Starfist: Lazarus Rising (26 page)

"What are they shooting at?" Nehemiah asked.

"Ghosts, shadows, maybe some of your loose cattle. All right, men," Bass shouted, "get ready! They'll be through the village and on our side very soon now.

Hold steady."

New Salem was shrouded in smoke from the fighter attack, so the three vehicles that maneuvered between the ruins were forced to slow down as they moved forward into the center of the village. Raipur's driver pulled out onto the main street.

The way was strewn with wreckage, but at the far end of the street stood an intact and imposing wooden building. To both sides, structures had escaped significant damage. "Watch those houses," he told his gunner. The gunner swung his weapon left and right as the vehicle crept down the street. From somewhere, another gunner fired at a target. Raipur's gunner opened up.
"What are you shooting at?"
Raipur shouted. The onboard communications system was out too, forcing him to give his commands by voice. The gunner did not answer, but continued shooting. Clouds of acrid wood smoke drifted down the street, obscuring the spaces between buildings.

Something moved off to their right front! The gunner laid into the target. Raipur had seen the demons before today, and to his clouded vision what moved behind the cloud of wood smoke looked just like one. The smoke cleared for an instant and he could clearly see the projectiles hitting something and the blood and flesh gouting into the air. The thing bellowed. "Stop!" he shouted into his driver's ear. He reached back and grabbed the gunner's leg, giving it a hard pull. "Cease fire!"

The gunner, a triumphant grin on his face, leaned down into the cab and shouted,

"I got him, Sword! I got him!"

"Stay here and keep alert," Raipur told his driver. "Come on," he called back to his gunner, "we're going to take a look." They dismounted and, personal weapons at the ready, ran back between two houses to where the creature had been hit.

Raipur's heart was in his throat as he walked between the buildings. What if this was an ambush? "Keep alert," he gasped. The building on the left was still burning, but the one on the right was intact, though already embers from the fire had drifted onto its roof. The heat from the burning structure was intense. They shielded their faces from the heat and smoke as they advanced.

"You sure got him," Raipur muttered as they came upon a large pool of blood. He looked around. "He must have crawled off somewhere."

"I blasted him!" the gunner enthused. "Over there!" he shouted, pointing over to his right.

They approached the target cautiously, weapons at the ready. At first Raipur thought the man had shot a tent, because all he saw was something flat on the ground colored red, white, and black. He moved closer. Horns and a long face?

"Congratulations, buddy," Raipur said, "you just killed somebody's cow."

Eventually the platoon rallied on the far side of the village. The vehicle commanders dismounted and gathered under the cover of their cars to confer with Ben Loman, whose face was flushed beneath a thick layer of soot. All the men were breathing heavily from the excitement and exertion—and relief that apparently the village was deserted.

"We'll withdraw to the ridge where we started from," Loman began, "and fort up there for the night, until reinforcements arrive tomorrow. The village may be empty now, but—"

One of the gunners called down something from his cupola.

"What is it?"
Loman answered, annoyed at the interruption.

"Sir..." He nodded his head toward the thickets that spread outward from their positions. "There are well-beaten paths leading away from the village in this direction."

Loman paused, then he nodded and climbed up into the nearest vehicle, motioning for Raipur to accompany him. "How much time to sundown?" he asked his sergeant.

"I'd say about twenty minutes, sir," Raipur answered, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Hmm." The lieutenant looked in the direction the gunner had pointed. "Yes, definitely a path leading down there. Okay, here's what we're going to do. Sergeant, I want you to take your vehicle and one of the others and perform a reconnaissance down this path. See where it leads. You should be able to plow through these bushes without any trouble."

"Yessir," Raipur answered. It wouldn't do any good to argue with the officer, so he'd go down as quickly as possible and get it over with.

"Make it quick, Sergeant. We'll cover you from here."

Raipur dismounted and picked one of the vehicle commanders to follow him down the path. "Stay fifty meters behind me," he said. "If we run into an obstacle, offset a few meters to either side of my vehicle, to give supporting fire and an escape route. I don't want you shooting into my back, understand?"

