Revenge of the Damned (40 page)

"Turns oot, thae's a diploma-mill quack ae thae village. An' m' gran'sire sits doon ae th' chair, an' thae dentist lookit ae' his teeth an' say, 'Aye, thae's got to coom oot. But ae nae hae anesthesia.'

"M' grandsire say, 'Dinnae fash. Pull it.'

"An so, wi' great gruntin' ae groanin't, thae dentist yankit thae tooth. An' he's sweatin', an m' grandsire's sweatin't.

"An' thae quack say't, 'Dinnae thae be th' greatest pain y've ever felt?'

"M' grandsire says, 'Nae. Thae's naught.'

"Wi' considerable astonishment, thae dentist say, 'Whae's worse?'

"M' grandsire, explain't. 'Last week, Ah come down wi' th' runs. S' bad, Ah canne mak't oot m' cabin't' thae backhouse. So, Ah drap m' trews ae th' snowbank, right outside m' door. An' Ah forget Ah was cleanin't m' bear traps before thae snow fell, an' Ah left a wee trap set right where't Ah be crouchin't.

" 'Which Ah'm remindit aboot when thae trap closit.

" 'Snapit closit on m' balls.'

" 'Good Lord,' thae dentist sae. 'Y'r right. Thae's th' biggest pain ae all.'

" 'Nae, nae, lad,' m' grandsire say. 'Th' biggest pain ae all wae when Ah come to the
end
ae th' chain…' "

His punch line was greeted by the usual cold, stony silence. But only from St. Clair. L'n was on the floor with laughter. Alex gave her a huge, fond smile.

"I don't get it," St. Clair said flatly.

"You—you don't?" L'n gasped through laughter. "Why not? It's—so simple that it's—" She broke off to compose herself. "Look. A bear trap has this big long chain."

"I know that," St. Clair said, a little miffed.

"And one end of the chain is staked to the ground. And on the other end is—well, the bear trap. And, see, when the jaws snapped shut, they caught Alex's great-great-whatever-grand-father by the scrotum."

She erupted into laughter again. St. Clair just glared at her. Alex thought she was absolutely wonderful.

"But—see, that still wasn't what really hurt the most," L'n went on. "What really hurt was—"

"I don't want to hear it again," St. Clair said. "Please!"

Alex got to his feet and strode around the table to L'n. He patted her fondly on the shoulder. She was a being after his own heart. Kilgour had found himself a duck.

"Do you know any more like that?" L'n asked hopefully.

"A few, lass. Just a few. D'ya e'er ken thae one aboot th' spotted snake?"

"Nooo… I don't think so. Why don't you—"

"Don't get him started, L'n," Sten's voice boomed from across the room. "Or you'll wish you were back in a Koldyeze cooler."

The three turned to see their wandering boy. Poor Sten. His hair was wild, his eyes were glazed, and his clothes drooped from him like wet gunnysack material. And as he walked toward them, he moved with a footsore limp.

"What the clot happened?" St. Clair asked.

Sten sighed and shook his head. He slumped into a seat and made desperate pointing gestures at a gaping mouth. Alex handed him a throat-soothing brew. Sten gulped it straight down in less than four swallows. He slammed the mug on the table. Alex refilled it. Sten chugged only about half of it. Then he belched and took a tentative sip.

"Well?" St. Clair prompted.

"For a while there," Sten said, "I thought I was for the high jump. I got picked up in a Tahn sweep."

His three companions started. Sten waved them back down again.

"They just needed some clean-cut types to stand in front of a demonstration to wave signs at a livie crew. We all stood there in the sun for five hours or so, and then Lady Atago came out to make general nice and urged us to commit suicide. We all thought this over for a bit and said that was okay, but can we go home now?

"No such luck. Atago said stick around there's gonna be a show. And we were treated to eleven more hours of traitors confessing their sins on the big screen and then getting themselves geeked for our pleasure."

"Any traitors in particular? L'n asked.

"The ones we made up. Toward the end there, I almost felt sorry for them."

"Thae'll no be blame in pity, young Sten," Alex said, "so long a' y' dinnae make a habit ae it."

Sten did not comment. Instead he did a little gentle whining for food, and while he ate, he filled them in on his mission to Koldyeze.

