Scorpio Invasion

by Alan Burt Akers

  We talked and argued and eventually decided to burn a certain barracks which housed a company of particularly unpleasant Schtarkins.

  “It must look like an accident.” I sounded heavy and tired. “If these rasts suspect it was arson, sabotage—”

  “The retribution will be frightful.” Nath the Rumpador nodded.

  “We’ll fix it,” growled Bargrad the Pellin. “I’ll get old Palandi the Iarvin to design a device. He’s a sneaky Khibil, full of himself—”

  “And much reduced, much reduced,” said Foke the Clis.

  “Broken in the ib,” confirmed the Brokelsh. “But I will speak to him.”

  Having settled that, I produced a half loaf, only a little moldy, and divided it up. I’d had that off a tray going past on a wagon.

  Well, we burned the barracks.

  A fine hullabaloo followed; but the incendiarism was put down to accident. For the next three days it rained hard. We did no more burning for a sennight, and then we burned a smithy where arrow heads were forged. That, too, given the danger of the fires, was put down to chance.

  Because the Shanks couldn’t tell one person from another of the same race of diffs we were able to work some schemes that in any other context would not have been possible. I was able to join a work gang in place of somebody else. The Shanks simply counted how many of us there were in any one gang, and kept checking that number. By this means I and my companions could move about Taranjin relatively freely. We needed to get the word out and spreading that the Day was coming. And to be ready. By this means, also, I was afforded the opportunity to take stock of the Shank forces. They were formidable. Clearly, however, this was the bridgehead for an Invasion. The forces gathered in Taranjin were not of the size to resist a concerted attack delivered by even a small proportion of the strength we could muster. The problem was mustering that strength.

  When I’d worked my way around to joining a group of apim armorers, I had the layout pretty well firmly fixed in my head. Shan-lao Ortyghan at first resented my presence. He ran the shop and he was well aware that if he did not produce what the Shanks required he’d get no food, or he’d be stuck through with a trident. He was a bulky apim, with a stomach shrunken away from its former protuberant glory.

  He had lost the skills of Naghan the Hammer and I had to convince him I was a competent armorer in all branches of that abstruse science before he would accept me as a substitute for Naghan the Hammer. Then he became more friendly.

  When I said I required a sword he just turned away.

  When I persisted, he said: “Those Shank shints can count, you know.”

  “So we cabbage a little metal from here and from there. You, Shan-lao Ortyghan, will provide enough good quality metal that the Fish Faces won’t miss for me to forge a sword.”

  I will not go into the details necessary in the Convincing of Shan-lao Ortyghan the Armorer. Suffice it to say that he grunted out: “Very well, Prince Chaadur, we will cabbage the metal for you. And may the True Trog Himself bless our endeavors. For if we are caught—”

  “We will not be. The Shanks can be fooled. Have we not proved that?”

  “Aye.” He had to admit that, grudgingly. We could bamboozle the Fish Heads. It was risky; it was just about our only weapon at this time.

  On a gray day of wind and rain and black clouds billowing a new reinforcement of Shank flying ships soared in from the sea. We counted the squadrons. There were five squadrons of thirteen ships each. Also, these ships were, again, of a different style from those which we were accustomed to see flying over Taranjin on patrols.

  “By the Resplendent Bridzilkelsh!” swore Bargrad the Pellin, staring up with the rain beating on his pugnacious Brokelsh face. “The shints!More of ’em. That upsets the balance, Prince Chaadur!”

  “Aye.”

  The flying ships in their rigid lines through the bluster circled and lowered past the outskirts of the port, vanishing past the roofs, landing in the field allotted to them. This did, indeed, alter the balance.

  The next time Deb-Lu contacted me, I’d have to make stronger representations through him to Drak, Emperor of Vallia, to release more vollers from the Vallian Air Service. Yes, very well, I knew they were committed and needed elsewhere. I’d just have to try to convince Drak that we needed them down here.

