Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (41 page)

From behind the group Frederico's voice sounded off, “My mother and I will be your flanking cavalry.”

All heads turned to look at the Posleen boy—no, he looked more the full kessentai now—in armor and with his halberd, flanked by his mother with her sword and champron and cuirass like her son's.

“Sally told us. You wouldn't expect us to leave you to fight along, would you?”

“That answers the issue of the flanks,” Faubion said. “As much as it can be answered anyway.”

The Wachtmeister nodded a slow agreement. “All right then. Here's the rule. For the first, last and only time in my military career, we are going to vote on something. However the vote goes, for or against, we all follow it. Any questions?”

Seeing there were none, or at least none that anyone present cared to ask, von Altishofen said, “We'll begin with the youngest guardsman. De Courten, how say you?”

The youngest of the guardsmen gulped. Then he thought about the beautiful woman, Sally, and how he could not stand to be ashamed before her. He managed to get out, “I say 'aye,' Herr Wachtmeister.”

“Affenzeller?”

“We march, Herr Wachtmeister.”

“Bourdon?”

“Let's go.”

“Stoever?”

“Remember Tuileries, Herr Wachtmeister.”

“Beck?”

“I never said I wouldn't go.”

Posleen Prime

However harshly the trial and execution party had bound and gagged Guanamarioch, none of those guarding Tulo'stenaloor and Goloswin had the courage to so much as come near them, let alone keep them from talking, either to each other or to their guards.

Said the clan lord, “I will personally cut out that addled-egg, ovipositor-licking, feces-eating piece of filth's guts and roast them in front of him over low coals.”

Goloswin smiled wryly at Tulo'stenaloor. “No you won't because you know that he is acting within the law. The scroll says so.”

“Screw the law,” Tulo snapped. He cast a baleful glare at his captors. “And you little piles of abat dung will join your leader at the barbecue.”

The senior of those guards answered, “I and my People are merely following orders, Clan Lord.”

“That isn't helping, Tulo,” the tinkerer said. “Threats are rarely as effective as pure reason.”

“Fine then,” Tulo snapped. “You talk some sense to them. You explain what the humans are likely to do if they decide they have an obligation to defend this Guanamarioch. You explain to this never-sufficiently-to-be-damned ijdits that we are facing extinction here.”

Golo smiled broadly. “I think I'd rather explain just what the limits of the law are . . . and how broad it can be. Those . . . and the lawful power of a clan lord.”

“Indeed,” agreed Aelool.

It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.

—Professor Allan Bloom

Anno Domini 2024

USS Salem

“I don't think we even can do anything differently,” von Altishofen whispered into the ear of a softly weeping Nurse Duvall. “I'm sorry, Gina, but we really have no choice.”

“Do you know what they'll do to you?” she asked, between sobs. “I and the tank can fix a lot. But neither of us can turn Posleen poop into a living, breathing, sentient organism again.”

The Wachtmeister put his hands on both her shoulders, pushing her just far enough away to look into her eyes. “Don't be such a doomsayer,” he said. "When a Posleen gets a bowel obstruction from my skull lodging in its intestine, then will be time to worry about not being able to resurrect me.

“Besides, my father begat me mortal and my God called me to be a soldier. This is as it must be.”

Von Altishofen gave the nurse a quick embrace, then turned to his leering guardsmen. A surprising number of them also had one or another, or in the case of de Courten, three of the ship's women saying their goodbyes.

“Vexillation . . . fall in,” von Altishofen ordered. The twelve other Switzers said their last words of farewell and formed two ranks on the corporals, Grosskopf and Cristiano. Each man carried his halberd and had a baselard strapped to his side. Their monomolecular armor shone like fine, new bronze. On each head was perched a morion of the same material. To either side of the two ranks, Frederico and Querida formed up. They, like the Switzers wore armor covering their upright torsos. Instead of morions, however, their faces were covered with champrons. Frederico bore his halberd in both skilled claws while Querida had a shield and her old boma blade strapped to the left side of the harness she wore outside of and over her armor.

