Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (29 page)

‘My friend, the gourd is with you.’

‘Wanna ’nother drink?’

‘Clot me! Am I not circumcised? Must I wail like a woman when the elder passes?’

‘Gotcha. Ya wan’ ’nother drink?’

Ida took a long draw off the gourd, burped, and passed the gourd to Acau/lay. It was a neat trick, since they were sitting across a fire from each other, about a meter and a half apart. But Acau/lay, Sten’s former enemy, simply hiccuped, grabbed, and chugged.

Sten had to admire the being. When you are three meters high, you have a helluva drinker’s reach, among other advantages. Speaking of reach, Sten plucked the jug from his new old buddy Acau/lay and took a deep swallow, passed it on, and bleared at the scene.

Prior to his present drunkeness, Sten had learned several things. To begin with, his hard-found friends were one of many tribes on this planet. They called themselves the Stra!bo. Which translated into The People of the Lake. Recalling Doc’s mocking laughter over that discovery, Sten winced.

The postcombat celebration was being held in the Stra!bo tribal hall, which was a single chamber the size of a warehouse. The circular ‘building’ was made of an enormous bush. As near as Ida could tell, the bush was a single plant, thousands of years old. As generations passed, the outer edge of the bush had expanded to its present enormous size, while the inner area died back, leaving bare ground – one huge bald spot. The Stra!bo had only to put a thatched roof in place to provide themselves a feasting hall.

The place was crowded with partying Stra!bo. Males and females
all getting drunk on their thin (but highly alcoholic) grain beer and telling lies about what great warriors they were.

Acau/lay thumped Sten in the ribs and passed him a big, foul-smelling pot. Sten took it, raised it to his lips, and smothered a gag. The pot was filled with a grayish-pink matter with large globules of stringy red floating and bubbling about.

‘The drink of life,’ Acau/lay said by way of encouragement.

Sten contemplated his own life and liver, then sipped. The smell and flavor hit him like a missile.

‘Thanks,’ Sten croaked to Acau/lay, and passed the pot to Doc, who looked at him with pleading in his eyes.

For a moment Sten almost sympathized. Then he remembered the mocking laughter and gave Doc a grin. ‘Delicious,’ he said.

Doc suppressed a shudder and drank. And a remarkable thing happened: For the first time since they’d met, Sten saw Doc beam. Beam without benefit of tragedy or gore. Doc took another gulp. Nem!i, the Stra!bo chieftain, almost had to rip the pot away to enjoy his own ‘drink of life.’

‘What is that stuff?’ Sten whispered.

‘Blood and milk,’ Doc said with unseemly satisfaction. Then he smacked his lips.

‘You’re … smapsolute … I mean … absoluteshly … Clot it. You’re right. It’s delushhious.’

Doc burped and grabbed the pot back from his host, Nem!i. Guzzled the vile mixture down.

Sten was in awe. Doc was drunk. From the blood. Then he understood. As one of evolution’s most perfect carnivores, Doc was in butcher’s heaven. The blood was hitting him like 200-proof alcohol.

‘Sm-watch schmiling at you … foul hu … hu … human?’

Doc glared at Sten and turned to Nem!i. Patted him on the knee with a tiny paw.

‘Ya’ know,’ Doc said, ‘you’re not too … uh … bad … for a life-form. Now gimme that pot back.’

‘Aye, and it must be a lone life y’ be livint, lass. Herdin’ thae bloody great coos, wi’ nae boot the wind in y’r ear ae company.’

Alex placed a sympathetic hand on the tawny knee of Di!n, one of the Stra!bo women. She patted his hand back, her palm engulfing even one of Alex’s huge meat hooks. She was thanking him for his understanding.

‘What is a woman to do?’ she asked. ‘Hour after hour staring at
the buttocks of beasts. Once in a doublemoon I get to practice my javelin throwing on a hungry Tsar-cat …’

She drank deeply. Wiped away a tear. She lowered her voice to a soft whisper.

‘But I have dreams,’ she said.

Alex smiled, moved closer.

