The Rifter's Covenant Read online

  “Deploy scuttlers and the . . .” His mind groped for the name they’d tagged the Kelly weapons with. “. . . triskels. Now we find something live and get directions.”

  Panarchic intelligence had been limited to the adits that covert operations had detected. They knew nothing of the interior, except by analogy to other Barcan installations that had been compromised.

  The little machines, taking their directions from the Marines’ suit computers in a distributed array, picked their way down the wreckage, disappearing into various openings. The scuttlers were general-purpose vermin: they could relay data through repeaters they emplaced, interfere with communications, manipulate controls, and so forth. The triskels were more focused. They dealt with one thing only: Ogres.

  But there hadn’t been time to learn all the options of a weapons system the Panarchy hadn’t known about. All they had to handle them was skull-knowledge rather than the settled muscle-wisdom that practice brought, even in a sim.

  As the tactical picture grew clearer, Meliarch ZiTuto hoped that would be enough.

  CLAIDHEAMH MOR

  Another tactical update rippled through the screens as the Kelly ship awaited Cameron’s reply.

  “Neyvla-khan is moving,” he reported. “Time to give him something to think about.”

  He issued commands to the Kelly courier, which promptly vanished.

  “But not Hreem.” Kor-Mellish thumped her fist on the edge of her console, sparking a laugh from the rest of the bridge. “Cameron, I love your twisted mind.”

  FLOWER OF LITH

  Hreem watched the flares on Avasta hungrily. Time for mind games now.

  “Carcason. Reverse course, head out of Barca’s shadow from Shimosa. Make it look good.”

  “Captain?”

  Carcason’s doubtful tone infuriated Hreem. “Just do it, piss-weasel. But not too fast, see? Don’t get outside the penumbra.”

  A short time after the navigator complied, Dyasil spoke up nervously, the rasping sound as he rubbed his chin irritating Hreem. Why didn’t the stupid blit either grow a beard or depilate? “Signal from Scorpion. Two-second delay.”

  Hreem dismissed the irritations and moved up to the edge of his pod. “Put him on.”

  He didn’t wait for the screen to clear before he began speaking. “The damn nicks are mixing in now. I think it’s time to blow the resonance field and get the hell out of here.”

  On the screen, Neyvla-khan shrugged, his thin, pale face scornful. “You are a fool, Hreem the Useless. A tempath’s puppet, expecting me to believe such mewling nonsense. You are in this treachery with the Barcans.” He spat elaborately. “Lances. Pah!”

  Hreem fought back his anger. “You chatzing moron. Is that why they just sent Riolo back in pieces? Yeah, I tried to cut a deal, but they aren’t having any of it.”

  He saw the impact of his lie in the narrowing of Neyvla-Khan’s eyes.

  “I don’t know what Barrodagh is up to,” he went on, “but I don’t trust him any more than you do. Maybe it’s not nicks, maybe it’s Dol’jharians. Maybe Barrodagh was stalling us so they can get it all themselves.”

  He saw doubt lengthen his enemy’s long face, and pressed his advantage. “You know how many armories’ve been looted. Maybe they found some of those stealth lances the RiftNet is always talking about. Next thing you know, they’ll be shutting down our power.” Norio squeezed his arm, his fingers moving in the simple muscle code they used: Clever.

  Then the image tore across, flickered out, and returned fuzzily.

  “Gee-mine!” Metije shrilled, her console lighting up amber and red.

  Hreem slapped the Lith’s shields up full.

  “Looted armories!” Neyvla-khan hissed, showing all his teeth.

  His face dwindled to a point and vanished a moment before the Lith shuddered to a missile strike. Several screens filled with garbage.

  “Pili! Take out the resonance generator! And trigger those chatzing sneak-missiles. Erbee, find the ones Neyvla-khan’s got aimed at us.”

  “Not in position yet, Captain,” Pili replied, his high voice squeaking with strain. “Ten minutes or so.”

  “No traces here.” Erbee’s scrawny body knotted with tension.

  “Chatz! Carcason, get us out of here!” Hreem grabbed his head and tried to think. “Where’d that gee-mine come from?”

