Starfist: Hangfire (26 page)

Colonel Deacon Truthly Godsservant stood tall in the commander's hatch of his Gabriel armored fighting vehicle. He relished the growling, clanking, and rattling of the Gabriel. He shook with the rattling of the vehicle and imagined that shaking was the trembling of God's will filling his body. It gave him a feeling of power, imbued him with certainty that his force would easily smite the heretics who had usurped the devine authority of the priests in the village of Eighth Shrine and somehow managed to knock out two Avenging Angels.

He scanned the landscape. To one side of the roadway the ground sloped upward toward the mountains. That side was terraced for rice paddies. Golden wheat for the sacred wafers grew on the level ground to the road's other side. Well ahead, dust rose from the churning treads of the six Gabriels that scouted ahead of the main column of twenty-one. Far to the flanks four more churned the rice paddies, grinding the golden wheat in their protective screenings. The loss of the rice and wheat would teach the local peasants not to harbor heretics. Ahead, the road wound through a small range of low, wooded hills that were too rocky to farm.

Godsservant's own AFV was fifth in the main column of twenty-one vehicles. Twenty-one plus the scouts and flankers. Thirty-five Gabriels, righteous avengers of the Lord! And four hundred Soldiers of the Lord rode in those blessed chariots. They were a fearsome sight to the sinners on whom they brought down the Lord's righteous wrath. A thin smile creased Godsservant's harsh face. He glanced at his map.

Ten more kilometers. His scouts should break through the wooded hills into view of Eighth Shrine in a few more minutes.

"First platoon, hold up," ordered First Acolyte Loveoflord. Around him the six Gabriels of the scouting screen clanked to a halt just inside the trees. Loveoflord, the platoon commander, raised his telescope to his eye and surveyed the open land ahead. "Check our position," he ordered the gunner, who doubled as navigator.

"Sir," the gunner-navigator said sharply, "we are 1.4 kilometers from the heretic village, azimuth 327."

"Double-check that," Loveoflord said.

"Right away, sir." The speed with which the navigator said, "Reading is the same: 1.4 kilometers, azimuth 327," told Loveoflord either the navigator had already rechecked their position or was confident enough of his navigation he didn't bother to.

"Then Eighth Shrine is in sight?"

"If we're through the trees, yessir?"

"Come up here." The gunner-navigator couldn't see outside from his navigation position, instead he had to rely totally on his instruments.

There were scrabbling noises from below, then the navigator squeezed up into the commander's hatch next to Loveoflord The officer wordlessly handed him the telescope. The navigator took it and looked ahead.

"That's odd," he murmured. He lowered the telescope from his eye and checked his wrist compass.

Then he looked again, this time in a sweep that let him view the entire landscape beyond the woods. He handed the telescope back and said, "I've been here before, sir. I recognize the land." He looked at his platoon commander but fear was visible in his eyes. "Where did the village go? And what are those buildings?"

Loveoflord shook his head. "Take your gun station." Then he got on the radio and reported to Colonel Deacon Godsservant.

At a range of two kilometers, closer where the trees obstructed their vision, thirty-five Gabriels, each armed with two 12.7mm projectile machine guns and a 75mm cannon, ringed the place where Eighth Shrine should have been. The four hundred infantrymen had dismounted and split into two groups before the vehicles moved into position; two companies remained with Colonel Deacon Goddservant at the approach to the village, while the third swung around in a wide arc to form an anvil on the other side of the village for the main force's hammer.

Godsservant finished his visual inspection of Eighth Shrine. The village's buildings—the temple, the silos, the barns, and houses—seemed all to be gone, though he could still see the roads and pathways. In place of the buildings there were seven squat constructions; flimsy looking, ugly, mud-colored things in no architectural style familiar to him. No people were in evidence.

"Commence," he ordered.

Fifty meters to his left a platoon, thirty-four men, rose from cover and trotted for the village. The platoon moved in good order; spread out, each man with his flechette rifle held at the ready. A hundred meters from the nearest of the strange structures the soldiers dropped to prone positions.

"Report," Godsservant ordered into his radio.

