by Yronwode
McLargehuge answered, “He said he’s gonna need more time.” His other advisor, Bob Johnson harrumphed, “He needs time for rounding up enough hairless boys and toothless men from the sticks, like all the other Chieftains.
That’s how they’re filling out their ranks. Just getting rid of the smucks they don’t want.” K-Rock grunted. “They will be sufficient.”
“How are we gonna to hide 100,000 men from the Theocrats? Never, that’s how!” snarled another advisor, from the tribe of Nodoy, whom K-Rock had named Stump Beefknob. He was a bit younger than the others, a bit fatter, and, K-Rock sensed, a little soft.
“Oh, but we will,” K-Rock assured them. He pulled out a map of the Midian peninsula printed on brown, leathery paper, and indicated the foothills that lay between the Tsi Nai Mountains and the broad, flat Plain of Salvation, the Demilitarized Zone that stood between the city of Nimali and the Midian frontier. “These foothills outside Nimali will hide our numbers. If we move stealthily, the Midians will not be aware of our plans.”
“Then what?” Beefknob asked incredulously.
“When the time is right, the force will charge across the DMZ,” K-Rock said.
“All that’s gonna get you is 100,000 corpses,” Beefknob protested warily, eyeing K-Rock’s deadly walking stick which had begun to twitch in his hands. “Midian regulars number 100,000 men, with twice that in the reserves. Also, they got better weapons, better armor, aircraft we don’t got. Not to mention the Shield.”
“I will take care of all of that,” K-Rock said calmly. “You shall see.”
“Some strategy for us your Midian Horse conjured,” another military advisor, Rod Bonemeal asked, contempt dripping from every syllable. Bonemeal had been sent by Nameki, and his was short and thin, but otherwise quite brutish in his looks and behavior.
Bang had been lurking near the back, always within whispering distance of K-Rock, she passed him water and she spoke as he drank it. “Now is the time to strike.
The Theocrats are busy mourning the death of their Great and Holy Pontifex.”
“So?” asked Bonemeal.
Bang explained. “For six days, they will be on official state holiday. Most workers take that time off. That’s our best opportunity to attack them while they are unaware.”
“Security Forces will still be working, and on high alert,” Beefknob protested.
“No one can pass the Shield, so doesn’t matter” Bonemeal pressed.
“Before we strike across the northern plain, it is my intention to sow mass confusion and panic in the cities of Xenthe and Xiyyon. That will give the Theocrats something far worse to deal with,” K-Rock said ominously.
“How?” Bonemeal demanded.
K-Rock looked around at the men, and saw that Bonemeal and Beefknob were not the only skeptics in his rank. He decided it was time to show them what had been hidden in the nearby rock formations.
“Come and see,” K-Rock ordered. He led them from his tent, and walked behind the row of tumbledown dwellings that marked the edge of Urk-El, which had been nothing more than a trading village for a few score families of lizard and desert bean farmers. The villagers had mostly been hiding in their dwellings since K-Rock and his men arrived, since the arrival of Tsi Bai “politicals” usually meant food stolen and daughters raped. Also, sons. K-Rock had barely noticed the villagers himself.
Behind Urk-El was a formation of stacked and eroded rocks. The rocks were a maroon color, and they turned blood-red in the morning sun. They were filled with magnetite, and created almost a cave system that stretched above and below the ground. The early settlers had even made dwellings here, beneath the arches of rock, and later they were used to store grain. More recently, they had become a garbage dump. ‘
But there was one space among the rocks of Urk-El where some strange and amazing objects were being hidden, safely away from the prying eyes of any Midian agent who might be in the village.
Bang led them toward three large transports that had made the journey from Izzan-Al-Izzan. The devices they carried had been found in the desert, shortly after the strangers’ sky-ship had been brought down in flight. They were covered under a large, dirty sheet of tarpaulin.
“Show them what we recovered from the Badlands,” K-Rock ordered Bang.
With the help of McLargeHuge, Bang peeled back the tarpaulin to reveal three objects, about the length of a man’s height, made of a white metal-ceramic alloy. The rear part was a pair of tube-shaped engines with six fins projecting above and below.
