Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  “Jay, you old reprobate!” Brigadier Sturgeon replied. The two embraced and slapped each other hardily on the back.

  “I haven’t been on station very long, Ted, so all I know is that old Doc Friendly had called for help. I didn’t know they were sending in the good old 34th FIST! Damn! How’re old Dean and Claypoole?”

  Sturgeon laughed. “They’re around here somewhere. I thought Creadence was ambassador here, Jay. Damn, it is good to see you again!”

  “He was recalled just recently, lucky bastard, and I volunteered for the job because I need the money. Oh, excuse me, Ted, this is Prentiss Carlisle, my chief-of-station.” Carlisle and Sturgeon shook hands. “Prentiss has only been here a little longer than I. He replaced a man who was killed in an accident.”

  “ ‘The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.’ ” Carlisle grinned weakly as he quoted the ancient saying.

  “It will be, sir,” Sturgeon replied. “How’d your predecessor die?”

  Carlisle shrugged. “A vehicular accident, we think. He was out gathering information on the, uh, situation here, and his landcar must have run off the road. He and his driver were both killed.”

  “Where are the local authorities?” Sturgeon asked. The two Confederation diplomats were the only people in the welcoming committee. Sturgeon hadn’t expected pomp and ceremony, but it was normal for representatives of the local government to greet the commander of a Marine force when it made planetfall.

  Spears tamped down a grimace before it could appear on his face. “I imagine they’re in conference, Ted.” Acrimonious haggling was more like it, he thought. The last time they’d deigned to speak to him, it was obvious the theocrats were fighting over how much or little to tell the Marines about the situation. That, and how much of the planet to allow them access to. And how much contact the off-worlders could have with their own military. The only thing on which the theocrats seemed to be in agreement was that contact between the Marines and the civilian population should be as limited as possible. But they disagreed on what constituted “as little as possible.”

  Sturgeon kept his expression neutral and his voice level. It wasn’t his position to criticize local governments. “We are here. What do they expect us to do?”

  “They said it’s my responsibility to quarter you,” Spears said, then added apologetically, “But that presents a bit of a problem. Interstellar City isn’t big enough to accommodate a FIST and your follow-on reinforcements.”

  “Jay, we’re it.” Sturgeon said.

  Carlisle swallowed. Suddenly he wished he knew more about the military. For the first time, he looked at Sturgeon, really looked at him. The brigadier’s face appeared friendly enough, but there was steel in his expression, and his eyes looked like they never missed any detail of his surroundings. At first glance he seemed relaxed, but Carlisle now noticed an underlying tension, a readiness to move and act on an instant’s notice. The Marine leader was a very strong man, accustomed to command and action. He also gave an impression of high intelligence. Carlisle suspected he was more than capable of seeing far beneath surface details. Then the last part of what Sturgeon said registered.

  “H-How many men did you bring, Brigadier?” he asked.

  “One thousand Marines, with supporting arms, of course.”

  “Only a thousand men?” he asked.

  “Mr. Carlisle, as Ambassador Spears can tell you, a Marine FIST is a most versatile and potent weapon. I assure you, we are more than are needed to deal with a simple peasant rebellion.” Before Carlisle could ask what Sturgeon meant by a peasant rebellion, Sturgeon turned to Spears. “Jay, I don’t need for you to quarter my Marines. All I need here is an office suite and facilities for my command and control center, say twenty-five of us. The rest of the FIST will be in the field.”

  “Yup,” Spears replied. He turned to Carlisle. “Prentiss, if we were facing a million-man army equipped with the latest weapons, well, the Confederation would’ve sent us two thousand Marines to do the job.” Both he and Sturgeon roared with laughter. Carlisle smiled but his face turned a light shade of red.

  “By ‘in the field,’ I assume you mean on operations?” Prentiss asked.

  “That’s why we’re here, yes.” In his peripheral vision Sturgeon noticed a landcar draw up.

  “How will you know where to send your Marines?” Prentiss asked. Spears meanwhile was silent, smiling cryptically. He knew enough not to ask such questions.

  “That’s one reason I wanted to meet the local authorities.”

  “Well, Ted, you’re about to do just that,” Spears said.