"Sir," the second acolyte commanding the advance platoon replied instantly, "I detect no movement among the structures. I hear nothing other than the wind and distant animal calls."

"Hail them."

"Yessir." The junior officer rose to his feet and spoke into the boomer he carried. "In the village of Eighth Shrine, show yourselves! We are Soldiers of the Lord and wish no harm to any other than sinners!" His voice echoed off the low hillside behind the village. There was no other reply. He repeated his message. Still no reply.

"Advance," Godsservant ordered.

The platoon rose again and continued its advance. The strange structures proved to be as flimsy as they looked at a distance; they opened easily and fell apart at a blow. In moments all seven were knocked down.

"Sir, the place seems to be totally abandoned."

Colonel Deacon Godsservant gave a signal to his driver, and his Gabriel rumbled out of the trees and sped into the village site.

"Sir, I found some odd things," the second acolyte said when Godsservant dismounted and joined him.

"Look." He pointed at the surface of one of the village's roads.

A swath about three meters wide was swept at an angle across the road—no debris, not even a pebble, was in the swath, Pebbles and twigs were scattered out from its sides, as though tossed or blown from it.

"And over here, sir." A rectangular patch of ground cover on the edge of the village site was crushed, as though something heavy had rested on it.

Godsservant stood at one end of the crushed area and looked into the village. "It looks," he said after a moment, "like an off-worlder shuttle landed here and debarked hovercraft." He pointed. There were several swept swaths across roads. Many of them were in line with the crushed area.

"Unbelievers landed here, sir?" The young officer's voice cracked.

Godsservant grunted. "We will find them. We will take them. The Collegium will find out what they did to the village."

The second acolyte swallowed. The Collegium was the very core of Kingdom's disciplinary arm.

When people were called before it, they might go in whole, but they always came out broken if not dead.

Godsservant ordered the battalion's officers to join him for a meeting. In a few minutes all the officers in the battalion were gathered near the crushed area.

Suddenly, plugs of turf popped up all around the officers, and creatures stood up in the holes that had been concealed under the plugs. The creatures were manlike, but smaller. They held nozzled hoses in their hands, pointed toward the officers. One of the creatures shrilled a command, and they sprayed the officers with a thick, greenish fluid. The officers screamed in agony as the fluid hit them and ate into their flesh and bubbled it away.

In seconds the lead sword of the advance platoon was the senior man left functional. He started shouting orders to the infantrymen, but a stream of greenish fluid took him in the face. He couldn't scream because the breath he drew in sucked the acid into his lungs. More turf plugs popped open and creatures stood up in the holes. Only four soldiers managed to get off shots before they were all down, writhing in agony. All the shots missed.

Inside the treeline a company first sword realized that all the battalion's officers were dead or dying, as were all of the soldiers in the village. Even though he was but an enlisted man, he was the senior remaining man in the battalion. He took command and ordered the Gabriels to open fire with their cannons and obliterate the site.

Lost to the men in the armored vehicles in the blasting of their own guns was a rapid-fire cracking along the length of the hillside behind the village. They saw nothing coming and their threat alarms sounded no warning. Every one of the Gabriels was hit by a force equal to two tons of dynamite before they could get off their second salvo. The force was concentrated to punch a hole through the armor. The secondary explosions when their magazines went off tore them apart and violently flung their parts great distances.

The riflemen in the two companies that formed Godsservant's planned hammer saw their officers killed most hideously and came close to panic. When the Gabriels blew up and many of them were wounded or killed by shrapnel, they closed the short distance to panic and ran. In their flight many of them passed near the still hidden observation posts and died as horribly as their officers had.

The soldiers in the one company of the planned anvil didn't see the officers die, but they heard and saw the deaths of the Gabriels near them. No one rose up to take command immediately, so they dithered fearfully, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Suddenly, doors opened in the hillside in front of them, the back side of the hill behind the village, and combat vehicles smaller than their Gabriels sped out.

The soldiers didn't have any antiarmor weapons; they broke and ran. The small vehicles that pursued them were nimble and chased them wherever they went, spraying a greenish fluid from their cannon nozzles whenever they came close to a fleeing soldier. All of the soldiers in the anvil died.