The forward section was a bulbous shape, reminiscent of a hammer. If K-Rock had been in his right mind, and if Alkema had been there to ask, he would have been informed that these were Hammerhead missiles.
“Among the gifts the gifts I brought for you,” K-Rock intoned, “the key to destroying the Midian’s Shield.”
“From the wrecks of your ship,” an Izzan-Al-Izzan ranking engineer, dubbed Stump Junkman by K-Rock, explained. “Engineers took one of these into the wastes and detonated it. That thing, by the way, not too easy. We lost one engineering team when one of those things exploded. But we got a yield of five kilotons; we measured it.
Three o’ these linked together’ll give us fifteen kilotons. That’ll destroy an entire Theocrat city.”
“The Theocrats will be in chaos when their holy city disappears in a flash of light,” K-Rock spoke.
Bonemeal protested. “That’s the wrong strategy. Use three warheads. Destroy Security Base One, Command and Control, and Security Ward.”
“No!” Bob Johnson insisted. “Military positions are hardened against attack.
Even close weapons ain’t gonna to do enough damage. Anyway, we’re gonna to kill more Theocrats if we link them together and blow them up in Xiyyon or Xenthe.”
“They will be detonated simultaneously in Xiyyon, just before the attack,” K-Rock ordered with an eerie calm.
“No,” Bonemeal protested. “If we do that, the Theocrats’ll kill us all. They won’t stand for it.”
“Another word and Mr. Smashy is going to be too angry for me to control,” K-Rock snarled at Bonemeal. “These weapons will destroy the city, which will distract the Theocrats with chaos at the moment we launch our attack. But what is furthermore, they will destroy all the major temples in this planet, and with the symbols of their faith destroyed, the Theocrats will be demoralized, and they will fall before us like weak trees before a strong wind.”
“How will you get these into the city?” Bonemeal asked.
“They have engines,” K-Rock indicated, tapping on the rear of the missiles.
“Engines and Guidance Systems are still off-line,” Junkman noted nervously.
“Figuring ‘em out could take many, many days… maybe never.”
“Even if I threaten to kill you if you don’t figure it out in time,” K-Rock growled.
“There is another way,” Bang told him him.
“Speak it to me, horse” K-Rock commanded.
“The Theocrats always send ‘humanitarian’ aid in the event of natural disasters,” Bang explained. “They evacuate the most seriously wounded to their central medical facilities. They have always made sure their medical centers are vastly superior to ours, as a means off keeping us oppressed. The neo-natal death rate is
eighteen times higher in Xirong areas than in Midian…”
“Get to the point,” K-Rock ordered. There was an echo of something familiar in the way the woman yammered on at him insistently.
“All we need to do is smuggle the weapons into Xiyyon on board an ambulance,”
“They inspect ambulances, though, do they not?” Bonemeal pointed out.
“Yes,” Bang hissed. “They don’t care how many Tsi Bai die before they gets the medicals. They want us dead! ”
“How will the ambulance get through the inspection point,” Bonemeal clarified his question.
“We will stage a massive catastrophe,” Bang explained. “We will have a disaster so huge they will h
ave to deploy many hundreds of air ambulances. And they will have no time to inspect them all.”
Bang hauled out a map, printed on the back of a thick, yellowing piece of paper.
“On the southeastern coast is the city of Fett-Al-Birt. The Theocrats, as part of the Kariad Peace Accords, built a fusion energy plant here. Of course, they don’t provides us with the technical support to maintain it. Also, their workmanship was no-grade, so is only about 40% functioning. It’d be easy to cause the plant go critical, and devastate Fett-Al-Birt.
“The Theocrats will send airlift ambulances to the scene. We hijack one, put the warheads inside, and take directly into Xiyyon.”
Her rough finger traveled over the map to the locations of Xiyyon. “Warheads detonate, thousands dead, film at eleven.”
“The casualties in Fett-Al-Birt would be equally as devastating,” Bonemeal said.
