Date Point: 14y3d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.
Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač
“Lieutenant?”
Marty had found the time for a power nap. It didn’t feel much like she’d been asleep, but when she looked around and then checked her timepiece, it turned out to have been nearly two hours. Dusk had turned into definite night-time out there.
She looked up at Lance Corporal Rees, who’d woken her, and rubbed at her eye to help herself wake up.
“…What’s up?”
“Wildey’s back, ma’am.”
Marty hauled herself up out of the corner she’d fallen asleep in with a groan. She’d swept it clean and laid down a thin bedroll, which pretty much made it a five-star hotel by the standards of their current situation, but she was definitely going to spend some time appreciating the gargantuan emperor-size bed in Adam’s apartment when she got back.
And a shower. God she needed a shower. Thank fuck for Frontline, or she’d be stinking like a vinegar-soaked pig right now and posing a serious biohazard to all of the planet Gao in the process. As it was, she just felt greasy, gritty and rough.
None of those thoughts escaped the confines of her head, though. She put her helmet back on and followed Rees down the stairs and out the front door.
Wilde was standing in the back of a Gaoian pickup, a four-wheeled grunter of a thing that was clearly built for agriculture in a big way. It looked like it could handle the huge neglected bales of hay that dotted the surrounding fields, and carry them over any terrain that wasn’t actually a ravine.
And its back was absolutely full of boxes, crates and bags.
Wilde beamed at her from atop his loot throne. “Happy to report mission success, ma’am,” he grinned. “Food, blankets, medical supplies, bottled water…” he threw aside a tarpaulin “…and an emergency water-fuelled fusion generator.”
“Water? Not deuterium?” Marty asked.
“Nope. Any old H2O should do, according to our new Gaoian mates.”
Marty turned around and cast around for their electrical expert. “Patel!”
The skinny British sailor showed up in seconds. “Ma’am? —Ooh!” Her face lit up the second she laid eyes on the generator.
“I take it you’re familiar with these things,” Marty observed drily.
“Always wanted to get my hands on one!” Patel enthused as Doyle obligingly hoisted it down off the pickup’s bed for her. Her face fell a little as she examined it. “…I just wish the Chief could have seen it.”
“Pretty sure he’d want you to get it set up and running ASAP,” Marty told her. Patel snapped back to the here-and-now, nodded, and Doyle helped her cart the generator array.
Wilde hopped down off the truck, while SOR techs swarmed it to strip it of its cargo and file everything away. “There’s another load to come, but this is all the most important shit,” he said. “What’s your call on bringing the Gaoians up here?”
“You think they’re harmless?”
“I think one of ‘em’s about as close as we’re gonna get to having a doctor.”
“A harmless doctor?” Marty insisted. Wilde grimaced.
“…Probably harmless,” he said. “And another’s a mechanic, handyman sorta bloke.”
“Probably harmless,” Marty echoed, flatly and skeptically.
“They’re clean. Just…well, when the rest of the town fucked off to figure out what’s going on, these four stayed put. Now, for me that says they’re smart enough to keep their heads in a crisis…” Wilde gestured as his sentence tailed off, saying the rest without speaking it.
“But you can’t discount an ulterior motive.” Marty finished for him.
Wilde nodded. “Still…I’d put my money on harmless, to be fair,” he added.
“…Fine. Bring them up,” Marty decided. “We need the local knowledge. But keep one of the techs assigned to watch them, or an MP or marine if any show up.”
“Got it.” Wilde hopped back up into the pickup as the last of the supplies was borne away to be stored in the farmhouse’s most secure inner sanctum. “Shouldn’t be long.”
“Keep an eye out for the convoy from three-lima-bravo-seven while you’re out there,” Marty warned him. “They checked in a couple hours ago, they should be close.”
Wilde knocked on the pickup’s cabin roof. “They can help us load shi—”
Something crunched into his armor’s chestplate with enough force to stagger him, and he fell on his ass with a curse. Three more bullet holes manifested in the pickup’s windshield, and Marty threw herself behind the pickup for whatever cover and concealment it provided. All around the farm, the SOR techs flung themselves at whatever cover they could find, while Rees and Hayes ducked down inside the truck.