‘You promise you will not laugh if I tell you?’

Alex nodded a solemn promise. Fingers tracing the knee a little higher.

‘I dream that somewhere, someplace, there is a strong and handsome enemy. An enemy just for me. Who will love me and I can love in the killing.’

She gave Alex a deep soulful look. Alex slowly pulled his hand away.

‘Do you think,’ she began, then: ‘No. I could never ask. I am still an unblooded warrior. How could a man like you …’

Alex tried to be kind.

‘Nae, lass, it cannae be. Ahm beit sorry, but we must be friends noo. Nae more.’

Di!n sighed a maidenly sigh of disappointment, belched, and passed the gourd back to Alex to drink.

‘Fascinating,’ Bet said. ‘Fascinating.’

She politely covered a yawn. It wasn’t just the beer, although beer had always made Bet sleepy. It was the beer plus her companion, Acau/lay.

The warrior Sten had defeated was the tribe’s champion. And as champion, it was also his duty to be the Stra!bo historian. Just then he was giving Bet a thrust-by-parry account of the tribe’s beginnings.

The history of Stra!bo was its wars. Normally there was nothing Bet liked better than war stories. But some time ago, the Stra!bo and the other tribes had realized that the millennia of slaughter had to stop. Still, there remained the problem of how young warriors could be blooded, to become adult men and women. Thus the creation of the highly formalized champion-against-champion combat.

The ritual, Bet guessed, had begun about two hundred thousand years ago. And Acau/lay knew the details of each combat. It was a strange kind of a Jacob begat whomever history.

‘… And then in the year of the burning grass,’ Acau/lay droned on, ‘Mein!ers slew Cal/icut and there was a great feasting … In the following year, Ch!intu slew the Stra!bo champion, Shhun!te, and there was a great mourning …’

Bet glanced over at Sten for possible help, then cursed to herself. He was pointedly staying out of it, drunkenly babbling to the chief.

‘… And in the year of the rains, the Trader’s champion …’

Bet came wide awake.

‘Traders?’ she asked. ‘What traders? And when?’

Acau/lay was delighted at her sudden display of interest. He had at one point begun to suspect his guest was bored, but on reflection dismissed the thought for the silliness it was.

‘Just traders,’ he said. ‘Beings like you. It was – perhaps five hundred combats ago. Our champion defeated theirs. We exchanged many presents, and they left.

‘Let me see now, I think their champion’s name was—’

‘Never mind that,’ Bet broke in. ‘Do the traders still come?’

‘Of course,’ Acau/lay said with some surprise. ‘They come very regularly. Are we not friends? Do friends not wish to visit often and exchange gifts?’’

‘How often do they visit?’

‘About every thirty days. In fact, they were here not long ago.’

Acau/lay took a slurp from the gourd. ‘We thought you were their rivals.’

Bet jabbed Sten.

‘These … traders,’ Sten asked carefully. ‘Different, you say.’ He hiccuped. ‘Are you sure they aren’t just from another part of this world?’

‘Could I, Nem!i, chief of all the Stra!bo’ – he belched – ‘become that confused?’

‘Drinkin’ this yak-pee,’ Bet said, ‘easily.’ Acau/lay had already passed out beside her.

‘Do herdsmen have gray rafts that float in the air instead of the water? Do herdsmen have their huts shaped like fish, that can also fly through the air?’

‘Offworlders,’ Sten said with satisfaction.

‘And will you take us to these traders?’ Bet asked. She sounded almost sober.

‘For my new friends, who have been blooded by the rites of the Stra!bo … tomorrow or the next feast day I will send you, accompanied by my best warriors.’

‘We thank you, chief,’ Sten said, realizing he was starting to sound about as formally drunk as Nem!i.

‘It is, I must say,’ the old chief wheezed, ‘a long and hard journey of some thirty risings and settings of the sun.’

‘Nem!i, what’re the hazards that …’

Bet stopped. Nem!i had sagged gently against Sten and started snoring. Sten and Bet looked at each other. Bet shrugged and picked up another gourd.