  Norio whispered, “Are the Barcans betraying us all?”

  The Lith raced back into the shadow, fleeing the inner edge of the penumbra of the Shimosa weapons. Hreem’s gut heaved and churned as if the gravs were failing.

  Things were suddenly very complicated.

  AVASTA STATION

  Solarch Topanar’s scuttler found the first live Barcans. It and several others of the little mechs from his and the other squads had relayed views of pathetic huddles of dead ones, burned or suffocated by the sun-hot gases sweeping through the corridors when the lance teslas overloaded.

  But several hundred meters down one corridor, around a corner, here was a group of five, cowering in another of the recessed, doorless rooms that were apparently their posts during an emergency. There were no controls, just a comm.

  The light enhancers and infrareds pulled detail out of the murky Barcan gloom, giving the figures in front of him a faintly solarized look. ZiTuto confronted the one whose clothing indicated the highest rank.

  “Where is the main control room?”

  The man gobbled a reply, which the Marine’s suit computer rendered into Uni. “I don’t know.” The Barcan’s heart rate increased above the level terror had imposed; the infrared imager overlaid an increased glow on his cheeks and forehead while the suit’s chemonark detected increased perspiration and pheromonal activity. He was lying.

  ZiTuto stepped forward, knowing how menacing his armor made the movement. He pointed at the man with his right index finger, made massive by his suit gauntlet. “I will kill you if no one tells me in five seconds.” He started counting.

  The man shook his head, his face set stubbornly. Well, your oath against mine, thought the meliarch as he reached “five.” He clenched the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand and a thread of brilliance shot forth, impacting the man’s chest. The Barcan burped noisily as the blood in his lungs vaporized; a reddish mist shot forth as his mouth gaped in an agonized rictus and he fell backward in limp disarray.

  ZiTuto swallowed his distaste and turned to the lowest ranking Barcan, on whose codpiece a stain was rapidly spreading. “Where is the control center?”

  To the Marine’s relief, the answer tumbled out as fast as the man could speak.

  Then he noticed the tags around their necks. He queried the squad.

  “Probably not much use, Meliarch,” Dryden said. “They’re probably in here ’cause the tags aren’t any good in the corridors during an emergency.” She paused. “But combined with the data from the scuttlers, maybe they’ll get me into the system.”

  She stooped and took the tag off the dead man, pressing it against a rough patch on her armor. Then she extruded a probe from her left gauntlet and tapped into the com console.

  A minute later she reported, “Viral agents released; some phages found a match, too. We can use the tags, but they’ll only—maybe—slow down the Ogres, unless we’re in one of these emergency stations. Further on I may be able to snag a station layout, or maybe one of the other squads will come up with something.”

  ZiTuto had deployed the other four squads on slightly diverging courses to multiply the chances of finding the right way to the control room; they all carried sufficient shaped charges to blow their way through intervening walls to join forces if needed. He noted that Amahiro’s and Mynheer’s squads were slightly closer if the Barcan had told the truth.

  “Right,” ZiTuto said. “Each of you, grab a tag.” He windowed the full tac overlay up and relayed the info to the other squads; none of them had yet found any living enemy.

  The Barcans howled with terror as they were stripped of the tags
, but to no avail, and the sound of their misery followed the Marines down the corridor.

  Then, just as it had almost faded away, the image from the scuttler they’d left behind flared and died. The cries rose to screams. ZiTuto triggered his enhancers. Was that crunching he heard?

  Before he could query any of his squad, a shout came through the comm from Dyarch Amahiro, whose squad was slightly closer to the command center, like “Ogres! Efreem, get the chatzing triskels back here!”

  ZiTuto could hear weapons fire over the comm from Amahiro as he deployed his squad against whatever might be following from the way they’d come and began moving in what he now was sure was the direction of the control room. He pulled up the tac overlay again as he commanded, “Dryden, get a scuttler down there and throw in the triskels.” Nine of the little Kelly machines danced past them from behind, toward the now silent safety room. “Takai, Sorensin, get the armor-piercing wasps up.”

