Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium)
Read Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) Online
Authors: P. K. Lentz
Tags: #ancient, #epic, #greek, #warfare, #alternate history, #violent, #peloponnesian war
(Book I of The Hellennium)
~
P.K. Lentz
Text copyright © 2015 P.K. Lentz
All Rights Reserved
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Longing for Oblivion
PART I. PYLOS
PART II. ATHENS
PART III. AMPHIPOLIS
PART IV. ARKADIA
12. She Whose Wrath Is Relentless
PART V. ELEUSIS
Oblivion
“Geneva, I'm sure there's a reasonable
explanation for this,” said Lyka, an unwelcome presence hovering
over the pilot's controls in the hardliner's steering chamber, “but
it looks as if we're in the wrong layer. It's Severed.
There's no way back. We're trapped here.”
Lyka did not seem particularly alarmed, but
then Lyka was old, much older than her two crewmates, even if she
did not look it, and was perhaps less prone to fits of excitement
than other fighters of the Veta Caliate.
Eight seconds later, Lyka's severed head
floated free in the zero-grav, haloed by a cloud of tiny globules
which burst into flat red flowers on contact with the chamber's
smooth surfaces.
The head drifted gently past the small
room's only hatch, which presently opened at the approach of the
third and final individual aboard the hardliner
Longing for
Oblivion
.
Eden had certainly overheard Lyka's
observation. Now her eyes went wide at the sight of her
slaughtered crewmate. At her pilot's console, Geneva
triggered a control to quickly seal the hatch. Four fingers
of Eden's hand were pulped in the closing orifice as she tried, and
utterly failed, to hold it open. She did not scream.
“
Geneva!
” she instead howled in rage
at the fibresteel door. "You're dead, traitor!"
Alone in the steering chamber but for the
two wayward parts of the nominal superior she had just killed,
Geneva ignored Eden's promise and the stream of stinging insults
which followed it. She double-checked her instruments.
This was the right layer. Not the one on their mission
manifest, of course, but the right one.
His
layer. That
was
his
Earth directly ahead.
Pre-industrial, which was good. And
the hardliner's current course would land it somewhere in the
western hemisphere, which was also good.
Their landing would be less a landing than a
fiery disintegration in this Earth's atmosphere. But it was
vital that
Longing
not survive, and for that
reason Geneva had overridden those elements of the liner's systems
which enabled it to transition between void and atmosphere, gravity
and none. The hardliner would break up on entry, and the
three crew aboard would make landfall, or seafall, separately from
their vessel and each other, and with no protection but their
voidsuits. All three would surely sustain catastrophic
damage. But they would heal. They would survive.
Geneva had hoped to be able to destroy her companions utterly
before reaching her destination, but that was far from a simple
task, the tools for which were not typically present on a
hardliner.
No, her sabotage had not gone quite as
planned, but then plans only worked in perfect worlds, and perfect
worlds did not exist. For that reason, Geneva had few
certainties concerning what she would do when she got groundside.
Rather, she trusted in her ability to take advantage of
whatever opportunities might arise to work toward the achievement
of her aim.
Her final aim. Her last mission. –
She knew what she
would
not
do. She had no interest in ruling
this world or in depopulating it by the thousands, both of which
were available options. One way or another, her existence
would end in this endeavor, and she would have the luxury of taking
her time at it, since Caliate pursuit seemed unlikely. She
could live a life here. Many lifetimes. Primitive ones,
but surely enjoyable.
Maybe her two companions would even
unwittingly help. Neither bifurcated Lyka nor furious Eden,
pounding uselessly on the hatch with one hand and one freshly made
stump, had any inkling as to why they were doomed. They were
Geneva's siblings, of a sort. Two of thousands, most of whom
called her vile names behind her back, if not to her face, and who
only grudgingly trusted her because Magdalen told them they must.
Magdalen was wrong after all, it seemed: wayward Geneva had
been a traitor to the Caliate once before, and now, with this act,
she became one again. Betrayal was easier the second
time.
They hit atmosphere. Instruments
showed the steering chamber getting very hot very fast.
Eden's pounding stopped, and she screamed a few last words in
the moments before the hardliner
Longing for
Oblivion
achieved its eponymous wish.
“
I will find you, bitch!
”
Staring blankly at the instrument panel,
Geneva paid her no heed.
