“Not if we all work together,” I said. Already Beecher was moving his people to the medical stations. Armed Legion soldiers escorted women and children to the inoculation stations. They were needed. No one appreciated the presence of our military golems or our aerial drones.
These were old school frontier folk, afraid of the Anti-Christ and all its works. Raximander had provided them with a reason to make a deal with the Devil. Given time, they would get used to our presence. I’ve seen it before in a hundred places.
The golems stood still and did not move, massive unblinking presences but strangely reassuring if you’ve just been attacked by corpse warriors. A ten-meter-tall Walker loomed over us, cybertanks guarded the approaches to the square
“That is going to be the trick, isn’t it?” Beecher’s smile was ironic. “We are a fractious folk on Faith. As I am sure you have no doubt noticed.”
“You are working with us.”
“I do not have much choice if I want to save my people, do I?”
“Maybe the others will all see reason too.”
“I fear they may prove more resistant to the idea of cooperation than I.”
“If Raximander keeps on attacking they might get the idea.”
He froze on the spot for a moment. Stillness settled on him for an instant and his face became distant, then he was his usual affable self again. I looked at him. He could not see my features beneath the hologram but he sensed my thoughts.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There are many among my people who think that Raximander has provided you with a convenient excuse to intervene here.”
“If it were up to me I would have preferred an excuse not to intervene.”
“Your masters might not think the same way.”
“I doubt this place was on their radar until you started shooting at each other and setting fire to Shogunate sales people. Tarring and feathering their corpses was a bit stupid if you did not want to draw the attention of the Fed Gov. It has to be seen to respond to the Shogun’s protests.”
“I said the same at the time. Still a Brood invasion does provide a useful pretext for intervention.”
“I am as willing as the next man to believe the worst of our politicians but trust me, not even they would deploy the Assimilators against a human population.”
“I hope you are right.” I could see he was turning the thought over and over in his mind, inspecting it from as many different directions as he could, watching its facets glitter in the cold clear light of his mind. He was thinking not about the truth of the concept but of how he could make it play with his people.
He was a politician. I don’t know what had made me think he was different.
We reached the medical booths. One by one the people were injected, starting with the youngest and most vulnerable. I could see they were worried. They feared the medicines were going to turn them into mindless lackeys of the false gods of Artificial Intelligence but they were more worried about being absorbed by the false god who was Raximander. Rightly so.
As each person passed, a medical sensor bleeped and a hovering drone recorded their bio-medical update. Medico Mark scowled and knuckled his eyes. “How is it going?” Beecher asked.
“Better than I would have expected,” Mark said. I could tell from the way he spoke he was troubled. He looked up at me and said, “No. Seriously. Better than I would have expected. There are fewer mid-stage cases than previous experience would suggest. Either these people are resistant or our medical nanites are doing better against Raximander than I projected.”
“Let’s not shoot a gift horse in the head.”
“I always heard it was look a gift horse in the mouth,” Beecher said.
“You can do that after you’ve shot it.”
“I suspect you would, Stormtrooper 13.”
“Hey, I like animals.”
“It’s people you don’t like.”
I glanced around at the carnage. “I don’t often see them at their best.”
“No. There is that.” He paused for a moment. “I understand you fought on Antioch against the Beast.”
“I did.” I remembered the briefing. Antioch had been the home world of the Legion before they had been evacuated to Faith maybe twelve years ago. It had been the biggest spacelift in history. We thought we were doing something heroic. Who knew we would be standing amidst its terrible consequences a decade later?
“Were you in Valley of Roses?” I had fought there against Raximander and his Overmind. We had reduced the great garden city to charred cinders.
“Yes.”
“Was it—was it still beautiful?” There was a world of hunger written in Beecher’s face. He looked like a man remembering happiness and peace and all the good things he certainly was not going to get here on Faith. I was tempted to lie, but it would not have been a kindness.
“It was when we started,” I said. “Not so much by the time we had finished.”
“Nukes and nanoweapons, eh?” There was just the faintest of catches in his voice. “No, I guess there was not much left. Still, you saw it when it was beautiful.”
“I did and I am glad,” I said. It was true as well. Valley of Roses had been one of the wonders of the Republic, a place of huge hanging gardens and green ziggurat habitats. Of course, it had become a death trap once every living thing in it was turned against us.
He looked at me with a strange mixture of sadness and pride. His eyes glistened. If I had not known better, I would have thought he was about to cry. “It was a lovely place.”
“It was,” I said. We were silent for a moment, sharing a memory of a place that was no more. At that moment, we were not enemies, not friends. We were just people.
He looked away, swallowed and straightened his shoulders. The mask settled on his face. His features might as well have been carved from ebony. “Your friend, Monger, don’t trust him.”
Whatever the moment was, it was gone. “Care to expand on that?”
