by Scott Moon
He felt guilt, of course he did, but it changed nothing. His current situation required him to protect the remaining Blood Royal. He could not do that if they stayed in this village. Somehow, he needed to get them to move. Waiting was driving him crazy, but there was a man he wished to contact, a traveling peddler full of secrets. The man was a native of Grendel, but was from a class of natives that had never lost their understanding of Grendel's true purpose. This meant he would have technology not available to most locals. He might even sympathize with Seccon’s mission.
Seccon required resources and technology that he could not find anywhere else. There would come a point when he would be forced to leave the Sky Clan village and take Sveinn and his sisters — against their will if necessary — but he would wait a little longer. He needed to find the merchant peddler and convince him to reveal where the one hidden technological base was on this planet.
Borghild ran from the longhouse in tears, holding her torn tunic closed with both hands.
“Enough!” he shouted.
Fey backed away, then reached for a knife on the table without breaking eye contact.
“She is a good woman! You are petty, jealous, and not fit to be queen. I should leave you here with the others.” Seccon snatched the knife from her hands and tossed it aside.
One of the older women set down her tankard of ale and spoke. “Why should we be leaving, Sangerhinde? You keep talking about the end of the world. We fought two clans to remain free. Now you want us to leave?”
“He wasn’t wrong about the meteors,” Fey said. She spoke to the other women, but looked at Seccon.
“He wasn’t?” the woman said. “I didn't see any fiery destruction.”
Fey looked at Seccon with desperate intensity. He wondered if she would try to explain the red-eyed fairies she thought she saw, but realized that Aefel’s girlfriend wasn’t as brave as she pretended. She would not stand up to the rest of the Sky Clan as Borghild was forced to do on a daily basis. The fear of being thought a fool paralyzed her.
Seccon faced the older woman across the table and noted her scarred knuckles and calloused hands. “The demons who hunt Aefel use magic. Fey thought she saw fire-eyed fairies, which is what any of you would believe them to be had you seen. But they’re not. I've never seen a fairy and I don’t know or care if they are real. But I saw many demon servants that day and thought that they would send down fire from the heavens. I was wrong. But I will not remain wrong for long.”
The older woman laughed. “Since when do demons send down fire from heaven? That sounds like the work of Thor or the Archangel Michael if you believe that sort of thing.”
“I called them demons because I don’t know what else to call them. I know that they’re very powerful and that they will come to Sky Clan and kill everyone.”
“So what would you have us do, Sangerhinde?” The woman cracked her knuckles and laughed, then took a large swallow of ale and stood from the table. “What do we do with a singer who doesn’t sing songs?”
“I don’t feel like singing.”
6
SUNRISE
SKY CLAN VILLAGE
GRENDEL 0473829: SURFACE, HIGHLAND VALLEY 83A2T
MISSION CLOCK: n/a – ROGUE OPERATOR
Aefel sent the bullet straight across the valley, cutting the frigid air of first light and ignoring fat snowflakes as they descended on the village. He didn’t breathe. The moment stretched toward misery. He saw enemies in his peripheral vision as they silently advanced on the outbuildings nearest the untamed forest. Seeing them, he kept his focus on his point-of-aim for the brief time it took the bullet to cross a thousand meters. Keep your eye on the target, Reaver. All the way to the bull’s-eye.
Holding steady on the weapon, even a rifle as advanced as the one Commonwealth Mission Command had given him to wipe out Sveinn and his sisters, was necessary on long-range shots. There was no reason to rush to failure. Half a second insured accuracy.
The bell rang with the impact of the supersonic bullet. Once he had thought of these people as merely feral sub-humans without cybernetic enhancements. Now, he wished he was free of circuitry, processors, and gears that made him human and then some. Anticipation of the coming slaughter caused him to grind his teeth and hold his breath.
Through his riflescope, he saw Seccon’s girlfriend, Borghild — he thought was her name — look up. During countless hours of surveillance, Aefel had come to believe that the blond woman was the most alert citizen of the village, despite the fact that other women treated her like a child or an idiot, or perhaps both. Borghild, the big-breasted child-idiot, was about to save the village, if she could figure out what had just happened.