  The tactical situation deteriorated rapidly as Mynheer’s squad came under attack as well. ZiTuto deployed this other squads toward the two under attack; he could feel the floor slap at his feet as they blew their way through rock in a frantic effort to support their comrades.

  But it came to late for Amahiro and her squad. Her voice rose to a scream distorted by the sheering noise of rending armor, then a shattering explosion that cut off. Horror—gained from sims of how Ogres were designed to fight Shiidra—jacked his adrenaline as he shouted an order over the general tac channel: “Don’t let them close with you!”

  Later replay showed it took only twenty minutes before the remaining Marines from Haarscharf finally reached the hatch to the control room. By then, they knew the value of the triskels, and deployed accordingly.

  “They’ve doubtless got Class One tags,” said ZiTuto hoarsely as they set up. “Grab ’em; if you take a hand or head with ‘em, too bad. They might help, but don’t count on it,” he said as two Marines set up charges against the hatch.

  In the command center, despite how the Servant gargled weirdly and fell silent, Cuonn was unprepared for the suddenness with which the enemy appeared. One moment, the quiet control room crackled with tension, the next, the hatch exploded inward.

  Several small cylindrical devices flew through the ruined hatch with a threatening buzz-hum, their pointed noses seeking from side to side. A wave of little scuttling machines followed, spreading out to clamber up onto the consoles and plunge sharp probes into them, while bizarre three-legged devices that moved in complex triple patterns of threes of threes followed, freezing in threatening positions around the perimeter.

  Then the room filled with bulky figures chillingly reminiscent of the Black Ones. Many of them had streaks of weapons fire across their armor, or even dents. Cuonn stared, all his calculations overturned. These were not Rifters, but Arkadic Marines.

  Many of the Marines took up stations around the room, their massive jacs at the ready. Cuonn could see at least one still outside the hatch. Other Marines approached each of the monitors at their consoles and yanked their tags off; several monitors screamed in pain or terror. One Marine approached him and did the same; Cuonn suppressed his yelp of pain as the chain sawed briefly at his neck before parting.

  Cuonn looked at him defiantly; he could see the Marine’s face clearly. He wondered how clearly the weak-eyed Panarchist could see him. There was no give in the man’s features. Cuonn resigned himself to death.

  And death came. Niches dilated in the wall and the Black Ones glided out with feral suddenness. The Marine triggered his jac and the answering blare of flame consumed Cuonn in mercifully-swift agony.

  ZiTuto could hear his coolant systems whining near overload as the last of the Ogres fell heavily to the deck, sparking furiously as the monothread tangled about them by the three-legged Kelly triskels cut deep into their armor. One Ogre discharged its chest-cannon mindlessly into the ceiling, bringing down a shower of molten rock on the hapless Barcans. Most of them were beyond feeling it.

  He looked down at the blackened corpse of the commanding officer with grim satisfaction, thinking bleakly that they’d just got a sip of what Amahiro and the others had drunk to the fullest.

  He glared at the nearest Ogre, still twisting spastically on the deck as its servos discharged, and shuddered. The humanoid shape was bad enough, but far worse were their faces: nonfunctional fright masks, originally calculated to make the Shiidra fear humans by exaggerating the features most noticeable to the dog-like aliens. They looked like a cross between a primitive ritual mask and a wildly grinning mental defective. More than ever now he was viscerally convinced that the Ogres were a horrifying trespass on the Ban, despite what Navy higher-ups said.

  Even the little triskels made him nervous, the more so because Dryden had insisted, despite Kelly assurances, that there was more implied by the computer links to them than she cared for. They seemed too sentient.

  But they had worked.

  Interrogation of the remaining Barcans soon revealed good news. It appeared the Barcans had decided to throw in with Hreem: all the weapons of Avasta were trained on Neyvla-khan’s fleet. But then came the bad news: the Scorpion was in the second target group of the sequence.

  “It’d take longer to reprogram than to fire twice,” Dryden said in response to his query. “There’s only two minutes to full control.”