Wilde slithered off the truckbed beside her. “Fuckin’ ‘ell,” he commented, sounding far less concerned about it that Marty felt he should be.
“You okay?” she asked him. He chuckled grimly.
“Eh…” He scooted round her and raised his weapon, aiming it into the night.
“…‘S’ bloody dark out there,” he observed after a second, then flinched back with a grunt as another round cracked past, missing him by what felt to Marty like inches. He gave no other indication of its passing.
Of course, the enemy could see them just fine—the farm had outdoor lighting. Marty squirmed sideways in the dirt to the other side of the truck until she could see the ’pit’ where their forcefield generators and batteries had been installed.“Patel! Kill the lights!”
Wilde nodded as the power shut off, plunging them into midnight darkness. He reached up to his helmet and lowered his night-vision into place. “Cheers.”
“Any idea where they are?” Marty asked him.
“Gotta be one of those hay bales. Too bad there’s a hundred of the bloody things…Here, you’d better get inside, LT. Wait for my word then run for it.”
Marty nodded. “Waiting.”
“Rees? Hayes?” Wilde keyed his radio to call the pickup’s driver, who’d sensibly remained inside the vehicle. “You both alright in there?”
The reply floated back from the truck’s open rear window. “‘S’ a bit drafty in here, Corporal. Some twat shot out the windscreen.”
“Just cuddle up to Reesy for warmth, mate. Better yet, open the door: Let’s see what our friend out there does.”
Hayes didn’t reply, but after some thumping and muffled cursing the pickup’s door swung open.
Hayes waved a hand at Marty. “Now.”
She went one way, he went the other. There were only three steps of open ground between the truck and the farmhouse, and she was through them before she even knew she’d made them.
Nothing appeared to happen. There were no new holes in the pickup door, and Wilde’s charge forward had ended with him sliding on his belly to fetch up behind one of the meagre earthwork-and-sandbag arrangements they’d set up around the yard, alongside Deacon.
“…Wills, where are ya?” Wilde asked after a moment.
“North end, behind the tractor. Can’t see him.”
“Hodder?”
“I’m in the barn. Got a good view of the field, no target yet.”
“Guess I’m headin’ out there, then,” Wilde told him. “Rees, Hayes. Out the van and back me up.” He squirmed forward around the earthwork and crawled forward until he was able to drop down into a ditch that ran around the farm’s perimeter, and Marty lost sight of him.
She retreated upstairs to track their movements via radio, and inwardly cursed whoever had neglected to think of putting a Flycatcher drone or something like it in the lifeboats. That one was definitely getting stressed in her debrief.
Interminable, indeterminate time passed, marked here and there by terse updates as the marines co-ordinated a glacially slow manhunt through the long grass. It came to an end with heart-stopping suddenness—the crack of gunfire, the squelching thump of a pulse gun firing three times, another burst of human weaponry. Silence.
“Hostiles serviced.”
“‘Drones?”
“Yep. Four of ‘em. Wills, Reesy, get up the hill there to the north, watch the fields.”
Marty got on the radio. “Patel. Keep the lights out, but see if you can patch that new generator into our forcefields. I’d like to have some real shields before the sun comes up.”
“Aye ma’am.”
“Rest of you get yourselves under cover,” Wilde ordered. Seconds later, the SOR’s techs bustled into the farmhouse from their respective hidey-holes. There was some nervous chattering, some laughter, and a few jokes.
Wilde sauntered in about twenty minutes later. His gear was muddy from crawling through a ditch and a field and he’d stuck a long grass stalk in his mouth, but he looked pleased with himself.
“That was fun,” he commented in a way which left it totally unclear whether or not he was being sarcastic.
“All clear?” Marty asked him
“Aye, for now. Hope Patel works some magic with those shields though. Or better yet, that Big Hotel have bigger things to worry about than us lot.”
