Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  The stick hit the deck again, and again as he thought of all his years of service to the revolution. All his sacrifices. There had been a girl once, the possibility of finding real comfort. But the revolution did not rest, and until it did… perhaps here. Perhaps there would be another girl with whom he might finish out his days in peace. Once this infernal war was over and the revolutionary flag flew where the Kamele corporations had once flown. Such a woman would be A widow no doubt. He rammed his stick into the deck again. He would not think about it. Not while the revolution was ahead of him.

  The shield around the corporation forces moved at a crawl across the savannah, aiming for a gap between the encircling arms of the revolutionary soldiers. Those were his men to the rear, closing off the mountain passes. Good men, all of them. They would do what was required of them, though from the looks of things, they would not be fast enough to close off the enemy’s route of retreat. Still, there was fighting around the place where the bubble once had been. A rearguard meant to slow the fat man’s pursuit. Dead men, every one of them, Carthalo was sure. He had seen fighting retreats attempted before. When you’re weapon was a sword it could not be done. They would be slaughtered, as the division that met the fat man on the savannah had been slaughtered.

  An invasion, Carthalo thought. What did Owolowo want from such a battle? To destroy this portion of the enemy would not weaken him, it would only make him stronger! He had said as much in their councils when they’d first come to the town. “Peace.” Carthalo had told him. “Peace will be our greatest weapon. To fight is to make enemies, to make enemies is to lose this planet. To sow peace, that is the way to victory. We must show that we love them more than their corporation.”

  The fat man had only laughed. “We have brought soldiers.” He said. “What for?”

  “Protection.” Carthalo replied. Dios would have known what he meant. Dioskoros had been so much the better of them all. The true commander, killed when the corporation decided to blow up their moon rather than render it into the hands of the revolutionaries. That had been a stunning thing. To think that mankind could destroy a planet, that he would. It demonstrated how high the stakes truly were on this planet. The last hiding place of the Kamele Corporation. If they would blow up a moon before losing it, he did not like to think what they would do when their army was destroyed by the fat man’s aggression.

  “They are for conquering, as you well know.” Owolowo had said. “The Kamele’s soldiers will not stand before our own. They have not been tested! They have not been blooded! We will teach them to fear us! From fear they will not oppose us, and failing to oppose us, we will march upon their headquarters and put their executives to the sword!”

  And they had not stood, Carthalo thought sadly. Fear would be the best the revolution could hope for from this battle. It was a slaughter, and now, as what was left fled for their lives, what would be the result? There was supposed to be ten thousand soldiers in that army, barely an army by the revolution’s standards, but those ten thousand had mothers, lovers, children, families amongst the cities they had come to liberate from their slavery to this branch of the Kamele corporation, the last branch, such was Carthalo’s fervent hope, and assembly leader citizen Joachim’s repeated assurances despite Carthalo’s doubts.

  Owolowo had won a victory, but had he won any friends? The city they’d fought the battle around had completely lost their fields. The very food that had motivated the fat man to move to this town in the first place was no more than scorched earth and the place in which Carthalo had hoped to make the revolution’s first allies had instead it been the site of the first atrocities. Who would fight for them now in Bresia, when their fields were gone and their people would go hungry. Carthalo and the fat man could not offer them reparations, only continued suffering, until they were liberated from those responsible and armed with the corporations own weapons against hunger and want.

  “Come.” Carthalo said. He hit the command button on the Matsumishi. “Take me to the first battlefield.” He said. He wished to examine it for himself.

  “Abouna!” Ode shouted, jogging along beside him as the six legged machine trundled out onto the grass the natives called song grass. Another problem there, since discovering its alcoholic content the men kept them in their mouths almost constantly, maintaining a buzz that Carthalo found disgusting in men who were supposed to be principled. “Abouna! Shouldn’t you take some guards? A squadron of the Matsumishi?”

