CHAPTER 19
TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING
The blaring of alarms filled the Rhea by the time we reached the bridge.
“Get word to Gaston!” I bellowed.
“What happened?” Vedi looked round, eyes wide. “Is Lord Oberlin . . . ?”
“Dead!” I cast the ruined shards of the knife-missile on the surface of the depowered holography well. “You need to lock the ship down. No one in or out!” The stark reality was that whoever had left the deadly toy for Oberlin to find had already fled. It had to be Lascaris. The grim-faced secretary would have been permitted entry to Oberlin’s chambers . . . and the ill-starred deck officer had said the man had gone off to the weather station.
The short-haired woman on the comms spoke up then. “I can’t raise Ground Control. There’s no traffic on the fiber. Error G14.”
“No connection,” Vedi translated, face white as milk. “Someone cut the hardline.”
“The same someone who killed Sir Friedrich,” I said.
“We have a saboteur,” said Vedi. “I’ll pull security footage.”
“You won’t find anything,” I said.
“I should have been here . . . ” came a small, shocked voice from one corner.
Turning, I saw the last man I expected. Priscian Lascaris sat slumped in a chair, face bent over his wringing hands. Squaring myself, my thumbs in my belt, I stood over him. “I thought you went to Ground Control.”
“I just got back,” he said, looking up through watering eyes. “I just heard.” The man was manically twisting the ring on his first finger. “Is it very bad, lord?”
It was, I thought. Very bad. But I said, “I covered him.”
Lascaris swallowed. “He was a good man. I know you had your differences, but he was a good man. His poor children. And the grandchildren! The babies! Eliza just had her third!”
I blinked, said, “I didn’t know he had family.”
“Oh yes.” Lascaris nodded, swallowing violently. “On Forum. He hoped to see them . . . one more time, you know? When it was done. Before he . . . before . . . ”
“The cancer,” I said, feeling an unexpected surge of guilt that I had suspected the secretary.
Lascaris nodded once more.
Turning from him, I spoke to Vedi, and to the woman on the comms. “Can you wave Ground Control?”
“I’m trying!” the woman answered, one hand cupping her left ear. “Signal should be clearer at night, but there’s so much bloody noise.”
“They don’t have a telegraph?” Cassandra asked.
The comms officer shouted back, “No, ma’am. Only telegraphs on site are ours and the Ascalon’s.”
“I’ll go,” I said, looking to Cassandra. “Let’s go.”
“My lord?” Vedi took a step toward me.
I laid my clean hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go to Ground Control and rouse Gaston and his men. Tell him what’s going on. Sound the general alarm! I want every man armed and ready.”
“Armed and ready for what?”
I hesitated. I had no choice but to trust Commander Vedi. “We’re under attack!” I said. “Gnomon has been infiltrated by the Extrasolarians, likely those loyal to the Pale King. Someone killed that Irchtani patrol.” I turned to go. “Most like that’s not noise on the radio. Most like we’re being jammed.”
The depth of the darkness surrounding us impressed itself fully on Vedi and the bridge crew then, for their silence was so deep it made even the Rhea’s alarms seem quieter and remote. But they were soldiers of the Empire, of HAPSIS, the men and women of Operation Gnomon, handpicked by Sir Friedrich Oberlin and most like by the Emperor himself.
Vedi said, “I’ve already telegraphed the Troglita. Captain Clavan is sending the cavalry. The aquilarii will be here within the hour.”
“Good,” I said, conscious of the blood still on my left hand. “We must mount a coherent defense. Send runners to the centurions if you have to. Men you can trust.” I was already moving for the door. “Prime the NEM weapon. See it’s kept ready to launch and under guard.”
“You think the Monumental is afoot as well?”
“If it’s not,” I said, “I think it soon will be.”
Cassandra and I paused only as long as it took for me to wash the blood from my hand. Within minutes, we had left the blaring corridors of the Rhea via the rear hold just as the men were making ready to seal the ramp. Memories of the battle on the Demiurge oppressed me then, of our men locked in the bowels of the Schiavona, hardening her defenses against the Cielcin horde.
“Stay close,” I hissed to my daughter, taking her by the hand.
“Marlowes!” a call from the black ahead announced Edouard Albé. The agent looked odd, in a suit of black combat ceramic, devoid of all badge or rank. His ancestor’s MAG rifle was slung over one shoulder, and here and there I marked the phosphorescent gleam of a shield curtain. I activated my own. “What’s going on?”
“Come with us!” I said. “We’ll tell you on the way!”
