by John Ringo
Perhaps a lucky hit had destroyed whatever intellect that was, for suddenly, the false cover had fallen away, leaving only the image of a wreck such as the people only saw as the residue of battles in space. That the enemy guns had fallen silent at exactly the same time as the holographic cover had disappeared seemed to confirm this.
Despite the obvious ruination visited upon the threshkreen ship, however, it was still steaming away rapidly through the hole it had previously blasted in the People’s enveloping net. Riinistarka strongly suspected that unless it were utterly destroyed it would be back. The People, themselves, were quite capable of restoring a wrecked space ship. He had seen nothing to date to suggest that these human vermin were any less clever.
Indeed, Riinistarka had already lost enough dear brothers to make him suspect that these threshkreen were quite possibly more clever. All the more reason they must be destroyed then, while they were still weak and relatively backward, lest the people later perish before a more dangerous enemy.
Dangerous? Riinistarka felt a sudden twinge of fear rise to the surface despite his best efforts to suppress it. There is the tale my father told, of Stinghal the Knower, and the siege of Joolon; how he breached his own walls and set fire to his citadel…
Suddenly, three quarters of the smoke and flame surrounding the threshkreen ship disappeared and Riinistarka found himself staring into the muzzles of eleven eight-inch guns.
More flame bloomed, eleven fiery blossoms of an altogether different character from that which had seemed to cover the ship. This was followed a split second later by the appearance of eleven smaller blooms. And then came agony.
The first of the humans’ heavy iron balls struck the control panel of the tenar of Riinistarka. The panel stopped the ball, yet splinters torn from it pierced the young God King’s body and shredded one eye. The next, so soon after the first that the Posleen could not sense the time differential, tore off one shoulder, lifting the alien onto his rear legs. The third, following the second at the tiniest interval, entered his uplifted belly, tearing apart his internal organs and crushing his spine half a meter forward of his rear legs.
None were merciful enough to kill outright.
Riinistarka barely managed to hold onto his tenar. With his controls destroyed and his spine crushed, he could not hope to do more than stay aboard as the tenar spun slowly in place a few meters above the sea.
With difficulty, the God King turned his remaining good eye onto his ruined shoulder. Splintered bone protruded between shreds of flesh. Yellow blood seeped out. Feeling sick, the young alien looked away.
In looking away from his shoulder Riinistarka’s eye fell on his belly. The threshkreen projectile had caused the skin of that to split, spilling organs out. He did not want to imagine what it had done to his insides. He forced himself not to think about what it had done to his insides.
At first, the wounds had not hurt, exactly. But after a few minutes, as the initial shock of being hit wore off, the pain grew. The God King whimpered at first. Then, slowly, the pain transformed into agony, the whimpers turned to screams.
“Faaatherrr!”
“We’re through, Captain,” Daisy’s avatar announced with what seemed like weariness. “Some of the enemy are pursuing, but the rear turret, and the three of the remaining four secondaries that I can bring to bear should be enough to keep them at bay.”
McNair, who didn’t just seem weary, nodded weakly.
“Casualties? Damage?” he asked.
“Incomplete reports, Captain. Bad, in any case. I am cut off from some areas.”
“You going to be okay, Babes?”
Daisy’s avatar nodded through her pain. “I’ll be fine, Captain.”
The pain had reached its peak and then begun to ebb even as Riinistarka’s life ebbed out with the flow of his yellow blood. He had only the one dull yellow eye left to contemplate the departure of the enemy, his final enemy, he knew.
So far gone was he that he did not even notice as his father’s tenar pulled up next to his. The airborne sled shuddered as Binastarion crossed deftly from his own tenar to his son’s. A great cry of woe and pain came from the father as he saw his son’s wounds. The father folded his legs to kneel beside the dying son. He reached out one hand to scratch the youngster behind his crest.
“Father?” Riinistarka asked weakly at the familiar touch.
“Yes, Son, it’s me.”
“I’m sorry, Father. We failed… I failed.”
Binastarion shook his head. “Nonsense, boy. You did all you could. No one could ask for more. I’m proud of you.”
The father followed his son’s gaze to where the hated threshkreen ship was escaping from his clutches. At least we hurt it badly. Though I am sure it will be back.
“You and your brothers damaged the thresh, and badly. It might well sink,” he lied. “Certainly it is at least half destroyed. In any case, it won’t be back to hurt us any time soon.”
Interlude
“And the other half, Zira?”
“The other half is that the usual procedure would be to turn over the precise normal that offended,” the Kenstain answered. “But in this case, the normal was a special pet. The philosopher would not give it up. The offended Kessentai was adamant. Fighting broke out. It spread like a wildfire among the septs of the clan. The reason it spread, of course, is that we had managed to create our own conditions for a miniature orna’adar, right there on our island. And we had not had time to prepare our escape.”
“Oh, demons,” said Guanamarioch.
