Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (30 page)

Sten, somehow, was right beside him, and then they were inside.

Flashing moments of red gore:

Di!n, a fixed smile on her face, as she slowly spitted a Jann officer against a bulkhead;

The whistle of spears wailing down a long corridor into a knot of panicked Jann troops;

Alex ripping a compartment door off its dogs and spinning it into a squad weapon as its gunner tugged uselessly at a jammed tripod;

Ida calmly snapping shots as a platoon of Jann, assembled in one hold, maneuvered forward;

Bet, on the back of a not particularly pleased Hugin, Munin soaring ahead of her, smashing down three Jann.

And then silence.

The red fog faded, and Sten looked around.

They were in the ship’s control room. Bodies were scattered across the room, and blood seemed to trickle everywhere.

On one side, a handful of Stra!bo warriors, spears ready. The cats. The Mantis troopers. Sten.

And, his back to the semicircular main control panel, the Jann captain.

In full uniform.

‘Talamein spoke against us,’ the captain said. ‘We have not found favor in his eyes.’

Sten didn’t answer, just walked toward him.

‘You are the leader of this rabble?’ the captain asked.

He took Sten’s silence for assent.

‘Then it is only right and fitting,’ the captain said, slowly drawing the saber at his side. ‘I shall fight a warrior worthy of my stature.’

Sten considered. Suddenly Di!n was beside him, pressing a spear into his hand. She nodded – yes. You.

Sten hefted the spear, then dropped it, and, in one motion, lifted his willygun and fired twice.

The rounds caught the captain in the head, splattering his skull back across the twin view panels.

Sten turned away, holstering the gun. Nem!i was looking shocked, and then his expression cleared. He smiled.

‘Ah,’ he said gently. ‘For Acau/lay. You do understand our culture.’

‘Is it gonna lift, Ida?’ Bet asked, slightly worried.

‘Of course it is,’ the Rom woman snorted. ‘So we’ve got half the ship sealed against leaks, we’re taking off with no landing gear, there’s a bad fuel leak, and I haven’t had a bath in a week.’

‘No problem for a lass like you,’ Alex agreed.

Her thunder somewhat stolen, Ida snorted and hit keys. Maneuver drive belched, hiccuped, snorted, and the
Turnmaa
’s nose lifted.

‘Now, as long as I can keep this computer from realizing what I’m doing …’

And she slammed both drive pots full forward.

Somehow both Yukawa drive units caught at once, and the
Turnmaa
clawed its way upward, searing the ground as the ship lifted for space.

Below it, only a handful of the Stra!bo were watching. They’d buried their dead, held their feast, and life went on.

Di!n, at the head of her phalanx, watched the
Turnmaa
flame upward and out of sight, silently thinking her own thoughts for many minutes after the last wisps of exhaust floated away and became indistinguishable from the clouds.

BOOK TWO

GARDE

The man in the river appeared to be in his mid-thirties. His long fishing rod was bent in an almost complete half-circle and the near-invisible line sang out from the reel almost to the growling rapids a few dozen meters upriver.

The man was muttering a steady stream of curses, half under his breath – curses and almost-prayers.

‘Run on me again like that, y’clottin’ guppy, and I’ll turn you loose. Come on, salmon. Come on back down. Come on.’

Suddenly the salmon broke water, a silver arc flashing in the gray spring sunlight, and came downriver.

The curses doubled as the man touched the wind button on his reel, one thumb held on the reel itself to prevent overwinding.

The meter-long fish torpedoed directly at the fisherman, and he stepped hastily back, swayed as his rib-booted foot slipped on a rock and he almost went under.

Then the salmon was past him and running again.

He flipped the reel switch and now let line run out, braking with an already seared thumb on the line.

Mahoney cut the power on the combat car and it dropped gently to the moss-covered ground. He stepped out of the wind-screened sledge and eyed the grove of soaring redwoods with extreme skepticism. Perfectly safe, the logical side of his mind said. The other side, the side that had kept him alive on half a thousand primitive worlds, insisted there be ghosties and ghoulies and four-pawed critters with appetites inside.