He laid a rifle on the table. “This is a bit annoying, mind.”
“What is it?”
“It’s what our friend in the field shot me with.” He laid his own weapon next to it. The two looked practically identical. “Our own fucking weapons,” he commented. “Perfect carbon copy. Look, it’s even got ‘HK’ and ‘A3’ on the upper receiver.”
“Who says they’re copies?”
Wilde sniffed. “Well if this was made on Earth I’m gonna find out how it got here and kick whatever bastard’s responsible right in the balls.”
“I was thinking it might have been on a Caledonia lifeboat,” Marty told him. “Two of them still haven’t reported in.”
“…Shit. Mind you, his mates only had pulse. If this came off a lifeboat, I’d expect more than one.”
“Which means there are probably more groups out there.” Marty sighed and grabbed the longwave radio. “I’d better alert the other boats.”
“Guess we’re in for a long night.” Wilde rolled his shoulders and headed for the stack of ration boxes. “Cuppa?”
Marty nodded at him and set about contacting the other survivors. She was due a sitrep anyway, and she needed to report this incident back to Stainless.
When Wilde put a mug down next to her a few minutes later, she barely noticed.
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Timothy “Tiny” Walsh
Getting Vemik drunk had turned out to be exactly as awesome as Walsh had dreamed. It had sure as shit gone some way to restoring Vemik’s usual bounce and vigor, at least—he’d spent the evening bouncing from place to place cooing curiously about everything. Especially how beer was made and also glass because glass beer bottles were really interesting and—
…And quite abruptly, he’d fallen asleep. Upright and bouncing to curled up between some tree roots and snoring in, oh…twenty seconds?
All of the Ten’Gewek turned out to be lightweights. Though, considering their only brush with alcohol was whatever they got from slightly over-ripe fruit Walsh couldn’t exactly blame them. Even Yan had been wobbling, slurring and doing his unconvincing best to remain dignified and respectable after a couple of bottles.
But, the day was up and they had a lot to do. Tribal life didn’t stop just because the world had nearly ended, and the women and children still needed food, which was why Vemik got a wake-up kick to the leathery sole of his foot…or was that the palm? Damn opposable-toe ape feet.
The young alien made a lengthy, pained noise and curled up tighter.
“C’mon, Sky-Thinker. Y’ain’t dead.”
Vemik groaned. “…You are sure?”
“Dead folks don’t talk to me much, in my experience.” Walsh gave him another ‘gentle’ toe-nudge to get him moving. “Up. You just need water.”
“I need quiet,” Vemik disagreed, though he rolled over and sat up, squinting and shielding his eyes from the rising sun. “…And dark.”
“Water,” Walsh repeated. “Trust me. Don’t make me pick you up and dump you in the river…”
Vemik groaned again, but levered himself laboriously upright—or as close as Ten’Gewek ever got to upright, anyway—and spat into the grass. Even that modest amount of exercise seemed to give him a boost though, because he cleared his throat, looked around more clearly and sharpened into the here and now.
“…Jooyun warned me of this. He call it ‘Hangover.’ Said it was the Taking to balance the Giving the night before.”
Walsh handed him his canteen. “Usually worth it, once it’s faded. How many did you have?”
“I had more than Yan!” Vemik said proudly. “Three!”
Walsh grinned as the younger man unscrewed the top. Apparently the Ten’Gewek system was extremely sensitive to booze. “A whole three, huh?”
“I am…” Vemik grunted and swigged from the canteen, “…a man of my tribe. Strong!”
“Hey, no arguing that, bud! C’mon, moving helps. We’ll go clean up our mess.”
There was a lot of it. Two or three Werne had fed last night’s feast, plus a handful of root-birds and other critters Walsh couldn’t name. A few people were still asleep wherever they’d happened to be sitting, and the sounds of the village waking up had a more sluggish quality than usual.
