Starfist: Lazarus Rising (3 page)

"Sir!" It was Senior Sword Raipur. He crouched beside Ben Loman and whispered in his ear so his voice would not be picked up by the men who were quietly taking up positions to either side of them along the rockfall. "We don't know how many of them there are down there," he hissed.

Ben Loman switched off his throat mike and turned to his noncom sharply.

"Count them!" he snapped, gesturing toward the fire with his head.

Raipur's night optics clearly revealed several dozen, possibly as many as sixty figures squatting about the fire. "They outnumber us, sir."

"We have the element of surprise," Ben Loman insisted, his voice edged with the exasperation he felt at his senior sword's despicable display of overcaution.

"First Acolyte, I have seen the demons close up and those don't look at all like them. Besides, Acolyte,
it is not our job to engage the enemy
! We should hold this position and wait for reinforcements!" Raipur was breathing heavily. Ben Loman just stared at the noncom wordlessly. Raipur felt compelled to go on: "I'd say they're refugees from somewhere. They may have intelligence we can use. If memory serves, this region was inhabited by several animist tribes, people too few in number and too insignificant for anyone to bother about. Let me go forward and make contact with them."

Ben Loman's mouth dropped open in surprise. He was speechless for a moment.

"Go forward? We lose the element of surprise and you get yourself killed?" He shook his head violently. Then chanting came to them on the quiet mountain air. The sound of the voices caused a chill to run down Ben Loman's spine. The others heard it too. "Is that the voice of mortal man, Senior Sword?" Ben Loman asked triumphantly. He switched his mike on. "On my command, at a hundred meters, fire when ready!" He turned to the noncom. "Demons? Pagans? I don't care who they are, let God sort them out!"

Great Shaman Hadu's body seemed to fly apart as several fléchette weapons hit him at the same instant. The Pilipili Magna froze in unbelieving horror for an instant, and then as the soldiers' weapons zeroed in on the figures crouching about the fire, they realized what was happening and scrambled in panic for cover, some toward caves in the rock wall, others into the high grass on the edge of the spring that was their water source.

"On your feet!
Forward!
" Ben Loman screamed. The soldiers descended on the camp in a ragged line, firing as they advanced. Suddenly, in that first volley, the weeks of hardship and danger drained away and they felt like giants squashing hideous insects before them. They shouted and laughed and screamed, firing with abandon into the fleeing mob of Pilipili Magna, harmless farmers frightened half out of their wits, not a single firearm among them. But to Ben Loman's men, the figures flopping and twisting in their optics were demons, ugly snouts, beady eyes, rending teeth and all. No mistake. Revenge was theirs at last!

First Acolyte Ben Loman's eyes blazed with fury, and spittle flecked his lips as he fired and fired and fired. What exhilaration! Demons scattered and fell before his onslaught. Before he knew it he was standing at the campfire. Twisted bodies lay all about. An elderly man—for now he could clearly see that his targets had been human beings, not demons—was moaning nearby, his legs neatly sliced off just above the knees. Without thinking, Ben Loman killed him with one shot to the head. Whooping and shouting, his men pursued the remaining Pilipili Magna into the dead end of the canyon, shooting them down without mercy. Gradually the screams and moans of the victims ceased.

Senior Sword Raipur was horrified at what he was seeing. He knew these men, had lived with them for months. They'd been disciplined soldiers, but now they'd turned into animals. He shouted for them to stop and regroup, but nobody was listening. Men were throwing the bodies into the fire! He rushed in and dragged a woman out, screaming for the soldiers to stop. No use, she was already dead. He whirled on the acolyte. "Tell them to stop!" he shouted. "What are you doing? Stop them, stop them!" The noncom was almost in tears as he screamed at his commander.

"On me! Everyone on me!" Ben Loman shouted into the command net at last, his breath coming in heavy gasps. Despite the cool mountain night air, he was perspiring freely. His legs felt rubbery. He steadied himself. He looked down at the old man as if seeing him for the first time. Damn! They weren't demons after all.

Gradually his men came into the firelight. "Senior Sword, are the men all accounted for?" he asked Raipur.

