IronStar (26 page)

Next, Kirrah turned to the problem
of naval defenses. With Opeth, Peetha and Delima in tow, plus the good
carpenter who had made her first longbow, they traveled by cart to the guild of
shipwrights in the oldest part of the city, on the peninsula between the small
lake and the North Geera tributary. The group quickly ruled out Kirrah’s ideas
to obstruct the riverbed (the river level would rise and flood the city) or wall
the riverbank along its entire length (too long a project for the available
time).

However it seemed prudent to put
Kirrah’s new recruits to work while they were awaiting military training,
building a wall to defend the bank of the river where it passed the military
compound, and another wall across the narrow strip where a corner of the east
quadrant of the city touched the riverbank. That would still leave the old
section with its crucial warehouses and workshops, and the southwest farming
sections, totally exposed to hostile river landings, Kirrah reflected with some
uneasiness.

A little digging uncovered a few
merchant sailors who could give eyewitness descriptions of the O’dai ‘excise
ships’. With the nominal role of collecting an O’dai-imposed shipping tax,
these vessels were about thirty meters long, two-masted, square-rigged, with
auxiliary oar power. They mounted a variety of heavy siege-bows and catapults.
A rather travelworn rumor claimed the O’dai ships which had besieged the city
of Ale’appa had used something larger that sounded like a trebuchet, which if
Kirrah remembered her history correctly, could throw a hundred-kilo stone for
three hundred meters or more.

With some sketching and handwaving,
she was able to get a very dubious shipwright to commit to work on a prototype
sailing vessel of about twenty meters length, with two masts but fore-and-aft
ketch rigged, on which he would mount as many of her new siegebows as could
fit. Kirrah left the carpenter and the shipwright to figure out how to get two
of the four-meter-long horizontally-mounted bows to fire forward and two to
each side, three if possible.

They still don’t believe you can
sail
into
the wind
, Kirrah realized. She also ordered the immediate
construction of a hundred small fire-rafts, two by four meter floating
platforms carrying brush and flammable tar and strung together by floating
ropes. At need these could be set aflame and pushed into the river to entangle
and ignite hostile warships.

Next was a visit to the potters’
guild, where craftsmen were put to work making hollow clay arrowheads that
would carry about a fifth of a liter of flammable oil and a flint ignition
primer. People in wooden boats want to throw things at people in stone towers,
that would be just fine, Kirrah would be ready. After that, a visit to the
blacksmith’s guild, where she redirected one of the smithies from turning out
pike heads, to work on a heavy anti-shipping chain to be laid across the river
on stone piers at the point where it was met by the city’s west wall. As soon
as the chain was ready, they would begin work on Kirrah’s next project,
starting with the heavy iron ‘tub’ as tall as a man and half that wide.

By early evening a rather tired
group returned to the Stone in a River school. Delima stayed with them because,
she said, she wanted a good view of the evening’s celebration. Kirrah flopped
down on one of the courtyard couches and, tiredly and a little warily, asked:

“What celebration?”

“It is traditional to celebrate a
new appointment, also to celebrate good news for the city. You have brought us
both,” explained the Guildmaster.

“Uhh,” said Kirrah wearily, “does
that mean I’m expected to…”

“Oh, goodness no,” the older woman
said. “This is just a little show for the citizens. By now the block-leaders
have reported on the Council meeting to their home blocks. Some small
celebration will be expected.”

“I appreciate the honor,” Kirrah
said, “but I am just as glad to rest. Tomorrow I shall take on the problem of
getting the farmers back to work. As soon as we have enough archers to keep the
raiders off the fields, we can get to planting. Damn! I should have thought of
building stone towers to defend the fields… I’ll get some of the trainees to
start on that. I think we can defend a site long enough to get some walls up at
least.” She knuckled her tired eyes and looked at the young Wrth woman who had
been with her all day. “Peetha, you have been very quiet today, is there a
problem?”

“No, Warmaster.”

“Tell me then, why you have so
little to say.”

“We …that is, the Wrth are taught
to listen to our leader and speak but little.”