There was quite a pile of beer bottles near the fire. And Yan, who was probably in just as much pain as Vemik right now and doing a better job of pretending he wasn’t. He was expertly doing something useful with the leftovers—the People didn’t waste food, if they could help it.
“Sky-Thinker. Big-Tiny.”
Those four words of greeting seemed to exhaust him for conversation, so Walsh clapped him affably on the shoulder and started gathering up the glass.
“These are useful so you should probably peel off the label and keep ‘em.”
“Daniel says they break, make sharp edge.”
“They can, yeah. But I reckon they’re tougher than your pottery. Plus they won’t leak, and they never hold a flavor from anything. Easy to clean, too.”
“Flavor of old bowl best bit!” Yan declared. “…Unless go bad.”
“Heh. Have you had water? It makes the headache go away.”
“Made dry mouth go away too.” Yan neatly ran his knife down a rib to clean off the last of the meat. “Need more for stew.”
“Wait,” Walsh laughed. “More water, or more beer?”
“…Cook with beer?” Yan grimaced. “Taste nice, but…”
“The alcohol’s the bit that ruined your morning. It cooks off when you get beer hot.”
“Al-co-hol,” Vemik repeated carefully. “Means—?” he paused, squinted at Walsh, then sagged. “I ask Jooyun later.”
“Ask me what?”
Walsh turned. Julian looked like he’d been awake for a couple of hours, and was fresher-looking than he had been in days, too. Sometime during the morning he’d found time to bathe, shave and change into some clean shorts. He had a towel over his shoulder and was still drying out, but he looked sharp.
The towel, for some reason, had the words “hoopy frood” embroidered in large, friendly letters in the corner. Walsh had no idea why.
“Vemik wants a Barney-style explanation of what alcohol is.”
“Oh, Christ,” Julian shook his head and chuckled softly. “Now there’s a loaded concept. Tiny, should we properly introduce alcohol to the natives?”
“You’re askin’ me? ‘Cuz of course my answer is hell yeah.”
Julian shook his head and chuckled in that gentle way of his. “So racist.”
“I watched you down seven beers last night in less than an hour, bruh. That makes you, like, at least half oppressor.”
“You should see my girlfriends.”
Poor Vemik looked positively crestfallen—literally. His crest actually drooped, just a little. “No answer?” he asked plaintively.
“It’s one’a those things that’s a few branches up the tree, Sky-Thinker,” Julian told him. “Also, alcohol burns, and explodes sometimes. And it can kill you, too.”
“Maybe not all Sky-Person things are for us,” Yan decided, gruffly. “I think this alcohol…not for us.”
“Man, there go my dreams of drunken cavemonkey shenanigans,” Walsh lamented.
“Stick to dreaming-root and magic powder instead,” Vemik agreed.
“But we literally civilized ourselves so we could make more beer. That’s gotta be worth something!”
“Daniel always telling us, do things how we do things. Not have to do things how you do things. Otherwise, what different?” Yan shrugged.
“Definitely. Don’t write it completely off, though.” Julian advised. “It’s worth knowing. Even if you don’t drink it.”
“What for?”
“Medicine, food preservation. You can make paints and dyes, clean metal, clean out wounds so they don’t rot, all sorts of things.”
Yan and Vemik shared a look, Yan’s tail twitched, and that seemed to count for a whole conversation. The Given-Man shrugged and returned to his cooking. “Need herbs for stew,” he said. “And roots. Vemik know kind.”
That ended that conversation. Walsh and Julian exchanged a silent face-conversation of their own, again punctuated by shrugs, and Julian nodded.
“Okay. Lemme grab some stuff and I’ll go with,” he said.
The two humans wandered back toward their own end of the camp and left Vemik alone with Yan. Walsh checked over his shoulder and sure enough as soon as they were out of earshot the two Ten’Gewek got to chatting.
Too bad Daar wasn’t around. He could’ve heard every word from a distance. Walsh would’ve killed to hear what they were talking about.
Oh well.
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
“…I don’t like this *‘beer,’*” Yan confessed.