Raipur glared ominously at his platoon leader. He had not fired his weapon, and what he saw in the diminishing firelight sickened him to the depths of his soul. "They were
not
demons," he answered, his voice hard and flat with anger.

"So what? They are infidels, pagans, life that is not even worthy of life!
Are all the
men accounted for, Senior Sword?
" Raipur was silent, continuing to glare at his commander. "I asked you a question, Senior Sword," Ben Loman said in his normal voice.

Raipur glanced about him quickly at the troopers gathered around the fire. "Yeah.

Sir."

Ben Loman removed his helmet and wiped the perspiration off his forehead. "All right, men. Spread out, look for survivors. Use your infras. We have to finish the job. You." He turned to Senior Sword Raipur, "You take two men and search up there." He gestured toward the canyon wall. "A bunch of them ran that way, probably into caves. Find them. You know what to do."

"Acolyte, if any of the survivors are armed, we could be ambushed. Let me take—"

"No! You take two men, swordie,
you
go up there,
you
flush them out, understand?" the acolyte sneered. "It'll give you a chance to fire your weapon."

Reluctantly, Raipur selected two men—he'd seen them tossing bodies into the fire—and started out toward the canyon wall. Along the way they discovered several refugees who'd only been slightly wounded. His men killed them without hesitation.

No longer worried about being fired on themselves, the soldiers used their powerful hand-held torches to light the way. The brilliant beams illuminated two dark openings in the rock face. "You two take the one on the left, I'll take the one on the right." The two soldiers looked at Raipur questioningly. "Go on! You know what to do. I'll be all right."

A few meters into the cave mouth Raipur turned off his light and switched on his infras. Nothing, thank God. He switched the light back on and proceeded farther back into the cave. Everywhere there was evidence that people had been living there—discarded clothing and personal items, fire pits, sleeping places. Raipur shook his head sadly. He switched off the light and stood there in total darkness, listening intently. From somewhere far ahead came the steady, hollow sound of dripping water. Then he heard rocks falling as if someone was scrabbling for cover, and his heart skipped a beat. He took the safety off his rifle. Innocent refugees or not, he was not about to take any chances. He switched his light back on. The scrabbling grew louder and then stopped entirely. He switched on his infras. There it was! Fifteen meters off to his left, a faint glow behind a small boulder.

Raipur grinned. He fired several bursts back into the cave but away from the faint glow that represented someone hiding behind the boulder. The fléchettes shattered against the cave wall in a brilliant pyrotechnic display, suffusing the cave with their pale light. His headset crackled suddenly but nothing came through. Evidently, the rock blocked the radio transmission. He grinned again.

Behind the boulder, cowering in a small ball, lay a young woman, a tiny bundle clutched tightly to her breast. In the brilliant light of Raipur's torch she squeezed her eyes closed and turned her back to him, putting her body between the soldier and her baby, anticipating the shot she assumed was coming and offering the infant the only protection she could give it.

The woman shivered in her rags; not from cold, but from fear. She moaned quietly, anticipating the shot that would end the life of her and her child. Raipur slung his rifle and unfastened a sundry pack from his equipment harness.

"Can you understand me?" he asked. The woman continued to moan and shiver.

He nudged her with his foot. "Can you understand what I'm saying?" he asked again.

"Answer me!" he commanded. The woman nodded. "Take this. Food in here.

Understand? Something to make fire and keep you and your baby warm. Stay here until we're gone, understand? Don't move, don't make a sound." He pulled a ground sheet out of the pack and covered the pair with it. If Ben Loman sent someone else into the cave to double check, the sheet would prevent their being picked up on his infras.

"Remember: no noise, no move, you understand? Be quiet, like death, or you
will
die." He stood there, looking down on the pitiful pair. "Lady, I'm finished, you hear?

I'm putting in for a transfer before that
asshole
can fire me." He paused. Evidently she didn't care about his personal problems. "Woman, put your trust in God, the protector of orphans and widows."