“Rumor has it that he has been dealing with the House of Ishtar. Importing weapons. The Fiscal Loyalists are arming their security sections.”
“They’re not the only ones. I’ve seen plenty of Ishtarian weapons around here. One was almost fired at me.”
“Once one side has these things, all sides have to. There’s always escalation.”
I thought about Rax and the leadership of the Aryan Jihad. If I was a betting man I would have put money on the likelihood that the Assimilators had arrived along with shipments of Ishtarian guns.
“You been buying?”
“I would if we could afford it. The Weapon Ship’s prices would indenture my people for generations.”
“Where did the Jihad get the money then?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it? Maybe they were not so afraid of getting into debt. Maybe they saw it as investment. They could get their world back and sell off the property they expropriated at the same time.”
Beecher studied the communicator on his wrist. Clearly he felt he had given me enough to think about. “I had better get back to my people. There are many things that need to be settled.”
I watched him walk away. He was a clever man, and not, I think, a bad one, but like every other politician on Faith, he had his agenda.
Chapter Twenty-One
Cold mist hung over the city. Some of it was natural, some of it was nanites. Visibility was low and everything had a haunted look to it. It had only been hours since we had left the Legion camp. Nothing else had been reported so far. It was all quiet on the Temperance front. I looked out the window of the hab bubble and saw the broken remnants of buildings. The city had been in a bad way before Raximander arrived. Now it looked like a real disaster area. I seem to spend half my adult life in them and almost all of my childhood.
“What do you think old Raximander will do next?” Ragequit asked over Grid.
“I’m willing to bet it involves attacking civilians,” said Lopez. He was not w
rong, I would’ve bet money on it.
“It looks like something is going down in the eastern sector,” the Colonel said.
“Raximander?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Anybody asking for help?”
“No but I’ve sent some reconnaissance drones over just in case. We may as well see what we are getting into.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
“I’m glad that my decisions meet with your approval,” said the Colonel.
I almost said there was no need to be sarcastic but in StarForce there’s always a need to be sarcastic.
A few more minutes passed as Ragequit and Lopez chatted about the Brood over Grid and I listened out of boredom.
“This is interesting,” said the Colonel. There was something about the way she stressed the word interesting that got my attention. I called up the same video feeds as she was looking at and I saw what she meant immediately.
Rax’s corpse warriors were attacking another Orthodox outpost but this time they were having a lot more trouble. The Orthodox weren’t shooting with assault rifles. They were shooting with large black military issue blasters. They were being supported by shiny silver tanks equipped with equally lethal energy weapons.
“That’s a couple of tech grades higher than I was expecting,” I said.
Ragequit said, “What?”
“Somebody’s been arming the militiamen,” the Colonel said. “And I don’t think we need to look too far to find out who.”
She was right about that. All of those weapons had the stamp of the Weapon Smiths of Ishtar all over them.
“I would not have thought they could afford hardware like that down here,” I said. “The Weapon Ships are not known for giving away stuff for free.”
At this point in time the militia were more than holding their own with their new equipment. I wasn’t sure for how much longer that would apply and I could already see the downside of the situation beginning to emerge.
“It’s not going to be fun fighting those guys when they become corpse warriors,” Ragequit said. He had obviously patched himself into the feed as well. He’d grasped the essence of the situation in an instant. There were times when he could actually be quite quick. “Those blasters look like Mark Twos. I’m pretty sure they can penetrate a Dyson field with one shot.”
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” the Colonel said. I could tell that she was trying to open channels to the Weapons Smiths but nothing appeared to be happening.
“It looks like there’s some sort of interference with the communications grid,” she said.
“Funny how often that happens here, isn’t it?” I said.
She looked at me. “What do you think?”
“I think there are a few questions that need to be answered.”
She looked at the squad and said, “Saddle up. It looks like we’re going to pay a little visit to the House of Ishtar.”
We marched across the landing field toward the ship along with a full complement of robogrunts. Orbital had been busy. It looked like the printers had been working full-time. We had more than replaced casualties. We could keep the situation under control for a bit longer as long as Raximander did not escalate it.
I was not sure that we were equipped to tackle a Weapon Ship if it came down to it. Anyway it was a bit late to be having second thoughts.
The Weapon Ship looked like two needle pointed star scrapers joined together by an ebony band in the center. Large as a small mountain, it sat within its own shimmering defensive perimeter. If it came to a fight between it and Orbital, I would not have put money on our side.
A company of black armored mercenaries with mirror-visored helmets was waiting to greet us. Just so we got the point, they were armed with the latest and greatest Ishtar blasters. They were surely the equal of reapers at the very least. I could not see any military golems but that probably just meant that they did not want to outrage local sensibilities. It wasn’t because they didn’t have them.