Aefel sent another bullet to the rescue, cutting the leather rope that suspended the fire bell from the porch rafter of the mead hall. Several other women in the village square looked around. Borghild was the first to act. She ran to her dwelling and emerged with Seccon in tow.
The regicidal enigma looked straight up in a classic posture of defeat and frustration, then dropped his gaze, shoulders slumping as he took a grim step toward Gunnarr’s dwelling. The elders of the village rarely left the young man’s longhall these days. They could order another evacuation. More likely, they would mock the assassin.
Aefel shifted the powerful optics of his riflescope toward the commandos as they advanced on the village, then held a position several hundred meters outside of the village perimeter. The captain of the company conferred with his second-in-command. Orders were relayed and the entire force hunkered down in a containment formation.
Aefel swore. He couldn’t see the infrared lasers that the men were using to direct incoming artillery, but he knew they existed. Time was short. As soon as the word was given to execute the bombardment, Sky Clan village would have minutes remaining before total annihilation. He wanted to start shooting, start killing these bastards with their strange markings in place of unit insignia, but a surprise sniper attack could do little but move forward their timeline. If they advanced instead of waiting on artillery, he would kill as many as he could before their counter snipers engaged him. In the meantime, he would put his faith in his aim and his silencer.
Aefel swept his vision over the rest of the village, finding Gunnarr staring at Seccon with cold resentment, clearly upset that the man had made him the fool during the earlier false alarm. One of the older women tried to shove Seccon backward and found herself sitting in the dirt, probably uncertain of how she had been thrown there, since Seccon barely moved his arm to execute the move.
Other women waved disgusted hands at the former Chief Strongarm of Emperor Dan Uburt-Wesson and went back to their chores.
Aefel aimed, then fired three shots in rapid succession, blowing a jug of milk from a woman’s arm, a wool brush from another’s hand, and throwing up dirt near Gunnarr and Fey. He prayed this didn’t set the Commonwealth soldiers in action.
The sight of Fey burned Aefel’s chest and watered his eyes, but he focused on his job. Counter snipers sent bullets into his hiding place a fraction of a second after he moved. He wondered if they had enough orbital artillery for a lonely FALD Reaver with a conscience, then ignored the probability of his death.
There was nothing left to do but move and move fast.
Beyond the atmosphere of Grendel, warships catapulted inert payloads of captured meteoroids. The push wasn’t hard. Kinetic bombardment relied on precision aiming.
Gravity did the rest.
Sky Clan village was reduced to a smoking crater while he was too busy to watch the destruction. Several times, he tried to observe the process of fleeing villagers and nearly paid for it by getting caught. The Commonwealth commandos were after him now, coming hard and fast with little concern for stealth.
Come and get me, you SLRDs.
The new, much more aggressive tactics made escape and evasion easier. He wondered if they were allowing him to get away. Two hours after the village disappeared, he watched the valley from a new
hiding place with only a little fear that his pursuers might stumble across him. He selected the location because wolves prowled the region. If soldiers came this direction, they would have to kill the aggressive animals and that would give Aefel plenty of warning.
Squatting in the shadows of an evergreen tree and sipping from a skin of watered-down ale, he catalogued the damage. The stout mead hall was now a thirty-foot crater, black as dried blood in the moonlight and filling with snowmelt. He wondered what strangers would think when they stumbled upon this place and found vegetation growing over the blasted holes and ruined building foundations. The sound of a wounded goat reached Aefel’s hiding place. He wanted desperately to sneak into the wasteland and put it out of its misery.
There were fewer bodies strewn along the trail than he feared there would be. From this distance, he could see women and girls with shattered legs and broken backs. They had crawled away from the bombardment. Others seemed to have suffered shrapnel wounds before fleeing into the woods to bleed to death. There was an old man spread eagle near the opening of the mountain pass where the villagers had fled. Aefel studied the body for a long time with his scope.