“That is not my way, Peetha. I want
you to tell me anything you can that will help me keep this city safe. I do not
press you to say things that would harm your countrymen.” Kirrah sat up and
leaned forward, looking at the young woman. “Understand, Peetha, I mean no harm
to your fellows. I kill to keep them from killing us, no more.”
Now that
Akaray’s family has been paid in blood
, thought something dark.

“If there is a way to send them
away, there will be no more killing. I just can’t think of how. So I am
preparing the Talamae to go out and kill them all. I will not ask my student
warriors to kill their own people.”

A thoughtful pause, then: “You are
…displeased with us? With me?”

“No, Peetha, I think you and the
others are the bravest warriors I have ever seen.”
Except possibly for a
certain young boy taking on a nest of irwua to save my ignorant butt
. “Why
do you think I am displeased?”

“You neither punish us, nor are you
willing to use us against your enemies.” A tanned arm waved towards the
northwest.

“You would be willing to fight your
own countrymen?”

“We have no countrymen but you,
Warmaster. Of course we will fight your enemies. I do not understand.”
Take
a deep breath, Lieutenant Roehl…

“For my …Realm’s soldiers, this
would be too much to ask. I do not ask what I could not do myself. You must
teach me, Peetha, about my students. I would use this weapon to its best. For
example, is there some way I could convince the warriors out there, to leave?
For starters, why did you agree to serve me, rather than die in my trap? I do
not think it was because you feared death from my
not-sword
.” The light
was fading from the sky as they spoke, and servers were bringing out torches
and setting places at the nearby outdoor table.

“There is belief, among us …among
the Wrth, that there are two gods who rule and protect us. One is IceWrth, one
is FireWrth. IceWrth rules our lives, she demands our sacrifices, chastens us
and strengthens and teaches us through pain and injury. The other is FireWrth,
her mate and
teka
; fang to her claw, wing to her feather. He rules our
deaths, carries us to the, what Talamae would call
sky-fire
, where
warriors live forever. Your
not-sword
, it spits sky-fire. When you stood
on the wall and demanded our lives, and burned any who opposed, we thought you
were FireWrth. When I saw you were a woman, I thought you were both. We must
obey, or our spirit will be left with our dead meat, for the scavengers to
consume, and not join the fathers in
sky-fire
.”

“Peetha, now you know I am not a
god, but a woman with better weapons. Yet you still serve me.”

“I know now that you are a woman. I
am not sure that you are not also both our gods. You know more of war than any
Wrth. I do not understand you. You fight as the Wrth do, with your weapons,
with your body, with your heart… but you also fight with your mind, and your
words, and your
kaiya
- your ability to make a new thing. I saw you make
weapons out of clay pots and stone and chain. You defeated the ironclad,
all
the ironclad, with words alone, without striking a blow. I wish to learn
this way.”

Kirrah sat back and thoughtfully
considered the implications of what she had heard. They were called to the
supper table. The sky had faded to a deep blue-gray. A delicious aroma rose
from the table, as Kirrah and her recent enemy joined Slaetra, Delima, a
wide-eyed Akaray, and a few others for their meal. Through the excellent first
course, Kirrah was mostly silent, thinking and plotting, integrating this new
information into her web of schemes and half-plans. Just as she was accepting
seconds, there was a sound, a small, soft, distant
whump
. She paused,
food halfway to her mouth, a tiny furrow in her brow.

That sounded just like
…
Another
whump
. A distinct
pop
, all muted by distance. Delima,
Akaray, and a serving-boy on the other side of the table were looking raptly
over Kirrah’s left shoulder, toward the southwest, the palace. Another
whump
,
more
pop
s.

“See,” said Delima, “the
celebration
!”
Kirrah stood and turned, in time to see a trail of orange sparks climb into the
dark sky and burst with a dazzling scatter of red and white sparkles.

Aw, damn!
was the first
thought to pass through her mind.
Fireworks! Now I’ve got to redo all my plans!
Why didn’t someone
tell
me you have
gunpowder
?

“The price of freedom is eternal
vigilance.” - Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826 A.D.; statesman and co-founder,
United States of America, Terra.

