by Chris Bunch
First Theodomir and then Ingild stepped away from their bodyguards and began the slow walk across the grass toward each other. Both men were edgy, not knowing what to expect. They stopped a meter or so apart.
Theodomir was the first to break. A huge grin on his face, he threw out his arms in greeting. "Brother Ingild, what joy it brings my heart finally to see you in the flesh."
Ingild also smiled. He stepped forward and gently hugged his rival, and then stepped back again. Tears streamed from his eyes.
"You said 'Brother.' How appropriate a greeting. I too have always felt as if you were my brother."
"Despite our difficulties," Theodomir said.
"Yes, despite them."
The two men hugged again. Then turned and walked arm and arm toward the chapel, before which was a small table covered with a white cloth. Shading it was a small, colorful umbrella. And on either side of the table were two comfortable chairs. There were documents on the table and two old-fashioned pens.
The two men sat, smiling across the table at each other, Theodomir was the first to speak.
"Peace at last," he said.
"Yes, brother Theodomir, peace at last."
Theodomir did the honors of pouring the wine. He took a chaste sip. "I know that at this moment," Theodomir intoned, "Talamein is smiling down on us. Happy that his two children have heeded him and are laying down their arms."
Ingild started to take a large gulp of wine, then caught himself. He took a very small, priestly sip. "We have been very foolish," he said. "After all, what are our real differences? A matter of authority, not theology. Mere titles."
You lying sack of drakh, Theodomir thought, smiling broader.
You great bag of wind, Ingild thought, smiling back and reaching a hand across the table for Theodomir to clasp.
"Brother," Theodomir said softly, his voice thick with emotion.
"Brother," Ingild said, tears dripping down his nose, equally emotional, wishing for all the world that he had dared to trank up with a few narco leeches.
"Our differences are so easily settled," Theodomir said. He shot a glance at Ingild's guards, wanting so badly to grab the wizened little drug addict by the throat and choke the life out of him.
"It came to me in a flash," he continued. "From the very lips of Talamein."
"Odd," Ingild said. "At that very moment I was thinking the same thing." And he thought of his awful casualties, and, more important, the terrible cost to the Holy Treasury. For half a credit he would gut the cheap piece of drakh right now.
"So," Theodomir said, "I propose a settlement. An ecumenical settlement."
Ingild leaned forward in anticipation.
"We cease all hostilities," Theodomir said, "And each of us assumes the spiritual leadership of our rightful regions of the Lupus Cluster.
"Both of us will be called True Prophets. And each of us will support the claim of the other."
"Agreed," Ingild said, almost too quickly. "Then we can end this stupid bloodshed. And each of us can concentrate on his primary duty. Our only duty."
Ingild bowed his head. "Saving the souls of our brethren."
And in two years, he thought, I'll raid Sanctus with half a million Jann and burn your clotting throne to the ground.
Theodomir patted the documents in front of him. They were treaties, hastily drawn up by his clerks for the meeting.
"Before we sign there, brother," he said, "shall we celebrate together?"
He pointed at the small chapel.
"Just the two of us," he said, "in front of the altar, singing our prayers to Talamein."
Oh, you slime, Ingild thought. You heretic. Is there nothing you're not capable of? "What a marvelous suggestion," he said.
The two prophets rose and walked slowly into the chapel.
Parral eased back in his chair, watching the two on the monitor as they opened the door, disappeared inside, and closed the chapel door behind them.
Tears of laughter were streaming down his face. He had never seen anything so funny in his life. Two sanctimonius skeeks with their "brother this" and "brother that." Hating each other's guts.
He rang a servant for a jug of spirits to celebrate. What a master stroke. Theodomir had fought him when he had suggested the meeting. He'd screamed, almost frothed at the mouth.
And then he had become suddenly, silent, when Parral explained the rest of the plan.
Parral leaned forward as the hidden monitors in the chapel picked up the two men inside. This is going to be very interesting, he thought.
He congratulated himself once again for having the foresight to remain on Nebta. Because, despite his assurances to Theodomir, he wasn't too sure how things were going to work out.
