"Nice to have the arms dealer on our side," I commented to Tychar as I donned my armor. "Too bad we can't get to his ship and get even more of this stuff."
"Aw, we don't stand a chance, anyway," Trag said cheerfully. "This is what you call a desperate battle against overwhelming odds. What good would more guns do?"
"My, aren't we confident?" I said dryly. "Are you saying we should just hole up in the mines forever?"
"Naw, that's not what I meant," he replied. "That was just a little prebattle black humor. You know, something to break the tension."
"Well, then, here's another one for you," I said, getting into the spirit. "T think it is a good day to die.' That's straight from Sitting Bull or some other chief, I forget which one—he was Native American, anyway— and I believe it's appropriate in our case."
"Ooo, I /iAethat!" Trag said appreciatively. "I think I'll paint it on my shield real quick."
Lerotan, who was eavesdropping on the conversation, commented, "Too many words. How about: 'Die, Dobraton! Die!'?"
As I had written "Kill the Bitch!" on my own shield, I thought this was much more appropriate, as did many of the other refugees who had straggled in over the past couple of days. Just having to escape with little more than their lives and then cross the desert had made them mad enough, but they brought with them tales of persecution and oppression. It appeared that Dobraton was not making many friends; at least, not among those who joined up with us.
This was good for our side, because we certainly needed all the help we could get, and, as anyone who is any good at taking over command of anything will tell you, the one thing you need to avoid doing at the outset is making any changes that will turn your constituency against you. Be nice, give them plenty of support and perks, and then later on, when you start initiating other, less popular policies, they won't mind quite so much—theoretically, that is.
Dobraton had obviously never taken that class in basic leadership. Not wasting any time, she'd rounded up as many offworlders as she could find and had them executed, along with a few Darconians who had been harboring them. As you might guess, this was not a popular move!
To Dobraton's credit, I believe she intended these actions to instill fear in her new subjects and guarantee their submission. However, I had done a bit of study since my discussion with Wazak the day he'd scooped me up off the floor, and I knew that the people of Arconcia had enjoyed a very satisfactory life under Scalia's rule; the crime rate was low, no one went hungry, there was medical care and education for all, and everyone was entitled to the same basic freedoms and opportunities. Scalia had added contacts with other worlds to the simple life in her realm, but most of her subjects had seemed to welcome this change.
Unfortunately, those who had supported Dobraton must have had a fair amount of clout—possibly wealthy merchants who didn't want offworlders horning in on their business, as well as ministers in the government who, like Dobraton, wanted to keep things just as they had always been—because seizing control the way she had done wasn't an easy thing to do. It took lots of money and planning to pull off something like that, and it also took a certain amount of gall. Running against an incumbent in an election was one thing, but killing someone to take their place was quite another!
We began our desert crossing about an hour after it was fully dark—though with three moons and rarely any clouds, it was always light enough to see where we were going. The desert was quiet, though there was nocturnal activity wherever you looked, and distant Arconcia gleamed in the moonlight. Some sort of night-flying bird or bat flew overhead in varying numbers, occasionally swooping down from the sky, as if trying to encourage us to turn back. We marched on in spite of them, some of us on dray Is, some on foot, and a few of the later arrivals in hovercars, which they had brought with them— though whether they'd been stolen or not, I didn't know and didn't care. Hardly anyone spoke as we traveled, which might have been due to fear or a desire for secrecy, but it also added to the eeriness of the journey.
Never having gone marching off to war before, I couldn't have predicted the way I would feel, but, surprisingly, the thought that I might not live to see another day wasn't first and foremost in my mind. I was more concerned with the danger to my friends, and the fact that Tychar or Trag might be killed terrified me more than anything Dobraton might do to me. I did my best to put such thoughts out of my mind, but they kept creeping back to torment me.
While our preferred plan might have been to retake the palace from within, with the coming of dawn it became apparent that engaging in a desert battle was to be our fate. As we drew nearer to the outskirts of the city, we could see Dobraton's army massed out on the plain, ready to advance. There was no hope of infiltrating the palace now, and unless Dobraton was leading her own army, there was also no hope of taking her out without killing anyone else. We should have sent a party ahead, I thought ruefully, sending them circling around to the opposite side of the city to get to her. It might have taken longer with the more circuitous route, but that way they wouldn't have known which direction we were attacking from. As it was, we were marching right straight into the jaws of doom.
I could hardly believe just how large an army it was. How had Dobraton managed to amass such a force?
Surely not all of those men could have wanted the Princess as a prize! The city itself had a population of only about two hundred thousand and comparatively few of them were military men. Who were these guys?
Lerotan had some really cool binoculars, and while I was pretty sure I could see Dobraton at the center of the column, I could see nothing else which would provide a clue to their identity.
I handed the binoculars to Wazak. "That is Dobraton, isn't it?"
I'll swear he smiled. "Yes, it is she," he replied.