“It felt nice last night…” Vemik ventured.
“So does a woman, and I didn’t get one last night because I was too…beered.”
“Dwunk,” Vemik corrected him, then corrected himself. ”…Drunk.” Vemik paused, then trilled. “Wait! Did mighty Yan Given-Man fail to Give it good and hard?”
Vemik knew what was coming, and tried to skip out of Yan’s reach…to no avail. Almost before he could even blink Yan was sitting on his waist and pinning him to the ground with his full weight. Vemik couldn’t even breathe, it hurt so much.
“Are you volunteering?” Yan trilled, with maybe a little more malicious satisfaction than usual. Even pain-headed from beer and early in the morning, he was still the fastest and strongest man Vemik had ever known.
Vemik shook his head vehemently, and Yan blinked then sighed and rolled off. “Sorry,” he said, helping Vemik to his feet. Yan was like that, all angry power one second and then almost as gentle as a Dancer afterwards.
Vemik felt he’d crossed a magic line himself. “It was a mean joke.”
“…Funny though,” Yan relented. He hauled Vemik off his feet in a crushing bearhug, affectionate this time but still painfully inescapable. “But don’t make a habit of jokes like that. Can turn to a bad Taking.”
That was fatherly advice. Not something Yan made a habit of, usually…
“Yes, Yan.” They pulled apart and looked at the neater pile of beer bottles. “It’s interesting. Jooyun and Wawsh…very different ideas about beer.”
“Walsh likes to have fun,” Yan said sagely. He almost managed to hide his smirk. “But maybe, we be careful about beer. Alcohol. Whatever. Feels like tricky magic.”
That wasn’t rejection, Vemik noted. It was just…caution. And caution was usually wise, so Vemik decided he could live with that.
“Okay.”
“You should get ready,” Yan returned to his stew. “Long day ahead.”
“But shorter than the ones before,” Vemik guessed.
“They always are, Sky-Thinker,” Yan sighed. “They always are.”
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.
Yeego, Clanless
Everything was fucked, and they knew it was fucked. That was the start.
An enterprising male like Yeego thrived in situations like that. While everyone else was running around with their tails on fire, Yeego had sat down and…thought. Carefully.
Life crystallized into simple facts. Facts like which courses of action were more likely to result in survival, both in the short term and the long term. Which was the foundation of all civilization, of course…and therein lay his course of action.
If the civilization that had permitted his own livelihood was collapsing around their ears, then they needed a new civilization. They needed stability, leadership, somebody who could fill them with confidence that tomorrow was going to have water, food, and willing females in it. Gaoians who didn’t have those things would swiftly abandon all pretense of civilized behavior until they were either dead, or had secured them.
Problem the first: Yeego wasn’t exactly a fighter. He had his share of duelling scars, but he was a silverfur—distinguished and handsome to look at but not of much use in the mud and the rain. Solution: find some big tough lump and sweet-herb his way into friendship.
Easier said than done. As it turned out, even in a crisis people weren’t inclined to feel well-disposed toward their landlord. Especially not one as wealthy as Yeego. Never mind that he’d earned all that money and property honestly and over long years, the Clanless didn’t like paying rent, and thus didn’t like they guy they paid it to.
He did have a very defensible estate, however. With its own water, power, plenty of room to build, high solid perimeter walls and a warren of basements. All apparently quite ancient, but Yeego would be nutless before he lived in anything that lacked for modern conveniences.
In the end, an offer of food and shelter won over the locals. A tomorrow with water and food in it, as promised.
Problem the second: Figuring out why some of their colleagues had gone completely Keeda-fuck crazy and started killing folks. That one was…vexing. Nobody credible had any idea, and the only ones who claimed to know were the real dropouts, the mangy lank-furred losers who wasted their lives on the datasphere dreaming of a real female’s touch.
But they were the only ones who’d ventured an idea: Implants. Could be translators, could be cybernetic memory or logic boosters, could be systems interface implants…the dropouts all babbled about conspiracy theories and why the Humans had been so reluctant to adopt cybernetics.