‘Well,’ Bet said, ‘I guess we’ll be able to get off this … charming world and not have to spend the rest of our days drinking blood and pushing calcium critters around. So shall we follow the example of the noble Nem!i?’

‘Why not,’ Sten said, and took the gourd. It seemed as good an idea as any other.

Sten came awake to the glare of an evil, yellow sun that was hurling spears through the cracks of the hut. He moaned gently and shut his eyes.

His head felt like a thousand – no, two thousand – ungulates had hooved through his brain, then paused to graze and defecate on his tongue.

Someone stirred next to him.

‘I think I’m gonna die,’ he said, holding his eyes tightly shut.

‘You are,’ Ida answered.

‘Shut up, Ida. I’m not kidding.’

‘Neither am I. We’re all gonna die.’

Sten came fully awake. Sat up and stared through bloody eyes at the rest of the group already up and glooming around the sleeping hut.

‘For once,’ Bet said, ‘Ida isn’t exaggerating. We’ve got some kind of bug. And it’s gonna kill us in about …’

‘Twenty days,’ Ida said.

‘Clot on that,’ Alex said. ‘At the moment Ah need a wee bit of the dog that gnawed the dirty Campbell if Ah’m gonna see the end of this day.’

Sten ignored this. ‘Would you mind explaining what’s going on?’

Ida flicked her hand scanner on Medic-probe and gave it to Sten. He peered at the tiny screen. And found another creature staring back at him with DNA hate in its single-glowing protein eye.

The Bug, as Bet had called it, was a rippling blue ribbon with the thinnest of green edges to mark the boundaries of its form. Spotted about its perimeter were tiny, bright red dots, like so many gun nests.

‘What the clot is it?’

‘Some kind of a mycoplasm,’ Ida said. ‘Note, it is a cell, but it has no cell walls. It’s probably the oldest life-form in the Galaxy. It’s mean, lean, and hungry. And we’ve been breathing in millions of them since we landed. Interesting that mycoplasms do occur in areas of volcanic activity.’

‘I’m not interested in its lifestyle, Ida. What about our own?’

‘Like I said, Sten, twenty days.’

‘No prophylaxis?’

‘None – except getting offworld.’

‘Twenty days,’ Bet mused. ‘Which puts us ten days short of the traders’ post.’

Sten rubbed his head, which was moving from the gong solo to the tympani section of the program, then looked back up at his equally gloomy friends.

‘Fine news. Now what else can go wrong?’

And above them the air split open with a blinding shriek. The hut shook, and a cloud of insects from the thatched roof floated down about them.

Sten and the others ran outside, to see the Jann ship scuttling across the sky.

Alex turned to Sten, smiling oddly. ‘Y’beit tha luckiest lad Ah’m knowit,’ he said, then pointed up at the
Turnmaa
as it climbed, then banked back toward the Stra!bo village, braked, and settled for a landing.

‘If die we mus’, tha wee beastie’ll hae to stan’ in line.’

‘IN THE NAME OF TALAMEIN WE DEMAND THAT YOU DELIVER UP THE OFFWORLDERS.’

The Jannisar captain’s voice boomed across the savannah, drowning out even the chants of a thousand warriors drawn up before his ship.

A forest of spears shook back in defiance.

‘It’s bloody foolishness,’ Alex said.

Sten, Alex, and the others were hiding in a small grove of trees watching the confrontation.

Sten had to admire the Janns’ efficiency. They were very well trained soldiers. The ship had landed. Before the dust of the ship’s landing had a chance to settle, the Janns had swarmed out, dug in, sandbagged, and set up their squad automatic projectile weapons.

On the ship itself, the top-turret chain-gun moved back and forth, tracing the line of warriors.

It reminded Sten of the volcanic mycoplasm hunting in their veins. The mycoplasm with its hateful DNA swinging back and forth, waiting for the pounce.

‘IN THE NAME OF TALAMEIN …’

‘We can’t let this happen,’ Bet said, rising to her feet. The others – even Doc – rose with her. Sten started out of the trees first.

