by Andy Graham
“Chel wouldn’t keep us here.” Rick hurried over to his bedroll.
“Damn right he would. He’s a vindictive little sod, the bald ones always are.”
“Maybe you should introduce him to your mother. Her testosterone could sort him out.” Rick winked at his friend just before the wooden door slammed open and most senior officer currently in Castle Brecan (to everyone’s dismay but his) marched in.
Chel had the dubious epithet of being both the youngest person to make lieutenant in the army and now the oldest person to still hold that rank. He was steeped in old-school, patriarchal values that would use the carrot to beat you with once the stick had broken.
“Corporal Richard Franklin,” Chel said in a voice like a dry shave.
“Frederick Franklin, sir. Not Richard. He was my late uncle.” Rick stared at a point just over Chel’s shoulder.
“If I say your name’s Richard, then your name’s Richard.” The lieutenant’s face gleamed as if it had been polished with sweat. He looked at the bedding next to Rick’s feet. “This your bedding, Richard?”
“My name is Frederick, sir.”
“Still pushing it, Franklin. Haven’t you learnt yet? Or maybe you want some of what Lee got? I hear he’s going to get some special treatment now. Shall I put in a word for you, too?”
Stann shook his head a fraction. The other soldiers stood parade-ground still.
“It’s my bedding, sir.”
Chel walked up the length of the mat and kicked Rick’s cooking cans over. “It’s dirty. Got footprints on it. Seems bruises aren’t good teachers. Maybe I should try my belt.” He stuck his thumbs behind the large brass buckle. It was perfectly aligned with the buttons of his shirt. “Don’t worry, Richard, that’s against regs for some reason, another change that has got Sub-Colonel Chester written all over it.” He splayed two fingers into a V shape and pressed them into his throat. “That and the parade pins. I got taught my lessons with a switch,” he said to the silent soldiers. “You whelps have it easy. There wouldn’t be all this trouble back in the capital if we were allowed proper discipline.”
Rick clasped his hands tighter behind his back. The burn scars on each wrist were taut and sweaty. He was here for Thryn and Rose. Every day he put in was another day of credit for his wife and daughter. “I’ll clean it up,” he said.
Chel cupped a hand to his ear.
“I’ll clean it up, sir.”
The lieutenant smiled. “Of course you will, Franklin. But first, remind me. Why are you here?”
“We’re here monitoring separatist activity in Mennai, sir.”
A rustling noise in the corridor stopped as quickly as it started. Rick swallowed. Damn Private Lee and those ghost stories.
“Yes. But why are you here, Franklin? Why were you dumped into my unit?”
“Sci-Corps. Tech support, sir.”
“Ah yes, of course. You’re the computer genius who’s supposed to make sure this new gear’s working.”
“Sir?”
“You’re the camera geek, Franklin. Highly recommended, too. Worked on the lunar mining mission, various jobs for the big dogs in the capital, blah blah blah.” He put one immaculate fingernail on Rick’s shirt and walked his fingers up to the collar as Stann’s eyes cut to the corridor. Chel wiggled a plug out of his pocket. A number was written on its back.
“Plug seven,” Rick said, the itching feeling that he had missed something felt like a bat to the back of the head right now. “That’s the socket to the monitor bank for the north wall of the castle, sir.”
“Oh, plug seven,” said Chel. “For the north wall, you say? You mean the wall facing Mennai, our enemy? The wall you and Sub-Corporal Taille were just checking?”
Chel teased open the plug. Like a cheap illusionist playing to a crowd of bored drunks, he snapped it shut again. The lieutenant separated the two halves with a flourish. “Now, you’re the expert, not me, but shouldn’t this wire connect to that terminal there?” Chel pointed.
One of the wires was hanging off its terminal by a thread of copper. The rest of the frayed metal was splayed out in a ragged fan. Rick screwed his feet into the ground, fighting the sinking feeling.
The nagging memory he’d been looking for came crashing back. With the unit’s captain recalled to the capital, Chel had ordered the soldiers on a twenty-four hour endurance march, daring them to report him for breaking the new eight-hour shift system. He’d wanted ‘to keep them sharp, while blunt with fatigue’. The lieutenant had tagged an emergency shift on the end of the march, claiming it didn’t count as part of their eight hours’ work, that they had hours to make up because of the march. It had been the day after Lee had been sent home. Everyone had been jumping at nothing. As sweat prickled through his skin, Rick remembered seeing the worn cable but the problem failing to register.
