Sword Destiny

by Robert Leader

  The hours passed. The Earth slowly turned, its cloud patterns changing shape and form to permit different glimpses of its land masses and oceans. The smaller, pitted grey disc of its single satellite moon gradually circled upward until it reached a point of balance immediately above the globe. The six Alphan Tri-thrusters hung motionless in space. Aboard them, all eyes were fixed on their viewscreens awaiting the first sign of movement from the Gheddans.

  When it happened it was with startling speed. The six Gheddan Solar Cruisers flashed out from behind the haze-blurred rim of the Earth like a volley of gigantic steel spears.

  “Top left quadrant, V-formation,” Kyle snapped instantly.

  “Attack speed, Rose formation.” Zela gave her commands in the same split second of time and the six Alphan ships immediately surged forward to meet the attack.

  There was no doubt now that the Gheddans were aware of their presence. The element of surprise was gone, but Zela had never relied upon it anyway. Her prime advantage was the extra speed of turn that her Tri-thrusters possessed over the Gheddan Solar Cruisers, and the Rose Formation used it to the maximum.

  The six Alphan ships flew into battle in two lines of three, one above the other. At the last moment, the elongated box pattern burst open, with each ship peeling away like a petal from a bursting flower. Up, down, left and right, the six ships pulled away in a tight, fast turn, letting the formation of Gheddan Solar Cruisers pass through their empty centre. Then immediately they were spiraling backwards to make the complete somersault loop and come back on the tail fins of the Gheddans.

  Only an inspired pilot with an automatic instinct for survival could have survived the manoeuver and Raven proved his own flying skills with an immediate response. The leading Solar Cruiser turned into a fast rolling dive to the left, not quite as nimble as the lighter Tri-thrusters, but fast enough to roll clear of the first lazer blasts from Zela’s ship. On his command, the rest of his fleet was spiraling left or right to escape destruction and most of them made it. One Solar Cruiser caught a crossfire of lazer beams and erupted into a colossal fireball of flashing red and blue heat waves. The others passed through the heart of the lethal exploding rose.

  There was no more opportunity for refined battle tactics and full fleet coordination. The rest of the battle became a bitter dogfight, with each ship obeying only the instincts and judgement of its own captain.

  Zela had marked Raven’s lead ship as her priority target and stayed with him. Her white-hot lazer beams slashed across his wake as he pulled away and then she turned after him and fired again. One shot slammed the spinning Solar Cruiser sideways, but it was not a kill. Raven’s ship was hurt but still intact. Zela stabbed her firing button again, but then another of Raven’s ships hit them with a blast that sent the Tri-thruster reeling across the heavens. The stars spun in a crazy dervish dance in their viewscreen. From behind them came the crack of an explosion, the heat of flames and the stink of smoke. Then a chain-reaction of smaller explosions and blown electrical equipment raced across the bridge. Sparks and flame flashed, fittings were torn from their mountings, and Laurya screamed as a heavy communications speaker flew off the bulkhead and smashed into her where she sat belted into her flight chair.

  Zela fought to control the violently spinning ship, shouting urgent commands at Kyle, who was desperately flicking switches in efforts to activate the ship’s automatic fire-fighting systems. Nothing was happening and there was no response from Cadel in the engine room. Zela swore and hung on to her manual pilot control. The meteor-scarred surface of Earth’s companion moon was hurtling up toward them in her main viewscreen and she used all her strength in a vain attempt to turn them away. Then Kyle unsnapped his harness and flung himself across the flight deck to join her. Their combined weight was only just enough. The ship’s nose turned slowly and then the barren surface of the satellite was sliding past below them. A range of the moon’s mountains reared up and it seemed that they cleared them by inches.

  Kananda had been flung forward in his seat, the leather straps tearing at his stomach and shoulders and almost cutting him in half. In one of the viewscreens, he saw three more fireball explosions and he knew that three more ships had died. Two of them, he thought, had been Alphan Tri-thrusters and only one Gheddan Solar Cruiser, which meant that the odds were again even. The two fleets were an equal match and were systematically destroying each other.

