal probed his thoughts, but suspected, as the lower ranks of Korvan society often did.
Fanrohausts were the middle class, the NCO’s, the lower management, the foremen. Their hierarchy in the Awareness allowed them to read one another, and be aware of it being done to them. They could command Minrohausts and have dreams of higher things, but their privacy was never assured.
Such was the lure of Ascendance. Haust rank brought one to the upper-strata of Korvan life. A Haust stood apart from eighty percent of Korvan-kind. They were the leaders, the thinkers, the motivated and inspired.
And a Haust was honored with the name of the familial genotype from which they were conceived. No longer known by a number and rank, but a name.
Higher rank would bring more privilege, but the ascendance to Haust was a true milestone and the driving factor in Tan-Ezatz’s society. She’d felt its competitive dynamic the day of her fourth year when she was released from her birth-crèche, had her hair shaved clean, and received her first implants. On that day she heard the whisper of the Awareness, of her race, and was filled with a fierce love for her people as she understood she’d never be alone again.
“HaustMarshal, it is time.”
Not so much a voice interrupted her musing as a ripple across the Awareness, a current of meaning, intent, and emotion. Communication without ambivalence, the dream, the strength of the Korvan race.
“I am aware,” Tan-Ezatz answered with a touch of amusement. The intruder was her Chief-of-Staff, HaustCommandant Bakta. Impatience shaded his words. He was not physically present, waited in her office, instead. She sensed he knew how little she looked forward to this briefing.
Changing course for the nearest lift, she said, “Let us begin.”
With an abruptness that was painful, her mind filled with crowding presences, a cabal of senior Hausts and their respective bands of subordinates.
She took a deep breath as she reached and entered the lift, steeled her mind against the wave of their personalities, emotions, and quirks. Fear—tightly-controlled but recognizable—colored their highest thoughts. Desperation lingered close behind. Only the younger commanders burned with outrage. The older officers felt dark, fatalistic.
The doors to the lift closed and it lurched downward.
Tan-Ezatz tried to feel young as she began. “The worms become more determined with each passing cycle. Last night’s attack took our satellites, our battle platforms, and most of the automated defenses. Orbital Defense indicates they expended 87.2% of their remaining ordnance and Starfighter Command is decimated. We may have twelve functioning fighters when the repair crews are finished. Taking such losses into account, we no longer have the capacity to hold the high orbitals, should the worms press their advantage.”
“When can we expect reinforcements?” asked one of the young commanders.
Tan-Ezatz wanted to fill the Awareness with her snarl at the officer’s naivete. With a touch of venom, she replied, “We must take steps to secure our position without counting on re-supply.”
“Can we expect a worm invasion, then?” asked a presence laden with foreboding. HaustCommandant Dramen-Singlo, senior amongst those in conference.
“Unlikely, at least in the near future,” she answered. “Deep space sensors show nothing within strike range. This may have been preparation for an offensive. The worms are softening us up, crippling our aerospace assets, and gathering data on our ground defenses.”
“How long?” Dramen-Singlo asked.
“Uncertain. But we cannot wait for word from Homeworld or for re-supply. We must consolidate now.”
Tan-Ezatz issued a mental order to the compact artificial intelligence that had occupied a large portion of her brain since childhood. A holographic map appeared to her and would be seen by her commanders at the same time. It displayed the southwestern corner of Lurinari’s largest continent, Freebourne. Mondanberg lay on the map’s northern edge, at the mouth of the Coreal Valley. South of the Coreal Mountains spread a wide expanse of plains, interrupted by the occasional stretch of rolling hills, that continued to the southern coast and a string of six cities highlighted there in blinking yellow.
“The worm Free City States,” she said, making no attempt to suppress the wave of determination that prickled through her. Across the Awareness, she felt her subordinates’ resignation at the mention of a topic discussed all too often.
Two-thirds of Lurinari’s surface area had fallen in the first eighteen months of the invasion. But what remained had occupied the Korvans for the last seven years, a prolonged siege of monstrous proportions where victory was measured by cities and villages subdued, sectors pacified. The contest had consumed tens of thousands of Korvans and Minrohausts and strained logistics nearly to the point of collapse.
And yet, these six coastal settlements that the worms called “Free” continued to hold out. Four and a half million indigenes clinging to a narrow strip of land, entrenched behind kilometers of defenses and hidden under overlapping layers of deflector shields so powerful they shut out all light, leaving the defenders to exist in a state of perpetual darkness.
“After last night, you cannot still consider the Spring Offensive salvageable,” Dramen-Singlo said with disbelief crackling about his thoughts. His Coreal Military District, the closest stronghold to the front lines, had had its resources pinched the worst in preparation for the new assault on the city-states.
“We must consider it,” Tan-Ezatz replied. “If the worms mount their counter-invasion while the city-states remain unconquered, we will face a battle on two fronts.”
She sensed agreement amongst some of the younger officers, particularly those who’d been slated to lead in the offensive, those with reputations to make. But a rumble of dissent issued from the senior commanders.
She longed to send jolts of rage down through the Awareness at them, the fools, the weaklings who refused to face the knowledge that the Korvan race, the Dream was in desperate danger across a thousand battlefields. Only action could save it.
Habit stepped in, calming words from childhood teachings, still warm in Tan-Ezatz’s memory. Anger clouds the mind, dulls the will. Anger must be mastered. A tool fashioned to one’s will. Just like the Universe.
“The Order of Battle for the Spring Offensive assumed full aerospace commitment,” Dramen-Singlo said. “Without it, we must take into account higher casualties amongst the Ground Strike Divisions. Resources will have to be shuffled. Timetables altered.”
The lift reached the administrative levels. Tan-Ezatz stepped from the elevator into the long, dimly lit hall leading to her office. Her footsteps echoed in the still, crisp air. She made out the faint hum of machinery, smelled concrete, steel, and the slightest tang of other Korvans.