“You don’t feel your clothes once you’re wearing them,” he’d been told by one of his instructors. “Your job as an electrician is to make sure you always see and feel everything you do, even something as simple as screwing in a light bulb. This way you’re less likely to make mistakes.”
The images danced around Chel’s leering face: Rick missing the connection, walking out of the monitor room and the film playing in his head cutting back to the plug. The scene could have been lifted from the dodgy movies he and Thryn laughed at so much. Only right now, he didn’t want to laugh. He couldn’t. He felt as if someone had filled his mouth with sand. He fought down the urge to swallow. He wasn’t going to let Chel see his victory, no matter how bad the mistake.
The lieutenant cupped his own face in his hands and made an O-shape with his lips. Stann, fidgeting on the spot, glanced at the door. His voice rapped off the walls. “Sir, permission to speak, sir?”
Chel wagged his finger at Stann. “Not now, Sub-Corporal, I’m just getting to the good bit.”
“Sir, the corridor, I heard—”
Chel formed his other hand into the shape of a gun and fired an imaginary bullet at Stann. “One more word, Taille, and everyone here gets rat-rations for the week.”
Stann saluted, his face grim. Chel held the plug up in front of Rick, opening and closing it in time to his words. “Maybe that’s why the monitors for the north wall are blank again today.” The click-clack of the plastic echoed around the room. “You wanted to check the wall, Franklin, ‘cos you said you’d checked the monitor room.”
“Sir—”
“I’m guessing the cameras were fine, Franklin,” Chel cut in, grimacing. “You people from the Bucket Towns are all the same.”
“Free Towns, sir.”
“The Buckets,” Chel shouted. His nose was a whisker away from Rick’s. The thin arteries in his eyeballs throbbed under the glistening white sheen. “You do not answer back to a senior officer! If boot camp didn’t get the message through to you, I will, by any means necessary. I’ll make you cut enough switches from that stinking forest outside for every soldier in this unit to beat you with. And you have my word that they will beat you until their hands are bleeding. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t think you do, Franklin.” Chel was apoplectic, slimy balls of saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth. “Maybe you left your brains in the same pail you bucket heads used to shit and wash in? You folk from these ‘Free Towns’ are as dull as the animals you live with.” Chel’s nostrils flared as he stamped a foot on the ground. There was a barely audible whinny from someone in the room.
The lieutenant spun to glare at the line of immobile soldiers, each and every one of them expressionless. “I’ve always wondered, Richard,” Chel said to the room as a whole, “do you all share beds with the animals, too? It’d explain a lot about you peasants: your looks, brains, the smell of your women.”
Stann’s face darkened. The air in the room seemed to get colder, harder to breath. Chel pivoted back and stabbed his finger into Rick’s chest. “Just you wait until the captain returns and I inform him ab
out this farce. I understand there are some new disciplinary procedures being rolled out.”
“Still not gonna get promoted,” someone muttered.
A muscle in Chel’s jaw twitched. He dropped the plug and kicked it behind the armchair. “Corporal Franklin, you will grovel your way into the corner and pick that thing up. Then you will fix what you broke.”
Rick wrestled to keep his face impassive. Never mind Chel’s bile. This was a rookie mistake. He hadn’t done anything this sloppy since he was a kid. If he couldn’t focus here, how could he focus in combat? Making this sin, and it was a sin for a military electrician, on Chel’s watch just made it that much more bitter.
The lieutenant launched a string of expletives at the other soldiers as he headed for the exit. Rick ducked behind the armchair, scrabbling on the floor for the pieces of the plug.
A blast of cold air chilled the sweat on the back of his neck. The door screeched open and Chel lurched to a halt.
A black-clad figure, covered in twigs and leaves, stood in the corridor. Gun-grey eyes stared out from a mess of leathery wrinkles. The old man tossed a leather bag at Chel. “Surprise,” he slurred in a thick Mennai accent.
