Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Gasping, I did not waste time. I raised my sword.

  The thing fell dead, and I looked round, not astonished but relieved to find Valka standing there, hand outstretched. She’d worked her witchcraft on the creature’s human-manufactured circuitry.

  “ ’Tis two now you owe me!” she said.

  * * *

  The tunnel arch loomed through the smoke ahead, and to my astonishment I found our detachment of men still holding the threshold. The survivors hurried through, and I caught the shoulder of the decurion Pallino had left holding the gate.

  “Give me the detonator!” I said, referring to the mines we’d set in the tunnel mouth before the battle had begun.

  This is not defeat, I told myself. We planned for this.

  I pushed the decurion along, intending to be the last in the tunnel. Men were fighting on the thoroughfare outside. I could hear their cries and the shout of plasma fire. I advanced to the level of the inner gate, clutching the detonator—a capped cylinder about the size of a fountain pen—in my false-boned hand. There I turned, and shouted orders for the rearguard to fall back.

  They did, retreating in that shuffling way armed men have while maintaining fire.

  Cielcin came fast behind, shadows advancing up the hall.

  “Oyumn saryr suja wo!” I said, ordering them to halt.

  The figures stopped and laughed behind their masks.

  “Run away, little rat!” their leader barked. “Run and hide! We will catch you, drag you out of your little holes, and strip you to the bone!”

  I signaled that the decurion should close the bulkhead.

  One of the others nudged its master in the arm. “Why don’t we have some fun with it first, Goraba? The yukajimn are sweetest when they fight back.”

  “Quiet, worm!” the leader said, shoving its underling aside. “We kill them and take them to the vayadan.”

  “Not today, I think!” I heard the fellow turn the key and the warning lights flared. “Sim udantha!”

  The bulkhead began rolling shut, three feet of solid steel. An alarm sounded, ordering all hands clear as the great gear-teeth rolled into place. The Cielcin all rushed forward, but too late.

  I thumbed the detonator the moment after, and felt the blast like distant thunder.

  CHAPTER 78

  OF RATS AND FALCONS

  “EXPLAIN YOURSELF!” I SAID, wrapping my hands about the lapels of the vulpine legate. Earth and Emperor, I was strong! The older officer came clear out of his seat, eyes vacant and detached from my face. He said nothing, and I shook him, heedless of the man’s rank and command. “We needed you. Your men needed you!”

  Bartosz’s gray eyes slid farther away with each passing instant.

  “Titus is dead,” came the reply, so distant. “He’s dead. The fleet is lost. We’re all lost. They’re at the gates. It is hopeless.”

  The legate’s chair rolled away and toppled with a crash as I pushed him back against the wall. “They are not inside. This was always a possibility.”

  Bartosz’s eyes flicked to mine for the barest instant. “You saw what they did. The size of that fleet! We never imagined—never imagined anything like it.”

  “Our fleet is coming,” I said. “Hauptmann summoned ships from across the whole sector.” As I am now, I understand Leonid’s black mood, that crippling despair, for it exists in every man. I would feel it myself, and more sharply, before the end.

  The officer almost laughed. “It won’t be enough. They have fifteen hundred ships!”

  “Most of them small, rapid attack craft. Unshielded.”

  “It won’t matter. We will all die here.”

  His back against the wall, I lifted Leonid bodily from the floor, muscles straining at the effort in Berenike’s somewhat heavy gravity. “We are alive,” I hissed.

  Those gray eyes found me at last, wide and empty. “Not for long,” he said again. “Titus is dead.” Disgusted, I dropped the man and turned for the door without intending to say another word. But the legate was not finished. “Go!” he sneered, word stretching on the air. “Go and die as you please. I shall die here, and die a man and not a rat.”

  “A rat?” I turned back, fully intending to hand the bastard a knife myself. Yukajjimn. Vermin. “If that is what we are, so be it. I will not give up hope.”