A couple of the Smiths themselves stood behind their bodyguards. I caught the discreet shimmer of protective fields. I hoped it was not because they expected shooting to start. It probably just seemed like a natural and sensible precaution for people as paranoid as the Weapon Smiths.
As the Colonel strode toward the mercenaries, they performed a neat shoulder arms, clicked their heels, swiveled, and left a path between them for us to approach their masters. It was impressive. Robogrunts could not have done it more efficiently.
“Colonel Green,” the first Weapon Smith said, “to what do we owe the honor of this visit?”
She was a tall, slim woman with a somewhat alien appearance. Her skin was albino but her eyes were golden. Possibly contact lenses, possibly implants. She was beautiful in an elfin sort of way. Her voice was several octaves lower than you would have expected from that slender figure.
“I’m sure you already know, Captain-Pilot Liasa,” the Colonel said.
“We have many skills,” said the second Weapon Smith. “But mind reading is not one of them.”
He was a thin snake-like man and I mean that literally. His skin was green and scaly. His eyes were unblinking.
“You’ve been selling weapons to the militias,” the Colonel said.
“Yes. We know.” This was from the elf. “You did not have to come all this way to tell us that.”
“Communications channels are mysteriously closed,” the Colonel said. “I was wondering how that could be?”
The elf woman smiled. “We are in full defensive configuration now,” she said. “It is possible that our jammers misinterpreted your grid beams.”
“Indeed,” the Colonel said. She matched the sardonic irony of the elf woman.
“It troubles you that we have been arming the local citizens,” the serpent man said.
The Colonel said, “You’ve given the locals weapons sufficiently powerful to overcome the shields of our battle suits.”
“We have not given them anything,” the elf woman said. “We have sold them that which they require to defend themselves in the face of an alien invasion.”
“I would not have thought the locals could afford such hardware,” the Colonel said.
“The situation is obviously an emergency. We have been authorized to equip the locals at a deep discount and provide them with generous credit terms.”
“You mean you are letting them mortgage the planet for the next five centuries?”
“I am not at liberty to discuss the nature of our financial arrangements. Suffice to say that in a court of law they would be found to be perfectly acceptable. If the Federal Government wishes to investigate the matter it can, of course, proceed through formal channels.”
We would not get anywhere. Politicians would be bribed. Arbitrating artificial intelligences would somehow overlook critical information. The Weapon Smiths would be allowed to continue their business.
“The business of the Federal Republic is business,” I said. The Colonel glared at me. I could tell exactly what she meant by the look. She was handling this and I was not to butt in. I did my best but I’ve never been able to resist an opportunity like this.
“The weapons have the usual safeguards built in?” asked the Colonel.
The Captain-Pilot nodded. “Their sensors will prevent them from being fired if in the hands of Assimilators’ puppets.”
But not from being passed hand to hand, I thought.
“The weapons are being sold with standard bulk military restraints. They are meant to be used by units. They can be passed out to anyone with a standard human genotype. They are not individually keyed, but there is no chance of any Assimilator being able to use them.”
“What about a killswitch?” I asked. Both of the Weapon Smiths looked at me as if I had suggested they perform an obscene sexual act for my personal amusement.
“There are none,” said the serpent man. “It would defeat the purpose of our wares.”
“Oh g
ood,” I said. “What could possibly go wrong in a situation like this?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Is that all you wish to discuss?” the elf woman asked.
“There is the little matter of Rax’s presence on the surface of the planet,” I said. The Colonel’s gaze went nuclear. It was like having a laser beam focused on me. I was glad I was wearing full armor.
“It is disturbing,” the serpent man agreed.
“You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”
“Are you accusing us of something, Stormtrooper 13?” the serpent man asked. He had the sound of a lawyer hoping that someone would make a slanderous remark.
“It is quite unusual to have a Brood presence on a world without any of the usual signs. Normally we can trace the vector. Either it’s a hive ship or some infected freighter.”
The serpent man replied, “We all know that hundreds of unauthorized ships can pass through systems. Particularly backward systems like this one, that do not have the detectors or the infrastructure to oversee interstellar trade.”
“I’m glad you explained that to me,” I said. “I would not have known that otherwise.”
“You’re welcome,” the serpent man said.
“Stormtrooper 13 was being ironic,” the Colonel said. “As he often is. However he raises a good point.”
“For the record, I wish to state that we did not bring any Brood biomaterial into the system,” the elf woman said. “If we had I would be aware of it. I am the ship’s mistress.”
I noticed the careful legalistic wording of that. She was disclaiming all knowledge personally, but she was saying or at least hinting that there was the possibility that it might have been done without her supervision or permission. The serpent man tilted his head to one side. In a human it would have been a gesture of curiosity. In a serpent man it might simply mean he was considering eating her. We should be so lucky.