Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  Conorado mentally kicked himself. He should’ve known someone would be monitoring the system. He was embarrassed. “Well, I’m sorry, Miss Lenfen,” he smiled, “but I really did want to know when we’ll reach Siluria.”

  Lenfen’s cheeks reddened. “Well, I don’t mean to sound bitchy, Captain,” her cheeks got even redder, “but you know, Minerva’s my responsibility and, well, I feel, um, ‘proprietary’ toward her. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Sure. When’s Hank, er, Captain Tuit due back?”

  Lenfen smiled as she handed Conorado a steaming mug of coffee. “We call him Hank all the time. He’s not feeling well and is resting in his stateroom.”

  “Well, I can’t sleep. Mind if I keep you company for a while?” He had not noticed before, but even in her formless jumpsuit, Lenfen was a remarkably pretty woman. “My name is Lewis but I prefer Lew.” He held out his hand.

  “I’m Jennifer but everyone calls me Jenny.” She took his hand.

  Her hand in his, Conorado was suddenly and poignantly reminded of his Marta. “Well,” he said, squeezing her soft hand briefly and then letting it go, “where are you from?”

  Marta Conorado decided to spend a few days in New Oslo. She had not made up her mind what to do about her marriage to Lew. The longer she remained alone in their apartment, the more confused she became. One moment she started to call the flight operations office at Mainside to book herself out on the next Earthbound vessel, but the next instant she wasn’t sure she could do it. So she decided to visit New Oslo and forget about everything for a while. The Conorados were not rich by any means, but they had saved, and she could afford to luxuriate for a few days in the finest hotels and restaurants the capital city had to offer. She might even go skiing.

  The Family Morale and Recreation office at Mainside had regular flights to New Oslo and other places on Thorsfinni’s World, so with little effort Marta was able to book herself out the following morning.

  The Trondelag Arms had a nice room available when Marta checked in. She was familiar with New Oslo from when they had lived there. Of the many places the Conorados had been stationed as a family, she liked New Oslo best. The climate, temperate in the summer months, was always bracing, and the ’Finnis, an industrious but fun-loving people, always made good company. Besides, the pace of life in New Oslo was invigorating, everyone intent upon the business of the day, working hard and enjoying it, but then when it came time to relax, they did so vigorously. Just the atmosphere to take her mind off her marital troubles for a while, she thought.

  Since her flight arrived in the early afternoon, Marta decided to try a hot bath before dining at her favorite restaurant, the Svalbard. As she soaked she dozed. At one point she thought Lew had come into the room. She awakened with a start. She reflected wryly that she just couldn’t get him out of her mind.

  The meal was excellent, served with the flair that made the Svalbard one of the prime dining spots in the city.

  Outside, she huddled into her furs against the penetrating cold. But she felt warm and content. She had not once thought of Lew during the meal. She started walking back up the street toward her hotel when someone seized her by the arm. Startled, she whirled to see a man, a big man, who began shoving her down the street. His grip tightened and hurt her. She opened her mouth in angry protest.

  “Keep quiet and keep moving,” the man said in the ’Finni dialect.

  During the time she had lived in New Oslo, Marta had picked up quite a bit of the language, but her first reaction to his words, which she understood perfectly, was to blurt out in English, “What the hell . . . ?”

  From behind them came shouting. “Halt! Or we will shoot!” Marta assumed it was a police officer. Passersby slipped and slid in the snow to get out of their way, and bystanders shouted and pointed at the pair as they stumbled quickly down the sidewalk and into an alley.

  The man only tightened his grip and shoved her along more forcefully. She felt something cold and hard pressed into the flesh just behind her left ear. “Keep moving and keep still,” the man said in unaccented English, “or I’ll kill you too.”