“We should evacuate as many as we can before the…”
“No!” Bang insisted. “Evacuation signal Theocratic Entity. They know we destroy the fusion plant.”
K-Rock hesitated, then spoke. “Spread a rumor among the people of Fett-Al-Birt that the Theocrats are going to sweep the city for guerilla fighters. Many will evacuate on their own. How long will it take to prepare a tri-partite warhead large enough to fit inside a Midian ambulance.”
The engineers agreed that it could be done in two days.
“We now have strength in numbers, and the element of surprise,” K-Rock told his advisors. “Now, we need the third key… absolute discipline and strength of will, of purpose.”
K-Rock turned and stared sharply at the men around him. “I know your masters do not intend to follow me. I know the conscripts they will send me are inferior, because they do not wish to waste good men on this foolish endeavor. I know further that they are planning to kill me before, during, or after the battle. So be it. At the day of battle, their men shall be mine, and there will be no question that I, K-Rock, was born to lead this army and this world.”
He turned and walked out of the tent. A few seconds later, he poked his head back into the tent. “Johnson, McLargehuge, Slabchest, you will come with me.” The three men followed him out, leaving the others to study the battle plans.
“What do you think,” Beefknob asked Rock Hardpeck, the representative from Yoohoo’s Phalange.
“He is completely out of his mind,” Thickneck answered. “If my master did not need the cure for Serpent’s blood, I would kill him where he stands.”
“As would I,” Beefknob said. “And were not the lives of all my sons and daughters forfeited if I did not return with the cure, I would kill him anyway.”
“Most of the ‘men’ the Chieftains are sending are just hairless boys and ancients,” Hardpeck sniffed. “Maybe the Mighty K-Rock’s plan is to let the Theocrats slaughter them, and then guilt them into surrender.”
“It worked before,” Bonemeal snorted.
They heard a noise outside, the noise of a large truck pulling away from the camp. Beefknob threw the plans on the floor.
“Let’s find us some lunch,” he suggested. “Our Megalomaniacal Godking can figure out his own furking war plans.”
They had almost made it to the food tent when they were quickly surrounded and disarmed by a group of K-Rock’s guards, led by Punch Rockslab. “What’s going on?”
“We’re killing you, that’s what’s going on,” Rockslab answered coldly.
And with a spray of weapons-fire, they accomplished exactly that.
Yronwode — Xenthe
Rook and Jordan took two of the new warfighters to the tavern in Xenthe where they had met the two girls, and noted that a booth near the bar was occupied by the same two men who had been sitting there previously. They stood out because they did not seem to be having a conversation, but listening in on the warfighters table. Rook figured they were Midian Intelligence agents, and Warfighter Zurich, a strongly built female who kept her red-brown hair in a perky ponytail, sent them over a round of the local ale.
“O.K., here’s the thing,” Rook was saying shortly after a couple pitchers of ale and a plate of breads, olives, and cheeses arrived. “The thing is, they have a game they call ‘air hockey,’ but it is nothing like the game of air hockey as we know it.”
“I kind of like this,” Zurich purred as she relaxed with her drink. “I haven’t set foot on a planet since Aurora. I forgot what the air smelled like.”
“This city isn’t bad,” Warfighter Trill, a young darker skinned man agreed.
“Considering what they had to work with on this forsaken planet.”
“Is this table wood or metal?” Zurich asked.
“It’s both,” Rook explained. “The trees that grow in the northern extreme have wood that’s as hard as iron, and only a little easier to cut. That’s how the planet got its name.”
“These olives are great,” Max Jordan said, out of nowhere. “Olives are really hard to grow. I remember my dad telling once about when he was young, he used to be sent to an Island called ‘Seche de Mer’ back on Bodicea. They grew olives there, and they would send boys there to harvest them.”
He realized the other three were staring at him. “What?” Rook sighed. “What the Hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Rook repeated incredulously. “You’ve just said the longest sentence anyone’s ever heard from you. You talked about your father, which you never do. And you talked about Bodicéa, which you never do. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing, like I said,” Jordan only seemed a little angry about it. “I just felt like talking about these olives. They’re great. Try them.”