  There was nothing he could do to tilt that balance, but the heat on the back of his neck told him that there was another danger. Kyle had failed to activate the automatic defence systems and there was a fierce fire raging behind them. Kananda unsnapped his harness buckles and pushed himself to his feet. There was a hand-held fire extinguisher strapped to the bulkhead wall and he dived toward it. Quickly he snapped the catches and pulled it free. It had a firing trigger and a short hand-held hose and he quickly put out the three small fires that flickered around the flight deck. Then he headed back toward the engine room, stumbling and bouncing off the bulkheads as the deck tilted wildly beneath his feet.

  As he passed through the open door, the heat hit him in the face like a physical thing, scorching his eyebrows and burning his hair. Cadel had been flung across the compartment by the blast of an explosion and lay dead with his head crushed against the steel step of the doorway. Flames leaped and raged and Kananda choked as he attacked them with the stream of compressed chemical foam from the extinguisher. Smoke and steam clouds boiled and sizzled around him and he dropped down on to his knees as he continued to hit the base of the flames. Tears streamed from his eyes and blinded him and then the chemical cylinder in his hand was empty. He cast it down and another sharp rolling pitch of the ship threw him in turn back on to the flight deck.

  Through squinting, weeping eyes he saw another ship die in one of the view-screens, followed swiftly by another, although he could not identify either of them. The blackness of space was now bright with multiple sunbursts and flaring coronas of death and destruction. All around them was an insane inferno, a madness of the gods that until now he would never have believed possible. It was a nightmare he had no time to contemplate. He found another fire extinguisher and returned to his own battle in the engine room.

  Zela had the ship back under her control. The vessel was sluggish and heavily damaged, but she was able to turn their nose back toward the battle. There were only three ships visible and intact, two Solar Cruisers and the last of her Tri-thrusters. The Gheddan ships were bearing down on the last of the Alphan fleet, their battle lazers burning white-hot holes through the floating debris all around them. Zela came back into the battle and took them by surprise, turning one of them into another fireball in the same second that the last Tri-thruster was also incinerated.

  They were the last of the two once proud fleets, Zela’s crippled ship, and an equally badly wounded Solar Cruiser. Like two dazed and semi-conscious boxers, they struggled to bring themselves round in their chosen ring of space. With tight-clenched teeth and a fast-beating heart, Zela watched as the sharp nose of the Solar Cruiser slowly drifted up to face them. It was all a matter of which vessel could bring her lazer banks to bear first and neither of them seemed capable of hurry. Her own ship was no longer fully responsive to the controls and she guessed that the plight of the Gheddan commander was almost identical. She could picture the Gheddan captain and his crew all violently cursing, while she silently prayed.

  Slowly, infinitely slowly, the two ships lined up to face each other. Zela could see that her solar-powered lazer banks were almost empty and that she could not afford to waste what might well be her last effective shot. At the same time, if she allowed the Solar Cruiser to get in the first shot, then they would almost certainly die. Sweat trickled down the side of her face and she was aware of Kyle standing tense and fearful beside her. Laurya was moaning softly in her harness nearby and there was blood soaking her uniform from what looked like a broken shoulder.

  The white beam of death lanced from the nose of th
e Solar Cruiser—and missed them, although it was close enough for its heat wave to slam against their bows in passing. The Gheddan captain had fired too soon. Zela dared not give him another chance and pressed her firing button. White fire lanced from their own bows and the Solar Cruiser blew up into a disintegrating halo of fiery matter that could have been the birth of a mini-galaxy. Zela and Kyle both flinched and instinctively flung up an arm as if to protect their eyes and faces as their ship passed through it, the debris bouncing off their hull in a furious rattling storm.

  A few moments later the last epicentre of white heat died and they were alone amid the floating wreckage of what had been two fleets. They stared around them with pale, drained faces, and then Kananda emerged from the engine room and came to stand beside them. His face and uniform were blackened and burned and his voice rasped weakly in his sore throat. “The fire is out,” he informed them. “Cadel is dead.”