  While the City of God sect modeled itself on the Puritans of the seventeenth century, they had no prejudices against the technology of the twenty-fifth century. Entirely the opposite, in fact. The memory of Cotton Mather, one of the most famous of all the American Puritans, was highly revered by the City of God. Mather, a member of the British Royal Society of his day, wrote prolifically on natural science and philosophy and was respected by his non-Puritan contemporaries for his wide-ranging knowledge and active curiosity about the things of the visible world. Subsequent generations came to despise him and Puritanism in general because of what he and they believed about the invisible world, which to Mather and his coreligionists consisted of demons, devils, familiars, and witches, all of which filled the air of New England, whispering into the ears of unsuspecting believers the joys of serving the devil.

  While the leaders of the City of God no longer believed in witches, they had a deep and abiding faith in such things as nuclear physics.

  The bomb the Army of Zion’s team on Siluria had built under the supervision of their leader, Epher Benediction, was a very simple affair but more than capable of rendering the spectacular results he wanted. It was easy to obtain the necessary components on a place like Siluria. That particular device consisted of one kilogram of Plutonium 239 encased in a one-inch-thick sphere or tamper of Uranium 238. The bomb itself was a hollow cylinder containing two elements of fissionable material. Its total weight was a bit more than ten kilograms, or less than twenty-five pounds. Upon detonation, the resulting explosion would be equivalent to thousands of tons of conventional explosive; not much by the standards of the destructive weapons of the day, in fact quite primitive, but set off in the Cambria’s propulsion unit, the explosion would light up the night sky of the entire Western Hemisphere of Old Earth. That was what Epher Benediction and his companions wanted.

  The five men who were about to sacrifice their lives to destroy the SS Cambria boarded her without incident. They carried few bags, but those they did carry were heavy. “We are miners,” one named Jesse Gospel told Miss Lenfen, “and we go where the work is, so we’re used to carrying all our possessions with us.” He smiled broadly through his thick black beard, and Jennifer smiled back warmly. “We have found new jobs on Earth,” he concluded. Neither Jennifer nor anyone else on the Cambria over the next few days stopped to think that there were no more mining operations on Earth.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  FIFTEEN

  For several more hours, the infantry Marines moving deeper into the swamp had no further contact with what nearly all of them by then believed were Skinks. Night fell. Itches that had eased or ceased resumed as new, nocturnal insectoids found their way inside the Marines’ uniforms. In the middle distance, night predators stalked and cried, in triumph or frustration. Their prey shrieked death agonies when they were caught, screamed relief or indignation if they escaped.

  Commander van Winkle called a halt at sundown. He didn’t stop his battalion’s advance because his Marines would be blind—their light-gathering shields overcame most of the difficulties of night movement. He stopped because his men were tired and needed to rest. Stopping for the night didn’t mean a full bivouac, with everyone in defensive positions and one man in three awake, watching while the others slept. Instead, each of the three companies would have two squads out on patrol. Half of the remaining Marines could sleep while the rest were ready to fight defensively—or go to the aid of the patrols.

  “Listen up, second squad,” Sergeant Bladon said.

  The nine Marines under his command maintained their scattered positions, listening to their squad leader over the squad circuit on their helmet comms. “We’ve got a short one, we’ll only be out there for three hours.” Nobody responded with the caveat, “If we don’t run into any trouble.” They understood that.

  “The string-o
f-pearls picked up something that might be an anomaly about a klick from here,” Bladon continued. “We’re going to scope it out.”

  “Might be an anomaly” was an apt description of the difficulty the string-of-pearls had in detecting and interpreting anything under the swamp’s canopy.

  “Take a look.” Bladon transmitted his HUD map to his squad. Each man examined it in his own display. The map didn’t show much; some waterways, their route out and the different route back, a mark for the location of the “might be an anomaly,” and three rally points.

  The map didn’t show paths or animal tracks, didn’t show the lesser rills, and the elevation lines were mostly incomplete. There were few landmarks they could use to navigate on. They would be totally dependent on Sergeant Bladon’s UPUD, Mark III, to tell them where they were and to find their way back. Nobody liked that—the UPUD communicated with the string-of-pearls, and they knew how much trouble SoP had seeing through the canopy. They were also aware of Gunny Bass’s distrust of it, and some of them had been with him when the Mark II had failed. Besides, equipment often failed in hostile environments. And the Swamp of Perdition, with all its water and muck, was definitely a hostile environment.

