Starfist: Kingdom's Fury (8 page)

The Skink's grip broke. He flailed with his fists, trying to beat Claypoole's arms. The Marine ignored the blows and swung the Skink like a sledgehammer at the other one, which was just rising. The Skink's scream stopped abruptly when its neck broke.

The other collapsed heavily from the collision, and Claypoole leaped on him. He tore the Skink's helmet off and slammed the palms of his hands against the creature's ears. The Skink screamed and his eyes bulged as he went into convulsions.

Claypoole dove for his blaster and rolled back to his feet, looking for more Skinks.

MacIlargie jerked back when he saw the rushing Skinks and rose to a kneeling position to fire at them. He got three, but a fourth closed and swung the nozzle of its weapon at his head. The nozzle hit hard enough to stun him and he fell over. The Skink leaped on him and dropped the nozzle to draw a long knife. MacIlargie recovered enough to bat the stab away, but he didn't have enough control of his body to wriggle out from under his smaller attacker. The Skink shrilled and thrust again with his knife. MacIlargie grabbed the Skink's arm and managed to deflect the thrust so the point of the blade jammed into the ground. The Skink struggled to pull the knife back, but MacIlargie held on hard enough to stop it. He struck at the Skink with his free hand, but was still dazed enough that he couldn't put enough force into the blow to knock the Skink away. The Skink fended off a second blow, then used both hands to yank his knife free. Reversing his grip on the knife's hilt, the Skink grasped it with both hands to bring it down into MacIlargie's chest. The Marine drew on all the strength he could muster, slammed upward with both fists and propelled the Skink backward. Instead of embedding itself in his chest, the downthrust blade sliced along MacIlargie's arm, the sharp pain and gushing blood startling him. Sitting up, he grabbed the Skink's knife arm with both hands and twisted. The Skink screamed and dropped the knife, but MacIlargie kept twisting. There was a sudden snap, and the arm in MacIlargie's hands flopped. He pushed the Skink off and picked up the knife, then slid it under the apron of the Skink's armor and into his belly. Momentarily free from attack, he looked around for his blaster.

Miraculously, no Skinks came through on the far right side of the thin Marine line.

Corporal Kerr saw peripheral movement and looked to his left. His throat went dry when he saw Skinks closing on the Marines there. For an instant he flashed back to the Siad horsemen who had swarmed into Tulak Yar, the village on Elneal where he was almost killed. He shook himself angrily. This isn't Tulak Yar, he thought. Those aren't the Siad. "Fire left," he ordered, and put action to words.

Lance Corporal Schultz looked and his skin crawled. He'd fought the Skinks several times, but never in such numbers. The sight of so many so close for the second time in fifteen minutes made him feel like maggots and other tiny beasties were crawling over him, burrowing into his flesh. He rose to a kneel and started picking them off.

Corporal Doyle held the extreme right side of the line. Ever since the Marine advance stopped, he'd been terrified that the Skinks would flank them, that all the Skinks on Kingdom would attack the Marines through his position. His first reaction to seeing a frontal assault that didn't come directly at him was profound relief. The relief didn't last. As soon as he tried to aim his blaster, he realized that in order to have a field of fire clear of Marines, he'd have to move forward, closer to the larger mass of Skinks he'd been shooting at. In that instant every fiber in his body screamed Run away! Run away! But he knew he couldn't. He was a Marine corporal in the middle of a firefight. No one would ever talk to him again if he ran away.

Everybody else might die if he ran away. He'd live in disgrace for the rest of his life if he ran away. He crawled forward, closer, so he could blast at the Skinks charging the Marine line. He didn't notice the wet and foulness that abruptly filled the crotch of his trousers.

All along the line, Skinks closed for hand-to-hand combat. With the infantrymen grappling with their attackers, only the Dragons still fired at the oncoming Skinks.

Marines began to fall before the overwhelming numbers.

The crew of one of the Dragons had been killed when Skinks converged on it, sprayed enough acid onto the vehicle's ramp to eat through the thin armor, and broke in. The other Dragons were maneuvering to prevent the Skinks from doing the same to them; the effectiveness of their fire was reduced. The flashing of dying Skinks no longer dazzled the killing ground. Skinks were making it across the killing zone in larger numbers.