"Got you covered, Sword!" The man grinned fiercely and gave Raipur the thumbs-up sign. He was one of the two men who had accompanied him to the caves the night they slaughtered the Pilipili Magna. The man liked to kill.

"Okay," Raipur sighed, "let's mount up. We don't have much time until sunset, and I sure don't want to be down in there after dark."

The width of the reconnaissance cars was considerably broader than the trail, but Raipur's vehicle rolled forward without resistance, crushing the bushes and shrubs beneath it. Dust drifted up from the broken vegetation and caused Raipur to sneeze violently, but the pleasantly tangy odor of crushed fiber filled the air around them. It reminded Raipur of the freshly cut lawn about his father's house. He'd joined the army to get away from the dead-end backwater where he was born.
Stop
daydreaming!
a voice shouted inside his head.

Gradually the trail steepened. Soon it was joined by other trails, all of which looked heavily and recently traveled. Raipur told his driver to stop. They were at the top of a wash or ravine that descended into a steep-sided arroyo. The entrance was blocked by what appeared to be thick foliage and a rock fall. That struck him as strange. A series of well-traveled trails leading into a dead end?

"Open fire on that barricade!" Raipur screamed at his gunner. "Get us closer!" he shouted at his driver. The concussive
whirr
of the high speed fléchette gun pummeled the top of Raipur's head as his driver inched the vehicle closer to the barrier. The man's face had turned white as he concentrated intently on steering the car forward. "Closer!" Raipur screamed, to be heard over the gun.

The topside gun abruptly stopped firing. "Jam!" the gunner shouted, followed by a string of foul curses as he tried to clear the malfunction. Raipur leaned out his window and opened fire on the barricade with his personal weapon. Foliage was splintering and turning to dust and wood chips. He could see clearly as it flew away that it wasn't growing there. It'd been piled up to camouflage a barricade.

The vehicle suddenly shook violently from the impact of the second car's hypersonic fléchettes. The dumb sonofabitch was firing into
him
! "Move to the flank!" Raipur said into his mike before he remembered their comm was out. "Get us out of here!" he shouted at his driver.

"I can't, I can't!" the man screamed, almost in tears. "The reverse is shot out!" He tried desperately to shift. "He shot the engine out!"

The gunner screamed in agony and dropped back down inside the car, writhing and clawing at his clothing. Then a viscous green stream of liquid washed over the vehicle's windscreen and it began to melt. With gripping horror, Raipur knew instantly what the stuff was. So did his driver, who howled in fear and leaped out of the car. A bright flash winked at Raipur from the barricade, and the windshield disintegrated in front of him, though miraculously, he was not hit by the single 9mm pellet that penetrated the windscreen. The four remaining pellets of the round hit his driver, who flopped to the ground, blood spurting from the buckshot wounds.

A man appeared on top of the ravine, a tank of some sort strapped to his back.
A
man!
It wasn't a demon! Instinctively, years of training taking over, Raipur leveled his weapon at the figure and squeezed off a burst. The fléchettes struck the tank on the figure's back and it ruptured. Raipur could hear the man screeching hideously.

His gunner lay behind him, quiet now, dead, his face eaten away by the acid. Raipur felt a rush of elation that the man on the ridge had died the same way. He was familiar with the Skink acid throwers, for that's what the man up there had used, but he did not stop to wonder how a human would have come to have one. He dove out the door, scrambled underneath the vehicle and lay there panting. They were
men
, he could deal with that! Where the hell is my backup? he wondered.

It was totally silent except for the hissing from the ruptured engine. It seemed a long time passed as he lay there, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes because it was still light when finally a commanding voice shouted, "Come out from under there and no weapons! Let's see your hands! You have ten seconds!"

Raipur crawled out from under the car and raised his arms. A man stepped up and struck him in the side of his head with the butt of his shot rifle. "That's for Levi!" the man snarled. Levi Stoughton, only seventeen, was the man Raipur had shot atop the ravine.

"Kill him!" someone shouted. Men began to kick and pummel the sergeant as he lay curled into a ball.

"Stop!" another man shouted. Raipur heard him approaching, grabbing the other men and pushing them aside. "None of that! This man is our prisoner."

"But he killed Levi!" someone protested.