  When he thought they’d had enough time to study the map and its implications, Bladon asked, “Any questions?”

  “What’s the anomaly?” Doyle asked.

  Bladon suppressed a sigh. “We don’t know, that’s why it’s an anomaly. The string-of-pearls saw something that nobody could identify. We’re going to find out what it is. Any other questions?” There were none. “Let’s move it out.”

  Without a sound, Schultz rose to his feet and headed out through the company’s night perimeter. Everybody knew he’d take the point.

  “Me, Chan, Linsman,” Bladon said, finishing the patrol route order; he followed second fire team, followed by third, with first bringing up the rear.

  They all used their light gatherers; the night was impenetrable without them. Vision was strange, eerie. Distance didn’t dim it and there were few deep shadows under foliage; everyplace was equally dark. It affected depth perception—the changes in light intensity and quality that normally gave clues to distance were absent. The ground, what could be seen through the foliage, rippled in shallow swells like the surface of a still ocean. Line of sight was restricted by the denseness of growth; in spots it spiked to forty meters, and was often less than five. The strangeness of vision had little effect on the Marines; all but two of them had combat experience with night vision. Of those two, in Corporal Chan’s fire team PFC Longfellow had used the device in Boot Camp training, but that wasn’t too far in his past. The one who had trouble with it was Corporal Doyle, whose Boot Camp night-vision training was more than ten years behind him.

  Schultz kept the HUD map tacked away in a corner of his vision, and without ever looking directly at it, followed the slowly moving dot that showed Sergeant Bladon’s position. As long as the dot was near the line that marked their assigned route, they were close enough on course. Schultz wasn’t going to be fanatical about sticking to the route; there were hummocks to go around, thick tangles of growth to bypass, waterways too deep or with bottoms too soft, which needed to be circled. Like any patrol route drawn by someone who hadn’t walked the ground, it had stretches that were too difficult or too hazardous. Schultz was cautious and deliberate in his advance.

  Mud sucked at their feet, strained to keep them in place, almost like an organism that wanted to hold them, digest them, absorb their nutrients. Prey browsed or foraged closer to a few men than to the entire battalion, predators stalked and cried closer. Water, evaporated from the streams during the day, condensed, slid down twigs and leaves and then plopped to the ground. The night seemed filled with more sounds than during the day. Or maybe the lack of daytime sights caused a subjective increase.

  Corporal Doyle was jumpy. All the sounds he didn’t understand had him imagining monsters creeping close. Water drops plop-plopped on his helmet like Chinese water torture. His feet felt the slime of the mud through his boots. Curiously, he barely noticed the swarming insectoids that had bothered him so much during the day. He kept thinking about the anomaly. Having no idea what it was, it bothered him. Surely they had some hint. Was it a structure? Did body heat show up? A heat signature that might indicate an engine of some sort? Was it a blank spot, like the string-of-pearls being blocked? Was it possible to block the multiple sensors and scanners of a string-of-pearls? Surely they knew something!

  And he couldn’t see anything! Well, he could see, but the light was so strange. It was like walking through a mist with lights coming into it everywhere from so many directions that there was no real point of origin; everything looked exactly the same. Not exactly the same—he could distinguish shapes and some colors—but nothing cast shadows, and he couldn’t tell where anything was. He had to look at this tree and then past it to that bush and back and at both at the same time to figure out which was closer, which was farther. And then how far away were they and how far from each other? What was going to happen if they got in a firefight and Sergeant Bladon ordered volley fire? How was he supposed to guess how far ten meters was, or twenty or thirty, to put his plasma bolts on line with the others?

  Every cry of a night hunter and screech of captured prey made him jump. Small muscles began to twitch involuntarily and his breath came ever more shallow.