Chel caught the bag, his eyes wide. Stann yelled. Launched himself at Chel. The room turned white. Then the gunfire started.
4
Aerfen's Debt
The shockwave slammed the armchair into Rick, cracking his skull against the wall. He was covered by the thick fabric. It smelt of mould and pinned him to the damp stone. As the reverberations from the explosion died down, the firing started. Then the screams. Voices. Shouting. Swearing. Pleading. Rick pushed and pulled, twisting under the chair as the carnage unfolded without him. Each time he moved, the throbbing in his head peaked and a wave of nausea ripped through him. The armchair seemed to be full of lead. He had to get out. Help his colleagues. The chair shuddered as something thudded into it. Rick thudded back against the wall. Winded and dazed. His vision cleared and, through the gap between the fabric and the stone, saw a hand dangling inches from his face. A streak of crimson trailed across the wrist, onto a finger. It formed a bead on the end of a nail. The hand twitched and the blood splashed onto the floor, congealing in the dust. To Rick’s horror, he realised more blood was seeping through fabric of the soldiers’ Throne, sticky and red and warm.
“Help me,” he yelled. His voice was lost amongst many. “Get me out.”
A door rattled open and the crash of booted feet shook the room. “Reinforcements!” an Ailan voice cried, relieved and desperate.
The shooting stopped. Too many people! Rick realised. Not enough space for guns. And in the time it took for him to draw in a breath of stinking air, to hope it was over, the air was filled with the hiss of steel, stabbing and gutting. Knives. The Mennai had brought their knives. That chilled Rick more than the guns. More even than the bomb. Now the room was thick with the tortured screams of a different kind. An evil kind. Screams born in a slashing red hell.
He had to get out! With a shove of his legs that left bile in his mouth, he toppled the corpse-covered Throne and crawled into a room that was utterly quiet.
Rick had no idea how long he had been trapped, wrestling with the weight of the chair and the spinning in his head. A minute? Ten? Less? But the scene that greeted him made him want to crawl back and put out his own eyes. The bomb had killed or crippled most of the soldiers in the guardroom. Bullets had done the rest. As for the reinforcements? Ailan soldiers, who, minutes ago, had been cooking, scrubbing, darning socks and cleaning weapons? They lay dead and dying. One clutched at the glistening purple coils spilling from her stomach, whimpering. Another was praying for the first time in his life. There were no nice deaths in battle. Heroism was a matter of perspective but these soldiers had died horribly. The armchair that had saved his life hadn’t fared much better. It was dripping red. All thrones come from blood, most return there. The soldiers’ Throne had been no different. A thought hit him, staggering him as another wave of dizziness washed over him.
Stann! Where’s Stann? Rick raced to the tangle of bodies on the floor. He peeled back one, then another. Another. None of them were the friend he sought. Rick was filled with conflicting emotions of relief, grief for the fallen and guilt for his relief. He tugged back another body, a Mennai trooper, and found Chel. What was left of him.
Rick’s knees hit the floor and he emptied his guts. The explosion had torn Chel in two. Maybe Rick should fear bombs more than knives after all. The lieutenant’s torso was in the centre of a fan-shaped pattern of soot and debris. The bomber hadn’t been any luckier. He must have stumbled as he tried to get away, the nails and ball bearings ripping him to shreds. The old man’s head lay in a corner. One gun-grey eye stared at nothing; a bent coin rested on the other eyelid.
Squatting back on his haunches, Rick wiped the strings of spittle from his mouth. There was still no sign of Stann. The corridors, he must be taking the fight to the Mennai. That’s what Stann would do.
The door slammed open. Rick grabbed the nearest weapon, a Mennai knife, and clutched it in front of his chest. The knife was a vile thing with a serrated, triangular blade. The jagged puncture wounds these things left wouldn’t close up and bled freely. It made him feel filthy just holding it. An Ailan soldier stumbled into the guardroom, covered head to toe with slime and gore.
“Help me, please.” Sub-lieutenant Lacky collapsed as Rick leapt for him, his own head spinning treacherously.
“Too many,” Lacky said. “Our patrols. Gone. Killed.” One thumb drew a red line across his neck. “Or pushed. Off the walls.”