As usual, he listened to that part of his mind and fished a combat harness from the back of the seat, slid the shoulderstraps on, and
buckled the belt. On it hung a mini-willygun, a grenade pouch, and his combat knife.

‘So if I’m wrong I’ll feel like a clottin’ fool,’ he subvocalized, and grabbed the small daypack from the floor of the car.

Looking cautiously about him, he paced very deliberately forward into the trees.

And, quite suddenly, standing in front of him was a small, bowlegged, muscular man wearing the mottled brown uniform of a guardsman and a rakishly-tilted bellman’s cap with a chinstrap. The soldier’s willygun was slung across his back.

Held in his right hand, at a forty-five-degree port-arms, was a fourteen-inch-long knife that looked like a machete, but its blade flared to double its size at the tip. The soldier’s left hand held, almost caressingly, the back of the knife.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Mahoney. Mercury Corps. On His Imperial Majesty’s service,’ Mahoney said, being very careful not to move, trying to remember when and why he’d had himself hypno-conditioned to speak Gurkhali.

The soldier was perfectly motionless. Very cautiously Mahoney extended his right hand, palm down.

The guard took his left hand from the knife and unclipped his remote sender. Half-stepped forward and ran the computer’s pickup over the back of Mahoney’s wrist.

The computer read the implant and fed it back to the guard company’s watch-computer. A beat, and then one light glowed green.

The Gurkha stepped back and brought his kukri to the salute. Mahoney returned it and walked deeper into the woods.

He was very, very glad there hadn’t been a glitch – he’d once been permitted to attend the praetorian unit’s birthday and seen one soldier, no taller than the meter-and-a-half trooper who’d challenged Mahoney, lop a bullock’s head off with one stroke, using the long ceremonial knife.

He half grinned, remembering the drunk that had followed the religious ceremonies and the blessing of the unit’s weapons. Tradition. How long, he wondered, had the short mountain men from Earth’s Nepal served as soldiers? Perhaps, he thought, longer than even the Eternal Emperor.

And then the roar of the river was loud in his ears, and he stepped through the scrub bush and stood looking down the sloping bank at the fisherman.

It was quite a sight. The man had the rod held high and horsed back. The salmon writhed in the rolling water around the man’s knees.

‘Ah, if I had one more hand … get in here, you clottin’ fish.’

The problem, Mahoney decided, was that the fish wouldn’t fit the landing net the fisherman held in his other hand. The fisherman turned the chill air a little bluer, dropped the net to dangle from its waist-strap, pulled from his back pocket something Mahoney thought was remarkably like a sap, and smacked the fish.

The salmon convulsed and went limp.

‘That’s all you needed,’ the fisherman said with satisfaction. ‘A priest to administer the last rights.’

He swung the creel from his back, opened the top, and started to stuff the overlength fish into it.

‘Nice to see a man happy at his work,’ Mahoney said dryly.

The fisherman froze, then turned and eyed Mahoney with a very cold eye.

‘Is that any way to speak to me?’

Mahoney ceremoniously doffed his beret and knelt. ‘You are of course correct. Accept my most humble apologies, and allow me simultaneously to apologize for disturbing your vacation and to greet His Imperial Majesty, the Eternal Emperor, Lord of Half the Universe and All Its Worshipful People, including that half-dead aquatic in your purse.’

The Eternal Emperor snorted and began wading toward the bank.

‘I have always appreciated,’ Mahoney went on, ‘serving a man who, in spite of his position, appreciates the simple pleasures of life.’

The Emperor stopped dead in the calf-deep water.

‘Simple, you clottin’ idiot? Do you know what this clottin’ salmon cost me? Three hundred years, you oaf. First I must convince Earth’s government that granting me a small vacation spot would in no way interfere with their local half-wit ancestral policies.’

He clambered out of the river and began walking toward the campsite.