"Look inside the vehicle. Levi got his licks in first and you killed this other man over here. It was a fair fight. You will not hurt this man. Get him to his feet. Tie his arms behind him. Get back to your positions. We sleep on our weapons tonight, men. Now you," he turned to Raipur, "you're coming with me." The man who spoke was of medium height but solidly built. He was strong. Raipur realized as much when the man grabbed his arm and shoved him toward the barricade. In the fading light it was hard to make out the color of his hair, but it was dark. His face seemed craggy in the bad light, and scarred—the face of a fighter, a man who'd been in more than one desperate scrape with other powerful men. The way he spoke, he seemed used to command. He sure commands
here
, Raipur realized.

The men around him scampered at his captor's orders and resumed their defensive positions. He was pushed through a narrow opening in the first barrier and through the next two, all of which were manned with determined-looking men armed with, he was surprised to see, bows and spears. The two who'd fired on his recon vehicle had projectile weapons; he'd seen them. They were used extensively for hunting where Raipur came from.

"My name is Charlie Bass," the man said.

"Sergeant Sudra Raipur," Raipur answered. His bruises were beginning to bother him and he had some difficulty speaking clearly from the blow to the side of his head.

"What's your unit?"

Raipur did not answer, and the man called Bass just shrugged and shoved him up a slope and into a large cave. They walked back into the recesses of the cave.

Women and young men were gathered in there.

"You killed my son!" a woman screamed, and lunged at the sergeant.

"He killed my gunner and he tried to kill me, madam," Raipur answered.

Bass stepped between Raipur and Mehetabel Stoughton. "This man is my prisoner and he shall be treated humanely." He looked at Mehetabel while he spoke but he addressed everyone in the group.

"That is right." Zechariah stepped forward. "He's wounded, Charles, I'll have someone tend to his injuries."

Bass took Raipur to a spot some distance removed from the group, who accepted his orders, but with very bad grace.

"Sit." Raipur sat, awkwardly, with his hands bound behind him.

Bass squatted in front of Raipur. "Tell me your unit, where the main force is, its strength, weapons, intentions, and I'll untie you."

"No," Raipur answered.

Bass smiled. "Didn't think you would. Look, we don't mean anybody harm. We built these defenses against the devils or whatever they are. They had me in a cage.

They tortured me. They killed all the people in the City of God sect except those who are here with me now. They killed your people too, from what I know. Why did you people attack us? Aircraft—your aircraft—came and bombed our homes, for no reason. What are you people up to?"

Emwanna, carrying a pan of water and some clean rags, came and squatted beside Bass. She started when she saw the sergeant and spilled some of the water.
"It is
him!"
she whispered. She reached out a hand tentatively and touched Raipur's face.

"Who?" Bass held a glow ball close to Raipur's face, and it also illuminated Emwanna's features.

The two stared intently at each other in disbelief. It
couldn't
be her! Raipur thought. Then he smiled.

"He is the one who spared our lives when these men killed my people," Emwanna said. "Let him go, Charles."

Bass looked at the two of them. "Well, I'll be go to hell," he said as he cut Raipur loose.

CHAPTER 19

Dominic de Tomas sat at his desk, reviewing marriage applications submitted by the men of the Special Group. Every man of the SG who wished to marry had to obtain the personal approval of the leader of the SPK—Dominic de Tomas. Marriage was encouraged for the men of the Special Group, after a certain age, to ensure that future generations of recruits would be produced who would carry on the values of their fathers. It was also intended to provide the stability of family life for the older members of the organization.

But marriage notwithstanding, the men of the Special Group were encouraged to father children, providing the mothers were women of sound genetic material. Any offspring born out of wedlock were raised by the Fountain of Life, a special institution devoted to the care of such children. The program had been in effect long enough that now some of the male children, devoted to the black uniform, were willing recruits for the Special Group. The females, likewise thoroughly indoctrinated and devoted to the party, were eager to marry SG men or to have their children. The offer the Fountain of Life held out to young single women—"that every unmarried woman who longs for a child can confidently turn to the Fountain of Life, which will supply her with a ‘breeding helper’"—had been eagerly accepted by women throughout Kingdom.