  “A Matsumishi is a machine Ode. They are tools. You are a man. Are you not capable of defending me?”

  “Yes Abouna. But still, I would feel better for your sake, if you called for a squadron of guards.”

  “They stay.”Carthalo waved his clawed hand, the one disfigured by the plasma and missing most of its fingers, the remaining pinky, thumb, and section of pointer finger splayed out like a claw. “You come if you are afraid. I wish to see the battlefield.”

  Thirty yards from the scar left in Marain by the orbital bombardment the Matsumishi’s legs crunched on gravel and scattered soil dug up from the heart of the savannah by the fat man’s plow. The pampas, Carthalo remembered, he must remember to call it the pampas if he wished to relate to the men that lived there. He must learn more of their words, more of their ways. Things he had only just begun to learn from the people of Bresia behind them. At the edge of the steep cliff face which marked the bombardment site Carthalo’s platform stopped so that he could view the carnage below.

  Bodies, what was left of them, stained the dark soil red. Men turned to statues by the plasma beams that killed them, still smoking where they stood in the melted remains of their own armor. Mostly the enemy, a rare few showing the revolution’s human face, contorted howls of pain in the melted aftermath. A few, less clear in their allegiance, showed grinning skulls through helmets ablated by the heat of the guns.

  Above him an airborne machine screamed by, pursued by other streaks of light. A few shots thumped into the dirt on the battlefield, stirring the mortal remains that were all that was left to show of the men who’d once stood and died there. The noise of it took him back, to other battles and other worlds, to the day when he himself was eighteen, as Ode was, and the revolution’s recruiter had come to his hometown, preaching the human dignity, the right to ownership of man’s accomplishments, to the automation that made the dynasties such opulent homes while the rest lived in squalor. He remembered how excited he’d been and the feel of his first suit of armor, a rough shod thing on which he’d drawn the human face of the revolution, angry and hungry for the blood of his oppressors, the machines he’d slain, the friends he’d lost, and he looked down on the dead and remembered the slaughter he’d watched here. His stick came down again in anger. These men did not have to die. These human beings, might have been spared.

  He could never understand why men fought for the corporations, why men died for a system which oppressed them by its very wealth, for men who lived so far above them while denying them even the simplest of comforts. A warm bed, when they could turn them out in the millions, enough to eat, when their own agricultural machines could turn a desert into a jungle, legs to help a man walk when he was injured by nature, or fate, or a fluke of the genes his mother gave him. All men were poor, that was true even of the lords of the corporations, but not all men had to be so poor that they could not eat. Not all men had to show their poverty in silks and soft things,and fancy homes and huge dinners. Not all men had to die alone and hungry, of diseases the rich hadn’t feared for centuries. No man had to suffer. No man. No man had to die the way the fat man had slaughtered these men. What good could come of it? Again and again, what was the good of slaughter?

  Carthalo remembered the soldiers who had guarded the palaces on Mawast. Every Corporation had armed men in the end, on Serranar just as on Kintiktu and Mawast. Traitors to their own kind. Men who saw an opportunity for profit, men who were wooed by wealth before the revolutionary message could spread across the planet, but those men... Ca
rthalo remembered the speech he’d made, the words, he no longer remembered. They were lost to him, a part of history now, and his finest hour. He remembered the themes, of mankind’s universal brotherhood, of the corporations attempts to subvert that dignity, to turn the common man into machines, the equal of the Matsumishi. Those men on that battlefield had come over to the embrace of their revolutionary brothers, laying down their arms until he’d called upon them to put their faces on and join the advance upon the palace city. That was the day, the day they’d named him citizen Carthalo. Citizen! Would they call them citizen for this atrocity? Brotherhood had been his hope for this army, peace, common cause against the corporation and its machines, but now.

  Widows and orphans.

  Carthalo rammed his stick into the platform and ground his teeth.