Why hadn’t the Humans shared that concern, then? They seemed like lousy allies.
For lack of any other kind of an explanation, he’d run with that idea. The farmers, laborers and working-class Clanless had pounced on anything to blame for the chaos swirling around them, especially when it came from a suave and successful silverfur rather than some lank-eared loser.
Dismayingly, it appeared that their crazed idea might actually be the truth.
Problem the third: they had to defend the property. That meant Yeego needed to learn the rudiments of such…uncivilized work, and learn them quickly. There were a great many Clanless out there, all clamoring for access to the resources Yeego’s estate promised and most, if admitted, would contribute nothing or worse than nothing. His fledgling pseudo-Clan’s territory could not admit an unlimited number of newcomers.
Force—It all came down to force. What stopped the desperate and thirsty from rushing his gates? Force, or the threat of it. What kept his new “Clan” in line and made them contribute to the greater good, or dissuaded them from complaining about their ration payments? The threat of being forced to leave and rejoin the hapless mob outside.
Really, Gaoians weren’t so civilized at all, when it came down to it.
Problem the fourth…naming his new Clan. An identity was vital, for cohesion and loyalty if nothing else. Once the immediate survival challenges were overcome, long-term prosperity would hinge on their sense of group-belonging.
All good things in time. There were more pressing concerns.
Concerns like the Clanless outside his fiefdom complaining of having lost some of their number to an attack by unknown forces wielding alien weapons.
“What do they mean by ‘unknown,’ exactly?”
Yeego had acquired a seneschal of sorts, Tuygen. In fact Tuygen was a Goldpaw associate, a skinny wheaten toothpick of a property surveyor and a highly-educated expert in the value of land and the common laws of ownership. Passing on the reports from the walls and gate checkpoint was a jarring change from his previous work. “The shots seemed to come from a great distance,” he explained. “Nobody saw or smelled the shooters, nobody is certain where the shots came from, and they’re all too scared to go out there and check.”
“What about our people? Could we send somebody out to scent the area? This happened…when? This morning?”
“Yes, Yeego. During a rain shower.”
Yeego grimaced. It would take a truly legendary nose to even identify any scent laid down in the rain, let alone track it.
“So what you’re telling me is, there is no evidence at all.”
“No, Yeego. There’s evidence, it’s just…hard to believe. The victims weren’t killed by pulse weaponry, you see…they were killed by fast-moving kinetic projectiles.”
“Kinetic…like during the Clan wars a few hundred years ago?”
“More advanced than that, Yeego,” Tuygen replied. “I had one of the bodies brought inside. Seymi retrieved these…fragments.”
He handed over a small transparent plastic bag. Yeego studied its contents without opening it and sniffed. If this thing was a kinetic projectile, it seemed like it must be a nasty one—The bag was full of tiny jagged fragments that between them couldn’t have assembled something bigger than his thumb-claw, and he could see immediately that the disintegrated shards would be far deadlier than a simple sharp, solid penetrator.
“I assume,” he sai d, feigning calm, “that our ‘experts’ have something to say on this?”
He’d hired the most…enthusiastic datasphere-dwellers. The ones who’d had the most to say on the subject of implants and so on. They’d turned out to be right about the implants, after all…
“I asked them. They…think it might be a Human weapon, Yeego.”
“…And we’re certain of our friend Dinso?”
“His message didn’t leave much room for interpretation,” Tuygen duck-nodded. “Humans are ransacking Yi-Jan Township.”
“Ransacking,” Yeego repeated skeptically. It seemed an unlikely word—Yeego had got where he was in life on the back of a keen instinct for sniffing out people’s motives, and there simply wasn’t a compelling reason why a force of Humans might ransack anything on Gao, let alone a tiny farming township too insignificant to even have a permanent Clan presence. Yi-Jan was little more than a couple of farmer’s workhouses and the handful of services the workhouses needed.