"Well, this doesn't look a bit good," I remarked to no one in particular. "Guys, are you sure about this?" No one said a word. I'd been gung ho enough earlier, but my enthusiasm was fading fast. "Well, what do you want to do? Keep on marching, or try for a parley?"
"Parley?" Wazak inquired, as if he'd never heard the word before.
"Oh, you know," I said. "You ride out carrying a white flag and then discuss terms of surrender or a truce—or give your opponent one last chance to back down."
"I don't think they're gonna back down anytime soon," Trag remarked. "We aren't that terrifying."
"But we have better weapons," Lerotan pointed out while patting his grenade launcher—or whatever it was. He'd never said, exactly, and I'd yet to see him use it, but he never seemed to want to part from it, either.
"Maybe so," I admitted, "but unless we can kill them all from here, I don't think it'll do much good."
If Lerotan's smirk was anything to go by, he was just waiting for the word from Wazak to do just that.
"How did they know we would be coming today?" Tychar mused.
"Well, we're not invisible, you know," Trag said reasonably. Glancing around at the surrounding tumble of boulders, he added, "Dobraton probably has a bunch of spies out here somewhere."
"But we came in the middle of the night!" Zealon said. "And we have seen nothing."
"It is the business of spies to remain invisible," Tychar pointed out.
"Either that, or somebody ratted on us," I said darkly. "And I'd sure like to know who it was, too!" I figured it was probably some of the men we'd recruited from Dobraton's gang, though I didn't suppose any of them would confess.
Of all people, Wazak was the one who spoke up. "I wished to engage Dobraton in an open battle."
"You did it?" I exclaimed in disbelief. "Wazak, are you insane? It's suicide! They'll kill us all!"
"I do not believe so," Wazak said evenly.
"What? Which part?" I asked. "That you aren't crazy, or that they won't kill us?"
I received only a speaking glance in reply, but knowing Wazak, if he didn't have some tricky little plot up his sleeve, I missed my guess, though putting his children's live
s at risk seemed downright foolish to me.
"Well, I'm not going to go marching on to my death just so Dobraton can go ahead and be queen," Trag said, echoing my own thoughts. "Making Zealon queen is what we're here to do, and we won't do it just standing around talking. I say we blow them up from here."
I looked over at Lerotan, who appeared supremely confident in spite of the large army massing in the distance. "Can you do that, Leroy?"
Lerotan nodded. "Yes," he replied. "But do you really want to do that?"
"Well, to survive this ordeal, it would seem that our only other option is to go out under a flag of truce." I said tentatively. "We should try to talk with them." I glanced at Wazak. "How did you tell them we were coming?"
Tapping his breastplate, he just gave me another look.
"Your comstone? Who were you talking to?"
"You will see," he said mysteriously.
"You left someone behind, didn't you?" I said accusingly. "Someone to contact?"
He said nothing. We kept on moving. Dobraton's army was advancing.
"So, what do we do?" I asked nervously. "Hold our fire until we see the whites of their eyes?"
"Uh, in case you haven't noticed, Kyra, Darconians don't have whites to their eyes," Trag said informatively.
"We may not get the chance to fire at all," said Tychar, pointing to the left of the city. "Look there."
Following his gesture, I looked to the north, and in the growing light, I could see that another army was now exiting Arconcia, and this one was even larger than the first.
Chapter 19
"We will march on," Wazak said decisively.
"You're not serious!" I exclaimed. "We're outnumbered a thousand to one!"
"Have faith, Kyra Aramis," he said.
"Faith?" I echoed. "Faith? Great Mother of the Desert!" I urged my drayl onward in an effort to keep pace with him. "We're all about to die, and you're talking about faith?"
"It's a good day to die, remember?" Trag said cheerlessly.
"I take it back!" I said with fervor. "It's never a good day to die! Sneaking back into the palace to nab Dobraton is one thing, but are you saying we should just march right up and let them blow us to bits? Or capture us? They might not kill any of the natives, but Dobraton already doesn't like me on principle and doesn't like me much personally, either, so I'm dead meat. Guess I should have thought about that sooner," I added reflectively.
"I will fight to the death to save you," Tychar said, leaning forward to kiss me on the neck. Thrills of desire might have rippled over my skin, but there was no time for that now.
"Yeah, but what good will that do me?" I grumbled. "I mean, if you're dead—and I'm sure Dobraton wants you dead on general principles, too—why would I want to go on living?"
"Aw, isn't that—what is it you Terrans say?—sweet?" Trag said. "They really do love each other!"
"Yes, we really do," Tychar said stiffly. "It is nothing to laugh about."
"Well, if you say so," Trag grumbled. "Now, me, I just want to f—"
Tychar silenced him with a gesture. "We will not speak of that now," he said.