  “Hope!” Leonid said. “There is no hope!” He slumped to the floor, back against the smooth wall of the conference chamber. In a small voice, he said, “They say you are a prophet, Marlowe, but you’re blind if you can’t see this is the end.”

  End. The word plucked a lonely note in me. Bahudde’s words echoed after it. Your time is ended. I had seen those ends, had I not? Played out in infinite forms across the limitless tapestry of time? Thus I knew no thing was determined, decided. Done.

  “Nothing is ended,” I said, recalling my vision of the end of time, of the egg that was itself a new beginning. “Nothing ever ends.”

  Leonid shook his head, lips curling. “You’re a fool,” he said. “You will die a fool.”

  “I will die a man!” The sound of my voice rang in the hollow hall and almost rattled the plate windows with their vision of the landing field and the Cielcin ships swarming over it. Not even Death was an ending. Not for me. Not for Leonid either, not that day at least. His death awaited him on another battlefield, about a different star. I took my hand off the knife. “Which is more than any man can say of you.”

  In the hallway, I seized a centurion of the Red Company and two men. “The legate intends to kill himself for his dishonor. You are not to permit him to do so.”

  “But sir!” one of the men said. He was a junior Legion officer, one of Bartosz’s own men.

  “He is to be placed in fugue for his own protection. You are to disregard any order he gives you, or by Earth and Emperor, I will send you out the front gates alone. Am I clear?” I turned to face the fellow squarely.

  He balked. “Yes, my lord. At once.”

  * * *

  Tired eyes greeted me in the command center as the door cycled shut.

  “Lord Marlowe.” Aristedes looked up from his console, gesturing to cut off the report he was hearing from one junior officer.

  Advancing to stand just inside the circle of the tactical console, I said, “How are our defenses holding?” I made no mention of the legate.

  “They’re trying to clear some of the tunnels on the city side, but they’re holding back the full brunt of their assault. Like they’re waiting for something.” Lorian indicated the wall of security panels behind him, image after image showcasing the Storm Wall’s defenses and the city and airfield outside.

  I shifted to stand beside him, peering at the wall and at the console table in turn. Lorian’s display showed a topographic map of the city and the Storm Wall, critical systems and troop deployments mapped. “Waiting for what?”

  “Your guess is good as mine.” The intus shoved lank white hair from his bony face. “Shields should hold indefinitely. They’re drawing power direct from the planet’s core. We should be safe so long as our concrete defenses hold.” He pointed to various points on his map as he spoke, indicating the collapsed tunnels and the main gates.

  “I thought you said they won’t shell us from orbit anyhow,” said a familiar voice from the corner of the room. Prince Alexander was seated there, trying to stay out of the way. He held his chin in one hand, looking for all the world like some bored monarch listening to the concerns of his subjects. I was surprised how calm he looked—I’d expected some behavior cousin to that of the panicked legate.

  I inclined my head. “Very good.” Fixing my attention back on Lorian, I said, “They’ll want to take us intact. We are a valuable resource, after all.”

  “They’ll start digging,” Valka said. She’d removed her helmet and the elastic coif, and sweat caked her hair. I had never see
n her so tired, so bloodless and ragged-looking. “They must have used sonar or gravitometers and found the tunnels. They’ll know that’s where the people went.”

  The prince sat back in his seat, arms crossed. “They must be hungry.”

  Put so plainly, that part of the reality of our position chilled the command center, and the aides and junior officers all were still.

  I broke the stillness with a question, rapping the console with my unscarred hand. “Corvo and the fleet are gone?”

  Aristedes sank back into his chair, massaging one knee that seemed to pain him. He found his cane—more out of reflex than necessity—and answered, “Yes. All gone.” I could see the wreckage of Ondu Station and Hauptmann’s proud defensive fleet smoldering in the upper atmosphere, mingling with the threatening clouds. “We need to buy enough time to guard against their return. Three days.”

  “Assuming the fleet returned the moment you signaled the attack,” Alexander said.

  “They did,” Lorian answered.