  Zela turned her head to look at him and the stunned horror of it all was still in her eyes. “The battle is over,” she said bitterly. “But I never expected to lose all of our ships.”

  Kananda said nothing. In a flash of sudden insight, it occurred to him that in all the battles that had ever been fought, at all levels and on all worlds, perhaps none of the participants had ever expected that they would lose so much more than they could ever hope to gain. Each side would always believe that it was an invincible elite, or that its cause was just and that somehow this would make a difference. Such was the supreme folly of both men and gods. However, it seemed the wrong time to make such a simple observation.

  Then Kyle said softly, “I am not so sure that the battle is over. I can only count the wreckage of ten ships, when there should be eleven. The first Solar Cruiser we hit, like us, I think was knocked out of the battle. And I do not think it came back.”

  “Raven,” Zela said with certainty. Her fingers flew rapidly over the keyboard of her control panel, bringing every possible angle of view up on to their screens. There was nothing except the widely scattered remains of tangled ship fragments, the distant stars, the Earth itself and its satellite moon.

  “If he is alive, then his ship must be crippled, probably in a worse state than our own,” Kyle said as he stared at the screens. “He must be lurking behind the planet or behind its moon.”

  “Damn him!” Zela said with feeling. Until they knew for certain, their situation had suddenly become a stand-off. They could not now dare to land or relax their vigilance until they knew what had happened to the last Gheddan ship.

  Maryam could smell the fires as Nirad led her through the narrow streets of the old city toward her father’s palace. Immediately she sensed that something was wrong. The smoke scent that wafted clearly to her sensitive nostrils was not the harsh, acrid stench of oil-fired thatch and timbers, the sort of burning that she would expect to find in the aftermath of battle. Instead the smoke was pleasant, tinged with sandalwood and perfumes, the more familiar aroma of sacrificial fires. It should have brought back happy memories, but strangely it filled her with a dire sense of foreboding.

  There was also the sombre change in Nirad. Her half brother’s initial greeting had been one of elation and delight and yet it had quickly evaporated. Now he walked silently, as though a heavy sadness had come over him.

  “What is it?” Maryam asked bluntly. “Does the battle go badly?”

  “The battle is almost over,” Nirad admitted. “Most of our champions and half of our fighting men are slain. Today we lost Lord Ranjit. He had proved a mighty fighter since the death of his bother Salim. No sword could stand against him. But today an arrow took him through the throat.”

  “So the funeral fire burns for Ranjit?”

  Nirad nodded, but his reluctance to add words told her that there was more.

  “Tell me all that has happened,” she commanded.

  Nirad shrugged. “At first we fought on the plain, but the forces of Maghalla were too many. So we withdrew behind the walls, and here we have held for fifty days. At first we waited while Maghalla built bridges, but now Maghalla has crossed the river and breached the walls. Of our great champions only Prince Devan and Lord Jahan are left. Jahan can walk again but he drags his leg.”

  “Our father?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Kara-Rashna is dead.”

  “Our brothers?”

  “Ramesh and Rajar still live. The Lords Kasim and Gujar also. We five seem to be blessed by the gods.”

  “Kananda? He rules now?”

  “Jahan and Kaseem hold our father’s mandate in his absence. Kananda left to follow you. When the blue gods took you in their steel temple, Kananda followed you with the golden gods. He pursued you into the stars.” Nirad stared at her. “Did he not find you?”

  Maryam stared back at him and now her eyes were again filled with tears. In all her days and nights on Ghedda, she had thought often of her beloved older brother, but never in her wildest dreams had she ever guessed that he might also be on the fifth planet, searching for her. Now there was that awful sinking feeling again in her stomach as she realized that, if Kananda was with the golden gods, then he must be with Alpha, and the Sword Lords of Ghedda had sworn to destroy their rival continent.

  Nirad took her arm again and led her on. “I must take you to your mother,” he said gravely. “Then I must return to my post.”