  The landcar stopped and four ornately uniformed men climbed out.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” the lead, most ornately uniformed soldier said as he approached, “I see the Confederation Marines are arriving.”

  Spears turned to him and brightened. “Archbishop General Lambsblood! I’m glad to see you.”

  Lambsblood spared Sturgeon a curious glance, wondering who he was, but kept his attention on the ambassador. “Have you word on when the Marine commander will arrive?”

  Sturgeon studied the Kingdomite general during that brief exchange. His uniform was a dusky orange, almost brown tunic over black trousers with silver seam stripes. Gold aiguillettes adorned both shoulders, and an electric blue sash slashed across his chest. A mass of medals was mounted on his left chest, and other ribbons and badges crowded his right. A sidearm in a highly polished holster rode his hip.

  “Archbishop General Lambsblood,” Spears said without revealing the embarrassment he felt for the Kingdomite commander, “may I present Brigadier Theodosius Sturgeon, Confederation Marine Corps. He is, I might add, the fightin’est goddamned Marine in the Corps.”

  Lambsblood blanched at the vulgar language the ambassador chose to use. Spears had already gotten off to a bad start with the Kingdomites. As soon as he’d realized how much they hated profanity, he’d started to use it on special occasions, to deflate stuffed shirts in their hierarchy. This was such an occasion, in his view.

  Lambsblood blinked, then looked at Sturgeon. The Marine’s uniform was dull green, originally designed to blend into the shadows of grassland or forest. Other than the rank insignia on the collar tips of the shirt, the only adornment was a rampant eagle clutching a globe that floated on a starstream, embroidered in black thread on his left shirt pocket. Lambsblood recognized it as the Confederation Marine Corps emblem. What manner of commander is this that he dresses so plainly? Lambsblood wondered. How can he command the respect of his men if he doesn’t look like a commander?

  “Brigadier,” Lambsblood said with a cool but polite nod. The Confederation only sent a brigadier, not a general? he thought. Do they not take our situation seriously?

  “General Lambsblood.” Sturgeon saluted and held it until Lambsblood returned it.

  “You are the Confederation commander for this mission?”

  “That’s right, sir.” Sturgeon smiled inwardly at the dismay Lambsblood wasn’t fully successful at keeping off his face.

  “And he’s a veritable ass-kicker!” Ambassador Spears crowed. Lambsblood blinked again and tried to ignore the ambassador.

  “How many days will it take for your force to land and prepare for action?”

  “The FIST will all be planetside within an hour. The ground forces will be ready to move out within minutes of the time the last element has landed. The air squadron will take just a little longer to be ready for action.” He glanced at his watch; it was 1017 hours local time. Kingdom used an adjusted twenty-four hour clock, even though its rotation period was nearly twenty-five hours standard. Sturgeon’s watch was calibrated to Kingdom time. “The entire FIST will be operational by fifteen hours.”

  “So fast? How few are you?” Lambsblood sharply shook his head. “No. You said the FIST. You have only one FIST?”

  “That should be more than enough, General.”

  Lambsblood’s face darkened. “Brigadier, I know the reputation of the
Confederation Marines. I was a very junior officer the last time the Confederation sent Marines to our aid, so I know that reputation is well-deserved. But the enemy we face has powerful weapons, weapons we’ve never encountered before.” He shook his head and looked away. “They have weapons I’ve never heard of. They rendered four of my divisions and eight squadrons inoperable in a battle that lasted ten minutes. They can destroy your entire FIST in moments.”

  Sturgeon nodded. “I understand your concern, General. But the Marines don’t stand still. Today’s FIST is much more potent than it was a generation ago.”

  “You are too few,” Lambsblood said harshly. “The Confederation has seen fit to waste your lives for nothing. You and your entire force will be killed as soon as you encounter the enemy.” He spun on his heel and strode toward his landcar with his retinue in tow. Before they reached it, a soldier jumped from the landcar and raced to the general. He reported, then Lambsblood stood still for a moment, looking off into the distance. The three staff officers exchanged glances and looked anxious. Lambsblood abruptly spun about and marched back to Sturgeon.