  Time crawled. He remembered Soaba’s face, her smile, the touch of her hands. Then the console in front of him lit.

  “All yours, Meliarch.”

  He brought his finger down on the firing stud with controlled gentleness, mindful of his amplified strength, so all the violence of the motion was expressed in his vengeful shout.

  “For Soaba!”

  AVASTA: LAZPLAZ TOWER 2

  Dyarch Sussonius reviewed their situation with quiet satisfaction. As expected, the lazplaz tower was unoccupied—and no wonder, he thought, bringing up the spy-eye view of the thick, rippled crater of glass that surrounded the installation. He glanced nervously at the ridge that hid them from line-of-sight with the tower—it seemed little enough to shield them from the fury of its discharge.

  “We’ve got activity, Dyarch,” reported Solarch Byrd, who was monitoring the quantum clamp on the fiberlink that carried the commands of Avasta Station to the weapon.

  “Massdriver warming up.”

  Sussonius checked the spy-eye again. Sure enough, a wavering beam of ghostly light now emanated from the mouth of the hundred-kilometer massdriver, as it cleared itself of lunar outgassing in preparation for the blast of near-lightspeed plasma it would momentarily deliver to the tesla deflector in the tower.

  He withdrew the spy-eye. Overhead, a sliver of Barca gleamed. The part of its surface in sunshadow gloomed in light reflected from Shimosa, invisible over the horizon.

  “Prepare for discharge,” he said. The squad hunkered down. He spared a glance for the higher ridge a few hundred meters farther out, beyond which the Kelly ship waited.

  “Here we go,” Byrd said.

  A breathless heartbeat, then, with a soundless crash that slapped up through the ground at him, the lazplaz discharged. A lurid sheet of light shot overhead, threaded with brilliant lines of light as the backblast tore rocks off the top of the ridge shielding them and hurled them away—probably into orbit. He caught a glimpse of a seemingly solid bar of energy spearing up; a few seconds later a coin of light blossomed above the limb of Barca.

  “That’s one!” Ra-Tremon exulted, her voice high.

  “You gotta let us watch the next one,” Norski added.

  Sussonius grinned, needing no urging. He extended the spy-eye again. The crater around the tower glowed dull red, a hellish foundation to the white-hot glare from the refractory electronic alloys of the lazplaz tower. As the Marines watched, the mechanism elevated a new mirror into its yoke. The mirror pivoted, taking up a new aiming point, and a new disc of the ultradense matter that sustained the momentum-converting tesla effect slid into place above the mirror.
/>   The laser would fire straight up, deflected by the aiming mirror through the tesla lens, which would deflect the plasma delivered by the massdriver along the axis of the laser beam. The lens lasted scarcely a nanosecond, the mirror not much longer, but that was enough to deliver a three-hundred-meter-long slug of plasma whose intersection with the beam of coherent light could punch through almost any ship’s shield.

  The massdriver began outgassing again, but this time the light was harder to see.

  “I’ve got the sequence decoded,” Byrd reported.

  “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

  A beam that looked like a solid bar of white-hot metal snapped into existence, linking the mouth of the massdriver with the tesla lens, intersecting a scarcely less violent cylinder of coherent light, revealed by the gases released by the last discharge, lancing up from the laser. At their meeting point, hell blossomed and leapt hungrily into the sky at an acute angle. Then the spy-eye flared and evaporated as the ground shook once again. The deathly light of the backblast scythed overhead. Sussonius heard a gentle tinkling from his armor—little spheres of rockglass blown upward by the first discharge, only now falling back in the gentle pull of Avasta.

  “Telos,” someone breathed.

  “More like Haruban’s style, I’d say,” put in another.

  “That’s it,” Sussonius said. “Show’s over. Byrd, set up the intercept on the fiberlink. When the signal comes to disable, we’ll turn off the tesla generator and cripple the failsafes.”

  He looked back at the ridge, whose edge still glowed. Without the tesla generator, when the weapon fired, several kilos of plasma would impact the ultradense lens at near lightspeed.

  “And we want to be very, very far away by then. Move it!”

  EIGHT