Edouard said little as I broke the news of Sir Friedrich’s death, though I sensed in him an echo of the grief I had seen on Lascaris’s face. Oberlin had inspired loyalty in his people. Loyalty, and more than loyalty. Love.
Ground Control lay in the heart of the camp proper, on the left side of the road leading down to Phanamhara, just beside the great tent of the motor pool. It stood perhaps little more than a mile and a half from the grounded Rhea—which stood at the outer edge of the landing field, nearest the desert. We made straight for it, hurrying along in the dark. Men rushed past us. Men in the helmeted jumpsuits of the engineers, carrying short-barreled disruptors. Men in full ceramic plate, faceless as unfinished statues. Men in the desert camouflage and undyed capes of the local Defense Force.
There were lights overhead as Irchtani swept by, and the questing beams of torch-lamps as men ran about on the ground. Now and again words would wash over us, confused snatches of conversations, half-heard orders.
“Some bastard cut the power!”
“—secure the reactor!”
“Heard they did for the boss . . . ”
“Not the old man!”
“Rhea’s locked down.”
“Lord Marlowe? That you?”
Commandant Vimal Gaston was already awake and moving when we reached the Ground Control station—a low, flat-roofed disc of a building resting on several cement pilings. He stood upon the porch before the main doors, dressed in a matte-black combat skin—with no armor save his shield-belt.
“What’s going on?” Gaston’s normally neatly combed hair was all a tangle, and his sideburns stuck out like the mane of some grizzled lion.
“Oberlin’s dead,” I said. “We have a saboteur. Someone killed him and cut the power from the camp reactor. They cut the hardline between here and the Rhea. You need to get your men armed and out here! Comms are bad—I think we’re being jammed.”
“Jammed?” The fellow drew back, surprised. “By whom?”
“The Extrasolarians,” I said, certain I was right. “I think we had a mole. Oberlin must have known it.”
Gaston frowned. “Earth and Emperor . . . ” He made the sign of the sun disc, touching brow and heart and lips.
Just then, the storm sirens began their wailing, a high, womanly keen that filled all the world. At that moment, a slip of a girl emerged from the station, barefoot and clad in a long, translucent gown. She clutched the commandant’s breastplate to herself, and—seeing her—Gaston turned and permitted her to fasten the armor in place. I had seen the girl before, on the rare occasions I’d dined with the native commandant, and still I was not certain if she was his squire or his concubine. Possibly she was both.
“Right then!” Gaston said, thumping his chest. “I’ve roused the lads already.”
“How can we coordinate with the comms down?” I asked.
Gaston grinned. “My lord, Sabratha’s my home—born and raised! I’ve been dealing with this shitty radio since I was in school. We’ll send runners, and fire up the emergency lights!”
Just then a cry—shrill and piercing, loud enough and sharp enough to slash across even the wail of the sirens—filled the night.
Three long notes, each choked off at the end.
“Ai! Ai! Ai!”
“That’s the birds?” Gaston asked.
“They’ve sighted the enemy,” I said, peering up into the night.
“We need to move,” Edouard said, shouldering his gun. “We need to get back to the Rhea. Marshall our defenses.”
Cassandra grabbed my wrist. “Abba! What about Neema?”
I swore. The thought of my servant cowering in the ship’s larder, or in his cabin, filled my mind. “Albé! We need to make for the Ascalon.”
“But Commander Vedi!”
“We can telegraph the Rhea from my ship! We need to move!”
“I can wrangle an escort, lord!” said Commandant Gaston, who turned and swatted his girl. “Move your ass, Carla! Find Lumin and his lads and send them out, double quick! And fetch my gauntlets!”
The girl hurried inside.
“No need for the escort,” I said. “We can’t waste time!”
A gleam of violet flashed from the camp behind, the telltale glow of plasma fire.
A shot.
“That’s gunfire!” Gaston swore. “What the hell is going on?”
I was already running. “Evacuate the xenologists if you can!” I shouted. “Guard the motor pool! Air support is coming!”
A wind scoured the camp, tugging at the lines of weather balloons and carrying with it the clamor of human voices.
Shouts. Cries of pain.
A bolt of green lightning slashed across the night. The beam of an energy-lance.
Static hissed in my ear, and I discerned two words:
“ . . . from . . . above!”
“Abba!” Cassandra was a half dozen paces behind me. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” I said. Was it MINOS? Had the sorcerous servants of the Pale King come to Sabratha? “We need to make sure Neema is all right.”