“Right,” agreed Ziramoth. “The clan quickly broke into competing factions, all based on that one little spark. Instead of waiting for another clan to nuke our cities we saved them the bother and did it ourselves. Of course, as soon as the conflagration started those normals whose gift it is to build the starships began work instinctively, but it was all they could do to keep, barely, ahead of the destruction. And they never got very far ahead. Of all of our clan who had settled that island, fewer than one in twenty managed to escape. And the scars of the fissuring, brother slaying brother, were too deep to heal. The refugees stayed in the small groups into which they had split. Some were absorbed into other clans, but most went their own way, leaping into the void between the stars even without reconnaissance.”
By now the sun had set. Guanamarioch looked down into the stream at the stars reflected therein. Which of them, he asked himself, how many of them have seen our passage since that long ago, terrible time?
“Who was it, Ziramoth? Who was that long ago philosopher who plunged our clan into chaos?”
Now it was the Kenstain who grew silent, staring into the flowing stream at the stars that twinkled there.
His voice, when he answered was full of infinite sadness. “His name was Ziramoth.”
Chapter 20
This is defeat; avoid it.
— Caption to a painting, Staff College, Kingston, Ontario
Bijagual, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
They’d held for a while, there at the bridge before the town of Bijagual. Half of Digna’s artillery, firing directly into the cleared kill zone, had stacked the aliens up like cordwood, carpeting field and stream with their bodies and then adding layers of bodies to that carpet. It had become quite a plush pile before the Posleen had learned better and gone searching for the flanks.
Digna had assumed they would go searching for the flanks as she’d assumed they would eventually find them. She had hoped it would have taken a bit longer, long enough to finish burying her dead, at least. That grace the aliens had not given. Before the bodies could be decently interred the frantic calls had come from both flanks. She’d ordered the mortars to give priority of fires to one flank, the SD-44s to another. The guns and mortars had fired off every round that could not be carried out on the long anticipated and planned-for retreat. That artillery fire had helped, but not enough.
She spared barely a glance for the long line of noncombatants trudging
the road to Gualaca. Instead, she stood there, at the edge of the long meter-deep trench she’d had dug against this eventuality. Her eyes swept along the length of the trench, fixing in her mind the last few images of some of her most beloved children and grandchildren.
Digna had buried children before, several of them. But they had been only babies, dying — as children in the Third World often do — before she had had a chance to get to know them and love them as individuals. This was in every way worse.
The column of refugees-to-be was mostly silent until Digna ordered the gasoline poured into the trench. At that, with the overpowering smell of the fuel blown across the road by the breeze, the deaths became real. As if the first leaping flames were a signal, a long inarticulate cry of pain and woe arose.
She had not had the heart to order someone else to apply the flame. Instead, a grandson had handed her a lit torch. Almost — almost — she had broken down and wept as she turned her eyes away and tossed the torch into the trench.
Her grandson, the same one as had supplied the torch, touched Digna’s shoulder in sympathy. She shrugged it off, bitterly and impatiently.
Voice halfway to breaking, she snarled, “Never mind that. There’ll be a time for tears later. Get these people moving.”
Her clan and its retainers had retreated with the smell of fuel overlaying that of overdone pork.
Digna had looked upon that pyre exactly once, dry-eyed. It was still not the time for weeping.
Dry-eyed, too, she had prodded, cajoled, and beaten her family toward the northeast. There, all through the night, the lights of the town of Gualaca had served as a beacon. There Digna hoped to find safety, at least for a time. Perhaps there would even be medical care for her wounded kin.
It was not to be. Crossing over the bridge spanning the Rio Chiriqui southwest of the town, Digna had expected to find a defense prepared. What she’d found instead was a town bereft of leadership; the alcalde gone with his family, the militia officers gone with theirs. What was left was not much more than an armed mob without direction.
Direction Digna knew how to provide. She’d taken charge, ordered half a dozen men shot, and formed the rest into a semblance of a defense. With another twenty-four mortars and a dozen SD-44s, plus a fairly generous amount of ammunition, she’d held the bridge and the fords over the Rio Chiriqui for two days. This was long enough, if just barely, to send the noncombatants on foot thirty kilometers up the road northward in the direction of Chiriqui Grande on the Caribbean coast. The vehicles, and there had not been many of them, were commandeered to carry the wounded and the food. The point of that band was just cresting the mountains as the pursuing Posleen again found the fords to turn Digna’s flanks. She began another fighting retreat.
The little towns on the way were scooped up, the very young and very old being sent northward, along with most of the women, while the younger men and some of the women were pressed into the fighting arm.
Digna had to order a few more men, and two girls, shot along the way. She’d sent them to their deaths dry-eyed still. I can weep later.
There had been a moment, there where the fighting had been thickest, that Digna had thought with despair that she would not be able to hold, that the aliens would break through to feast on her charges. Then suddenly, as if by a miracle, the aliens’ flying sleds had all turned and disappeared southward. She had no idea why, but relished the thought that somewhere they were being badly enough hurt to cause such a change in priorities.
With the disappearance of the flying sleds, the Posleen normals had pulled back. With the terrible pressure from the aliens relieved, Digna was able to pull out her expanded forces mostly intact.
As he was probably her best field man, and perhaps because he was also one of her oldest friends, Tomas Herrera took the point.