  Maryam made no argument. Her thoughts and emotions were churning as she tried to assimilate all that he had told her. They passed through the central square of the city and she saw that in the adjoining courtyards of all the great temples, the funeral fires were burning high and bright. The images of leaping flames and ascending sparks burned into her memory, and yet for the moment, there were other factors that would only register later. There were no bodies in the flames or awaiting cremation and no scent of roasting body flesh. The fires were lit, with praying priests in attendance, but they were waiting for something else.

  They reached the palace and he led her to the women’s quarters. There he knocked on the door to the Queen’s apartments and bid her goodbye.

  As he turned to leave, she caught at his arm. “Nirad, there is something you are not telling me. What is it?”

  He blinked and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. Then he bit down on his lip. “The women will tell you,” he said. “But perhaps it would have been better if you had not returned to us.” He spun on his heel and walked stiffly away.

  Maryam would have run after him, but in that moment the doors opened and she was swept up in the tears and embraces of her mother and her aunt. The queens Padmini and Kamali kissed her and hugged her and drew her inside and then she was struggling to answer a thousand questions. Bravely she tried to respond, but then slowly the answers died on her lips. She realized that all the heartfelt weeping that accompanied this reunion was not due to tears of joy and neither was it due to their shock at her appearance, despite the fact that she was still smeared with river mud and dried blood. Their faces were too pale and desperate and the robes they wore were the simple white that symbolized death. Suddenly it all fell into place: Nirad’s reluctance to talk, the high funeral pyres and the white robes.

  “Mother.” She almost screamed as she touched the plain white linen of her mother’s sleeve. “What madness is this?”

  Padmini drew a deep, sighing breath. She looked to Kamali, their faces frozen white, and suddenly the weeping stopped. Both queens tried to draw themselves together and restore some dignity. Padmini took Maryam’s right hand between her own and held it tight. Kamali did the same with her left hand. Maryam stared horrified from her mother to her aunt.

  “Dearest daughter,” Padmini said softly. “The gods are cruel to us all. You could not have chosen a more bitter time to return to us. Karakhor is defeated. Lord Jahan believes that the next attack must be the last. The fires in the temple courtyards are our funeral pyres, already lit for the Juahar ceremony. At dawn, Lord Jahan and Prince Devan will lead the last of our men out on to th
e plain to die, to hold back the hordes of Maghalla for one last day, while we lead the noble ladies of our city into the flames.”

  The Juahar was the ceremony of ritual suicide, when a dutiful wife mounted her husband’s funeral pyre to perform the act of Sati. It was the extreme act of final sacrifice, or total despair.

  “No,” Maryam cried. “No, you cannot do this.”

  “We have no choice,” Padmini said softly. “It is something which perhaps we should have performed weeks ago, when our husband, your father, the noble Kara-Rashna died. At that time, Holy Kaseem counseled against it and his counsel seemed wise. We knew that many more wives must lose their husbands before this war could be over and we did not wish to set a precedent for Sati. But now our situation is hopeless. At least the Juahar will give us all a proud and clean death by holy fire and save us all from being raped and despoiled by Sardar and his barbarians.”

  “No,” Maryam cried again. “Karakhor can hold—must hold—for another day. Raven—my blue god—will return with his steel ship and fight for us. He can destroy the army of Maghalla.”

  “The prayers have been said and all the sacrifices made, and all the gods have deserted us,” Padmini wept. “If Indra, Varuna and Agni have abandoned us, then why should we believe in your blue god?”

  “Our time has come,” Kamali whispered. “Lord Jahan and Prince Devan have said that they will not fight their last battle hiding behind our broken walls. They are both proud and noble men. They will lead our forces out on to the plain for the last stand of Karakhor. We must perform Sati. We must go through the Juahar.”

  “Raven will come back,” Maryam insisted. “I am his wife. He will not abandon me.”

  The two older women looked at her sadly, their expressions reminding her of how she must appear to them after crawling through the mud along the riverbank and with the tangled leaves of the forest still matted in her loose black hair.