by Andy Graham
“I promised the child for my brother and that is what I have done,” the speaker-drone rattled.
“I knew it,” Vena whispered.
“What?” Nascimento asked. “He’s—” His gaze whipped back to the treeline as the realisation sunk in.
The speaker-drone hissed into the air. “The deal only promised a chance of peace. And that chance ends with Ray Franklin’s life. He dies, then you die.”
Randall squeezed the trigger and Brooke screamed.
It wasn’t the click of the hammer on the one-shot pistol that scared Ray, it was the sound of Brooke’s scream. But as the scream faded to be replaced by any number of unholy curses from the Angel City, he heard the snickering laugh of his half-brother.
“Empty,” Randall said. “Got to have a little fun here and there, right?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Says the man who trusted his life-long nemesis? I may be crazy but you’re an idiot. My putting you down is doing the world a favour. Randall fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. One tumbled to the ground where it lay, slug-like, ugly and larger than life. It seemed to grab the attention of everyone there like a noose. “Next time I do it for real.”
Ray’s decision to sneak out in the night seemed unutterably naive. Dying here would solve nothing. “I was stupid to believe that there was enough humanity left in you to hold true to the spirit of your promise.”
Randall laid a hand on the back of Ray’s neck. It was cold on the sun-warmed skin, greasy. “I’ll let you in on a secret, brother mine. You don’t get anywhere in government with humanity. Leadership is not about humanity; it’s about decisions. And the best way to make those choices is maths. Turn people into numbers. One just needs to know the right sums to make the equation balance. That’s why businessmen make the best leaders. No sense of moral responsibility, no sense of—”
Unsung legionnaires jumped. Rifles coming up to their shoulders as they pivoted in all directions.
“Hold!” their commander shouted. It was Toorn: the kid from the 10th Legion with knitting needles for legs and bowling balls for biceps. And it appeared Toorn was even more useless as an Unsung captain than he had been as a 10th-Legion private.
“What’s going on, Captain?”
“Don’t know, sir. We—”
“What’s that noise?” Randall shouted. “Someone tell me what that noise is!” The hand clutching the pistol stabbed randomly at the air. “I want answers, I want . . .”
Ray could hear it, too. It sounded like someone chanting—
“‘Doomed, Doomed. Doomed. We’re all doomed!’ What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Nascimento asked. “You seem to be the expert on Ailan’s government and military, Vena. Care to help?”
“I wish I could.” She was leaning on the edge of the palisade, aged fingers white on the weather-worn wood.
“The Unsung are attacking from a second point, as you said they should.” Lukaz pointed to the left of Ray and the VP.
“I don’t think so, my pasty friend.” Nascimento grunted as Mayka elbowed him in the ribs. “I think this might just be the cavalry come to save us.”
A figure limped out of the green shadows of the forest, the lopsided rise and fall of his shoulders in time with the syllables bellowed from the woods. Nascimento let out a low chuckle. “I don’t believe it. If only Baris Orr were here. This is gonna be good. This old boy’s got balls you could break mountains on.”
A lone figure emerged from the forest. He limped towards the Unsung, raised a half-hand and yelled, “Get your hands off my grandson.”
Ray’s jaw hinged open. This wasn’t possible. Around him, the Unsung, untrained thugs and bullies who thought a uniform gave them a moral and legal right to violence, were scurrying for orders. They’d already learnt in the forests that a legionnaire’s life prospects weren’t the same as in the recruitment ads. And now, a pensioner with a prosthetic leg and half a hand was facing down a squad of Ailan’s dirtiest. And they didn’t know how to deal with it.
“Who is that?” Brooke asked.
Nascimento folded his arms across his chest. “That’s your future grandfather-in-law. And,” he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “he could teach you Donian hard-arses a few things about contrariness.”
“Stann Taille?”
“The one and only.” Nascimento waved across the palisade. “Got to admit, I’m a bit of a fan.”
