IronStar (49 page)

The ship’s bell rang a brief code,
and the other steamships ceased pummeling the tatters of the O’dai army. Kirrah
spared a moment to sympathize with the enemy officers, who were desperately
trying to choose between deploying in the shallow water and facing the moving
sheets of burning oil, versus bunching up on the few patches of higher ground
where the flames could not reach, and drawing fire from the ships’ mortars.

“Warmaster, I believe if we ran
full speed through the flames, we could reach the cavalry safely.”

“Thank you, Captain. Do it.” The
Flowerpot
II
heeled again and built up speed. In a few seconds, they approached the
upstream end of the flaming oil slick. Everyone held their breath while the
steamship sliced dramatically but uneventfully through the flames, the burning
oil pushing to either side as their bow wave swept through. They headed
straight for the mouth of the South Geera. Kirrah’s comm chimed and a clear
woman’s voice said:

“Lieutenant Roehl,
Argosy
Shuttle
One, request approach vector.”

“Shuttle One, Roehl. Come in from
due north, request one supersonic pass directly over the fire, then circle and
land two hundred meters south, at a point I’ll mark with my beamer. Surface
vegetation under twenty centimeters, sandy soil, no problems. Watch for locals
when landing, it’s a busy night. I will meet you there. I’ll be embarking with
a few guests.”

“Wilco, One by.”

Huh, I seem to be switching
languages automatically
, Kirrah noticed.
Now, where were we
…

“Captain, can you sound the ‘Call
Cavalry’ on the ship’s bells? We’re getting close to - there they are!” At the
low-high-low chimes, the nearest cavalry riders turned and made for the shore.
Kirrah stood at the ship’s rail and shouted down to the cavalry corporal.

“
Dakka’tachk
! Tell all the forces to circle the O’dai and hold a
line! No more attack, just turn the stragglers back. And tell our soldiers
Kirrah Warmaster is about to make the sky roar, to frighten the enemy. They are
about to surrender!” The man saluted and galloped off into the darkness.

In a few moments, Peetha, Captain
Og'drai and Kirrah stood on the
not-grass
as a large white charger
pounded up and reined in beside them.

“Doi’tam
-
fira’tachk
! Well done! No disrespect to
your riding skills,
Fira'tachk,
may I suggest you dismount and take firm
hold of your horse’s bridle. You are all about to see something unlike anything
you have ever seen.” Baffled, the large Cavalry Major did as ordered. Kirrah’s
eyes scanned the sky to the north.

“Any breath now…
there!
See
those lights in the distance?” Peetha was giving her the oddest look. Together
they watched a tiny bright triangle of white lights rise above the horizon.
Oh
good, they’ve got the spotlights on, nice effect!
Around her, others were
turning and staring at the spectacle of a fifty-meter circle of brilliant white
daylight racing toward them in total silence across the starlit plain.

“It’s so
quiet
, Warmaster,”
said Peetha’s hushed voice.

“Not quiet, it’s just coming faster
than the sound it makes. You’ll see in a…”

Suddenly the circle of light
reached them. Something
big
flashed overhead and the sky was rent by an
enormous
BANG!
that escalated into an ear-ripping shriek. The sound was
so loud it hurt the ears, battered the body and hammered at the mind. It didn’t
so much stop, as
deepen
into a reverberating roar that echoed back from
the city walls and filled the night sky with a flowing cataract of thunder. Men
afoot were falling to their knees, hands over their ears. War-trained horses
reared and danced like unbroken colts under their riders, although Kirrah
noticed the Major’s big white animal only skittered a few steps sideways and
laid its ears back. Behind them, two rapidly-receding circles of violet-white
light marked the exhaust from twin fusion rockets. Peetha’s hungry eyes tracked
the thunder as it turned, kilometers to the south, swinging around to the east.
Her face shone, fist at her throat in the Talamae salute.

“Captain Og'drai… Captain…
Captain
!”
Take it easy, Lieutenant, that was quite a shock to the uninitiated. There,
we have eye contact
… “Captain Og’drai. Now that we have everyone’s
attention, I will need you to tell the O’dai in their own language, it’s time
to surrender. We will board that small sky-boat when it lands in another half-
bhrakka
.”