  I let them bicker a moment, brushing past a trio of young officers who stood looking on to stand at the low, broad-framed window. The command center was situated high up in the Storm Wall. While holograph plates on the back wall showed a false view of Deira and the Valles Merguli, the room’s true windows looked out on the starport, where at a distance in rough formation waited the spindle-shadows of Cielcin siege towers—a hundred of them at least. About them swarmed a great tumult as the xenobites hurried about inhuman business. From the way they ran I guessed they knew a storm was coming.

  “Storm’s coming,” I said. “Probably tonight. Whatever attempt they’ll make, they’ll make it from the city side. Unless they dig into those blast pits.” I gestured at the starport landing craters out the window and turned back.

  The intus was nodding, massaging his jaw with one delicately braced hand. “The pits are hardened against rocketry. They couldn’t be more fortified.” He had a point, and it was one that ought to have occurred to me. As if noting my embarrassment, he added, “But they may still try it.”

  “We have men in the underground terminals,” the prince said, stirring in his seat.

  A junior officer piped up, “And in the maintenance tunnels, aye.”

  Lorian waved his hand, silver glittering. It was, I thought, an astonishingly casual gesture with which to dismiss the words of an Imperial prince, but for once Alexander raised no objections. “And each unit with artillery-grade plasma howitzers dug in by the bulkheads leading in from the pits. No, gentlemen, ladies. No. They’ll make their assault through the gates on the city side, assuming they can’t excavate the tunnels. We need to consider our options.”

  It was inevitable that someone would object, and so no one was surprised when that objection came, voiced by a Legion navy captain who had remained with Bartosz rather than fly out with the fleet, a sallow woman with a face like spoiled milk. I didn’t know her. “Who exactly put you in charge, mutant?”

  Lorian’s pale, watery eyes flicked to me. I signaled the affirmative, and a positively lupine grin flowered on the young officer’s face. “Ask the legate.”

  Sensing my cue, I stepped forward. “Lord Bartosz is under arrest at present.”

  “Arrest!” The captain’s hand twitched toward her sidearm. “Sedition!” Her underlings all tensed.

  “Peace, soldier!” I made to stand between her and Lorian. “The legate was planning suicide. The loss of Lord Hauptmann and the fleet took him hard.” As I spoke, it occurred to me that this woman’s ship was likely among those killed in the orbital engagement—that she had lost people. In a smaller, kinder, voice, I added, “He is being placed in cryonic suspension for his own safety. I am in command here, and you will obey Commander Aristedes. Am I clear?”

  She did not answer, and so I redoubled my efforts, turning instead to the entire assembly of officers, technicians, and aides. “Am I clear?” I pressed forward, advancing on the patrician woman like a shadow.

  “Yes, my lord,” she said, and bowed her head.

  “Very good.” I turned sharply away, the entire matter forgotten.

  The chamber was silent for the span of a half dozen heartbeats. Lorian broke it, tapping his cane against the metal floor. “The gates are heavily fortified,” he said, indicating the angled approaches to the Storm Wall’s city gates, each dominated by a huge thrust of whitewashed concrete and steel fleshed with slitted windows, gun emplacements, and the silvered dishes of static field projectors made to short out the Royse shields of anything that passed beneath their watchful eye. Each was dominated by a massive plasma turret—more flamethrower than firearm—capable of flooding the entire wedge-shaped space with matter hot as the surface of Berenike’s sun. “They tried a push on the gate here, above White Street, during the initial offensive, but we burned them pretty bad. Possibly that’s part of why they’re waiting. That and the storm.” I could see Lorian’s mind working, ticking over fact after fact. The man should have been a scholiast; he had a mind like an ancient computer, all switches and wires.

  “Surely they could find a way in if they wanted,” Valka said, sinking into an abandoned seat near the dull wall.

  Alexander’s frown was audible before I saw his face. “You think they’re waiting on something more?” He looked round at us. “Not numbers! They must know . . .”