Ray pushed himself to kneeling, his head still spinning from the beating he’d got in the early hours of the morning. Randall made a weak attempt to stop him but was not paying attention. The hand holding the snub-nosed pistol quivered, pointing at the bullet on the ground.
The Unsung were looking to their leader for orders. Captain Toorn was desperate to do something but was undone by the fact that a lone pensioner was not fazed by a squad of legionnaires. As unruly as the 10th Legion may have been, Ray thought, they were at least well-trained legionnaires rather than a collection of Friday-night thugs.
“What the hell are you all doing?” Randall screamed. “There’s almost one hundred of you! Surely you can take out one cripple?”
“One cripple?” Stann shouted back. The cry echoed up over the palisade.
“Get half of all the people who can fight and get ready to rush them,” Nascimento said to Lukaz.
“And you?”
“I’ll be down just as soon as you get going. I don’t want them to know we’re on the way and I’m a little bigger than you mountain folk on accounts of not growing up in a tunnel.”
The leader of the Hoyden disappeared.
“You not going with Lukaz?” Nascimento asked Mayka.
“Someone needs to look after you,” she replied.
“Sweet, maybe I’ll— Just wait up a minute.” Nascimento grabbed Brooke’s hand. “Where are you going?”
“You’re not thinking to stop me fighting for him, are you, Jamerson?” Brooke said in a tone of voice that might as well have had a fist attached to one end.
“Never.” Nascimento pointed out towards the forest. “I want you to watch your grandfather-in-law in action.”
“One cripple?” Stann shouted again, the words crackling through the ringing in Ray’s ears.
A squad of Unsung shuffled forwards. It was ridiculous. They could have shot Stann by now, rushed and cuffed him at the least. What the Unsung had suffered at the hands of the tribes and the Resistance in the forests had shaken them to the core. This was why the legions trained rookies for so long: to instil a fear of disobedience above everything else. But for that you needed leadership. And Captain Toorn, who had modelled himself on Captain Electric, the legions’ mascot, was as useful as a cotton-wool condom.
“One cripple?” Stann repeated. “I see two cripples and one old woman.”
A man armed with a crutch and a limp made his way to Stann’s left, morning sunlight gleaming on his scarred face. A woman with silver hair swinging about her shoulders stood to Stann’s right. She was carrying a banner that cracked and rippled in the breeze. The twin Arch Trees of Axeford glistened in gold, silver and green thread, branches curling from one side of the flag to the next, entwined in a knot in the centre.
Stann pointed left and right. “Former range-sergeant Tino Martinez of the Rivermen, and Flayme. Think of us as the vanguard of the Axeford Militia. They rode once in the story of Greenfields and now we’re here to keep up traditions.” He glanced from side to side and shrugged. “On foot rather than horseback, hard to get a horse in a chopper.”
“There. Are. Only. Three. People.” Randall had given up on volume and was biting off the words between clenched teeth. The Unsung started forwards.
“Three?” Stann grinned. “There’s more of us than just three.”
The shambling charge of the Unsung slowed.
Nascimento counted the men and women as they emerged from the treeline. About thirty in all; more than half were bald, balding or grey. A number made Stann and Mart
inez look agile. And a bunch of them seemed as likely to shoot their own toes off as the Unsungs’.
“They’re outnumbered three to one!” Brooke said.
“You got premature nappy-brain, Brooke?”
“What?” she spun, hand raised to slap him.
“They’re the cheese to bait the mouse.” A huge grin split his face. “And even I know that a mouse is nothing like a sheep or a goat.” Nascimento handed her the binoculars.
Stann held up his ruined hand and the Unsung advance halted, unsure of what to do. Maybe they were looking for bigger weapons, maybe they were just surprised, or maybe it was just his confidence that had gutted theirs. “A few of us got together and decided enough was enough. I want what’s left of my family back and you” — he pointed his half-hand at Randall — “got to go. You’re not my family. You’re nobody’s family. Best you can hope for is to walk away now, while you still can.” He held out his crutch. “I’ll lend you this if you need.”