True to her word, the LAS came
roaring loudly back in from the east and climbed to three hundred meters. More
violet-white flame stabbed out from thrusters under its belly, and the
thirty-two meter long sleek dark gray shape settled noisily atop four howling
columns of violet fire, directly onto the vacant spot indicated by a flick of
Kirrah’s beamer. The
not-grass
flared yellow and orange in the
down-wash, leaving behind a thin layer of ash over a patch of bare earth. Landing
gear extended and crunched onto the sandy gravel. The flames turned pure white,
then orange, then faded to yellow and black retinal afterimages. Cooling metal
ticked and popped in the sudden silence. Kirrah signaled her companions
forward.

As the four reached the shuttle’s
tail, all the external lights came on. The same emblem on the shoulder patches
of Kirrah’s suit glowed from the six-meter high tailfin, stars-and-lightning
over a winged serpent. Kirrah, Peetha and Og’drai walked around to the front of
the shuttle. Just in front of the swept-back delta wing, a section of skin was
splitting and rotating downward to form a short ramp. As they arrived, a dozen
gray-suited figures in helmets, superficially similar to Kirrah’s survival suit
but looking thicker and with more ominous-looking bulges, came stamping down
the ramp and formed a double line at the bottom. Another suited individual
marched down the ramp and stood waiting at attention while Kirrah’s party drew
up at the far end of the line. Seeing her approach helmetless, he keyed his
helmet down, revealing a handsome square-jawed recruitment-poster Marine, a
Lieutenant according to his suit flashes.

“Heesent…
arms!
” he shouted,
and twelve heavy beamers slapped crisply into gloved hands in a parade-ground
perfect present-arms. His eyes locked on hers, and Kirrah had trouble not
cheering outright, as they traded her first Regnum-style salute since leaving
Trailway almost eleven Standard months ago.

“Lieutenant Marcus Warden, Regnum
Marines, at your service
ma’am
!”

“Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl, RSS, late
of the
Arvida-Yee
.
Murphy’s cold butt
, Lieutenant, I never
expected to be so glad to see a Marine. Look, we’ve got to get this war
stopped, it’s just
senseless
now! Request permission to come aboard with
these friendlies and use your external speakers.”

“Lieutenant Roehl, my instructions
are to provide you with
full
assistance. Admiral Dunning was quite
emphatic that we help you stabilize the situation, as long as you aren’t at
personal risk. You understand that your personal intel is priceless at this
point. With that reservation, my soldiers and this shuttle are yours.”

“Excellent, Lieutenant!
Introductions later, take me to your microphone!” Lieutenant Warden looked back
sharply as Kirrah continued smoothly in Talame:

“Doi’tam
-fira'tachk
, hold
these O’dai for me, another
bhrakka
,
”
 
and exchanged the Talamae salute with her
cavalry major. Peetha’s slim form fairly bounded up the ramp after Kirrah,
Captain Og'drai following at what he hoped was a more dignified pace. The
Marines stayed at parade rest below the ramp while their Lieutenant accompanied
this utterly bizarre party into the fuselage of his craft. Peetha and Og’drai
goggled at the softly red-lit interior, the precise rows of seats, the dozens
of controls, panels, fittings, overhead racks - some color-coded, some medium
gray but all looking dull and bloody and purposeful in the dim red interior
night lighting.

Three paces to their left the hatch
to the flight deck stood open. Kirrah nodded to the pilot and flight engineer,
both young enough to make her feel ancient.

“Thank you both, that was a
wonderful show you put on. Just what we needed to make them stop killing each
other.”

“Ensign Piersall, our pleasure,
ma’am,” said the young woman with the big grin in the left hand seat. “Hardly
ever get to do that on orders, ma’am.”
I bet you don’t…

The slightly older woman at the
engineering station handed Kirrah a rod about the size of a pencil.

“Just press there, Lieutenant…” She
frowned in surprise and vague disapproval to see Kirrah pass the device to the
short, tanned, sandy-haired man behind her. Dressed in boots, loose trousers
and some sort of linked-ring metal cloth covering his upper body, and with an
honest-to-Murphy
sword
hanging from his left hip, he looked like someone
from a period 3V show. So did the lean, quick, tough-looking girl with them.
Pretty
face, except for that scar on her forehead… was that a
Kruss
hilt
sticking out of the serviceable-looking sheath strapped to the girl’s right
thigh? And why were her eyes shining like she’d just seen the Second Coming?
Who
were
these people?