Claypoole and MacIlargie stood back-to-back. Each had his combat knife in one hand and a long-bladed knife wrested from a Skink in the other. Skink body armor was designed to stop projectiles but was less effective against bladed weapons. Half a dozen Skinks lay around them, bleeding from wounds—a couple of them were no longer moving. But others, too many others, were circling the two, wielding knives of their own, tightening their circle. And more were rushing toward them. The scene was repeated all up and down the line.

Then several of the circling Skinks flared up from plasma hits. An instant later, Marines bowled into the Skinks.

"Kilo Company to the rescue!" shouted one of the newly arrived Marines. He lifted his blaster and flamed another Skink.

The loud crack-sizzle of Dragon guns behind the line increased, and Skinks in the killing zone flared into vapor. More cracks of blasters and the louder sizzles of Dragons came from the left front.

When Brigadier Sturgeon asked who else was able to move and said he wanted more Marines in the attack against the high ground, each FIST in his command ordered an infantry company out of its defensive positions. When the new, stronger counterattack struck, the Skinks broke and ran. Once more the Kingdomite artillery regiments fired on the flat below the heights.

CHAPTER FIVE

The blood-flecked thing that had once been a woman screamed horribly as an almost fatal surge of electrical current coursed through her broken body. He depressed the button for several seconds, causing the woman to writhe against the restraints in uncontrollable spasms. Dominic de Tomas, Dean of the Collegium, lifted his thumb, and the current abruptly ceased. The woman lay on the table semiconscious, struggling for breath. The interview, as de Tomas called such sessions, had been going on for over an hour, and he was beginning to lose interest since his victim was nearing the end of her endurance.

"Primitive, but effective," de Tomas remarked to a black-uniformed guard standing nearby at rigid attention. It was not often the Dean of the Collegium himself participated in the sessions, and the guards and technicians were impressed. De Tomas smiled amiably at the woman panting and gasping on the bloodstained rack.

She had been a minister of the Anabaptist Sect, in fact one of the last of the Anabaptist leaders on Kingdom, thanks to de Tomas's unflagging pursuit of dangerous thinkers. The few remaining Anabaptists had converted to more politically correct sects, but the dying woman on the rack stubbornly refused to recant. That was all the same to Dominic de Tomas because the minister would die no matter what she promised to do under his torture.

De Tomas walked over and stood looking down at the minister, who was slowly recovering the power of speech. "We have modern and humane methods to make people do what we want," he said. "But in your case I decided to use electroshock because . . . well, it's more painful, and because I have no further use for you, and, to be perfectly honest, because you are impossibly ugly."

The guards and technicians present chuckled at his banter. They were all loyal members of de Tomas's Special Group, an organization of highly trained and dedicated armed men, rivals in many ways of the Kingdomite Army of the Lord. He had built their strength to well over one thousand members, and had even given them military ranks and titles, as well as the latest weapons. It was they who enabled him to enforce his will as the Dean of the Collegium. They were handpicked men who had completed a rigorous course of indoctrination and training, after which they had sworn a blood oath of total loyalty to de Tomas.

Unlike de Tomas himself, who believed in nothing, they had been indoctrinated into a military cult based on the twelfth-century Germanic Order of Teutonic Knights. Their icons of military virtue were the German prince of the Cherusci tribe known as Hermann Arminius, who destroyed Quintilius Varus's legions in 9 A.D. in the Teutoburger Wald; and Heinrich I, "the Fowler," who was elected king of the Germans in 919. In fact, the logo of the Collegium, which de Tomas had designed shortly after becoming dean, was a silver goshawk symbolic of Heinrich, wings spread, perched on two golden lightning bolts—representing Arminius's victory over the Romans. De Tomas artfully, but not overtly, encouraged the belief among his followers that he was the reincarnation of Heinrich. Whether his men believed this or not, they did believe that Dominic de Tomas was their leader, for whom they would gladly sacrifice their own lives. They also believed that anyone who opposed the work of the Collegium, and especially those brought before it for heresy, were enemies of the state who deserved death, and were unfailingly rewarded with it.