“Right . . . FACE!” The section turned as one toward the pinnace's ramp. “Board . . . SHIP.” With Querida leading, the troops began trudging up the ramp, their steps beating time on the metal even as the jingling of their armor and weapons joined in that beat. In any of them felt fear at the coming fight, one could not have told it from their faces.

“Father?” von Altishofen asked of the priest, standing on the deck with both his arms around Sally, the woman. In one hand Dwyer still kept hold of the processional cross that would be his sole armament in the coming battle. Sally held in one of her hands an Artificial Sentience she had had the forge cough up.

“One minute, Wachtmeister,” the priest answered.

“I wish I could go with you,” Sally whispered.

“Yes, but you can't,” Dwyer answered. “Not without landing the ship, anyway, and that would be what we call 'a really bad idea.'”

“I feel like a coward,” she said. “Me, a warship, and I feel like a coward.”

“Yes, and you used to feel ugly until Guano made you that figurehead, too. Face it, beloved wife and beloved ship and beloved AID, for a being with logic circuits at her very core, you're not always terribly logical.”

“My prerogative,” she sniffed.

Dwyer snorted. “Of course. In any case, don't feel like you're missing anything. You'll be up here still, face to face with a kessenalt, a C-Dec and a potentially suicidal artificial sentience. You may have your own fight.”

She nodded. “I know. It doesn't make me feel any better.” The woman sighed and said, “It's time for you to go.”

“With my shield or on it?”

“No,” she answered. “With your cross or not at all.” She draped the chain of the AS she held around Dwyer's neck. “This will translate for you.”

It will also allow me to watch the battle.

Sally departed the hangar deck just as the pinnace's ramp wheezed shut. She was so intimately a part of the ship that she needed to touch no controls to cause the air to be evacuated and the hangar doors to open. Under her control, the pinnace lifted, then turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face the open bay. Still under her control it began to slide out of the hangar, and then to descend to the planet below. It would be several hours before it landed.

The Roga'a, Posleen Prime

Guanamarioch saw the pile of wood and immediately felt his stomach lurch. Kill me, yes, if you must, but not like this.

Finba'anaga saw the captive preacher's color go from a fairly solid yellow to a much paler shade. Good, he thought. You should fear it.

“Boras, bind the heretic to the pole,” Finba ordered. “Loosen the coils around his muzzle, that he might make his plea.”

At first, Guano thought that his former escort meant to bind him to the stake that ran through the wood pile and above it. Yet it was to a different pole that he was led, one set into the stones of the speaker's platform in the center of the Roga'a.

He didn't know the kessentai who led him. At least he didn't until that kessentai whispered in a fierce voice, “Why didn't you listen to me and leave when you could?”

Guano, with his muzzle still tightly bound, could not answer. The kessentai leading him didn't expect an answer. He simply bound Guano's neck tightly to the pole and backed off.

“Borasmena, loosen the rope around the creature's muzzle,” Finba reminded. Borasmena did, undoing the knots and tugging on the rope until it was nothing but a non-restrictive coil around Guano's mouth and face.

Guano took a deep breath, his first easy breath since the coil was first set. After that, he said, “Thank you,” and then, more softly, “and thank you, too, for the warning, Brother. God's blessings upon you, without it my wife and son would have been taken as well.”

Borasmena made a slight nod and said, again, also softly, “You should have listened to me.”

Guano shook his head. “That I could not. I am, you see, much like yourself, a kessentai under authority.” Borasmena nodded, grateful that this kessentai understood, and then backed away.

Though his neck was fast bound, his head was free. Guano turned it and looked directly at Finba'anaga. A certain amount of his color had returned, and his face displayed the same calm it did whenever he was not spouting forth on the imagined virtues of his false god.

In part to cover his own nervousness, Finba declaimed, “The accused is charged with heresy and blasphemy. How does he plead?”

“I recognize no authority you may have to require of me a plea,” Guano answered, still calm.

Finba'anaga sneered. “My followers are my authority. Our ancient faith is our authority. And you will answer, heretic.” To Borasmena, Finba said, “Scourge him.”