“What?” Randall Soulier had gone the colour of a bruised plum. Stann had been a decent boxer, a good legionnaire and the best shot in the military at one point. But his true talents had lain in riling the opposition. Call it trash talk, sledging or just plain old cheek, it was his one true gift.
Stann looked over his shoulder and yelled, tracing the shape in the air for the VP’s benefit, “Any of you relics got an ear trumpet for this kid? Seems he’s a bit hard of hearing.”
The Axeford Militia shrieked with laughter.
“Doomed!” one yelled.
“Doomed, doomed, doomed. We’re all doomed.”
“But at least I ain’t deaf,” Stann said.
“Deaf, deaf, deaf!” The chant went up.
“Kill them!”
“Kill them!” Captain Toorn echoed his commander-in-chief’s strangled cry.
“Kill them now!” The VP was red-faced and shaking.
“Yeah,” someone muttered. “Kill them.”
“There’s an idea.”
“Shoot them.”
“Then kill them.”
“Might shoot the old lady with my pink pistol first,” another added. “No blanks in that, I promise you.”
A bunch of Unsung laughed the throaty hur-hur-hur laugh that had nothing to do with humour and everything to do with pain. The legionnaires, it seemed, were beginning to remember what they were good at.
Stann coughed, discreetly.
Maybe it was the speaker-drone, maybe it was just a trick of the imagination, but the cough was heard by everyone watching. The incipient violence paused mid-curse. “I said a few of us had had enough.” Stann pointed behind the Unsung. “We met these people on the way here and they agreed with me.”
“What do you mean ‘the cheese to bait the mouse’?” Brooke asked.
“You see it?” Nascimento pointed in the same direction as Stann.
“Another banner. With a golden tree.”
“Who’s carrying that banner?”
“Bull and Gate. The 6th Legion and . . .” She gasped. “Not possible. The Praetorian Guard.”
“Who?” Vena’s head snapped round. She leant as far over the palisade as she could without falling to get a better view.
Brooke lowered the binoculars. “That means—”
Nascimento grinned. “The Old Lady of the Legions has picked a side.”
Vena grabbed the binoculars and trained them on the right side of the forest. She took in a breath of surprise and said, “It’s—”
“Field-Marshal Chester?” Randall Soulier pressed a hand to his temple. It felt like part of his skull was about to explode. “She should be dead! What happened to the bomb?”
“She survived, sir,” said Toorn helpfully.
“Yes, I can see the dried-up old leather-flap survived, you fucking idiot! Why wasn’t I told this?”
“Comm towers were down, sir, on account of the sun-fans falling on them.”
Toorn seemed oblivious to the effect his words were having. Randall wondered if Toorn was oblivious to words as a general principle. And, for a brief instant, Randall wished he had been gifted with Captain Toorn’s intellect. Life would be so much easy if you never had to think about more than what went in and out of the holes that evolution had blessed you with. Food, shit, piss and words. For some people they were all the same stinking thing. “You’re not making sense, Captain. If the comm towers ‘were down’, does that mean they are now up? If not, how do you know Chester is alive and I don’t?”
“Sir, we heard rumours about the field-marshal but wasn’t sure you’d be best pleased with the news, sir, and you was frowning at your papers in your command tent and we thought you was deciding important things or had another source of news that we was not privy to, sir.”
Randall, for the first time in his life, was genuinely speechless.
“Sir, I . . .” Captain Toorn faltered. The branches and trees of the Donian forest swayed and bent as more legionnaires emerged into view. One by one, they slid into the open to form a semicircle of two ranks. The first pulled large rectangular shields off their backs and set them into the earth. A crackle and spark of electric light skittered off the shields and a random hope surged through Randall: Stann Taille was wrong. Chester had come to her senses; she was here to help him.