The fact that Dominic de Tomas himself was not of Teutonic origin had no bearing on his status as the leader of the Special Group, or what amounted to chief priest of the order.

De Tomas beckoned to the technician in charge of the interrogation lab, a stormleader, the equivalent of a lieutenant in the Army of the Lord. "I've had my amusement for today," he said. "Into the furnace with her . . . slowly and feet first.

Revive the bitch periodically. Put it all on a vid, so I can watch later. You know the procedure." He shrugged. "I have an important meeting to attend now." He gestured at a Shooter, one of four handpicked bodyguards who accompanied him everywhere, "Theodor, if you please."

The jackbooted guard snapped to attention and handed him a cape, black, with a bright red lining, a silver goshawk and golden lightning flashes emblazoned on the back. De Tomas donned it with a practiced flourish. He saluted the stormleader smartly and swirled to the door.

Behind him the Anabaptist began to scream as she was wheeled slowly into the maw of a raging blast furnace. Shrieks accompanied them all the way to the elevators.

Dominic de Tomas had risen to the presidency of the Collegium, the disciplinary body of the ruling theocracy on Kingdom, through guile, ruthlessness, and considerable talent as an administrator. A failed poultry farmer, he had emigrated to Kingdom as a member of the now defunct Rochester branch of the Scientific Pantheist Sect.

The Scientific Pantheist movement had been founded by two brilliant eccentrics in the city of Rochester, New York, in the year 1956. Rochester was famous as home to various crackpot sects, most notable the Spiritualist movement that flourished there in the nineteenth century. The Pantheists had their first falling out in 1958 over whether to call their system of beliefs Scientific or Universal Pantheism. The founders became martyrs over this question, killing themselves in a fight on the steps of the public library on July 18, 1958. But the profound schism occurred shortly before the Second American Civil War. The Rochesterians maintained that nature was dominated by a polarity of life or a unitary intelligence, but they kept the freethinking creed of social responsibility espoused by the original founders of Scientific Pantheism. This put them at odds with what became known as the Philadelphia branch of the sect. The Philadelphians believed in the unity of life force in nature but denied that it represented an intelligence incorporated in the essence of a Supreme Being.

The Philadelphians were quite numerous and prosperous on Old Earth, where they ridiculed the Rochesterians mercilessly and succeeded in making them the laughingstock of the religious orders, derisively calling them "SciPans," a term the Rochesterians abhorred. So they emigrated to Kingdom, where they'd been assured there would be the guarantee of freedom for them to practice their beliefs as they wished while living in harmony among themselves and with their neighbors.

De Tomas had joined the sect because he sensed their weaknesses and because a man like himself, with no core belief in anything but his own destiny, would be free to pursue his own goals unnoticed. As a requirement for emigration, the Pantheists had been required by Kingdom's theocracy to nominate a member to sit on the Collegium. De Tomas saw that as his opportunity and volunteered. He was accepted because nobody else in the libertarian sect wanted anything to do with a body they considered positively medieval. De Tomas assured them his membership would be pro forma only. How wrong they were. The SciPan sect had speedily become defunct on Kingdom, thanks primarily to de Tomas's persecution of his former

"coreligionists"; the Kingdomites did not particularly like freethinking, socially active congregations. Many sects were allowed to practice on Kingdom, but only those that practiced a strict orthodoxy, did not proselytize, and did not ask questions.

The Collegium was originally formed to enforce orthodoxy among Kingdom's many sects. As such, it possessed extraordinary police powers over virtually anyone suspected of heresy. The Collegium's decision in any case was final, and it could impose the death penalty without resort to other civil courts. The dean's office was permanent, but he was advised by members of the various sects appointed on a rotating basis. They advised him on the finer points of sectarian orthodoxy, but over the years, de Tomas was able to dispense with their counsel, securing for himself a free hand to conduct investigations and impose punishments.

Originally the civil police in the various communities had been charged to cooperate with the Collegium by apprehending and bringing heretics before its tribunal. But under de Tomas's leadership, he persuaded the Convocation of Ecumenical Leaders to allow him his own enforcement arm, and he had then created the Special Group. They were feared everywhere their jackboots marched.