The engineer’s eyes widened even
farther as more of that soft, guttural, oddly liquid language flowed from the
Survey Service Lieutenant’s lips. Then the short man spoke into the mike-rod,
either a different dialect or a totally different language, with more burrs and
intonations, punctuated with unexpected stops.
This will be fun for the
Contact Team
, she thought, one eye rechecking that the uplink feed was
live. She could imagine them hovering over their workstations in the
Argosy
,
sucking in every phoneme, under the Admiral’s watchful eye five hundred
kilometers straight up. From the outside speakers, every word, or whatever they
were, boomed out into the night. On her external viewers, several thousand
armed men were picking themselves up and forming into bunches.
Looks like
the party’s over
…

“Lieutenant Warden,” Kirrah said.
“Do you happen to have any perimeter-posts on board? Good. Here’s the problem.
Somewhere out in that mess,” her arm swept in an arc taking in the scattered
O’dai forces, “…there’s a spool of nanowire, and a Kruss launcher for
smartshot. I think they’re both cobbled together from spares, but I
want
that
damned stuff, we’ve lost too many people to it, and I have no doubt your
Admiral would find it interesting. To say nothing of a Board of Inquiry, or a
Civilium Scrutineer. So I want to pin these
O’dai
more or less where
they are, until we find their Kruss toys. Then they can
walk
home, for
all I care. So if you could set those posts at seventy-meter intervals and
configured to fire sublethal charges at anyone approaching from the north, I
think the rest can wait ‘till daylight.

“If you don’t mind leaving your
Marines here, that would help too in case the
O’dai
get adventurous.
Because I want to move this shuttle over to the city there, and we can get you
introduced to the local leadership. Our, I mean the local forces can hold the
O’dai
here on the peninsula, all we need to do is drain the lake so they can be on
dry land for the night, I just had to flood it to send a burning oil slick into
their camp. Now here’s how you tell the friendlies from the bad guys, you see
those ribbons hanging from the shoulders? Those are rank insignia. Ours are all
orange and green, orange and blue or orange and yellow. In the city you’ll see
orange and white, and the orange and blue in the palace, they report to the
King, all the others report to, well, me. Oh, and there’s the white and green
cloth patches, those’re the
Pavattan
Cavalry, they’re allies from the
north. Also report to me. Basically I need you to… what
are
you looking
at, Lieutenant?”

Indeed the man was staring at
Kirrah with the vaguely hunted expression of a civilian who’d wandered by
accident into one of Professor Stanglee’s Advanced Astronautics and Navigation
classes.

“Sorry, ma’am, our briefing said
you were
helm
on the
Arvida-Yee
…
you
did all this?” He
nodded toward a display at the engineering station, currently showing a
night-vision view of the smoke and carnage to the north. The oil was still
burning fitfully. Most of the patches had been swept downstream. One or two had
made it up into the riverfront blocks of the city itself, on the still-rising
water.

“Well,” she replied a little
defensively, “I
had
to, the Kruss just kept attacking my, my friends.”

“I… see.”

“Look, Lieutenant, my cavalry and
archers will be able to handle this. We can send relief forces from the city to
guard the prisoners until morning, about six hours from now. Basically I need
your Marines to support my cavalry and archers. With those E-5H heavy beamers
and combat suits, one private could stop a regiment. Can we detail six to help
hold the perimeter and six to help with the search for Kruss tech?”

“Very well, ma’am. Um, how do we
coordinate with ‘your’ forces? That sounded like an interesting language, but…”

“Oh,
right
! Sorry,
Lieutenant. Ahh, P.O.?” this to the woman at the engineering station with the
Petty Officer’s star-and-wings shoulder patch. “Could you let me upload my
language files? I’m not a contact specialist, but my wristcomp has a pretty
good set of vocabulary and syntax… in fact why don’t I just upload the thing’s
whole memory, and you dump the language files into the troopers’ suits out
there, and we can all understand one another.” The woman pulled a thin cable
from her console and attached it to a tiny port in Kirrah’s wristcomp.