And then they heard Acau/lay’s cry for combat.

‘/ARI!CIA!’

‘/ARI!CIA!’

Acau/lay stepped away from the crowd and stalked toward the ship. He was carrying the bundle of weapons – a gift for the enemy he would slay with love in the grove.

‘/ARI!CIA!’ He cried again. Coming to a stop in front of the waving turret of the chain-gun.

‘S’BE’T,’ the Jann captain’s voice boomed back.

Acau/lay hurled the bundle of weapons down on the ground. Drew back, pointing at the grove of trees and urging the ritual combat.

‘/ARI!CIA!’

‘/ARI! …’

And the chain-gun boomed out. Cutting off Acau/lay’s final cry to fight. The projectiles stitched across him, literally cutting him in half.

As one body, the warriors hurled themselves forward, and all the Jann guns opened up instantly, cutting and spewing fire. Before the Mantis team could move, a hundred Stra!bo were dying on the ground and the others were fleeing.

In a crazy moment, Bet remembered Acau/lay telling her of the Stra!bo pride. In their two-million-year history they had never broke and run.

The tear-runnels had dried, but still marked Nem!i’s cheekbones. He and Alex lay below the crest of the low hill overlooking the Jann cruiser.

‘If these men are beyond custom, then they are beyond the law,’ the alien whispered.

‘Y’ken right,’ Alex said. ‘Ae Ah said b’fore, they’re naught better’n ae scum a’ Campbells.’

Sten lay on the hilltop, binoc-lenses carefully shielded from reflection, staring down at the cruiser.

‘If they do not have the law, then we cannot surrender our friends to them.’ Nem!i continued his careful analysis. He was still deeply shocked by Acau/lay’s murder. ‘So this will mean …’

Sten clicked the binocs off and back-slithered down the hill beside them. He’d overheard the last of Nem!i’s whisper.

‘This will mean,’ he interrupted flatly, ‘that at night’s fall we kill them. We kill them all.’

As the sun was occulted by the crater wall, an exterior speaker crackled:

‘Evening stand-to. All bow. Talamein, we thank thee for thy recognition of our might. We thank thee for our strength as Jannisars and for proclaiming our duty on this world of unbelievers.’

There was no movement around the cruiser as the black-uniformed troops listened to the prayer, except the endless, automatic sweep of the chain-gun’s turret atop the ship.

‘We thank you in advance,’ the captain’s voice rasped on, ‘for the
boon which you will grant us on the morrow as our due for pursuing these unknown raiders. S’be’t.’

The soldiers moved quietly into their nightwatch positions.

‘Why did your Sten not pick one of us, one of the Stra!bo to begin the attack?’ Di!n asked furiously.

Bet deliberately kept stroking Hugin, even though both tigers had been given their instructions and should have been on their way. Ida didn’t volunteer, either.

‘Because Sten respects your customs,’ she finally improvised. She picked herself up and eyed the ranked formation of Stra!bo warriors, hidden deep in the battle grove.

‘Knowing little of your laws, he felt that perhaps his methods – the methods of our team – might violate your customs.’

Di!n grunted in satisfaction. She returned to the endless stropping of her spearblade on the leather strap curled around her fingers.

Bet looked down at the tiger. ‘Munin. Hugin. The cattle. Now.’

The tigers spun and bounced off into the gathering dusk, bounding deeper into the grassland that led out of the crater.

Ah, nae ye’re bonnie wee boys, Alex thought, watching the five-man Jann patrol approach the clump of brush he was flattened in.

Ye hae not jus’ the wee perimeter laddies, but rovin’ patrols goin’ to an’ fro throughou’ the night.

Aye, an’ here they come. Point mon, all alert an’ strikit … patrol leader … aye, two weapons mons, an’ th’ wee tailgate.

C’mon, laddies. Alex’s waitin’.

The patrol crept through the now almost total blackness past his clump of brush. Kilgour shouldered out of his weapons harness. Waiting.