“But that’s not like you,” Rook repeated. “Is this from carrying around Caliph in your tac gear? Did she do something to you?”
Max Jordan shrugged. “She erased some bad memories, that’s all.”
“She did what?” Rook repeated.
Max Jordan repeated himself. “Caliph erased most of my traumatic memories.” Johnny Rook pressed him. “Caliph did what?”
Max Jordan shrugged a little as he answered, as though to question what the big deal was “She isolated traumatic memories from my childhood and erased them.
It’s kind of like when you had a headache, and then you feel better. I feel like that all the time now.”
Zurich jumped in. “Are you insane, Max? Doctor Reagan, God Rest Her Promiscuous Soul, would never have allowed that. Do you know what happens to people who undergo selective memory erasure?”
Max Jordan shrugged again and rolled an olive around on his fingers. “I know, permanent personality shift. It’s worth it. I didn’t want to carry those memories around any more.”
Johnny Rook took it further, “Permanent memory shift, za, but try insanity. Your mind knows where the holes are. It keeps picking at them, subliminally, trying to fill in the missing gaps. Eventually, it leads to psychosis.” Rook saw Trill and Zurich looking at him and realized he owed them an explanation. “It was in a fiction-drama, but it was based on a true story.”
“I know that one,” Trill told him. “When the guy starts wearing dresses and asks the other guys to call him Loretta.”
“Good fiction-drama,” Zurich agreed.
Max Jordan was quiet for a moment, then he said to Johnny Rook: “Caliph says to prevent that syndrome, she synthesized new memories for me to fill in the holes. I remember that an Aurelian molested me when I was a little boy, but I remember it like something I read about, not like something that happened to me.” He paused. “For some reason, now I hate ice cream. But on balance, it’s still worth it.” Rook was very concerned about this. “Max, we have to get you out of your combat gear. We can’t have Caliph…”
“She’s not in my combat gear,” Rook explained. “She’s in my head now.”
“Holy crap, Max,” Rook stood up suddenly and knocked his chair over. “Is Caliph with us now?”
“She’s always here,” Max Jordan said
with a smile, tapping his head. “She’s not doing anything right now, though. She’s just observing.” Trill and Zurich were confused. “Caliph is here?” Trill asked.
“You bet,” answered a grinning Max Jordan.
“You let an AI live in your head,” Trill said, pretty shocked.
“No, she only goes there sometimes,” Max explained.
Johnny Rook faced him. “Can you still fight?”
“What?” Jordan asked.
Johnny Rook challenged him. “That anger you felt toward the Aurelians, isn’t that what drove you to become a Warfighter?”
Max Jordan turned serious “I am still a Warfighter, and I still hate the Aurelians, and those aliens who took my mom, who were also probably Aurelians.” It was around then that the serving girl returned. “I am sorry,” she told them.
“You can finish your food and drink, but the tavern will be closing now.”
“Closing?” Rook asked. “What is it?”
“It’s when we stop serving drinks and lock the doors, but that’s not important right now,” the pretty maid brushed her hair back over her shoulders. “In honor of the passing of the Pontifex. We have to close… out of respect.” Then, she half-smiled and added. “I have two friends who have a place not too far from here. You can come and drink with us, if you want.” Yronwode – The Wilderness of Howling Zeal
As the sun was setting (that is to say, as the sky dimmed in the east and brightened in the west), North of Urk-El, on the northern rim of the Euphoria mountains, K-Rock took the small party of military advisors. He squinted out over the Barbas-Ur flatlands that stretched to the north. “This is it,” he announced to them.
There was a ruined complex of buildings there, forming a semi-circle around a large spire that still reached a hundred and forty-four meters into the sky. “What is this place?” K-Rock asked.
“Mission Barabbas,” Punch Rockslab, his current favorite aide-de-camp answered. “The Redeemers used to had a mission here, a long time passed. They tried to convert the Tsi Bai to their religion in this place.” He pointed toward the spire.