Nascimento pointed with one hand, with the other he pulled Mayka to him. He grit his teeth, waiting for the elbow in the ribs that never materialised. Below, the pocket of Unsung were surrounded: forest behind them, the Angel City in front, Stann Taille and the Axeford Militia to Nascimento’s left (some were now sitting down or leaning on their crutches, their ageing and damaged limbs catching up with them after the long hike through the forest) and, to the right, Chester’s legionnaires. The latter lined the forest edge, their shields spitting an oily green light.
“Those shields are a shit to carry at the best of times,” Nascimento said to Mayka. “Light as you like, almost bulletproof, look cool but awkward as fuck. Kind of OK for crowd control but useless in battle, unless you’re fighting on flat terrain against people who do exactly what you want them to do. Most legions gave up on them.”
The line advanced, swallowing the banner man and the golden tree. A second banner bearing the red, white, green and blue of the country of Ailan appeared. Nascimento rubbed his hands together with glee. “This is getting good.”
Vena Laudanum whispered, “And so the pawn that became a knight seeks to be both king and queen.”
“What’s going on?” Randall’s flash of hope had cooled to a dull smudge.
“Looks like a rescue, sir.” Captain Toorn, recently promoted and so far out of his depth in the swamp of his own ineptitude he’d need a ladder just to reach ‘hopeless’, frowned in what he clearly hoped looked like an expression of omnipotence.
“Toorn looks like he needs a shit,” one of the Unsung said.
“Is Chester rescuing us?” another asked.
A series of red laser dots burst across the chests of the Unsung like a rash of pox spots.
“What do you think?”
“Shut up!” Randall’s voice. A silence broken only by the rustle and creak of the forest fell across the plain.
They watched. Captain Toorn and the Unsung, Stann Taille and the Axeford Militia, Ray Franklin, kneeling in the damp grass, they all watched. Nascimento and Stella and Vena watched. Lukaz and his Hoyden, the tribes, the Resistance, they watched. And Randall Soulier, he watched, too, his anger drowning out the sickening sense of failure that his adoptive father had beaten and tormented into him since before he could walk.
Field-Marshal Chester emerged from the shield wall, walking with that characteristic limp of hers. Silver feathers were emblazoned onto one side of her high-collared uniform, a golden tree on the other. Despite her trek through the Donian forests, she looked like she was on a parade ground.
“Or a private fashion show for military fetishists the world over,” Nascimento said to Mayka.
“Fetish?”
&nb
sp; “I’ll explain later. Show you maybe.” This time, he did get elbowed.
Jake Swann, who had not yet reached the ramp to the Angel City, made a break for Chester’s legionnaires. Little feet kicked up dust and soil. The retort of a rifle cracked across the grass. The shield wall buckled but held, the bullet had flown high and wide and buried itself in a tree. Before the echoes had a chance to rattle across the mountain, a series of answering shots hit the Unsung shooter. He collapsed, smoke feathering the air above the bullet holes in his chest. Jake skidded to a halt and stared at the Unsung with dead eyes, tiny fists held rigid at his side, unmoving. A section of the shield wall detached to envelope the rigid boy and pull him back. A plaintive cry, a mother’s cry, echoed from the top of the ramp, calling the boy’s name.
“Drop your weapons and you and the Unsung will be treated better than you deserve,” Chester said.
“Shoot her!” Randall screamed. “Do your duty to your country! For death and glory. I am your president. Follow me. Die for me! Charge!”
“Screw death and glory,” one muttered. “I’d rather have bed and breakfast.”
“You charge first, then I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t remember voting for you.”
“Don’t remember no small print about dying for a rich brat who’s never served, got no family in uniform, and not prepared to die for me, neither.”
And the Unsung threw their weapons on the floor and set to cuffing themselves with their own restraints, as if to make sure Chester’s people knew the Unsung were now prisoners of war and so had rights. Rights they were unlikely to give to others, but were happy to claim for themselves.
Shaking with rage, the VP tossed the snub-nosed pistol to one side. Memento of his mother’s death, it may be, but he needed something bigger. He snatched Captain Toorn’s rifle out of his hands and staggered forwards, grasping for the trigger.
