Tur’ma took a knee and indicated the two breaches they had in front of them. He knew he did not have enough rifles coming up to cover what would boil through the breaches.
“Teark, what enemy is this?” A lowly dadu, a recruit dripping blood off his brow from a piece of shrapnel or gravel, asked him as he sighted down his rifle.
“It does not matter,” he lied to the warrior and himself. He was desperate to know the answer to that question himself. He could not believe this was the action of a rogue Kaerin lord. It followed that Kaerus itself needed to be warned. With the message ship Mer’as gone, he could only hope that Fas’toal had dispatched a message to the long-talk tower before he’d been killed.
Whoever they were, the barrels of their weapons appeared at the nearest rent in the walls, and opened fire. He was hit in the upper arm and almost spun around, ending up completely covered by the stone cistern of the water well he had been using for cover. How had they known where he was? More fire erupted from the middle breach. Some of it was directed across the length of the compound into the unprotected backs of Sak’il’s remaining warriors on the harbor wall. Most of the enemy fire was focused on his own position in the corner of the fort, from where he’d thought he could catch the assaulting troops by surprise.
He peeked around the edge of the stone cistern and fired twice, adding what felt like a poor response to the volume of fire targeting his warriors. It seemed there were hundreds of rounds impacting around them for every one of the rounds their big rifles sent towards the enemy.
Whoever the attackers were, they let out a battle cry that he lost in the gunfire that accompanied it. A small hand of the enemy came charging through the breach and turned directly towards them, firing their weapons from the hip. His men put two down quickly, punching massive holes through their chests; a third was hit by so many rounds that his upper body came apart before it hit the ground. It seemed an odd thing to think of, but Tur’ma took solace in the fact that these were just men; they died just as easily as his warriors were about to.
He watched as one enemy’s rifle failed him or ran short of ammunition. The warrior dropped the strange firearm and, without a pause, drew a short bouma blade and charged into his warriors who had taken cover behind an overturned flatbed wagon. He watched as a high blood warrior caught the blade with his rifle and turned the strike. His warrior wrenched the blade away, and used it to quickly kill the enemy. A bouma blade! These could not be some subject clan. Who had ever heard of subjects possessing weapons such as this? They were sheep!
The last of the enemy was hit and knocked off his feet. He still managed to crawl a few feet forward before he stopped. He was already turning away when the man moved again, lobbing something over the wagon his men hid behind. A bomblet! It wasn’t something that garrisons such as Sy’rane were equipped with, but he recognized it for what it was. It exploded with far more power than those he’d seen demonstrated during training. One of his warriors, trailing his entrails, was blown up and back against the wall of the fort.
There were no more attacks, just an uneven exchange of gunfire that continued to whittle away his men. He knew he had less than two hands’ worth left when he saw movement at the edges of the stones blocking the most distant of the breaches. There was a bright flash from outside the walls, a moment before what he took to be a signal rocket flew through the opening, and shot across the length of fort. He tracked its quick flight across the length of the yard and lost sight of it a split second before it exploded against the interior of the upper walk of the sea wall. It detonated with a flash of light that obscured the half dozen warriors who had been supporting his defense from the far wall.
When the fire and smoke cleared, he was unable to see a single Kaerin warrior still standing on the seawall. They’d had no protection from the heavy fire pouring through the holes in the east wall; fired by an enemy he couldn’t see unless they came forward to attack. He lunged around the base of the stone well, fired and registered that he’d just killed another attacker. He ejected the spent cartridge, inserted another and slammed his bolt shut. He sought a target at the farthest breach where the rocket had come from. Three strange-looking tubes popped around the tangle of debris blocking the hole the enemy had blown in the wall. He took aim at one of the tubes and squeezed off his shot, just as three rockets blasted forth and streamed directly towards them.
His warning was ripped from his lungs as he felt himself picked up and thrown against the northern wall by an invisible hand. He lay there for a moment, cocooned in silence before his ears started ringing. Coming slowly to his elbows, he could see only one of his warriors, lying in the dirt adjacent to the opposing wall. The man was thirty feet away, lying on his side, half in, half out of a shallow crater shaped like a ditch. The warrior was struggling to reach the pommel of his long sword, lying a few feet away. He watched, unable to tear his eyes away as a series of bullets stitched across the man’s torso. He hadn’t been able to get to his sword.
Tur’ma managed to look around him. One of the rockets, perhaps the one he had hit, had flown over them and impacted the north wall behind their position. Its explosion had blasted a hole in two heavy timbers, several feet off the ground. He began to crawl towards the hole the moment his fingers made certain his sword was still attached to his back. He could hear the occasional bark of the enemy’s rifles. They sounded far away, almost as if they or he were underwater.
Expecting to be seen and shot in the back at any moment, he pulled himself up to the edge of the hole and then through the gap in the wall. The fall surprised him; he’d forgotten how the hill sloped away from the walls on the north side. His bouncing roll ended at the edge of a drainage ditch, on the arm that had been hit. He bit down on the pain until he felt a tooth in the back of his mouth shatter. The white-hot lance of agony that shot through his head cleared his mind. He made it to his knees, breathing deeply and slowly through his nose, desperate to regain his center.