It was not Seccon.
An hour passed and his pursuers seemed to have lost interest in finding him or were following one of the many false trails he had set. Carefully, with slow movements and frequent stops, he worked his way down to the destroyed village and looked for Fey and the others dear to him. Battlefield carnage was nothing new to him. He moved quickly, finished his search, killed the bleating goat, and began following the exodus.
Despite the tragic number of human corpses, it was the sound of the goat and the sight of his missing hind legs that bothered him. Breaking its neck took seconds, but he still felt the fur in his hands and smelled the musky exhalations of the animal.
It was morning before he located Fey and the others. Seccon had survived, as had Sveinn and his sisters, including Fey. Borghild seemed furious with Seccon. The man avoided her, often suffering what looked to Aefel from a distance as screaming directed at the former Strongarm’s back. The dirty old soldier had had his fun with the young woman. Now he was going to face her wrath.
Aefel pondered Borghild’s anger. The rest of the villagers were sobered by the destruction, clearly glad to be alive and overwhelmed by the violent force of the orbital bombardment. They probably thought God, or the gods, had damned them all.
He decided, after watching several interactions between Borghild and Seccon, that the man had been prepared to abandon her. It seemed he had left the woman to fend for herself.
It took some time for his appreciation of Seccon’s capabilities to solidify. The man frustrated the searching commandos at every turn. It was a matter of time before Fey and her siblings would face the wrath of the Earth System Commonwealth. With Seccon scouting ahead and changing their course often, they had a chance. For a man who hadn't seen field duty for decades, he was doing well.
Aefel only suspected the reason Sveinn and his sisters were marked for death. His understanding of politics was fundamental and utilitarian at best. He believed his eyes. Direct observation had served him well over the years. All he knew for certain was that the next time they tried to kill Fey and her siblings, he would show the bastards what a FALD Reaver could do when he had nothing to lose.
7
MIDDAY
KLAK MOUNT TRADING POST
GRENDEL 0473829: SURFACE, MOUNTAIN PASS 83D2B
MISSION CLOCK: n/a – FUGITIVE
Klak Mount Trading Post served Seccon’s every need, except there was no modern military garrison waiting to follow his command. He had to assume his few confederates had been discovered and captured — or with any luck, killed — before they secured transport to Grendel. The Hawk Clan, led by the badly wounded Jorgo the Giant, still controlled access to the mountain pass where the trading post dominated the east/west commerce route — and that wasn't good. The gate guards atop the stone walls were less than generous without bribes to warm their hearts and he needed to get people inside before Jorgo massacred every man, woman, and child.
His situation deteriorated hour by hour. To make his situation perfect, he estimated that less than one percent of the Grendel population understood sarcasm.
More than half of the Sky Clan villagers were injured, including Sveinn, who suffered shrapnel wounds while running to help his twin sisters and burns while bashing the head of a Commonwealth commando who had moved in right after the artillery barrage. Seccon forced his mind away from the memory. Twice in as many minutes he had feared Sveinn dead.
Everything he had done would be meaningless if he could not prove the crimes Dan Uburt-Wesson had committed against his own family. To do that, he needed at least one of them alive to present to the House of Lords and Commons.
Now he looked at a four-meter-high door made of iron-banded timber and a gatehouse fashioned from well-laid stones. The owners of the place might not recognize laser-cut stonework or modern construction techniques, but Seccon understood this place had been built during the pre-colonization phase. If he were lucky, there might be a bunker under the primitive replica.
Two men stood at the top, leaning on spears and flirting with Borghild.
“You’ll be fucking yourself, I say.” Borghild had a way with words that Seccon hadn’t anticipated when they first met.
Gunnarr moved in front of Borghild. “Is Candon still your Bondi? He asked about my sister the last time our clans met at the Althing.”
The two guards sobered. One left and came back with a severely blond-haired boy about Gunnarr’s age. His skin was albino white and he looked both grave and glad to see Gunnarr.