  Behind him, in the city, were men and women he’d talked to, people he’d hoped to call his friends and brothers and sisters in arms. People who understood what the revolution was about in the first telling. They were sympaticos, while out there on the savannah, no, the pampas, his half of the army sought to cut off the retreat of the planetary brethren of those sympaticos in order to complete the murder Owolowo had begun. It was Carthalo’s only concession to the fat man, an attempt to show a united front to their divided command. It was still only a portion of his soldiers, most were still behind him, camped in Bresia chewing on grass and muttering about the blood they’d been denied, as though they were mere beasts out for flesh. It was a hunger they shared with their Akereke.

  Carthalo had hoped that conceding to Akereke Owolowo’s demands of a split command would slow his enthusiasm for blood and slaughter. He thought it would slow him enough for Carthalo to make gains amongst the local population, to show them what the revolution could bring to them, to show the fat man the way of peace that could lead to conquest. This victory on the battlefield would only fuel Owolowo’s thirst for blood and the natives of this world that they were no better than the corporation they’d come to free them from. The murder would fuel all their thirst, and then what? What would they do when the revolutions soldier’s no longer fought for the common man and saw this world as a treasure chest filled with plunder waiting to be taken? What would they do when this army turned to rape and pillage? They would be no better than the corporations they had come to free these people from. They would become what they all hated. Oppressor rather than brothers. Predators on a planet full of prey.

  Beyond the scar in the land, beyond the bodies and the pools of blood, he could see the armies now. They drained into the mountains in pursuit of more blood, unaware of how this victory would only make their job on this planet harder. Carthalo sighed and might have rammed his stick into the deck again if his hand hadn’t been sore from the grip he’d held it with through the battle. He flexed, and tried to relax muscles that had not relaxed since he’d emerged from stasis and found out about Dioskoros death, leaving he and the fat man the highest ranking soldiers in the army.

  “Ode.” He said. He remembered the priests of his home town, the time his mother insisted he go in to confess his lies about his sister to the umfundisi in the small basement church. This vast and empty plain, this pampas, filled only with he, Ode, and the dead, seemed as good a place for a confession as any. A troubled heart sought outlets, he’d found. Even a small outpouring could make a difference in his search for personal peace.

  “Don’t ever grow old Ode.” he said.

  “I will endeavor not to.” Ode replied.

  Carthalo smiled. “When you get old you grow bitter and tired of the mistakes of your peers.” He tried to keep he and Owolowo’s disagreements hidden from the rest of the army. There had been no way to do that with this battle. Even arranging his soldiers as an obvious trap to keep the enemy from retreating in the event that they did come out and fight had not hidden the division. He had hoped it would dissuade the enemy’s commander, but that hope had been disappointed.

  They could do nothing, it seemed, he and Owolowo, without arguing. Such infighting could not continue. In the battles above the planet it had been a minor issue, even in landing their goals had aligned, but now, now it had come to blood. “Wars should not be fought amongst men like this.” He said. “Only machines should die.” He lifted his stick, looked at it, and set it down, gently this time, and held his claw up to the light. “Men should not have to kill men.”

  Something would have to be done about the fat man. Something soon. Something final, before more would have to die. That was not a chain of thoughts he dare go down. He would have to make this man his friend, somehow, to show him the way of peace, or to die trying. What was his life in comparison to the revolution? The revolution must go on, here on Marain and elsewhere, even if he, one man, did not, It must go on.

  Epilogue : Moses // Last on the Line

  Somehow he’d made it. Somehow in the midst of the fighting and the artillery barrages and the constant pursuit, he’d made it into the foothills, among the passes and steep hills of loose scree and tangled vines. They’d made it, and now they were going to die.

  He was tired, deathly tired. His limbs ached, and his stomach roared, and his breath felt raw and painful. He’d had to sprint again, trusting his suit to two and three minute all out runs to get him there once the mouth of the enemy’s trap began to close. His limbs felt like a giant had been trying to pull them off the way he’d plucked the limbs off eater beetles as a child. His head swam from the elevated oxygen intake. Now the scree was crumbling beneath him as he tried to climb and he was sliding backwards down the hill.