Above the clouds, and far above the square
sails of wooden ships crewed by mariners to whom the sea on which
they fished and traded and made war was the center of the world in
more ways than one, a strange vessel's long journey met its
catastrophic end. Three of the many small, burning fragments
into which the vessel shattered had once been alive, and would live
again.
Strange Flotsam
Ninth day of Metageitnion in the archonship
of Stratokles (August 425 BCE)
By moonlight the Helot rowed his tiny boat,
its hull patched and rotten, toward the shore of the mountainous
island that dominated Pylos harbor. Sphakteria, it was
called, an ugly name for an ugly lump of rock. Windswept
waves from the Ionian Sea poured relentlessly through the narrow
channel between island and mainland and threatened to swamp his
little craft, a fleck of chaff on Poseidon's vast domain. But
such were the only conditions in which this voyage might be made,
for in daylight and when the weather was fair, Pylos harbor was
watched over by Athenian triremes, the crews of which would halt
and slaughter any who tried to run their blockade.
But what was the risk of death to one
enslaved by birth to men whose sons hunted and killed his kind as
practice for the killing of better men? Ever had that been
the lot of Messenians, at least since their ancient conquest by
Sparta, to toil in servitude as Helots whose highest hopes in life
were to meet a natural death and leave behind a few sons to inherit
their hard lot. Until now, that was. Now there was
cause to dream of more, for the Spartan forces besieged on
Sphakteria had promised to make rich men of any who could smuggle
them food, and free men of any Helots who did the same. Yes,
the risk of this short excursion was high, but so was the
reward—freedom, an unthinkable thing for one upon whose people
Sparta renewed annually her declaration of war, in order that a
Helot's murder might cause his killer no ritual impurity.
Now the Spartans were embroiled in a war
more pressing than the perennial one against their slaves. In
six years of war with Athens, Sparta's ancient hegemony over the
Peloponnese, her own backyard, had gone unchallenged—until this
summer, when out of nowhere the Athenian general Demosthenes had
landed at Pylos and built a fort. Thinking Demosthenes their
deliverer, Pylos's Messenian population had gone over to him,
yielding the city to Athenian control. A Spartan army,
recalled from its annual siege of Athens, had descended swiftly on
Pylos from its landward side, whilst even more troops were brought
in by sea for a naval assault.
Either Demosthenes was favored by his city's
gods or the Spartans had angered theirs, for when the desert dust
had settled and the tide had rinsed the shore clean of blood, the
Athenians remained in place. The Lakedaemonian army still
held the surrounding plains, but Athenian ships controlled the
harbor where sat the isle of Sphakteria, on which Sparta, confident
as ever in eventual triumph, had stationed a garrison before the
battle.
Now those men were trapped. When
Sparta's attempts to negotiate their release were met in far-off
Athens with scorn, the proclamation had gone forth: freedom to any
Helot who risked bringing the trapped men provisions. It was
an offer only a fool could refuse, but Pylos, it seemed, was a city
of fools, for instead of seeing that the Athenians cared nothing
for their welfare, but only for humiliating their enemy, Messenians
had flocked in even greater numbers to Demosthenes. Did they
not realize that the moment Athens' aims here were achieved, her
forces would abandon Pylos to the mercy of its once and future
masters? And those masters knew no mercy. When the last
Athenian ship had sailed and their shortsighted local allies fell,
as surely they would, the punishment for those Helots who had
turned, along with many who hadn't, was sure to be swift and
brutal.
This Helot, though, was no fool. He
saw what the future held, and so he rowed on through the crashing
waves. He cast a backward glance over one shoulder at his
destination and saw Sphakteria rising from the silvered water like
the spine of a great black serpent bathing in the harbor. In
silhouette the island's shore did not look treacherous, but it was,
so much so that his decrepit little boat was unlikely to survive
the landing. No matter. It needed only to get him
ashore along with the precious cargo that would make him a free
man.
Land came unexpectedly in the form of jagged
black teeth jutting from the water. The sea around the boat
frothed white on the rocks, pelting the Helot's face with chill,
salty droplets. Squinting down the darkened shore he picked
out a spot where the rocks seemed fewer and less rugged, and he
hunkered down and pulled harder on the oars. A swell thrust
the boat's prow into the air, and as it slammed down, the oar in
his right hand snagged between two rocks and snapped in
two.