“We should go directly to the Rhea!” Edouard shouted.
“The Ascalon is closer!” I said. “And we’ll need it if we have to retreat from this place!”
“Retreat?” The word sounded like an oath on Edouard’s lips. “Surely, it won’t come to that.”
“We don’t know what we’re up against!” I shouted back. “Or what their numbers are!”
The enemy had played his hand perfectly. In killing Oberlin, he had decapitated our command structure. Marika Clavan was Oberlin’s right successor, but the captain was in orbit aboard the Troglita, and our only means of communication with her were the quantum telegraphs in the Rhea and Ascalon. With the hardlines cut, ground communication was limited to the near-useless radios, or to runners, signal flares, and the singing of the Irchtani. We were scattered, confused, half-asleep.
We had already lost.
Red light filled the sky with roaring, and the three of us all ground to a halt. Ahead and above us, the sky was filled with tongues of flame and I clapped my hands to my ears for fear the sound would deafen me. They were the descent thrusters of a mighty rocket.
Edouard shouted near at hand. “Is that the cavalry?”
“It’s too soon!” I shouted back, realization and horror dawning on me.
If we cut through the camp, leaving the road to the left, we could reach the edge of the landing field and the Ascalon. I took us off the path instead, trying not to think about what I knew was coming.
Something huge and feathered struck the edge of one of the pod buildings and fell broken on the sand. It was one of the Irchtani—and though it was dead, it moved.
A silver adder uncoiled from the bird man’s loins, blood-soaked and shimmering, and raised its head like one of the serpents Sir Roban Milosh had taken me to see fight mongeese in the grand bazaar of Meidua when I was just a boy. It rose steadily, bladed jaws whirring like the bits of a drill. It rose until its whole body was in the air, twisting as it sought for meat.
It was a nahute, and presently it vanished up into the night. Wide-eyed, I followed it, throwing an arm out to halt Cassandra in her tracks.
There was a pale figure falling, floating out of the night like a diver down to the floor of what once had been Sabratha’s sunless seas. White crowned it was, black eyed as a corpse. Tall, thin, and terrible—clad in oily black. In one hand it grasped the bloody serpent by its tail. With the other, it drew a scimitar long and white as its chalky hide.
Upon its thin breast, there gleamed the emblem of the White Hand.
It alighted smoothly, disengaging the pilfered repulsor harness it wore.
“Is that?” Cassandra’s voice shrank, more a breath on my ear than anything, nearly lost in the wail of the sirens and the roar of engines.
“Yes,” I said, and drew my sword.
There came then a moment of relative quiet in the chaos, and into it I raised my voice and bellowed as I had not done in a life-age of common men. “Cielcin!” I screamed, blade kindling in my hand.
I had not seen one of its kind in two hundred years, not since the day I reached across time and space to crush Ugin Attavaisa for all it had taken from me. The same light and fury flowered in me then, and white light streamed from my sword as I crossed the dust between us.
The scahari warrior threw its nahute, but I slashed the serpent to pieces, and fell upon its master like rain.
I understood then just how it was we’d been outmaneuvered.
Cutting the power and leaving the knife-missile for poor Sir Friedrich to find had required a saboteur. But the chaos in the camp? The shouting? The shots? The missing Irchtani?
The Cielcin had come, had relied upon an advance team dropping under the cover of night. Just as we had dropped upon Ganelon, relying on our repulsor harnesses.
The Cielcin, under Syriani’s direct control and with the lodge of sorcerers to support its rule, had adapted, had evolved. The body that lay in pieces at my feet wore a shield-belt. They had been stealing those almost since the war began, but under Dorayaica, the seizure and reuse of man’s technology had been elevated to a science.
An art.
“Abba!” Cassandra’s shout slashed over my awareness, and looking up I saw three more of the Pale descending as if on cables.
Edouard’s rifle cracked like the thunder, splitting the night. The bullet struck one of the xenobites square in the chest, but its shield caught the impact, shed its energy as light. These three hurled nahute of their own, and I drew back a pace, caught one of the flying serpents in the teeth with the edge of my blade.
Gibson’s blade.
Behind me, Cassandra’s twin swords flashed into being. She leaped into the air then—leaped over me—and slashed the nahute to pieces. But her jump had carried her nearer the enemy, and they closed in. The sight of my daughter beset by the Pale twisted my guts like wire, and I hurtled past her, striking the nearest with my blade. It raised its own to parry, but the highmatter sheared through the sword and the arm that held it. The Cielcin staggered back, clutching its bleeding stump.