The two brothers kept on talking, though; bantering back and forth and distracting me to the point that it was some time before I realized that we were, indeed, still moving forward. Gazing out at Arconcia, to my horror, I saw another army of Darconians begin to emerge from the southern reaches of the city.
"Nowcan we turn back?" I pleaded, any brave notions I'd ever possessed evaporating with the increasing heat of the morning. "We don't stand a chance in this battle, and, you know, the mountains weren't so bad, were they? We could stay there a while longer, and in the meantime, Dobraton might die from... oh, I don't know... a—a bad cold or something. You never know."
"She's babbling again," Trag commented to Tychar. "I thought she only did that when we—"
"Enough!" Tychar said in commanding tones. "Her fear is understandable."
"And your lack of fear isn't!" I said roundly. "What about you, Zealon? Aren't you scared to death?"
"No," she replied. "I am angry."
"Well, I was angry," I said, "and it sustained me for a good, long while, but it's all gone now! Somebody better make me mad again real quick."
"You're a really terrible piano player," Trag said promptly.
"You'll have to do better than that," I said wither-ingly. "I've heard that one before, and I didn't believe it then, either."
"You are even uglier than Dobraton," Lerotan said.
"Okay, that did it, Leroy!" I said, laughing. "I'm hopping mad now! Put down the bazooka, and I'll jerk a knot in your—er, I mean—Dobraton's tail."
It might not have made me feel any more courageous to laugh, but it did divert my mind from my imminent death. While we were talking, we were continuing to draw nearer to the city, and it was fairly obvious that Trag was just itching to shoot something. Tychar was very quiet, but as we rode upon our drayl, his arm around my waist spoke volumes. Wazak's swagger became even more pronounced as Dragus and about a hundred of the miners, along with one of Lerotan's men and Racknay, split off to the left. A similar group divided from our main force and formed a line to the right, led by Hartak, Zealon, and the Edraitians. Even spread out like that, our force was paltry compared with what we were facing. All of the other offworlders, myself included, were divided up among the three groups, with Trag, still riding with Nindala, opting to stay near Tychar and me. If Dobraton was aiming to target all the aliens, she'd have to take a few Darconians along with us—which, unfortunately, wasn't something she'd ever considered to be much of a deterrent.
"We're in range," Lerotan said quietly to Wazak. "Just give the word."
Wazak nodded, but cautioned, "Not yet."
Lerotan seemed surprised at Wazak's reluctance to open fire, but the more I looked at what we were up against, the more I realized that we were facing not just Dobraton's army, but what had to be the entire population of Arconcia. We couldn't possibly kill them all— and wouldn't have wanted to. What good was getting Zealon's throne back if there were no subjects left for her to rule?
It was a subtle move, but I saw Wazak tap his com-stone and mutter something.
Then, as if on his command, the two factions on either side of Dobraton's central force closed in to form a buffer zone between the new "Queen" and her guard. Wazak then picked up the pace until we were about a hundred meters from the enemy and stopped. From where I sat on my drayl, I could see that these must have been the ordinary citizens of Arconcia we were now facing, because they were brandishing every manner of homemade weapon imaginable. Despite their numbers, Lerotan's arsenal could have taken out most of them before they ever reached us, and I thought it was pretty sad that Dobraton would sacrifice them in such a callous manner.
"Dobraton!" Wazak called out. "Lay down your weapons, and you will not be harmed."
"He wants them to surrender to us?" Trag whispered in disbelief. "That's pretty cocky of him, don't you think?"
"Extremely," Tychar agreed. "If nothing else, you can't deny he's got balls."
As you might expect, Dobraton's response to Wazak's demand was a sharp bark of laughter.
"You will not retake the throne with your pitiful little band," Dobraton jeered. "We will not surrender, nor will you surrender to us. Whether you stand and fight or run for the mountains, we will destroy you."
" And your mangy little dog, tool" I muttered with a grim smile, though, to be honest, Dobraton made the Wicked Witch of the West seem downright grandmotherly in comparison.
"You have given us your answer then," Wazak said gravely. "So be it."
Again, he spoke quietly into his comstone as he motioned for our front line to advance. We'd just about halved the distance between us and our opponents when the buffer zone of Darconian citizens all turned to face Dobraton, leaving an open space of desert in front of where she stood.
If I was surprised, I'm sure Dobraton was completely dum
bfounded.
"Again, I ask you to lay down your arms," Wazak called out.
Dobraton looked at him, and then at the force of citizenry who now appeared to be ranged against her. She was completely mystified but didn't back down for an instant.
"What is this?" she demanded angrily. "I will not tolerate such disloyalty! You will all be destroyed!"
"I don't think so," Zealon called out. "You made one small mistake when you took power."
"And that is?" Dobraton sneered.
"The people of this city are not as opposed to change as you are," Zealon said, stepping forward. She looked and sounded quite royal; she would make an excellent queen. Scalia would have been proud. "As Queen, I will give them the changes which they, themselves, decide upon."
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