Gualaca Bridge, Rio Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
“Demons of Fire, curse the Aldanat’ who condemned us to this,” whispered the low flying God King, Slintogan, as his tenar skipped over the mounded piles of his people’s slain. Scattered among the heaped, yellow, centauroid corpses were more than a few crashed tenar, clear indicators that more than mere normals had fallen trying to force a way across this river.
Internal gasses from decomposition had swelled the bodies, Slintogan noted with disgust. In many cases, the internal pressure had been strong enough to burst abdomens and spill out organs. And then the sun had gone to work; the stench was appalling.
For a moment the God King thought a curse in the general direction of the now escaped threshkreen, not for killing so many of his people, but for allowing so much valuable thresh to be wasted. As it was, with the bodies grown so overripe in the sun, even the normals could not be forced to eat of them.
It was enough to make the hardest heart weep.
But then, this is not the way of the local thresh. I wonder how it would be to grow up and grow old on a planet so abundant, in comparison to its population, that its inhabitants can afford to sneer at nourishing food.
My people, too, might have had such a chance, if those stinking, ignorant players at godhood, the Aldenata, had not meddled. “It’s for your own good… We know and you know not… War is the greatest of scourges… Trust and have faith in us.”
The God King laughed softly and bitterly. More likely this planet will change its direction of rotation than that a group of do-gooders with the power to meddle will refrain from it. Damn them.
The losses from the attack on the threshkreen ship had been so horrific that Slintogan, normally a leader of about four hundred, had had to bond with four times that many normals left bereft of their Gods. His brother God Kings were equally overtasked.
And the thresh must have a considerable lead by now. “A stern chase is a long chase,” as Finegarich the Reaver is reputed to have said.
The God King looked ahead and upward at the mist-shrouded mountains to the north. The road he could barely make out. Even so, he knew the road was there and had no doubt that the thresh who had butchered the People here by this body of flowing water would be fleeing up it.
A long chase and a tiring one. Worse still, a dangerous one as we will never know a moment in advance if the thresh have turned at bay and wait in ambush.
Near Hill 2213, Chiriqui Province, Republic of Panama
The sharp crest of the Cordillera Central loomed in the distance, bare rock surmounted by trees. Sometimes, Digna could catch sight of the walls of the crest, rising vertically over the more gentle slope below. It seemed to her that the rock walls never grew any closer.
The way up was hard, even though the winding, all-weather road was good. More that once Digna, or one of her followers, had to threaten to shoot anyone who refused to keep up. Many of them looked enviously at the horse she sometimes rode but more often led. There was no telling when she would need the horse for a burst to speed to some trouble spot. A rested horse would be capable of that burst where one wearied, even by so slight a load as carrying her ninety-pound frame, might not.
If some looked at Digna’s horse with envy it was as nothing compared to the greedy stares that followed the vehicles carrying the wounded, the lame, the infirm and the pregnant. Enough sniveling, or so thought some of the slackers, just might be enough to get a faster and easier ride to safety.
A great-grandson handed Digna a radio, announcing, “It’s Señor Herrera, Mamita.”
“Si, Tomas. Que quieres?” she answered. What do you want?
“I have a truckload of young men that we stopped,” Herrera said, from nearby Edilze’s battery position. It was on Edilze’s radio that he spoke.
“What are young men doing in a vehicle when we need them to fight? What are young men doing in a vehicle when we have babies being carried and pregnant women and the old and sick still walking?”
Unseen in the distance, Herrera looked over the dozen or so disreputable, bound prisoners standing under guard by the truck from which they had been removed at gun point. He sneered at them as
he spoke.
“Dama, they stole the truck and forced out the previous occupants.”
Equally unseen by Herrera, Digna’s face turned red with rage. Cowardly bastards.
Digna’s late husband had once had a solution for criminals who trespassed on his land to commit their crimes. It was a solution much frowned on in more civilized circles but, in the outlying parts of Panama, and especially in earlier days, it had been a solution the implementation of which was unlikely to ever come to light.
“Hang them,” she said. “Hang them right beside the road.”
Herrera smiled at the twelve — no, it was thirteen — thieves as he took a coil of rope from the horn of his saddle.
He had no clue how to tie a proper hangman’s noose. No matter, a simple loop would do well enough. This he made and then tossed the coil over a convenient tree branch. A shudder ran through the truck thieves as the loop arced over the branch and came to rest a few feet off the ground.
Tomas gestured with his chin for one of the prisoners to be brought over.
Hands bound as they were, still the prisoner attempted to wrap his legs around a sapling as two of Herrera’s men grabbed him by the arms. A few kicks to his calves and thighs loosened the entwining legs. He began to beg as he was dragged toward the rope, the begging changing to an inarticulate scream as the loop was placed around his neck and half tightened.
“Did the sick and old who were designated to ride that truck plead not to be put off by you and your friends?” Tomas asked conversationally as he adjusted the loop to the neck.
“Please,” the thief begged. “Please don’t do this. I had a right to live. I have a right to live. Please…”