  “Brigadier,” he said as briskly as he’d walked, “you say your Marines are ready. If they are, I have your first mission. I just received a priority message. An outpost of the Lord’s Army has been attacked. There are no details available save it sounds as though the outpost may have been wiped out. It’s possible that survivors are holding out. How fast can your Marines get there?”

  “Where is it?” Sturgeon was signaling for his principal staff to join him even as he asked the question.

  Lambsblood grinned wickedly. “Six thousand kilometers almost due west of here. On a mid-ocean island where there had been no previous reports of hostile activity.”

  “Give me the coordinates.” Sturgeon turned to Commander Usner, the FIST operations officer. “Divert the next wave to the coordinates General Lambsblood gives you.”

  Usner aye-ayed and got on his comm, issuing the orders to divert the wave of six Essays that was already descending to make planetfall. Lambsblood had his staff provide the coordinates.

  “See to security,” Sturgeon told Commander Daana, the FIST intelligence officer. Then to the Kingdom commander: “Six thousand kilometers? That’s the dawn terminator.”

  Lambsblood agreed. “A dawn attack. Classic.”

  “Do you want to join us?”

  “How many of us do you have room for?”

  “Assign a Dragon to them,” Sturgeon said to Lieutenant Quaticatl, his aide.

  “Aye aye, sir.” Quaticatl spoke into his comm unit and a nearby Dragon roared to life and flowed to them on its air cushion. “It can hold twenty combat-ready Marines, sir,” he said to Lambsblood.

  Lambsblood nodded. He signaled to his communications technician and gestured toward the dropped ramp of the Dragon.

  “Jay?” Sturgeon turned to Spears and indicated he could board with the general’s entourage.

  “Oh, Ted,” he drawled, “I don’t think so. You almost got me killed the last time, as I recall. No, Prentiss and I will earn our pay the diplomatic way, by sitting on our fat asses and composing flowery goddamned reports back to headquarters.”

  Lambsblood raised an eyebrow. What kind of people were these two? A commander who dressed like a private soldier, called the ambassador by his first name like some old drinking partner, and a Confederation ambassador who—who used the language of a common soldier? He shook his head. What he needed was professional help, not a pair of comedians.

  Sturgeon and the necessary members of his staff boarded his Dragon. The Dragons roared into the gaping maw of an Essay.

  “Schultz, Mark One! Doyle, infra,” Corporal Kerr barked as he slid his magnifier shield into place. It was two minutes since the first Essay of the diverted second wave landed a kilometer from the attacked outpost and its Dragons roared off to approach to within a few hundred meters. The infantrymen were already spreading out in defensive positions around the Kingdomite outpost. Kerr’s fire team was near the end of a windbreak treeline half a kilometer from where their Essay had made planetfall. Following Kerr’s orders, Corporal Doyle was scanning the landscape before them in the infrared, looking for the heat signals of warm bodies. Lance Corporal Schultz was using his naked eyes. Kerr himself was using the telescopic magnifier shield in his helmet to look farther and see smaller things. Long practice had taught the Marines that the combination of viewing methods was most effective.

  An ancient ocean-floor volcano had birthed the island, Trinity. Eons of wind and rain since it went dormant had eroded broken, sharp-edged rock surface into gravel, then sand. Wind- and avian-borne seeds and spores in their turn mulched the sand into dirt. Eventually, lush vegetation had taken hold. The only animate life native to Trinity were insect analogs. Humans had imported all the larger animals that populated it, and they’d imported many, both farm and game. The local economy was the same as the rest of Kingdom, agricultural, though oceanic fish and seaweed farms were as important as the grain, fruit, and vegetable farms on land.

  Farmland lined by windbreaks spread out before Kerr and his men. A group of houses and other buildings huddled together a couple of kilometers away. A disproportionate number of the buildings were topped by spires, belfries, or onion domes; a minaret matched the tallest spires. Tendrils of smoke rose from a few of the buildings. A road slashed through the hamlet. One end ran through a break in a tree row exposing boats bobbing gently in the ocean. Even with his magnifier Kerr could see no people in the fields or the beach.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  Schultz grunted a negative.