"What do we do next?" St. Clair asked.

"Right now there's not much more we can do. We keep our agent network nit and tiddy. Feed the corruption meter whenever the flag pops up. And make general low-profile pains of ourselves."

"Clottin' borrring," L'n said. "Where's all the romance and pulse throbbing you promised? Intrigue! Danger! Clandestine action! I didn't sign on to be bored, cheena!"

Everybody laughed.

"I'm afraid that's what's in the cards for a little while," Sten said. "We've done all we can to this point. Now we have to wait for events to catch up to us. Big events. That we have no control over. Like in the Fringe Worlds. And Cavite."

He got up and refilled everyone's glass with brew.

"Although I hate to confess this, it's sorta like Alex's story," he went on. "We've got the Tahn by the scrotum in the jaws of a big steel trap. But they still don't know they're hurting yet.

"So we gotta wait until they reach the end of the chain."

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

T
he empire had learned—at least slightly—from the slaughter in the Pel/e systems.

Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney looked at the preinvasion bombardment plans for the Fringe Worlds and snarled, "Double it." '

"Double what, sir?"

"Everything."

His staff looked at the overheads and followed orders. Twice the conceivable amount of ordnance was scheduled for delivery on the Fringe Worlds, and then, once more, Mahoney told them to double
that
.

He doubted that it would work—but then, Mahoney had never been convinced that putting a man where a bomb or a bullet might go necessarily worked.

But he would do the best he could.

He would have liked to have leveled the worlds as he had done to the Erebus System—but there were civilians resident. Mahoney wondered how many of them had survived not just the Tahn conquest but the subsequent occupation.

Had he his druthers—but he did not.

Finally there came a day when there was no return fire taken on any of the Fringe Worlds selected for invasion.

Mahoney ordered the assault.

He acted knowing that the Tahn defenders would come out of the rubble as if all the firepower expended had been so many fireworks.

He was quite correct—which was why Mahoney chose to disobey orders.

According to the Eternal Emperor and his psych staff, Mahoney's return to the Fringe Worlds was what the Emperor insisted on calling, using jargon unknown to anyone around him, a "photo opportunity." Whatever the clot a photo was did not matter—his propagandists went into motion.

Before Mahoney's battlewagon lifted with the fleets toward the Fringe Worlds, several chaingun galleries had been stripped of weaponry and converted into press suites. As many livie crews and journalists as could fit were packed in.

The battleship was supposed to land on Cavite, center of the Fringe Worlds, in the fourth wave. Assumption: First wave gets slaughtered, second wave takes casualties but holds, third wave consolidates, and we can land some camerabeings in the fourth wave. Bangs will still be banging, but nobody's going to get killed.

Least of all Ian Mahoney as he strode nobly down the ramps of his battleship and made a noble statement that he had returned or declared this world open or whatever noble statement he chose. Noble statement-type propagandists were assigned to his staff.

Unfortunately, on L-Day, H-hour, Mahoney was nowhere near his command ship.

He was strapped into a troop capsule on an assault transport next to the First Guards' command sergeant major, a noncom whose body, guardsmen thought, had been replaced sixteen times, bit by bit over the decades, but whose brain had never been modified after the CSM had been declared clinically dead a century or so before.

Mahoney had forgotten how much it hurt when the transport, just in-atmosphere, blew its twenty assault capsules down toward the surface below. He had also forgotten just how many times "down" changed places as the capsule dived toward the robot homer below.

Just before impact, he and the sergeant major forced grins at each other: See, we're used to this drakh. Neither of them realized how much his own smile resembled the rictus of a corpse or thought about it as the capsule slammed down in the usual semicontrolled crash. Semicontrolled was defined as less than fifteen percent incapacitating injuries on landing.

The minicharges exploded and the capsule's walls blew off. The straps came free, and Mahoney grabbed his willygun and stumbled out into the rubble of Cavite.

There were various reports as to what noble pronunciations on the order of "I have returned" or "
Lafayette nous arrivons"
Mahoney made as his boots crashed down. They were all tissues of lies.

His first observation: "I forgot how much this clottin' armpit world smells like an open—incoming!"