Outside, the other two soldiers were waiting. "We got some!" one gushed. "They were hiding back in there! We cut them up like sausages!" He began to laugh in a high-pitched cackle.

"We lit them up," the other added. "Swordie, we saw flashes from your cave and tried to get you on the horn. You must've got some too, huh?"

"You bet," Raipur answered. "Let's go back and tell the acolyte. We're all done up here."

Hours later the woman removed the ground sheet the soldier had given her. Dimly, the light of day illuminated the cave entrance far from where she lay hidden. There was no sound save the steady dripping of water. Were the killers gone? Wrapping the ground sheet about her like a cloak, she gathered up her child and the sundry pack and stumbled toward the light. Her name was Emwana Haramu, and her child, a boy, was named Chisi.

CHAPTER 3

Interstellar communications were slow. Messages couldn't travel any faster than a starship or drone traveled through Beam Space—some six and a fraction light-years per day. When a message sent via starship went from the point of origin of a message to the message's destination, it didn't necessarily travel in a straight line. The message might travel on several ships before it got where it was going, and could take a year or more to get there. If no starship routing was available in reasonable time, or the message was time sensitive, it was sent by drone—if a drone was available and the cost justifiable. The Confederation Diplomatic Service, the military, and the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation, and planetary governments, along with the larger interstellar corporations, were generally the only entities that used drones for interstellar communication.

Second Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs Lumrhanda Ronstedt knew this when he overstepped his authority a skosh by stamping a request for Marines from the Confederation Ambassador to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles "Approved, Office of the President." After queuing it via fast channel for the offices of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—he hadn't been prepared to exceed his authority far enough to queue it "urgent"—he made an entry in his tickler and forgot about the matter.

Ronstedt did such a good job of forgetting that he had no idea why his tickler saw fit to remind of it nearly a year later, when the first report came in from the Marines dispatched to Kingdom. He looked at the header, saw that the message was from the Commander, 34th FIST deployed to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles. He recognized the name of the planet, of course—the history of the lesser human worlds was a hobby of his—but had no idea what a Marine FIST was doing there. Being a methodical person who disliked going into anything without as much background information as possible—except when it suited his fancy to see what foolishness humanity was up to next—he went back to his tickler to see if he'd put any notes in it to clue him as to what this was about.

There
were
notes, and
bing!
he remembered. An "urgent" dispatch had come from Friendly Credence, a dead-end diplomat with no experience beyond diplomatic circles, who was Confederation ambassador to Kingdom. Credence had put in a request for Marines to put down a peasant revolt. Absurdly enough, the ambassador had claimed the peasants were armed with weapons more powerful than anything in the arsenal of the Kingdom army. Even more absurdly, he claimed—well, "hinted"

might be the better word—that the revolting peasants were actually an alien invasion!

Nonsense!
Everybody
knew
H. sapiens
was the only sentience in the known universe. Ronstedt made a quick check in
The Atlas of the Populated and Explored
Planets of Human Space, Nineteenth Edition
, and saw that Credence had been replaced by Jayben Spears. He looked up Spears in the
Blue Line of Ambassadors,
Ministers, and Consuls
, puzzled for a few moments over Spears's checkered career, and concluded he was either an incompetent or a troublemaker who'd been shunted aside to a nowhere backwater to get him out of the hair of his betters.

This should be interesting, he thought. He smiled and settled back to read the dispatch, despite the fact that it was classified "Ultra Secret, Need to Know" and he wasn't cleared to have the need. He was confident he would get a few chuckles out of the human follies he would read about in the dispatch.

A paragraph into it, his smile was gone. He began swallowing and massaging his suddenly constricted throat. Two paragraphs in, he used a tissue to pat his suddenly damp forehead. A paragraph later a bead of perspiration actually did pop out on his forehead. By the time he finished reading the three pages, sweat was dripping from his brow and flowing from his armpits, his eyes were wide and his pupils dilated, he was mildly hyperventilating, and his heart rate was elevated.

There was nothing remotely amusing in the dispatch. There
was
an alien invasion on Kingdom, and the Marines had suffered heavy casualties and were hard pressed to hold.