  At this time, too, by cunning if simple appeals to the natural cleverness inherent in any Khibil’s opinion of himself, I’d stiffened up old Palandi the Iarvin’s resolve. In a pathetic attempt at the usual cutting superior manner of any Khibil, he said: “I have made the device, prince.” He showed me the little wooden box. I was at pains to admire his handiwork.

  Truthfully, the thing was a little marvel. In the box a fruit would be connected at each end to rods which held a powerful twisted cord in rest. He’d suggested a gregarian, anything of a similar nature would have done, an orange, an apple, anything that would rot away. When the fruit rotted enough it released the cord which unwound like a spring. This struck sparks from a flint and toothed wheel. The sparks fell on the prepared tinder. The rest of the box was packed with combustibles. We had, therefore, if not a time bomb, then a timed incendiary device.

  “Dondo!” I said, congratulating Palandi.

  “Oh, aye,” he sniffed, brushing up his whiskers from which the red had faded to a dull gray. “She’ll burn ’em, may Bil the Khib frizzle ’em.”

  The necessity was to select a fruit in the last stages of decomposition. Now, remember, food was so valuable, was so difficult to obtain, that to dedicate a whole fruit to our incendiarism was so altruistic as to be beyond credence.

  “A fish head,” I said, firmly. “Any fruit is beyond our powers.”

  “Even a stinking fish head,” grumped Foke the Clis, “will be difficult.”

  So, and of course, in the event I donated a fish head out of a garbage pail outside a Shank barracks. You had to fight to get the garbage, too.

  What with this scheme and that burning, this reconnaissance and that listing of forces, that horrendous time passed.

  Through this period we discovered further ways of fooling and tricking the Shanks.

  Shan-lao Ortyghan proved to be not only a fine armorer but an excellent engraver. He could produce the most wonderful patterns along a sword blade. When a party of Shank officers discovered examples of his work in a back room of the smithy they became, as Shan-lao expressed it: “Beside themselves with wonder and admiration of the workmanship.” Nothing would suffice but that they must have their own swords beautifully etched with patterns of fish and ships and clouds, and the whirling Celtic lines that made a blade an artifact of art and beauty.

  “I’d a’ refused ’em,” said Shan-lao, bitterly, “but they’ll pay extra food.”

  “Quite right,” I said.

  “But, prince—?”

  “You’ll need acid. Strong acid. You and your assistants will beautify the swords of the Fish Faces.”

  Here I was piercing two birds with a single shaft.

  First of all, if we could get out hands on acid, then Palandi the Iarvin could use the method of having acid bite through a membrane for a timing device instead of a rotten fish head.

  In the second place, as I said to the armorer: “You will execute the most wonderful designs upon the blades of the Shank weapons. If it is to become a fashion with them, then we’ll use that to our own advantage.”

  “It sits ill with me, prince, to pander to a damned Fish Face.”

  “Assuredly. You will, good Shan-lao, cut the patterns deep. Very deep. The color will conceal the depth the acid has bitten. You see?”

  “Oh, aye, I see. And when the swords break in a fight, they’ll march around for me and stick a trident through my guts.”

  “When the fight happens, we’ll all be in there fighting. If we don’t we don’t deserve to succeed. When we’ve scored the victory, the depth of the acid will not be an issue. Of course, if we do not win on the Day, then little will matter thereafter.”
/>   “By the Divine Tears of the True Trog Himself! You speak sooth there!”

  “Then let the acid bite deeply, Shan-lao, and curse all the Shanks down to their hellish hell.”

  “Quidang to that, prince!”

  In a similar fashion I persuaded a lithe rascal who swore by Diproo the Nimble-fingered to go along with a scheme I’d concocted in a moment, I suppose, of divine madness.

  This Luan-Chi the Flexible joined Bargrad the Fellin and myself in an argument over a suitable use to which we might put Palandi’s incendiary device.

  “Barracks are fine,” I said. “But if we burn a food warehouse—”

  Luan-Chi, a Thanko with a mop of dusty dark hair and the long and drooping nose of his race, said quickly: “That would not be clever.”