But if there were Humans in the area and a Human weapon really had been used to murder Clanless refugees outside his own gates…At the very least, the threat loomed that the desperate mob might do something foolish.
Best see what all the trouble was about. Leaders needed to lead, after all.
“…Vehicles,” he ordered.
Date Point: 14y3d AV
Lavmuy, Planet Gao
Brother Fiin of Clan Stoneback
Finally being able to shed the too-heavy mantle of Champion-In-Stead should have been a relief. In reality, it was terrifying to see exactly what kind of a creature the male whose pawprints he’d been walking in really was.
Daar was The End. He was pure anger given fur, claws, teeth and a city full of foes to destroy.
Any Stoneback Brother could tear through biodrones with well-practiced ability, and Fiin had lost count of how many he had personally put down…but Daar was on another plane of skill, backed with a body no Gaoian—and only a tiny pawful of Humans—came even close to matching. It was like the old days and the old stories. He was a force of nature as the Humans said, and nothing the biodrones could do offered the barest hint of effective resistance to him. The ‘drones and all their devices fell before him like grain before the harvester.
Yet despite his awesome lethality he killed with absolute economy; maybe a triple-shot burst with his weapon or a swipe across a throat without even pausing to finish the job. He instinctually knew when a target was destroyed and just let them bleed out. He’d move on, servicing more without a bound of space between.
One moment he could be a charging hammer-blow, the next a twisting, flowing acrobat moving from twopaw to fourpaw and back again, all without any hitch or clumsiness. Where there were too many to personally service, he simply bowled right through them, killing them with his sheer size and strength. Where they were too spread out to personally destroy, his enormous body would weave from cover to cover almost too fast to track, led by the sharp staccato punch of his Human-made machine gun.
He even managed to practically explode one especially unfortunate biodrone with a rear kick that raked his claws up its belly and left guts flung across the gutter.
Fiin found himself very grateful for all the grueling and repetitive training Tyal had put the Fangs through before the end. Keeping up with Daar was more physically and emotionally draining than anything Fiin had ever experienced, including the Third Ring and the Final Rite. The fight went on and on and the enemies kept coming, each painful step forward brutal and bloody, until at last they were all dead and Daar had slaughtered a mountain of corpses, one which Fiin’s entire Claw had barely managed to match.
When the killing had finally stopped, and the subway station was properly secured, only then did Daar, Champion of Stoneback, deign to lift his helmet and take in the scene. His eyes were shining with the slaughter. It wasn’t joyful, and it wasn’t angry. It was something horribly both at once.
“We have minutes at most,” he announced. It wouldn’t be long before the ‘drones regrouped and re-attacked. “Collapse the tunnels.”
Fiin moved to obey. Anything to get out of Daar’s terrible presence.
The ground fighting in Lavmuy was chaos on a scale he’d never dreamed of seeing. Every building that wasn’t actually a blazing pillar of flame and smoke or a collapsed field of rubble was a knot of either the hungry and desperate unaugmented, or the blank-faced ruthless augmented ‘zombies’. Half the time both groups were liable to shoot on sight.
It wasn’t like the first day of the war. Anybody who’d made it this far had reverted to Clannish instincts at their most feral, trusting only their closest brothers to help them stay alive in a world where everybody else seemed to want them dead. Fiin’s Growl was missing several patches of paint despite its small-arms shielding. There were a surprising number of gauss, firearm and plasma weapons out there.
High-powered kinetic pulse was a recent development and entirely dangerous, the Dominion’s answer to Humans and insurgent Hunters. Daar in that miracle suit of his might be able to shrug it off, but not even a full-blooded Stoneback was going to come out of it well if they took a bad hit. Three from Fiin’s Fang were out of the fight with broken limbs and punctured lungs. One more was dead, and the culprit hadn’t been a biodrone, oh no. It had been a building full of dehydrated, panicking Clanless salary workers who’d managed to somehow arm themselves, and had rained a remarkably accurate volley down on the Stonebacks from their lofty position.
Daar had responded by flattening the building.