“Ivar, it is good to see you. Can I bring my people in? We have wounded,” Gunnarr said.
Ivar waved his hand without looking at his guards and the gate swung open. He was thin for a young man of Grendel, tall and almost willowy. Although he didn’t look strong, the men of the trading post seemed to fear his displeasure.
“It is good to see you, Gunnarr.” Ivar’s deep voice was quiet. It contrasted with his delicate physical appearance, but seemed to fit him as though from frequent and strenuous use. He called his steward and gave orders for the people of Sky Clan to be admitted and cared for. “My father has gone to the Great Hall. Jorgo brought the news. He claimed your people did the murder, but I never believed him.”
“Thank you, Ivar.” Gunnarr hugged the tall lord of Klak Mount. He made introductions.
Seccon bowed. He no longer led a troupe of performers. Hiding in Borghild’s dwelling had made that impossible. Gunnarr and the others still called him Sangerhinde, which, so far as he could determine, meant singer or master of singers. In many situations, the title felt derogatory.
“Is this all of your people?” Ivar asked. He placed one hand on Gunnarr’s shoulder and looked down the trail through the pass toward Sky Clan village.
“There are stragglers,” Gunnarr said.
Seccon looked around. His heart raced as he searched for Sveinn. Only years of military training and half a life in the Emperor’s court allowed him to hide his alarm. “Where is Sveinn?”
Gunnarr started to answer, but Ivar was already responding to Gunnarr’s words. “Jorgo has gone on the war path. My scouts sent a bird. I am surprised you made it to our gates before his warriors attacked your column.”
Seccon turned to run back and find Sveinn, but hesitated. “Lord Ivar, do you have a horse that I might borrow?”
Ivar regarded him with curiosity. “You are alarmed at this news?” He summoned one of his guards with a gesture. “We have many garrons. Small horses, but surefooted.”
Moments later, Seccon was rushing down the trail at a painful trot. He hadn’t ridden a horse since the last time he hunted with the Emperor, several months before the assassination. Compared to most soldiers in service to the Commonwealth, Seccon was a good rider. His kidneys didn’t appreciate his skill as they took a beating from the garron’s clipped gait.<
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The stragglers streamed up the trail now, casting aside baskets of food and personal possessions as someone fought to guard the narrow path. Shouts and the sound of blades ringing on shields darted through the thin mountain air. Seccon slowed the shaggy little horse and weaved through the people — most of them old or infirm. He stood in the stirrups and searched for Sveinn.
What he saw amazed him.
Sveinn had formed a perfect imitation of a shield wall, except that only half of his fellow boys and girls had shields and his companions looked like children playing at war. The Blood Royal led the charge with such resolve and such complete loyalty of his fellow younglings that Seccon paused to stare. “Sveinn! You must retreat!”
Jorgo and a dozen stout warriors took a step backward, laughing and pointing swords at the fierce children.
“Damn you!” Sveinn yelled. “Fight or go back to your village and leave us alone.”
“It is too late for that, boy,” Jorgo said.
Seccon rode nearer the scene and dismounted, allowing the reins to drag on the ground. He hoped the horse would stay, but spared it little thought. “Sveinn, the rest of the clan has arrived safely at the Klak Mount stronghold. There is no need to fight.”
Sveinn’s sister, Ari, stared at him as though he were mad. “No reason to fight? They are Hawk Clan.”
“Have you had your moon blood, little Ari? I think you have.” Jorgo’s deep voice rumbled, suddenly devoid of laughter.
Seccon stepped through the shield wall and glared at Jorgo.
“What do you want, old man?” Jorgo spat to one side, revealing several missing teeth.
“If you knew how old I am, you would probably fear me as a wizard,” Seccon said.
Jorgo interrupted, ignoring the words. “There is no glory in killing a band of children who don’t know swords from their mother’s tits. But I am coming up this trail to finish the rest of Sky Clan. If you want this boy and his heroic band to survive, you must talk sense to them. They will make good thralls. Especially you, Ari.”