And Mahoney chewed gravel as the missile smashed down bare meters away.

The First Guards had been singled out for the "honor" of being the first to land on Cavite by Mahoney. Years before, the division had been wiped out holding Cavite in the opening of the Tahn War. Only a handful of noncoms, officers, and technicians had been evacked during the retreat at the Eternal Emperor's personal orders. They had been used as a cadre to reform the unit with fresh blood and then sent back into combat.

Mahoney thought they deserved the "privilege" of revenge. He might have been a little battle-happy in his thinking. There were no more than a dozen guardsmen who had been on Cavite—the grinding down of the Tahn had ground the division, as well. In addition, they still had not finished training the replacements after the Naha.

The "honor" that all the combat-experienced troops would have liked was a return to Prime, a nice parade, and the next half century spent garrisoning some R&R world. Two beats after the first
Wheep-Crack
past his or her ear, even the most gung-ho replacement agreed with that idea.

But the Guards pushed on, day by bloody day, across the planet and into Cavite City. The battle was a reversal of their bitter defeat—now they had complete air and space superiority and an unlimited amount of weaponry and ammunition.

Not that the Tahn defenders surrendered.
K'akomit'r
, in their language, meant both "I give up" and "I do not exist."

Most of them chose just that—fighting to the last round, then suiciding with a grenade or charging armor with an improvised spear. Mahoney saw one stubby Tahn private, surrounded, tap-arm a grenade on the ground and then tuck it under his combat helmet. By that time he and the other battered guardsmen around him thought the subsequent explosion the best joke of the day.

Less than an hour later, one of Mahoney's aides, one who
had
landed on the battleship, found the fleet marshal and handed him a message.

EYES ONLY, from the Eternal Emperor. The message was in an old Mantis code that Mahoney could decipher blindfolded and in a typhoon. It read:

QUIT PLAYING GAMES AND GET BACK TO WORK.

Mahoney growled, stripped his combat vest of grenades and magazines, threw them to a nearby guardsman, and headed back to maps, computers, and projections.

Lady Atago fulfilled her vow.

Every Tahn fleet that was combatworthy was grouped and launched at the Fringe Worlds. She ruthlessly stripped reserve and home defense squadrons of all warships and sent them into battle.

The slogans were chanted, and the livies were ominous with takeoff after takeoff.

The Empire's defeat was certain.

It was very uncertain to a nameless Tahn supply officer who sat in the cramped cubicle of his obsolete battle cruiser. Finally he shut off the com that was still broadcasting inspirational messages from the council and stared at his screens.

He keyed to the bottom line of all of them.

CREW: 50% of mandated personnel. 11% rated "Trained." 4% "Station-trained."

SUPPLIES: 71% required for mission accomplishment including return to base.

ARMAMENT: 11% bunker capacity chainguns; 34% tube capacity missiles.

SYSTEMS: 61% functional.

As he watched, the "sixty-one percent" hesitated, then changed to "fifty-eight percent" as, somewhere in the guts of the ship, another weapons system succumbed to cumulative wear.

The livies that showed the Tahn going off into the final battle were supposedly broadcast live. Atago, no fool, was not about to allow that.

Accidents, after all, could happen. And accidents were most demoralizing even to the thoroughly conditioned Tahn populace—which was why the livies showing the takeoff of those three brand new superbattleships that had chilled Sten were never seen.

One of them—the replacement for Atago's obsolescent and battered
Forez
—was not scheduled for the assault.

But the other two were.

One, the
Panipat
, lifted up to twenty meters away from its massive docking cradle before losing two Yukawa drive units and almost crashing. Only skillful pilotage brought it back down, seemingly undamaged. Immediate system analysis showed, however, that not only were the two drive units out, but
all
other units would be failure-prone. Also, the AM2 drive would produce no more than fifty percent capacity.

There were no explanations—except that all three ships had been slammed together, even more hastily built than were the usual Tahn warships. Plus, in a time when all strategic materials were in critical shortage, compromises had been made.

The new Forez-class ships might have looked awesome. But there was not a lot of them there.

The third ship, the
Gogra
, lifted successfully. Out-atmosphere from Heath, the ship's commander ordered the ship and its four escorting cruisers into AM2 drive.