‘Next I purchase from the province of Oregon the whole clottin’ Umpqua River. Then I purchase the towns up and down the river and relocate each and every yahoo to the world of his choice with a proper pension.

‘Then I spend several million credits cleaning up the pollution and programming these clottin’ fish to swim up it to lay their clottin’ eggs.

‘Nah. Do not give me a simple.’

Mahoney followed the Emperor, smiling to himself. It was obvious the Emperor was having an excellent vacation. He hoped he’d be as happy once he finished Sten’s report.

It was quite a campsite. A low, staked-down vee-tent almost into the bushes. A half-decayed log had been muscled up to a flat boulder. Stones had been piled nearby to form a three-sided fireplace.

Other than that, there were no signs that the Emperor had been camping in this spot for more than fifty years.

In the fireplace was tinder under a teepee-shaped collection of wood that went from twigs to some fairly sizable logs. The Eternal Emperor walked out of the brush, whistling softly. He was deftly bending a green sapling into a snowshoe-shaped grill. As he passed the fireplace he took out a disposable firestick, fired it, and pitched it at the wood. It roared into a four-foot pillar of flame.

‘See that, Colonel? Good firebuilding. Woodsy lore and about half a gallon of petroleum. Now we wait for the fire to burn down, and I clean this here monster.’

Mahoney watched curiously as the Emperor took out a small knife and deftly cut the fish from below its gills to venthole. He carried the fish guts into the brush, then walked over to the riverbank to wash the now degutted salmon.

‘Why don’t you have one of the Gurkhas do that, sir?’ Mahoney wondered.

‘You’ll never make a fisherman, Colonel, if you ask that question.’ Almost without a beat: ‘Well?’

‘The rumors were right,’ Mahoney said, suddenly sober.

‘Drakh!’ the Emperor swore as his hands, seemingly moving with their own will, slit the salmon down its back and split it neatly into two halves.

‘The samples the Mantis team procured from the Eryx Cluster match, according to preliminary analysis, all the capabilities of Imperium-X.’

‘You can ruin a man’s first vacation in ten years, you know, Colonel.’

‘It’s worse. Not only is this X-mineral able to replace Imperium-X for shielding purposes, but it evidently occurs in close to a free state. Of the four worlds surveyed by my team, this X-mineral is present on at least three of them.’

‘I hear the sounds of a gold rush,’ the Emperor muttered. ‘And I’m starting to feel like John Sutter.’

‘Pardon, sir?’

‘Never mind. More of the history you refuse to learn.’

‘Yessir. You want the capper?’

‘Go ahead. By the way … did you bring a bottle?’

Mahoney nodded glumly. He fished a bottle of what the Emperor
had synthesized and dubbed scotch from the pack and set it on the boulder between them.

‘Too good,’ the Emperor said. ‘We’ll start on mine.’

He walked to his tent and came back with a glassine jar full of a mildly brownish liquid. Mahoney looked at it suspiciously. One of the problems of being the Emperor’s head of Secret Intelligence – Mercury Corps – and his confidant/aide/assassin was being subjected to the Imperial tastes for the primitive. Remembering a concoction called ‘chili,’ he shuddered.

‘They called this ’shine,’ the Emperor explained. ‘Triple-distilled, which was easy. Run through the radiator of something those hillpeople called a fifty-three Chevy, which I never bothered finding out about. Then aged in a carbonized barrel for at least a day or so. Try it. It’s an experience.’

Mahoney lifted the jar. He figured the less the taste, the better off he’d be, and poured a straight gurgle down his throat.

He realized he’d never noticed that the river was a nova and that he seemed to be standing in the middle of the fireplace. But somehow he didn’t drop the jar. Eyes watering, seeing double, he still managed to pass it to the Emperor.

‘I see you’re wearing a gun,’ the Emperor said sympathetically ‘Would you mind holding it on me while I have a drink?’ Mahoney was still gasping as the Emperor chugged a moderate portion.