Eyes awa’ fr’m ’em, he needlessly reminded himself. Dinna be lookin’ … ah, they be passin’. Pass on, pass on horseman, his mind misquoted.

The patrol, moving at a well-trained slowstep, silently passed the clump.

And Alex came up and fell into step behind them.

Step an’ step an’ y’ken we’re in rhythm … an’ now comin’ up behind yon laddie …

Alex’s enormous fist, three-gee-world muscles bunched behind it, smashed into the back of the rearguard’s neck. The Jann dropped without a sound. Alex caught him, eased him to the ground.

There was no sound. The patrol eased forward. and Alex continued his creep.

Nae, these twa’ll be linked by th’ weapons belt. A nit tricket if y’can solve it. His fist went flat at belt level, flashed forward, into the base of the fourth man’s spine.

He contorted, back broken, and fell. Alex pivoted around the falling corpse and sideslammed one meaty paw into the base of the third man’s neck. Then swore to himself as the loosely held squad weapon crashed to the ground from the dying man’s shoulder.

The Jann noncom had time to whirl and start his weapon up, finger coming back on the trigger. Alex one-handed the weapon away, the barrel cracking, and his open palm went straight into the man’s throat.

Gettin’ a wee sloppy, m’boy. Cartilage crackle and a gurgle, his mind reprimanded as Alex flat-dove forward. Hit the ground in what looked like a curled bellyflop as the point man heard his noncom’s deathrattle, came around, and Alex was rolling, his legs thrashing, and the man came crashing down, his weapon flying a meter away.

The pointman scrabbled for a knife, and Alex, now moving almost slowly, brought his knee up and then crashing down into the man’s ribcage. He heard the dull sound of ribs crunching, and the Jann contorted and was dead.

Alex held, flat. Waiting. Nothing. Up on his hands and knees, and looked back down the path.

Y’mum’d be proud, lad. Five for five. Ah, well. Roll on demob.

And Alex went back down the path to wait for the attack to begin.

Nem!i had never seen so small a being run so fast. He and Doc had taken position about one kilometer outside the crater’s mouth, deep in the grasslands. Between them and the craters, the Stra!bo cattle moved leisurely toward the corrals.

Doc was crashing through what was to him a jungle of grasslands, holding a heavy – again for him – bag of powder carefully to one side.

The ripped corner of the bag was trickling powder onto the ground. Doc looked up, saw that he was parallel with the crater’s far wall, turned, and – still at a dead heat – dashed back toward the Stra!bo chief.

Came to a halt. The small bear and the tall chief looked soberly at each other.

‘A being such as yourself deserves the highest respect,’ Nem!i said
soberly. ‘To these eyes, you were an elder advisor to your youths. But now to find that you are yourself still a warrior, in spite of your advancing years. And that your body can still function, even though you are as fond as I of feasting – it is an amazing sight.’

Doc ground his sharp little teeth and wished that the Empire hadn’t done such a good job of conditioning him out of killing people who thought well of him.

‘I thank you, Nem!i,’ he managed. ‘Your pleasure can only be exceeded by mine, when I see you personally lead the charge against the black ship.’

Nem!i shook his head sadly. ‘I am afraid not, my friend. Men of my age are fit only for the mopping up and to congratulate the young warriors after their success. I will not be able to seek battle this night.’

Doc swore six words Alex had taught him and touched the toggle switch.

And the powder caught, flashing high into the night. The tinderdry grasslands roared into life, and, almost instantly, the two-kilometer arc of savannah outside the crater was a crescent-inferno, burning straight into the crater.

The cattle caught the scent of the flames and lowed nervously. Their amble became a trot. Behind them was wildfire – a prairie firestorm.

Burning brands flew high into the night, and the fire began overleaping itself, almost burning itself out.

A blazing clump of bushes landed on one emasculate bellwether’s back. He howled in dismay and broke into a gallop.

The panic spread, and the ground thundered as the herds of the Stra!bo stampeded directly toward the crater’s mouth.

Hugin yowled nervously across the crater gap. Educated and mutated he may have been, but part of his tiger genes remembered what happened when large cats stood in the way of buffalo herds.