  There were hundreds that hadn’t made it. Hundreds, maybe thousands, who had died in the first onslaught when the shield left and the faces hurled themselves into the line. There were hundreds more who hadn’t been fast enough when the main body of the army made it into the foothills and it was the rear guard’s turn to catch up. No one would have made it from even that fight, if it hadn’t been for the hounds. Thousands of them in big wedges that hurled themselves into the line to buy the rear guard’s human forces a few minutes to begin their run. The machines hadn’t lasted long, and anyone who hadn’t begun their retreat in the first few seconds of the machines’ sacrificial charge were most likely dead. Anyone who hadn’t learned to run was most likely dead as well, though he’d seen a few hounds carrying three or four knights in tentacled arms and on their backs sprinting past him into the hills. So there was a chance even then. Moses knew that he should not have made it.

  His battery had been mostly dead by the time they reached the hills, from both sprinting and fighting, and the ragged arms of the invader’s encircling troops had begun to close, enough to where he’d had to fight to get up off the pampas. He’d thought the first knight would kill him when the sword first touched his shield, but he’d killed him, and the face’s intact shield had given him the battery power he needed to survive the fight up into the hills. He lived on borrowed time now.

  Sometime in all the fighting Moses had lost Pete Small. When Argo told him to run from the battlefield Moses had followed its instructions, turning tail on the two men who’d been trying to get a purchase on his suit with their swords and giving Argo control to get them out of there faster than they could give chase. Men had rallied around the flags, as they had before, and he’d fought his way into the hills, but he was accelerating into the a sprint to leap up a slope when the mechanism in his knee broke again. He hit the dirt so hard he thought he should have broken something, but when he stood it was only the suit that was broken, and the men who had rallied around him were disappearing into the mountain pass while the screaming horde of faces closed in behind him. Pete found him then, and for a while they fought together as they crawled peak by peak into the mountains. He would be dead without Pete. It was the second time he owed the barrel chested knight his life.

  Moses fought for a grip as he slid down the face of the hill. Tufts of the woody vine that matted the gravelly hillside came up by the fistful as he fell. The scree eventu
ally stopped and he with it and he began to inch back up again, careful not to disturb the loose bits he’d slid down. Shots splattered across the back of his shield and Moses heard shouts in an accent he recognized as Kamele, then shots rained down on the faces from above.

  “You must go faster.” Pete said from his position at the top of the hill. He crouched, giving his turret a field of fire down the hill while he pointed his flechette pistols. Someone showed their face and he let go, two full magazines of flechettes fired in two near continuous beams that rattled off the stones behind Moses. Moses reached one hand up to the top of the hill and pulled himself up by the root of a sibsig tree that stood at the peak like a sentinel. He rolled himself up onto his side, the crippled leg trailing behind him like an anchor. “They are coming.” Pete said.

  Moses opened his eyes and rolled over to look. Below the hills stretched out beneath them like an uneven floor. Nearly a mile of gently rolling hummocks green and grey where the underlying stone showed through its thin mantle of song grass and trailing vines. Those hills had been hard with his malfunctioning leg, particularly to fight in, but they were nothing in comparison to the steep piles of shattered gray rock they were climbing into now. Moses could not imagine having to fight in these. The footing was awful, unless you stood at the top of a hill, and even then he expected that a few shells could easily destabilize most of the cliff faces of loose stone that towered over them. They were following a narrow cut up into those mountains, a gorge where a small stream had carved through the loose rock and soil until there was an uneven path up into the mountains. It was the same path the rest of the army had followed and their passage had not improved the stability of either the tall cliff faces or their footing. Their shields might stop them dying from a collapsing wall of rock, but it couldn’t stop them getting buried.