By the time he made it to his feet, the pain had become fuel for his will. He noticed and ignored the hole in his leg he hadn’t realized was there. He was centered; he had to get to the tower. He had to send a message that would warn Kaerus. He stayed in the shadow of the wall and made his way towards the harbor. With each agonizing step, with each rifle shot from an enemy that was now within the walls, he was coming to grips with what had happened here. Someone had gone through them, overrun and captured Sy’rane, in as little time as it had taken him and his men to overpower a Creight settlement.
He reached the edge of the fort, on the outer edges of the corner that had been destroyed by one of the enemy’s shells. There was no barricade remaining above him from which the enemy could spot him. The two small boats were circling slowly beneath the seawall off to his left. The quay stretched off in front of him, and the tower at the end of it looked to be untouched. The land around the fort drained to the sea through a series of large pipes. He dropped into the knee-deep water of the ditch and made his way under the harbor road, coming out alongside the jumbled stone of the quay on the opposite side from the harbor. Staying below road level, he hopped one-legged, crawled, and pulled himself through the frigid water until he sensed the tower looming over him.
The wound in his leg was worse than he had first thought. He was dragging it up the circular stone stairs behind him as he shouted for the watchman who would have remained at his post. The lack of an answer was readily apparent. Leaning heavily against the outer wall, his last step had brought the lifeless face of the watchman into view. He paused to listen, but the lack of movement almost caused him to black out. He could send the message himself.
He came to the top of the stairs, noting the bullet wounds in the watchman.
“You here to use the radio?”
He was too tired to be startled by the wounded man sitting at a chair in front of the long-talker. “Radio,” the man had said. The enemy spoke Chandrian but used words he didn’t recognize.
Tur’ma noticed t
he warrior was shirtless and wrapped in a blanket; a pool of blood had formed under the chair from a tied-off wound in his leg.
“Who are you people?”
The stranger sat up a little and let the blanket around him fall open, revealing a tattoo of an eagle in flight. “I am Stant’ala, son of Brig’se and Don’eda of the Jema.”
As the man spoke, he noticed the strange hand gun the warrior held.
“The Jema are no more. You were sent to exile, destroyed by the Strema.”
The man shrugged. “The Kaerin have lied for so long, is it any wonder they would lie to their own?”
“Take your revenge, Jema. Know that the Kaerin will hunt you down and—”
The strange gun barked twice in quick succession before he realized he’d been hit and was on his knees, trying to take a breath that wasn’t there.
He watched as the Jema struggled to his own feet and came to stand over him. “It is my people that will hunt yours. Know this, Kaerin . . . I will be wearing your sword while we do it.”
The strange-looking gun came up slowly and stopped when it was level with his face . . . This can’t be.
*
Chapter 26
The morning sun promised a clear, blustery day on the western shore of Gotland. Audy glanced upward at the green pennant of Lord Madral, still flying over the fort the Jema now controlled. The Kaerin flag would not be coming down until they were ready to leave. He had no idea how often ships passed the island, but he had no intention of advertising their presence, not yet. He’d already detailed Mullen to put a team together to repair the worst of the damage to the seawalls. They would stay quiet here, for as long as it took Eden to reestablish contact with them.
They’d won a great victory. Not against the Strema or some other clan under the Kaerin’s boot, but against the Kaerin themselves. The story of a new Chandra had begun here. Sixteen Jema had died on this island; two Edenites as well. That number might grow, depending on whether or not Stant’ala recovered. The scout had been discovered by Hyrika after the fort was taken, unconscious from blood loss and cold bones. The scout had been clutching a Kaerin long blade in his hands, taken from one of the dead around him. The story of his swim and the taking of the radio tower would add to the story.
Lupe Flores, a Terran, had led the boats that had fired the first shots in what he now knew would be a war. The thought made him smile. He wondered if Lupe had any idea how many Jema children would bear his name in the years to come.
He had understood the pressure Jomra had been under “to return” to Jema lands. They’d done that; he was standing on ancient Jema territory at this moment. Land that the Jema could now rightfully say they had retaken from the Kaerin. But on the shore of the continent it was a different matter. Whether it was in Hatwa lands or some other clan’s territory, the Jema didn’t have the numbers to challenge the millions the Kaerin could bring to bear within a week’s march from three different directions.
The search for allies was going to be much harder than he had imagined. The experience with the Hatwa had not left him optimistic that any clan would be ready for revolt. They would each have a class of elders or council members who, at the end of the day, owed their power and positions to the Kaerin. It was a dynamic that the Jema could not have known about or prepared for. They’d been sundered as a clan, the survivors like him living under exile enforced by the Kaerin themselves. It was difficult for him, for any Jema, to imagine a situation where there existed clan elders who actively supported what Jake had referred to as the status quo. He still had trouble with the concept.
He only had to look at the barely concealed hostility of Arsolis, a small village chieftain, to see how the status quo enforced itself in the minds of the clans. Although, looking out to the harbor, where Arsolis and some of his people were crawling over the deck of a captured Kaerin ship which was three times the size of his largest hulk now beached on the east side of the island, he knew there were other ways to win over the people of Chandra.