Fifty thousand kilometers above the
equator of the planet called Trailway, the sun was always shining. Its light
glittered from a ring of massive Regnum naval installations, strung out like
jewels on a necklace in their shared geostationary orbit. Satellites tens of
kilometers in length – defensive forts, munitions warehouses, shipyards,
smelting and manufacturing plants, communications facilities, barracks and
training centers - together they made up the backbone of the Regnum Draconis
presence in this octant. The perpetual sunlight picked out tiny motes drifting
from one jewel to another: massive cargo carriers, personnel shuttles, swift
couriers, all lost against the vastness of space. Warships the size of small
cities drifted in parking orbits like shoals of tiny minnows. The immense
SkyLift elevator was visible, a hair-thin silver line etched on the blackness
from the planet’s surface to well above the ring of metal motes.

At one of these motes, an array of
sensitive antennae tens of kilometers on a side cupped its ear to the
electromagnetic hiss and crackle of the universe mumbling to itself. Ionized
atoms around a new star two thousand light years distant made a faint
frying-bacon sizzle. Enormous clouds of cool dust and molecular hydrogen ten
times that remote sang a bass microwave counterpoint. Cosmic rays, fragments of
shattered atoms from a thousand times yet farther, flickered past and were
recognized.

From the edge of the Trailway
system, a faint whisper of electromagnetics drifted in, weaving among the
background of rumbles and whistles like the murmur of a lover. Elegant software
sniffed and isolated the whisper, amplified it, corrected its drops and
stutters, teased out a model of the sender’s original. Another layer of AI
recognized the framestamp of a mailtube, isolated the signature of the Mark
VIII-b model, passed the packet to Naval Intelligence. There it joined the
queue of message traffic, and in due course the outer encryption wrapper was
stripped. Its priority was bumped several grades by another AI, and the inner
encryption packet was tightbeamed to the receiver bank halfway down the
SkyLift’s length.

From there it flowed as light, down
the thousands of kilometers of secure fiber, to the NavInt communications nexus
at the base of the SkyLift. It was read, a confirmation request flowed back up
the system and was duly filled. More light stuttered across the fibers linking
the communications complex to other surface installations, was received,
pondered for a few more nanoseconds by another AI at the Naval Operations
complex. Finally, a message appeared beside a flashing icon in the Priority
screen in front of a human. The young ensign looked for a moment at the message
and routed it downstairs.

It was winter on the northern
hemisphere of Trailway. Rear Admiral Lucinda Dunning enjoyed winter, and her
corner office on the ninth floor offered a good view. At the moment, the
luminous slate-blue light of late evening was muffled by a steady mist of
falling snow. Wind whirled the tiny flakes like constellations, wheeling and
promenading in the light spilling from her windows. Her comm panel chimed.
Distracted from her reverie, she bent briefly over the board. Her brow
furrowed, then furrowed deeper as she read more. She pressed a key. A face
appeared on her primary screen.

“Joe?”

“Luce, hi! What’s on your plate?
You look… odd.” Her quick gold-flecked brown eyes still framed a pair of small
sharp creases over the bridge of her long nose.

“Well, have you seen this?” Her
fingers tapped a few keys, the face on her screen shifted gaze. Between the
man’s bushy eyebrows, the same two-stage furrow appeared, then deepened.

“I …see! Right out there in our own
back forty. What’s the window for that scout? The…” eyes flicked off-screen
again, back: “…the
Arvida-Yee
.” Lucinda tapped a few more keys, then:

“She’s got almost another two
months on her assigned gig. Next regular mailtube due in twelve days. Joe, I
think we have to respond to this, whether we get an all-clear in the next few
hours or not. That planet they found is a gem, and I’d rather park a ‘Wagon
over it now than send a whole task force to get it back later. It could be days
before we learn the outcome. Or worst case, we never will. I don’t know what
the Kruss are up to, but whatever it is, they just lost an asset out there.
From the scan data I’d guess a light cruiser or more. We can get there with
more than they can, faster. I think we should. I don’t like the looks of this,
one bit.”