  If he’d thought it through a little further, Corporal Doyle would have realized that all he had to do with volley fire was aim at a point along the line everyone else was firing on. And if he could see who he was shooting at, he wouldn’t have to worry about range because the blaster was a line-of-sight weapon over normal infantry ranges—simply point and shoot and don’t worry about making sight adjustments. Besides, as odd as the light might be, he really could see, even better than he could with the unaided eye in the light of swampy day.

  They made good time, though the going was difficult. Schultz had to make sure every hollow, every depression he couldn’t see into at a distance, was untenanted. He needed to see the back side of every object behind which an enemy could lie in ambush. He had to watch that his footing was firm, that neither he nor the Marines following would slip in loose muck or trod in quicksand. He had to avoid walking on drifted leaves and twigs that might conceal a sinkhole or make unwanted noise. Before entering the water of a rill or stream, he had to assure himself that nobody was opposite, waiting for the Marines to expose themselves. And he couldn’t walk through the tangles and sheets of foliage that dangled and dripped from the trees. Somehow, he always found a way that didn’t require a path to be hacked or broken.

  The HUD showed they were less than fifty meters from the anomaly when Sergeant Bladon called a halt. They were a little more than an hour into the patrol. He spoke softly into his helmet comm.

  “Rat, take over. Hammer, you and me take a closer look.”

  “Aye aye,” Corporal Linsman replied, then began his own soft commands to establish a hasty defensive position.

  Schultz didn’t reply, he simply waited for Bladon to reach him before advancing in a low crouch. The two were crawling by the time they reached their destination. Bladon looked around, checked his HUD, checked the UPUD, looked around again.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  Schultz grunted softly. He didn’t see anything out of what passed for ordinary in the swamp.

  After they watched for a few minutes longer, Bladon called in a report. “According to the UPUD, we’re at the anomaly. Nothing’s here.”

  “Any marks on the ground to indicate anybody’s been there recently?” asked Lieutenant Humphrey, who took the report himself.

  “Negative. Looks like nobody’s ever been here.”

  “Set an ambush for half an hour, then come back in.”

  “Roger,” Bladon replied. Then to Schultz, “Let’s go.” He began to rise to a crouch to head back, stopped when he realized Schultz hadn’t moved. “What do you have?”
/>   Schultz didn’t reply. Using his infra, Bladon saw Schultz’s head slowly rotate, looking around.

  Bladon sank back to his knees, one hand on the mud, the other holding his blaster parallel to the ground. He slid his infra into place and scanned his surroundings. No heat signatures showed. He listened and realized it was several minutes since he’d last heard the cries of hunting or hunted animals. He glanced at the UPUD, but it didn’t show any movement.

  Abruptly, Schultz stood and raised all his shields. He breathed deeply, let the air fill his nostrils, roll across his tongue. He slowly twisted around until he was facing back the way they’d come.

  “Skinks,” he said, and headed back at a fast walk, gloved hand on his blaster’s firing lever.

  Bladon didn’t ask any questions. If Schultz said there were Skinks behind them, in the direction of the rest of the squad, he wasn’t going to doubt him no matter what the UPUD said—Schultz was more likely to be right.

  Halfway to the squad’s position, Schultz stuck out an arm, and Bladon would have run into it if he hadn’t been maintaining proper night movement interval. Schultz slowly swiveled to his right, lowering himself as he did. He raised his left hand and shook it to let the sleeve drop to expose his forearm, then pointed in that direction. Bladon turned to where Schultz pointed and lowered himself to a knee. He looked through his infra.

  Twenty meters away, where it formed the apex of an isosceles triangle with him and where he thought the nearest man in the squad was, he picked up a heat signature. It seemed large enough to be a small man, but was too dim for human body temperature.

  “Shit,” he swore to himself. He’d seen exactly that signature before—on Waygone. It had to be a Skink. He raised his infra and looked through the light gatherer. A Skink was turning, bringing the nozzle of its weapon to bear on him.

  “SKINKS!” he shouted, and fired simultaneously.