The two prophets were nearing the end of the ceremony, their chanted prayers echoing through the little chapel. It was taking way too much time, Theodomir thought. Normally a High Joining took about an hour to go through. But each man was trying to outdo the other, keeping the prayers slow and solemn. Each word was enunciated as if Talamein himself were listening.
He thanked Talamein that only the moving of the book and the blessing of the sacrificial wine were left. The two men turned to the altar, out of time, of course, and waved their incense wands at the huge book, which sat in the center.
Then they took two steps forward, both lifting the book at the same time. Ingild started to move toward the right. Theodomir the left. Suddenly the two men found themselves in the middle of a tug-of-war.
"This way," Ingild shouted.
"No, no. you fool, to the left."
Then, almost at the same moment, they both realized who they were. Nervous glances around the empty chapel. Theodomir cleared his throat.
"Uh, excuse me, brother, but on Sanctus the book goes to the left."
"Is it in the treaty?" Ingild asked suspiciously.
Theodomir covered his impatience. "It doesn't matter," he said with difficulty. "In the spirit of ecumenism, you may put it where you like."
Ingild bowed to him. And shuffled off to the right, pleased with the small victory.
They moved quickly to the last part of the ceremony: the blessing and drinking of the wine. The golden chalice of wine sat inside a small tabernacle with a slanted roof. They opened the tiny doors, pulled it out. and then quickly chanted the last few prayers.
Theodomir pushed the goblet toward Ingild. "You first, brother," he said, urging him to drink.
Ingild eyed him, suddenly suspicious. Hesitated, then shook his head.
"No," he said. "You first."
Theodomir grabbed the cup impatiently and chugged down about half of its contents in a very unpropnetlike manner. Then he shoved the cup at Ingild.
"Now you," he snapped.
Ingild hesitated, then slowly took the goblet. He raised it to his lips and sipped cautiously. It tasted fine. He drained the rest of the cup and then set it carefully on the altar.
"It's finished," he said. "Now should we sign those…"
He began to cough. A slight one, at first. Then it came in ever increasing frequency. His face purpled, and then he grabbed his sides and began to scream in pain.
"You fool, you fool." Theodomir cackled. "The wine was poisoned."
"But… but…" Ingild managed through his anguish, "you drank, too."
He toppled to the floor, writhing in agony, blood streaming through his lips from his bitten-through tongue.
Theodomir began dancing around him. Kicking him. Screaming at him.
"It was sanctified for me." he shouted. "Sanctified for me. But not for an addict. Not for an addict."
Ingild tried to struggle to his knees. Theodomir booted him down again.
"Who's the True Prophet, now, you clot? Who's the True Prophet now?"
Parral laughed and laughed and laughed as he watched Ingild's dance of death.
Then he flicked the monitor off. It was over. Oh, indeed it was over.
For a moment he wished young Sten were sitting in fron
t of him. He thought the colonel would have appreciated his plan. There are so many ways to win a war.
And then his heart froze, and he unconsciously ducked, as rockets screamed overhead and sonic waves boomed and jolted his palace.
Chapter Forty-Four
"GAD, COLONEL," FFILLIPS said dryly. "The villains have armor." The woman appeared absolutely unworried as the mercenaries and Companions took up fighting positions.
The Bhor, now seeing the commercial potential of backing Sten. had gleefully agreed to help in the landing on Nebta. They had scattered enough window and diversionary missiles over Nebta's capital to confuse even an Imperial Security screen. The Bhor transports had then slammed into the outskirts of the capital. Sten thought that the Bhor skippers had deliberately tried to take out as many monuments, mansions, and memorials as they could.
For once, Sten was glad to note, he'd made an invasion with no casualties—other than one of Vosberh's men, who'd managed to get drunk on stregg and fall headfirst off the landing ramp.
The three hundred soldiers had quickly formed up in battle formation and moved toward Parral's mansion. And then tracks had clanked and the ground rumbled and Sten realized that Parral had given himself a second line of defense. Men against armor.