Rick had a sickening image of Ailan soldiers falling from the walkways onto the cobblestones below the walls, like black-clad hail, crimson gashes across their throats. Lacky opened his mouth to speak but the cherry-red bubbles frothing on his lips were noiseless. His hand went limp.
“No. No! Don’t you fucking dare die on me.” Rick threw the Mennai blade away and drew his own knife. He sliced off a piece of a dead woman’s shirt, opening a fresh wound in her arm in the process, and applied a hasty tourniquet just as Lacky slipped into unconsciousness.
“Got to get out of here. Get help.” Rick lay the man down, grabbed a rifle, radio and helmet and sprinted for the back door, the closer one. It was blocked by corpses on the other side. The main exit? Too risky? He poked his head out. Clear. He cross-stepped down the corridor. He had no idea if he was quiet or not, his ears were full of a hissing noise from the explosion. At the end of the corridor was a T-junction.
Rick huddled into a shallow alcove just shy of the corner. Black stains gleamed on the floor. Ten metres of corridor separated him from freedom and help. Ten metres of stone and twisting smoke. Question was: what else did that ten metres hold? He balanced the helmet on the rifle muzzle and poked it round the edge of the wall. A shot thundered through the castle and the helmet clattered to the ground.
“A Mennai fucking terrorist,” he muttered. “That’s what else is in the corridor. Now what do I do?”
He glanced back at the guard room. Low moans drifted through the splintered door, mixing with the smoke and dust that choked the air, and an idea popped into his head.
The smell of burnt hair was thick on Rick’s tongue. He was losing his grip on his burden. It wasn’t heavy. Just unwieldy. Slick with blood. He hugged it tighter, fighting not to drop it. There was a blur of movement. A soldier, dazed from the bomb, stumbled past him into the T-junction.
“No!” Rick yelled.
Machine gun fire skewered the soldier. She gyrated as the bullets rattled her body and sent her spinning down the corridor.
“Fuck it.” He hadn’t thought there were any more people alive in the guardroom. Rick hoped his lame plan would help him get round the same fate as this poor woman. The ceiling shuddered. A burst of tiny stones pattered into his hair as the echo of another grenade faded down the next corridor.
Rick wrestled his burden closer. Bits of flesh flaked off it, onto his hand
s. He gagged and forced down the acid in the back of his throat. “Now,” he whispered. “Just do it now, before you drop him. Or puke again. On three.”
He eased himself forwards. Chel’s head, a dead weight on his neck, lolled back. His sightless eyes stared up at Rick. Even now, what was left of the lieutenant’s face seemed to smirk back, his sunken knuckles promising more character-enhancing beatings. No matter how much of a bastard he’d been to his subordinates, he hadn’t deserved this.
Forearms cramping as he held on to the back of the lieutenant’s shirt, Rick leaned Chel’s torso past the corner. A shot cracked the air. The dead man’s head exploded in a red cloud. Rick dropped Chel, spinning the lieutenant’s remains across the floor and flattened himself into the guard’s post.
The slow crunch of approaching feet got louder. It was working. The hells only knew how, but it was. Rick held his breath, gripped the handle of his belt knife. Except for the fuller, it was smooth and unadorned. As civilised as one of these things could be. A gaunt Mennai soldier stepped round the corner, his rifle poised. He saw Chel’s legless torso and paused. Rick slipped out of the alcove, wrapped his hand around the man’s mouth and slid the knife between his ribs. There was no scream, just a gurgling sigh as the man crumpled. Rick lowered the soldier to the ground and slit his throat. The man twitched once and lay still, blood pooling under his neck.
Get it over with. Keep it clean. Dignified. Part of him wanted to believe it was better to die on one of these blades than the ones the Mennai used but he doubted the dead man would agree. Rick bent over the corpse to close his eyes. He would have done the same to Chel, if all of the lieutenant’s face was in one place.
Rick huddled in the shadows and tried the radio he’d salvaged. Nothing. “I guess whoever built this castle wasn’t thinking of reception when they made these walls this bloody thick.” He kicked the stones behind him. He had to get onto the battlements, out of this charnel house into fresh air. He wasn’t sure how many from Ailan were still alive.