He bent down, picked up a rock and threw it out into the calm surface of the inner harbor. He ignored the small splash and focused on the expanding circles of waves that radiated outward. Kyle and Jake, and more so, Colonel Pretty had been correct. They needed someplace on Chandra that they could control with the numbers they had. A location with more of what he’d learned was called defensive depth. A location they could defend, where their waves could propagate from - to wash up against the Kaerin.
Gotland was a large island compared to where they had been centered in the Bay of Riga, but not large enough to provide the kind of defensible terrain that they were going to need. This had been a success; they now understood what they were up against and what the future would require. They would need all the Jema, and the Terrans’ help as well.
Jake had been talking up the island of Britain since they’d arrived. How the people of that island, from Earth’s history, had managed to keep it secure against larger, more powerful armies based on the continent. He knew Jake was a former sailor of sorts, and predisposed to think in terms of sea power. It was a new way of thinking for him and the Jema. On Chandra, sea power consisted of nothing but the means the Kaerin used to ship troops and supplies from point to point. That very fact now added weight to Jake’s argument.
Britain was a large-enough island to sustain the Jema, all of them. If a war to control the seas around a large island like Britain would be new to the Jema, it would be new for the Kaerin as well. Such a struggle would negate in large measure the Kaerin’s numerical advantages. And in time, word would spread. That was the real weapon.
He could almost hear Jake going on about how the people of Britain had built a global empire, and ruled it from that island that stood four days’ sail from Gotland. The Jema had no designs on ruling anyone other than themselves, but perhaps the island of Britain could be the location from which they could plant the seed and sink the roots that would shatter Kaerin control of this world.
One of those instruments of Kaerin control was coming towards his position in front of the fort’s seawall. Cal’as, the Hatwa warrior, was flanked by a pair of Jema warriors and accompanied by Gor’nas, the one former Jema Gemendi who had accompanied the expeditionary force. The order of Gemendi was no more among the Jema. Jomra had disbanded it. Every Jema now had access to more knowledge and technology than any Kaerin Gemendi alive; it was only a matter of taking on the new knowledge.
The group was hurrying down the quay, having emerged from the radio tower. Cal’as was waving at him frantically. Audy let out a sigh; Cal’as was a problem that begged a decision from him. The Hatwa may have been turned over to them as a hostage, but it had been done by Cal’as’s father, who had since been taken by the Kaerin. They would have to take Cal’as to Eden with them, or leave him here at the bottom of the harbor.
“My father was not taken!” Cal’as was shouting at him before the group reached him.
He waited, and noted the heavy, leather-bound book being carried by Gor’nas. He recognized it as a Kaerin logbook. He still could not read Chandrian, and had no desire to learn the language of his enemy. Members of the Gemendi were the only subjects who had ever been taught to read the invader’s script.
“Gor’nas? What is our Hatwa friend talking about? His father was seen being taken from his home by Lord Madral’s warriors.”
“He was being escorted!” Cal’as broke in.
Audy silenced the young warrior with a look and turned back to Gor’nas. The short, stocky Jema looked as if he could have Hatwa blood in him.
“Their radio log.” Gor’nas held up the book. “The Kaerin, as you know, broadcast in the clear, in what we now know as the shortwave. All stations hear it, just as we do when we intercept their signals.” Gor’nas pointed at the tower at the end of the quay. “Sy’rane’s radio is one of the more powerful long-talkers I have seen. From its records—I believe this fort relayed most messages going to or from Legrasi. It makes sense, given the location of
this island.”
Audy gave a nod of understanding. “There was a message involving Cal’as’s father?”
“Yes, sir,” Gor’nas said out of reflex, his face coloring. “I mean, war leader.”
Audy smiled. Gor’nas had served with the Eden militia in the fight against the Strema. He wasn’t the only one with a new vocabulary.
“Relax, Gor’nas. The language of Eden is now ours. ‘War leader’ is a Kaerin term, and I’m certain there is a very dead one in the fort behind me.”
Gor’nas smiled in appreciation at the answer. “Yes, sir!”
“My father’s presence was requested at the Kaerin holding of Landing.” Cal’as was bouncing from foot to foot with excitement. Audy realized the young warrior must have worked out what his father’s arrest might mean for him. “He was requested by name, along with several others from neighboring estates. He was escorted, not arrested.”
Gor’nas rapped his knuckles against the logbook. “It is as the Hatwa says, sir.”
“Landing? Where is this holding?”
“In the Middle Sea,” Gor’nas answered immediately. “It is the seat of my former order. It is where the Kaerin invaders first came to this world.”
“Why there?”
Gor’nas waved the book. “I went back several moons in the log; similar requests for other Gemendi with expertise in specific areas of knowledge have been made. In each instance, their travel was ordered to be expedited. Cal’as’s father was to be flown from Lord Madral’s estate in an airboat that had been dispatched to retrieve him. Why that location? I do not know.”
“Not as a prisoner,” Cal’as interjected, trying to make his point again.
Audy made a decision. “It would seem that your presence among us has not been discovered.”
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 37