The whip was an implement that, if the Posleen had ever developed it, had since been lost. After all, what need of an animal whip when the normals and cosslain were utterly devoted, and just bright enough to obey completely without the need for corrective devices? Indeed, when faced with the prospect of needing to cause pain, rather than death, Finba and his followers had been at something of a loss for some time. Then some bright kessentai had remembered a sort of tree that grew in a small bend in a creek not far from the city. The tree was thin, never more than two claws in thickness and more commonly only one. From it grew thin, flexible thorns, about a half an inch long.

Guano took one look at the thorny switches being carried toward him and thought immediately of Panama's black palm. For just a moment, Guano found himself back in the muddy Darien jungle, during the war.

Darien, Panama,

during the war

Step . . . slip . . . catch your balance by a vine . . . step . . . slip . . . catch your . . .

“Yeooow!”

The God-king pulled his hand away from some round creature that grew spikes in bands around it. The spikes came away from their attacker easily; they were barbed and lodged deep in the Kessentai's hand. Still cursing, with the other hand he drew a Boma Blade and hacked down and across. The spiked creature fell, dead apparently.

Curiously, Guano detected no thrashing at all. It must have died instantly. He replaced the blade in its sheath and began pulling the spikes out of his hand. Yeoow . . . yeoow . . . yeoow . . . Ouch! He sensed that the spikes were leaving residue behind. The wounds in his hand hurt terribly.

The God-king moved on. Suddenly, before he felt it, he sensed a mass of the creatures standing ahead, as if ready to fight him. Again he drew his Boma Blade, edging forward. He hissed and snarled, grunting and whistling curses at this new enemy.

The blade waved. He felt the slightest resistance as it passed through the body of one of the enemy. The body began to topple, towards the God-king. Hastily he backed up . . .

Right onto a pack of the vile, treacherous creatures that had apparently snuck in behind him. Guanamarioch received an assfull of spikes. “Yeoow@#!%^&$*!” he cursed as pain propelled him forward again . . .

Right into the embracing claws of his enemy. More spikes entered the young God-king's tender flesh, right through the scales. He flailed around with his blade, severing the assassins where they stood. Their bodies fell on him.

Yes . . . more spikes.

Beaten down, punctured in a thousand places, the God-king sank to earth still fighting. He was still trying his best to resist when pain, fatigue, and the hunger that had been his near constant companion the last several weeks, forced him from consciousness.

Ziramoth did not know what to make, the next morning, of the pile of freshly cut foliage with sharp defensive spikes all around. He was looking for his friend, Guanamarioch, whose oolt had set up a perimeter from which they guarded and within which they keened for the absence of their Lord.

Then the pile moved . . . and groaned . . . and said, “I'll kill you all, you bastards!”

“Guano?”

“Zira? Is that you? Have the demons taken you to the afterlife as well?”

“Guano, you're not dead. Trust me in this.”

“Yes I am, dead and in Hell. Trust me in this Ziramoth shook his head and began to gingerly pull away the pile under which he was pretty sure his friend lay. Sometimes, the pile shrieked as the plant trunks rolled about. When he was finished, Zira backed off and said, ”You can stand up now, Guano."

Carefully, and perhaps reluctantly, the Kessentai stood. Zira whistled and shook his head slowly, and half in despair.

Guanamarioch, Junior Kessentai and flyer among the stars, had, at a rough estimate, some thirteen hundred black, vegetable spikes buried in his skin. His eyes were shut from swelling where the spikes had irritated the flesh. He had the things in his nostrils. The folds of skin between his claws were laced with them. He even sported several that had worked their way through the bandages around his reproductive member to lodge in the sensitive meat below.

“I hate this fucking place,” the God-king sniffled.

Almost, almost, the memory was enough to cause Guano to smile. He looked at the switch again and thought, I picked a bad nyarg to give up shooting sarin. And then the first switch flew and whatever thoughts he may have had of old jokes were replaced by searing pain.

Pinnace, USS Salem

Dwyer was searching his memory for just exactly what it was that the faces of the Switzers reminded him of. It was an old memory, very old. And then it hit him.

The Marines I was with on the landing craft inching in to Inchon. They looked just like this. The fear that was so bad it had to be put completely out of the mind or risk madness. And the boredom that came from having a blank mind. The Switzers look bored.