I took off its head, and whirling faced the others, blade thrust out. My knee was already aching, and the shoulder Doctor Elkan had so expertly repaired. The two Cielcin spread out, readying themselves to strike together. Cassandra stayed close behind me, shifting her guard.
The two Cielcin ran.
Edouard Albé charged in from the side and smashed the butt of his ancestral rifle into the face of the nearest Pale. I gutted the other, and averted my eyes as the HAPSIS man drew his bayonet and thrust the point up under the fallen Cielcin’s chin.
“We need to move!” he said, wiping the bayonet on the dead Cielcin’s cape. He paused a moment to affix the blade to his gun. “Merde. Damn shields.”
All about us, the sounds and flash of gunfire filled the night. There came a roar like dragonfire, and looking up, we saw more descent fires like the first.
“Siege towers?” asked Albé, coming to stand by Cassandra and myself.
“Aye,” I said. “Probably a hundred Pale apiece.”
“How did they get here?” Cassandra asked. “What are we going to do?”
“We hold,” I said in answer. “We hold until the aquilarii get here.”
“We need to move,” the agent said again.
We barely made it a hundred yards before night turned wholly to day. A new sun blazed in the skies of Sabratha, if only for a moment. Every shadow was banished, and the world became a surreal tableau of graven marble. Men and Cielcin alike paused in that instant, and looked up in mingled horror and wonder at the light filling the sky. The very stars were lost, and the ground shook.
By the fire of that false sun, I saw illuminated the icy face of a moon, pale and pockmarked, cracked with age and eaten out where the raw iron of infernal engines gleamed.
It was one of the oscianduru, the worldships of the Cielcin.
It was not Dharan-Tun.
Seeing it, I knew the Troglita was lost. The light we saw—the light of that false star—was the light of her ending. Captain Clavan was dead, and First Officer Morrow, and Janashia and Browning and however many thousand men and women remained aboard.
Had they managed to launch the aquilarii in time?
Was anyone coming to aid us?
My skin crawled, and in the stillness and sudden silence I felt on me that sensation of eyes. I looked round, and in the fading light of particle annihilation, I saw her.
A figure in fuliginous black, darker than the returning night, formless and featureless, shrouded from crown to sole.
The Watcher stood amid the chaos, unmoving, and though I cannot say how it was I knew that it was so, I knew it was exultant.
Dae undallan!
The words resounded in my own skull, alien and yet—strangely familiar.
Aldon ollori Iadan, oi cocas olan!
Pain flared behind my eyes, but I did not look away, afraid the creature would vanish once again. Everywhere I looked, across every line of potential, every possible moment, I saw the creature staring back at me.
“Edouard!” I said, feeling the Watcher’s words like spiders crawling across my brain. “Take Cassandra to the Ascalon.”
“What!” Cassandra protested. “Abba, no!”
At that moment, a ragged shout went up. In the face of the loss of the Troglita, in the face of the slaughter and the fighting in the camp, in the face of that Cielcin moon, a single word was lifted like a banner.
“Earth!” the men of our legions cried. “Earth! Earth! Earth!”
Cassandra seized my wrist. “Abba, we have to go!”
For the barest instant, I looked away, and when I looked back, the beast in black was gone. “I . . . ” I swallowed. “Did you see it?”
“See what?” Albé shouldered his rifle.
“The Watcher,” I hissed. “She’s here.”
“She?” The agent’s voice was incredulous.
“I have to go back to the Rhea,” I said to them both. “Vedi has to prepare the Perseus weapon.”
Cassandra had not let me go, and shook my arm, pulling me toward the camp. “You can telegraph the Rhea from the Ascalon, Abba!”
I shook my head. “No one can see her but me,” I said, and tugged my arm free. “I need to be there, on the ground.”
“I’m not leaving you!” Cassandra said, and set her jaw.
Seeing Valka in that gesture, I shut my eyes. “Fine. Edouard!” I turned to the agent. “Can you go to the Ascalon? See she’s shielded and ready for takeoff, we may need her! And send word to Williamtown! Orbital Defense will have their hands full, but if they can spare even one gunboat for us here on the ground, it may tip the balance!”
The agent locked eyes with me, and allowed himself a curt nod. “As you will, Lord Marlowe!” He retreated a step, eyes downcast then, disbelieving. “The ship is lost.”
“I know!” I said. “We’re on our own down here! We can still do the job we came here for. Win or die!”
“Win or die,” Edouard echoed, and rounding bolted off into the night.
Or win and die, I thought.