‘Continue, Colonel, with your report. You are planning to stay for dinner, aren’t you?’

Mahoney nodded. The Emperor smiled – he
did
hate to eat alone, and his Gurkha bodyguards prefened their far simpler diet of rice, dhal, and soyasteak.

‘I ran a computer project, sir,’ he went on. ‘We can supress the existence of this X-mineral for perhaps two, possibly three E-years maximum. And at that time every footloose wanderer and entrepreneur in the Galaxy will start for the Eryx Region to make his fortune.’

‘As I said, a gold rush,’ the Emperor murmured. He was busy dressing the fish. He’d picked a handful of berries from a bush on the outskirts of the clearing and a small clump of leaves from each of the two bushes nearby.

‘Juniper berries – they grow wild here; two local spices, basil and thyme, that I planted twenty years ago,’ he explained. He rubbed berry juices on both sides of the split salmon, then crushed the leaves and did the same.

Mahoney continued with his report. ‘Per your orders, sir, I
instructed my Mantis team to take the most direct way back from the Eryx regions toward Prime World.’

‘Of course – that’ll be the route all my eager miners’ll follow if word gets out.’

‘The plot led through the Lupus Cluster,’ Mahoney said.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A few hundred suns, planets … mostly inhabited … back of beyond.’

‘Inhabited by whom, might I ask?’ the Emperor said.

‘My team’s ship got jumped by one of your majesty’s ex-cruisers. The
Turnmaa
.’

‘Are they all right?’ the Emperor asked tersely. All pretense of casualness was gone.

‘They’re fine. The cruiser starting shooting, my team put down on some primitive world. The
Turnmaa
came after them. So they took the ship. Two hundred dead black-uniformed crewmen later, they came home in the
Turnmaa
.’

‘Hostile group of boys and girls you breed over there in Mantis,’ the Emperor said, relaxing. ‘Any idea why these baddies jumped my ship? It was supposed to look like a tramp miner, wasn’t it?’

‘They started out by screaming “In the Name of Talamein,”’ Mahoney said, as usual preferring the indirect explanation.

The Emperor slumped down on the log. ‘The Talamein! I thought I put a stake through their heart ten generations ago!’

No psychohistorian has ever been able to explain why, throughout human history, waves of false messiahs come and go. Never one at a time. Witness, for example, the dozens of saviors, from 20 B.C. until A.D. 60, who gave the Romans a rough road to go.

A similar wave had swept the Galaxy some four hundred years previously. Since the Emperor knew that a culture must be allowed religious freedom, he could do little until a particular messiah would decide he was the Entity’s final fruition and declare a jihad. Until then, all the Emperor could do was try to keep the peace and endure.

There was much to endure.

Such as the Messiah of Endymion VI, who decided that all women on the planet were his sole property and all the men were unnecessary. The first item of interest is that the entire male population, believers all plus or minus a few quickly sworded atheists, suicided. Even more interesting is that the Messiah was impotent.

There was an entire solar system that believed, like the early Christian Manichees, that all matter, including themselves, was evil
and to be destroyed. The Emperor never learned how they managed to blackmarket a planetbuster nor how they managed to launch it into their sun, producing both a solar flare and a sudden end to the movement.

A dozen or so messiahs preached genocide against their immediate neighbors, but were easily handled by the Guard once they off-planeted.

The messiah of one movement took a fairly conventional monotheism system, added engineering jargon, and converted several planetary systems. The Emperor had worried about that one a bit – until the messiah absconded to one of the Imperial play-worlds with the movement’s treasury.

One messiah decided Nirvana was a long ways off, so his world purchased several of the old monster liners, linked them together, and headed for Nirvana. Since their plot showed Nirvana to be somewhere around the edge of the universe, the Emperor quit worrying about them, too.

And then there was the faith of Talamein. Founded in reaction to a theology in decay, a young warrior named Talamein preached purity, dedication of life to the Entity’s purpose, and putting to the sword anyone who chose not to believe as he did.