Munin coughed back, comfortingly. Then squatted and urinated. Hugin, too, followed orders.

The herd was just beginning to turn, unable to channel into the narrow crater pass, when the lead animals caught the scent of urine. What little ideas they had vanished in the acrid smoke and the scent of a hunting animal.

Hugin and Munin had not only channeled the stampede into the crater but almost doubled the stampede’s drive forward.

Into the crater.

Directly toward the Jann cruiser.

The Jann com center was a confusion of gabble:

‘Negative observation on firestart’ … ‘Alpha patrol, this is base. Alpha patrol, do you receive this station?’ … ‘In the name of Talamein, stop them!’ … ‘All stations … all stations to General Quarters’ … and then a long, blood-chilling shriek from one speaker.

The shriek came from the lone Jann soldier on observation point as the charging cattle broke through the savannah and reached his position. He held the trigger back to full automatic on his projectile weapon, and three animals rolled and were swallowed up as the rest of the herd boiled over the Jann.

The cattle thundered on. Even though they had heard the rush of the charge, the men in the weapons pits outside the floodlit glare had little time. To a man, they died under the axe-sharp hooves of the herd.

The Jann cruiser was barely twenty meters ahead of them.

There was no way or time for them to turn.

Sten, crouched high in one tree in the grove closest to the cruiser, didn’t even have time to finish his flashed-curio equation:

To calculate the changes in velocity of a body (the
Turnmaa
) when a certain force is applied (stampeding cattle), the formula is – clottin’ hell!

That solid black wave of cattle hit the equally solid Jann cruiser … and the stampede kept on coming.

And like a wave, it crested higher as animal dove over dead animal into the cruiser.

Fifty meters away, Sten could hear the alarms roar inside the cruiser.

The huge ship tottered on its landing jacks … rocked … and one small phalanx of animals slammed into it.

The Jann cruiser rolled, jack supports bending and snapping, and crashed to the ground.

Sten could feel the smash, even over the rolling thunder of the stampede.

Which was … just below him.

And, of course, the animals broke neatly, dividing around the trees, and continued their panic run off into the blackness.

Sten dropped out of the tree and hurtled toward the cruiser, clambered over the dead and dying animals, just as the
Turnmaa
settled on one side. The weapons in the top turrets were parallel to the ground.

Sten’s willygun came off his shoulder, and he scrabbled up the cruiser’s side, feeling a fingernail tear and break away. The turret hummed into life, just as Sten shoved his willygun’s muzzle into the shrouding around the chain-gun’s barrels.

He yanked the trigger all the way back and held it.

The willygun contained 1400 rounds. Each ‘bullet,’ while barely 1mm in diameter, was made of Antimatter Two, the same substance used to drive starships. Each ‘bullet’ was in its individual Imperium shield, and laser-fired.

One round, on impact, would have about the same explosive force as a twentieth-century handgrenade.

It took twenty rounds to sledgehammer through the shrouding, into the turret’s inside. And then:

Picture liquid dynamite exploding. Picture the heart of a fusion reactor,
sans
lethal radiation.

The picture of hell.

Sten let 500 rounds whisper and crash into the turret, then dove straight down, as the explosion boiled up, spraying the steel of the turret out the gun mounting.

Sten tuck-rolled in midair, then thunked down on a fairly convenient steer. He whirled as footsteps thudded up and:

‘Ah tol’ you there be naught ae useful like ae coo,’ Alex said, helping him onto his feet.

And then the world turned into chaos as:

Di!n, Bet, and the Stra!bo warriors roared out of the darkness; Hugin and Munin, seemingly enjoying themselves immensely, loped out to join the Lake People’s charge; Doc panted up, muttering unintelligibly, and …

Ida was standing beside them, her willygun spitting out measured bursts as Jann warriors tried to retake the turret, and:

‘Ah’m Red Rory a’ th’ Coos,’ Alex bellowed, and leaped straight up the cruiser’s side. Caught hold of some ripped hull plate and dove into the hole where that turret had been.