  “I’d burn the lot of ’em,” growled Bargrad in his pugnacious uncouth Brokelsh way. “But Luan-Chi speaks true, prince. If we destroy food we reduce the amount the Bolsted-rotten Shanks will give us.”

  “Anyway,” amplified the thief, “it is reasonably difficult to burn.”

  “There is a certain warehouse adjacent to the Marine Bazaar,” I said in an even voice, not to be deflected. “They store barrels of fish there. The fish is preserved in oil. Oil. That will make a capital blaze.”

  “We’ll all starve!”

  “The Shanks have ample supplies of food. They deprive us to keep us in order, to keep us in chains. If they lose a warehouse of fish, they have plenty more. They go out fishing every damned day, don’t they?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, then. We burn the warehouse and we make sure at least one of the walls is broken down.” I glared at them with all the intolerant domination of Dray Prescot. “They will order slaves to rebuild the walls.”

  “So we will toil to rebuild the walls—”

  “We build those walls in a certain way. We arrange the courses so that a section as wide as a door can be swiftly taken down. We will enter the warehouse secretly and take away many of those precious barrels of fish. Then we will rebuild the wall section so that it looks the same. They may guard the double doors at the front; we enter at—”

  “By Diproo the Nimble-fingered, prince! A scheme! It will work!”

  “Aye. With care and cunning, it will fool the Schtarkins.”

  So, that is precisely what we did. The Shanks never did figure out how barrels of fish were short in their inventory when the doors were fast shut and locked, with guards prowling. The walls stood, firm and solid. There must be some defect in their accounting procedures.

  And our people ate good fish in oil.

  These were just two of the schemes we tormented the Shanks with at that time. Perhaps the greatest weapon in our armory, though, was one I did not reveal to a soul. Since my tutor Maspero in far Aphrasöe had given me that genetic pill so that I could understand Kregish, I’d understood any language. Even the hissing spitting clicking racket of the Shanks.

  One day creeping along out of the way like any slave, I passed into a square where along one side the Shanks had set up a row of stakes. On top writhed the poor unfortunates condemned for whatever crime they had committed.

  There were forty-seven impaled persons. I counted as I walked past. The outcries had mostly died down, and the wrigglings stilled. The smells were no more unpleasant than most of Taranjin. Slaves like myself, passing along with downcast eyes, cast a single glance aloft, and then went back to scuttling along. They were just thanking the True Trog Himself it wasn’t them up there.

  A few Fish Faces with shiny tridents and scale armor were lolling about by the row of impalement stakes.

  “You can’t believe these people,” one of them was saying. This is a rough translation of the idiomatic fishy language. “Why do they do it?”

  “If they become any more troublesome,” spat his companion, “they will become uneconomic.”

  “Get rid of ’em all,” said another.

  Walking on past with my head lowered I almost missed the response.

  “Haven’t you heard? The leaders have struck a deal. By the Great Scaled One! We’ll soon have these drys whimpering in fear again and back under control.”

  Moving on in that slavish half crouch and shuffle I realized there were a number of facts to chew on here. Not one of those forty-seven poor devils had been anyone I knew, no members of the resistance cells we were setting up, so my conscience was, relatively speaking, clear on that score. If they’d been moved to do what they did because they’d heard of resistance within Taranjin, then I decided I wouldn’t hold myself responsible for that, either. Once you were committed then you took your chances like anyone else.

  So what was this deal the Shank Leaders had struck?

  And, too, in the tacit admission that some at least of the people of Taranjin were slipping away from control meant that our campaign had an impact.

  A few days later we worked a scam on the produce being brought in from the countryside. The Fish Heads really did not care to venture too far from the sea, although, as they had proved in the past, they would do so with frightful energy if they had to. They were growing accustomed to eating land produce. So our little group having arranged substitutes where necessary went along to the Ghat Gate and watched the loaded pack calsanys and high-sided carts rolling in. Shanks patrolled, giving an occasional lick with their whips, a vicious clout with their trident butt-ends.