Panic-factor for any inexperienced soldiers. But for the trained? Sten tried to remember where he'd seen the centuries-old illo of two crunchies staring at a track and commenting, "Naw. Not for me. A movin' foxhole attracks the eye." And then turned to a grinning Alex.
"W'doomit," the man reported. "Parral's troopies hae fifty wee recon tracks an' twenty or so ACVs. Shall w'ae surrender?"
"Try not to hurt 'em too bad" was Sten's only comment.
The Battle of Nebta—the first and probably only one— lasted barely an hour as the vee-formation of tracks clanked into the attack.
Alex picked up a crew-served, multiple-launch, self-guiding rack, carried it forward until the point of the vee-formation was almost on him. Then he triggered the missiles. The small rockets huffed out the tubes, shed their compressed-air launch stages, turned themselves on, and went hunting. Five of the rockets promptly homed on different tracks and turned them into fireballs. The sixth, for reasons known only to its idiot computer-mind, had decided that a statue of one of Parral's ancestors was a more important target and had taken that out.
The ACV vehicles had been short-stopped by a quickly massed wire screen, two meters high. They'd bumped up against the wire, then drifted back and forth while their only semi-trained drivers fought the controls and then those drivers had been calmly sniped down by Sten's soldiers.
The two command tracks had lasted a few minutes longer— as long as it took the ten remaining Lycee kiddies to cut off all commo and for Sten and three men to slip behind them and launch line-of-sight rocketry into their unarmored rear boarding ramps.
It wasn't much of a battle, Sten realized as he saw Ffillips jam a huge crowbar into one assault vehicle's tracks and step back as the crowbar turned into filings and Ffillips commented disappointedly, "Some of my older manuals swear that an obstruction in the idler wheels will stop any track," before she flipped a fire grenade onto the greasy engine exhaust and the track became a bonfire.
And then the tracks were halted and their crews were piling out and Sten now knew why conventional soldiers still wear white undertunics as Parral's last line of defense began surrendering en masse.
"So now, Sten thought, it is time to deal with our friend Seigneur Parral…
Chapter Forty-Five
PARRAL WAS RUNNING out of alternate plans. His great scenario calling for the Jann and the mercenaries to pull a Kilkenney cats on each other had somehow failed. Even his high-tech defense scheme with the imported armor was a bust. So Parral was supervising the loading of the last few art treasures into the ship.
The ship—a modified short-haul, high-speed freighter— had been set down in the middle of the mansion's grounds and the most portable and easily convertible of Parral's treasures stowed on board.
His new plan was to get off Nebta, hunt up some habitable world, and go to ground until the screaming and skirmishing stopped. If it ever did. Because with Ingild dead, the Jann no longer a factor, and his own power-play circumvented, the Lupus Cluster faced the threat of peace for the first time in generations.
He was pretty sure that Sten would turn over Parral's trading routes to the Bhor. Which would leave Parral somewhat less than necessary.
Oh, well, he consoled himself, under no circumstances can that drunk fuzz-kleek Theodomir hold things together for very long. Sooner or later he'd need expert help, money, and someone who could stay sober for longer than two hours. The mansion and Nebta could be rebuilt.
The last servant loaded the last painting, and Parral hurried up the ramp. He could hear the rifle fire approaching closer and closer. So? Let them loot the mansion. As the port closed, he managed a tiny moment of concern for his sister, Sofia, who'd disappeared some hours before. Then he shrugged. Perhaps she thinks she can do better with her bedmate Sten than with her brother.
Parral headed for the control room. The exec had been holding the ship on thirty-second-takeoff point for almost an hour. As Parral sank into the acceleration couch, the pilot began final countdown.
Outside, a haze built from the Yukawa drive, and the carefully sculpted gardens of Parral withered and died.
Five seconds and counting…
"Talamein has blessed us," Mathias crooned as he focused the helmet sights across the mansion grounds. "We are chosen by Talamein for his purpose." His fingers touched ready-buttons on the firing panel.