Before nightfall, the invaders were gone along with all their equipment and supplies. They left behind only the tunnels they dug under the hill and the holes in the village area, all still well-concealed, all booby-trapped.

The next day a specially trained reconnaissance team came to investigate. Not knowing it was unnecessary, they remained fully concealed. They retrieved fragments of one of the shattered Gabriels to take back for forensic examination. One of the reconnaissance soldiers, braver or more foolish than the others, crept into the village site during the night and picked up partial remains of one of the dead to take back for the same reason. When the technicians of the Kingdom's Army of the Lord were unable to determine what had killed the soldier or destroyed the Gabriel, the pieces, organic and metallic, were handed over to off-worlders for analysis. The scientists in Interstellar City were fascinated by the remains and wanted to know where they came from so they could visit the place and gather more pieces for analysis. Such a visit, the scientists were told, was impossible, and there the matter lay. For a while.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Gradually, Claypoole became aware of rushing water, far away at first and then louder as he slowly regained consciousness. He opened his eyes. In the dim light shining through a dirty window high above his head, he could see that he lay on the floor of a warehouse of some kind. Boxes stood stacked in neat rows along one wall. He could just make out a door at the far end of the building. The place was enormous. He coughed and the sound echoed loudly in the damp gloom.

The last thing Claypoole remembered was some girl named...? He couldn't remember. What the hell had she hit him with? Someone nearby groaned. His eyes now adjusted to the dim light, he could make out two other figures stretched on the floor nearby.

"Oof! I feel like I been shot at and missed and shit at and hit," one of the figures groaned. It was Raoul!

"Raoul! How are you?" Claypoole asked. Pasquin only grunted. The other figure had to be Dean.

Claypoole nudged him. Dean groaned. "Deano, we been zapped! How you feeling?"

"You telling me?" Dean muttered. Damn, this kind of roll job wasn't supposed to happen on Havanagas!

Pasquin sat up slowly. "Oh. Last thing I remember was Marilyn's big jugs, and then the lights went out.

Do you think that bastard Paoli did this?"

"Not at all, gentlemen!" a voice boomed from behind them. A dark figure approached, its heels smacking loudly on the concrete floor. A man in a dripping cloak stood before them, his face obscured by a floppy-brimmed hat pulled down low. "I apologize for this," the figure gestured vaguely, "but since you are under constant surveillance, I couldn't risk exposing myself to invite you to be my guests here like a gentleman." He laughed.

"And just who in the hell are you?" Pasquin asked, real anger in his voice.

"Never mind for now, Corporal Pasquin. Oh, yes, I know who you are, or who you want to be known as. We've been watching you too."

"Who's this 'we'?" Dean asked.

"Well, let's say I represent a group opposed to the criminals who run this world. How's that, Lance Corporal Dean?"

"You are with the Havanagas Liberation Front?" Claypoole asked.

The figure regarded Claypoole for a long moment before it answered. "Yes. Strange, three recently discharged Marine grunts know about the existence of the Front?"

"Culloden told us about you," Pasquin said quickly. That goddamned Claypoole, he thought, should engage brain before mouth.

"Oh?" The figure was silent again for a moment. "What else do you know about the Front?"

Pasquin got shakily to his feet and pulled up an empty crate, which he sat on. It was marked FERTILIZER. "We know the mob doesn't really consider you a threat." Pasquin's mind rushed. Nast had briefed them on the Front. This was a warehouse. It contained fertilizer. There was running water nearby. Yes! O'Mol. This guy had to be him. Somebody-or-other O'Mol, the gentleman farmer who owned property along a river. He couldn't remember the full name or the name of the river, but this had to be the guy.

"That's going to change, and very soon," the figure replied. "You know Johnny Sticks doesn't believe you're really three discharged Marines on a spree. Neither do I, come to that. Just what are you three doing here? Discharged servicemen never come here."

Silence. The water continued to flow outside, and far above them the rain thrummed steadily on the tin roof. Dean and Claypoole had now gotten up and were squatting on their haunches.