  The scam was a simple enough affair, workable when slaves hoisted the sacks on their shoulders and trotted in lines into the warehouses. We provided a sack identical to those being unloaded from the carts and carried into the building. Our accomplice was among the carriers. At a suitable place of shadows, under an arch, just past a door, the carrier would step out of line with his sack of flour and our man would take his place with his sack of sand.

  This was garsun flour ground from the massive roots of the gola-gola plant. They tried to grow corn here but the varieties were not up to much, the climate not quite right, but garsun flour made a marvelous doughy-cake in lieu of ordinary bread. We had two sacks away and then it was my turn to step into the line with my sack of sand.

  Jimjim the Randell slid past, ducking down into the archway’s shadows as I stepped out. His sack of garsun flour would feed a lot of mouths. My sack of sand, I devoutly trusted, would be allocated to a Shank unit. I moved on smartly following the fellow ahead and a voice, harsh, cutting, phlegm-laded with arrogant fury, lashed out like a whip.

  “Grak! C’mere, you miserable apology for a slave! You think you can fool me with a hoary old trick like that! You shint! C’mere!”

  I just stuck my head down, not wishing to believe, and hoping he didn’t mean me.

  But he did.

  “You! By the Triple Tails of Targ the Untouchable! We’re going to have some change around here, we’re going to have discipline and slaves knowing their place. C’mere, shint.”

  The thick and elastic coils of a black whip snapped about my waist and I was dragged back, the sack falling to the ground and spilling yellow sand across the bricks. I stared up.

  Up there a black-browed Kataki hauled on his whip, and his sinuous tail with its six inches of daggered steel hovered before my eyes.

  So now I knew the deal the Shanks had struck with the Katakis.

  Chapter twenty

  After the first blazing realization of the dreadful compact drawn out between Shank and Kataki, the thought uppermost in my mind was that I must not kill this arrogant and cruel bastard of a Whiptail.

  If a slave killed a slavemaster, the retribution would be so frightful everything of suffering previously endured would pale into insignificance.

  His whip hauled me towards him. He was a big fellow, clad in mesh, bright and bulky, well fed. His downdrawn Kataki face with the snaggly teeth and dark eyes bore down on me.

  “By Koskei of the Daggered Tail! A trick that would not fool a green coy! C’mere, you cramph, and I’ll stripe you!”

  He expected me to try to pull ba
ck, to draw away from him. Instead I surged forward, inside the bight of the lash. My left hand freed the coil of whip about me. My right fist fastened on his tail just where the dagger hilt was strapped with leather and bright brass buckles. I yanked and then instantly thrust forward.

  He was gobbling in black fury now.

  There was the immediate necessity to duck a blow from his gauntleted fist. Balanced easily now, forcing the tail towards his belly, I kicked. I kicked good and hard, where it hurt, betwixt wind and water.

  My toes are hard. I felt the soggy impact and he jumped under the impact. He started to double up and my left fist slashed him across that narrow Kataki jaw. He fell down and I threw his tail away.

  An uproar began, slaves shrieking in mortal fear, mingled with the hoarse and furious bellows of more Kataki slave guards.

  A swift look back past the shadows, past the line of slaves, showed me guards running up, whirling their whips, with the mingled suns shine glittering off their steel-tipped tails. Time to go.

  Jimjim the Randell had vanished, gone with his sack of garsun flour, hurrying to one of our secret hoards. Bargrad the Fellin stood in a dark corner, his savage Brokelsh face expressing a mixture of fear and surprise. His sack of sand still rested across his shoulders.

  “Drop that sack, Bargrad! Run!”

  The sack went onto the brick flooring and the Brokelsh was away like a deer startled by dogs. I rushed after him, around the corner of the warehouse, down the stinking alleyway beyond. There was a certain hole in the cross wall at the end and Bargrad fairly threw himself in and through. I followed, taking a bit of skin off my elbow as I went.

  The noise at our backs materially abated. We were now in a dark and narrow passageway that led past the second wall out onto Mare Street. The suns shine lay in a glitter of ruby and jade across the fish scales and bones littering the street, and a few slaves moved about carrying barrels into the next warehouse along. We had to reach and mingle with them, just two more fish among the rest.