  Between Hauptmann and Bartosz’s men and the survivors of the Red Company, we were fewer than eighty thousand. Eighty thousand against untold millions of the Pale. We had superlative defenses, superior technology, but the numbers? Even if we were to arm every man and woman of fighting age in the bunkers below, we would still be overmatched. Outnumbered one hundred to one. And at any rate to send so many peasants—untested and untrained—into the web of the Pale was more liability than asset, for the chaos of their panic would surely spell our undoing.

  “We could bomb the city.”

  I am no longer certain who it was made the suggestion, except that I know it was not myself. Perhaps here was the conclusion of Lorian’s frantic considerations, or a piece of Alexander’s casual disregard. Maybe it was only a suggestion floated by one of the odd captains or by Valka herself. It wasn’t me, nor was it Commandant Bancroft, who had returned from an inspection of the Wall’s defenses while Lorian still deliberated.

  We could bomb the city.

  Bancroft stood silent, her face utterly drained of blood.

  “You said it yourself in council,” I said, trying to sound conciliatory.

  Bancroft shook her head, but still said nothing.

  “I am sorry,” I added.

  “This is our home, my lord,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “I never thought it would come to this.” She did not beg, only stated the simple fact.

  To my astonishment, it was Valka who answered her. “Look around you. You have no homes.”

  Win or die, the people of Berenike could not remain on their world. Berenike had but one city, and its infrastructure was gone. Its people would be refugees, resettled or frozen and placed in colonial stores—a difficulty to be solved some other day. With the power plant compromised, it would not be long before the urban farms began dying, the water systems ruined, and offworld trade would all but cease, for to venture to worlds the Cielcin knew the location of was to incur disaster. It was rare but not unheard of to find that where one itani had come, others followed. Even if resettlement were not to be made mandatory, there would be thousands willing to sell themselves into serfdom or outright slavery for relocation to some garden world of the Outer Perseus.

  In a sense, Bahudde had been right. Our time on this world was ended. We had expanded too far, brushed against the borders of infinity.

  Infinity had pushed back.

  “We still have our lighter craft.” Lorian laid his cane across his knees, knuckles white on the shaft. “But Sparrowhawks are no good, too light.”

 
Bancroft hesitated only a moment, as if steeling herself for the inevitable. In a voice thin and airless she said, “There’s a fleet of old Falcon-IIs at the ODF base in Iselia.”

  “Iselia?” Valka asked.

  “Coastal town, about a hundred miles south,” Bancroft answered. “Down where the Mergo empties into the sea.”

  Alexander frowned. “But have they been hit?”

  Bancroft snapped her fingers at a pair of comms officers, who went about the business of answering the prince’s question.

  “Falcon-IIs?” Lorian was frowning. “I didn’t know those still flew.”

  “We get what the Legions cast off,” the commandant said with a shrug. “They’ll get the job done.”

  The intus’s demonic smile returned. “Plasma or chemical explosives?”

  “Plasma,” Bancroft answered.

  The comms officer butted in. “Iselia command’s still there.”

  All eyes shifted to me, and I turned to look at the good commander who sat—legs dangling—in the console seat as though it were the Solar Throne.

  Lorian Aristedes wasted no time, but drew himself up and—in a passable impersonation of Otavia Corvo—said, “See it done.”

  * * *

  From the south they came, and the burning followed. Indistinguishable at first from the thunder, the blue fire of their drives shone like lightning against the clouds. The Falcons came in low, carving a phalanx through the air and up the valley, rushing up the coast to the shelter of the Storm Wall in those regions where its height was not yet the full mile.

  Then the Cielcin answered, firing missiles of strange design. From Lorian’s still-functioning surveillance equipment, we could just make out the shapes of Pale warriors scrambling to get under cover of Deira’s many terraces, to shelter beneath domes and in narrow streets or in the relative safety of their siege tower vessels. To my astonishment, great clouds of nahute rose to greet the falling bombs, and many of the plasma charges erupted in the air, violet blossoms filling the sky above Deira like fireworks at Summerfair.