  “N-Nothing,” Doyle stammered. “Shouldn’t there be farm animals out there?”

  “Chickens, maybe,” Kerr said. “They’re only growing grain; won’t be any cattle or pigs. Nothing bigger than a dog. If you see anything bigger than a dog, speak up.”

  “R-Right.” What would be bigger than a dog other than cattle? Why speak up if he saw cattle? Oh, he realized, they might be human, might be the enemy. The enemy would want to kill him. He wiggled, trying to sink farther into the ground.

  Brigadier Sturgeon stood where the Army of the Lord outpost had been and looked at the destruction. During his Marine career he’d seen many 2-D images illustrating the destructiveness of explosive munitions used in the past. He’d even witnessed firsthand what they could do in demonstrations of archaic weapons—and a few instances of their present day use by poorly armed insurgents. But he’d never seen anything like this.

  The en route briefing had included a trid of the outpost, so he knew what it looked like before the attack—a substantial building of stone, steel, and wood. From where he stood, there didn’t seem to be as much wood scattered about as had gone into the building, and what was there was splinters. The stone was so thoroughly pulverized that much of it had to be in the grainy dust that covered everything. And the steel was . . . shattered was the only word that seemed to convey what had happened to the steel. Strangest of all was the almost total lack of charring. Explosives created heat, blasted out in flame, and started fires. He saw no evidence of fire. It looked as if some unknown force had struck the building from all sides.

  “So, Brigadier,” Archbishop General Lambsblood said, “what weapon do you think did this?”

  Sturgeon could only shake his head. “Where are the soldiers?” he asked. Not only was there no charring, there seemed to be no survivors. Neither were there bodies nor blood, no evidence that the outpost had been manned when it was attacked.

  Lambsblood shrugged. “We may find them. Or bits of them. Or maybe we will find nothing.” He looked at the surrounding countryside. “We don’t always find the remains of our soldiers when an outpost has been destroyed.” He paused for a beat, then continued. “There are those who believe these aliens take our soldiers prisoner. Some weaklings think some of our soldiers turn heretic and join the enemy.” He turned hard eyes on the Marine commander. “The images of the demons who have attacked
—I cannot believe any Soldiers of the Lord would join with them. And I can more easily believe they eat our missing soldiers than I can believe they hold them prisoner.”

  Sturgeon looked at him blandly and tried to come up with a way to say what he was thinking that wouldn’t offend Lambsblood. “General, when you characterize those who oppose the theocracy as demons, I can accept that as an expression of religious fervor. But ‘aliens’? What makes you think they’re from off-planet?”

  “The images!” Lambsblood snapped. “They’re quite clear. We have been attacked by off-planet demons.”

  “What images do you mean? I haven’t been shown any pictures of the rebels.”

  Lambsblood grew rigid, his face darkened. Then he exploded. “The images your Ambassador Creadence—would the Lord have seen fit to have kept him here—sent with his urgent dispatch! Images that show the hideous form of the demons, images that show their entry craft doing things that no human shuttle can match!” He stopped abruptly and thought. More softly, he continued, “Or did he send the images? If he didn’t, that would explain why the Confederation only sent one FIST under the command of a brigadier, rather than an entire army under . . .

  “Brigadier Sturgeon, we must return to Haven, to Interstellar City. You must see those images. I don’t believe you realize what we are facing here.”

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  EIGHT

  Captain Lewis Conorado observed the other passengers on board the shuttle that was taking them to dock with the SS Cambria in orbit around Thorsfinni’s World. There were eighteen other people on board. Six of them were members of the Confederation Diplomatic Service’s inspector general’s office returning from an inspection of the consulate. Three were members of the consulate on reassignment. Five others appeared to be businessmen, and the remaining four were ’Finnis returning to Earth. The diplomats were sitting just aft of Conorado. Their loud talk and laughter somewhat jarred Conorado’s nerves, especially when he heard them making disparaging remarks about the ’Finnis. They were so blatant it was evident they did not think the ’Finnis could speak enough English to understand them. Perhaps they just didn’t care if the ’Finnis knew they were talking about them. The businessmen, all from Earth, maintained a stiff neutrality.