Mathias and ten of his Companions had hastily set up the S/A missile ramp on the avenue behind Parral's mansion. Mathias closed the helmet face, and his viewpoint became the restricted dual-eyes of the missile, the launch-tube looming to either side, and, visible at the center, the heat-waved trees of the mansion gardens. "I have it," he announced.
His hands went around the twin joysticks of the missile control panel. "Launch on command sequence."
"Standing by," a Companion announced.
"Systems on standby. All systems on ready condition."
Mathias felt the tremble as, a thousand meters away, Parral's ship lifted from the estate. Prematurely he keyed the launch button on top one of the joysticks, and suddenly his vision became broad and fish-eyed as the missile came out of the tube, hissing fifty meters up into the atmosphere.
Mathias kept his other thumb poised on the number-two joystick's primary drive switch. The launch button now automatically became the manual-det switch.
Mathias orbited the missile, waiting for Parral's ship to come out of ground-clutter, and then, as the sleek torpedo swept back around, he had the missile's sensors on IR visual.
"Normal vision," he snapped. A companion flipped the switch on the primary switch and the missile howled up through Mach 8, crosshairs centered on the nose of Parral's ship as it clawed for height. The gray steel closed in Mathias' eyes until there was nothing but the heat-shimmer and the metal and then his eyes went blank.
Mathias yanked the helmet from his head in time to see the fireball sweep down the nose of Parrel's ship, catch the fuel tanks, and become an elongated cigar of flame, debris slowly pinwheeling back down toward the ground.
His Companions were cheering as Mathias dropped out of the command seat. Mathias allowed himself a laugh, then turned his face serious.
"Not I," he said as the cheering suddenly stopped. "But Talamein. I count myself blessed that Talamein has chosen me as the tool for his vengence, for the beginnings that shall make the Faith into the fire-hardened sword the Original Prophet intended. For this—which I vision as merely the beginning— we shall give thanks."
Which was why, when Sten and Alex burst through the brush, they found the ten men knelt in prayer, seemingly to an empty short-range portable missile launcher.
Chapter Forty-Six
SOFIA SAT ON a small boulder just at the water's edg
e. She was staring out to where the huge waves she loved were still continuing their thunder, regardless of man's change.
Twenty meters behind her, just on the fringe of the black sand, Sten waited.
He'd found Sofia in hysterics in the mansion as his troops swept through, moving the servants out from the wall of flame that Parral's crashed ship had started. He'd slammed a med-shot trank into her arm and ordered her moved to his own headquarters. Then, and it was very hard, he forced his mind back to business, to the endless details of what happens when you've won a war and what to do next.
The first, of course, had been a chain-coded message sent on Parral's high-power transmitter, to a clean transponder on some worldlet just outside the Lupus Cluster. The message, a short series of code breaks, read:
GOOD GUYS CHOSEN AND VICTORIOUS. GOOD GUYS ARE THEODOMIR. PHASE A & B COMPLETE. APPROPRIATE ACTION IN YOUR DEPARTMENT NOW.
Within three Imperial hours, the message had been through the Mercury Corps chain and was in Mahoney's and the Emperor's hands. And a return message went back:
STAND BY. IMPERIAL CONFIRMATION ON WAY. DO NOT EMBARRASS THE EMPEROR. LAYING ON OF HANDS WILL COMMENCE IN ONE WEEK. DO YOU PREFER PROMOTION, MEDAL, OR LONG LEAVE? YOUR PERFORMANCE DEEMED IN THE SNEAKY TRADITION OF MANTIS.
Which left only minor details until the Emperor and his entourage showed up to confirm Theodomir as the rightful Prophet and leader of the Lupus Cluster. Minor details like burying the dead, nurturing the sick, keeping the mercenaries from outrageous looting, and… and Sofia.
And so they had gone to that black beach. Neither Sofia nor Sten had said anything until the grav-sled set down. Then Sofia dropped her clothes and paced to the boulder where she had sat silently for almost two hours now.
Suddenly Sofia rose and walked back to Sten. She curled down onto the sand beside him.
"You did not kill my brother?"