Granted, the Humans had done the actual flattening—a pair of dart-shaped fighter craft had thundered in and raked the building with bullets that tore its facade to shreds and collapsed any forcefields the occupants might have erected in the instant before a missile plunged into the tower’s innards and broke its back. Once the collapse was over, there had been nothing left but a twisted pile of steel, glass and concrete, and a dust cloud that lingered for two hours.
The Humans had done all that in seconds…But it had been at Daar’s command. He hadn’t even flinched, just moved on to the next thing that attracted his wrath.
All for this. The metro system was a vital line of communication that the Hierarchy were using to move their forces around unmolested by human air support, orbital weapons and indirect fire. Those tunnels made taking the city a near-impossible task and they were in the first-tier circle of concerns for both Grandfather Garl and Champion Daar.
Stoneback would take and hold Lavmuy no matter the cost, and make it the first major base of operations in the war to retake Gao. Fortunately, the biodrones seemed amateurish where ground tactics were concerned. That was possibly because the infosphere was in lockdown by Longear and operating in a special emergency services mode only; Fiin wasn’t privy to the complete details. That seemed to be limiting the control their Hierarchy masters could wield, and that was perhaps the only small advantage Fiin’s Fang had in this terrible mess.
And it wasn’t like Daar’s tactic was pointlessly destructive. A few judicious demolition actions in theory served the double purpose of securing the Clan’s own hold on the city, but if the biodrones were too slow to see the danger then they might even corrale a significant enemy force. Or, who knew, maybe even trap them entirely and leave thousands of biodrones to expire in the dark behind impenetrable tonnes of rubble.
None of that stopped him from growling happily when the building came down.
“Fiin.”
The Champion was cleaning his claws. It wasn’t a fastidious gesture but a practical one—they were caked in gore, and needed to be clean to work at their best. But he was doing it while aiming a look in Fiin’s direction that clearly said ‘get yer tail over here right now.’
Fiin obeyed, with a degree of hesitation. Daar absolutely reeked of dominance and aggression.
“I ain’t got time for a timid ‘Back, Fiin.”
Stung by an exact echo of the words Tyal had once spoken to him, Fiin straightened up and bustled to his Champion’s side.
“…Yes, my Champion?”
That drew a sigh and some of the tension flowed out of Daar’s body.
“You have a deal with the Straightshields,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.
“Yes?”
“…Your contact was a Hierarchy agent.”
“…I didn’t know.”
In a moment so fast and stunningly violent that Fiin couldn’t even hope to keep up, Daar grabbed him and took a single, deep sniff. This seemed to satisfy him, because he let the younger male go almost immediately.
“…You smell as honest as a ‘Back should, at least,” he allowed.
Fiin resolutely refused to acknowledge the implied insult and the lingering pain in his neck where the Champion’s arm had dug in, beyond shaking himself as he straightened up. “…Did I do something wrong, Champion?”
“How much did you tell him?”
“Nothing. All he ever asked me to do was report any criminal activity within the Clan if I saw it. I saw no harm in agreeing because…well, we’re Stonebacks! If one of our Brothers was breaking the law, we’d all pounce on him. Right?”
“And if he’d asked for more than that?”
“I would have taken it straight to Father Tyal.”
Daar huffed and shook out his neck, then scratched at the top of his head. “…Yeah, I know. I just needed you to say it. An’ I’m sorry.”
“The Clan comes first.”
“Yeah. It does. Thing is though, my concerns lately are more than Clan.” He watched Fiin’s brothers laying the charges for a second then growled. “You were there when Tyal was killed. Garl thinks it mighta gone different if the young pup hadn’t dug his claws in an’ argued so much, so what happened?”
“…I think he’s probably right,” Fiin confessed. The fate of his brothers and of Mother Ayma had been weighing on his conscience.
“Why?”
Fiin had learned much about controlling his body language over the years since his induction into the Clan, which was why he successfully resisted the urge to fidget or scratch at his ears as he thought. He just paused, and allowed the words to assemble themselves before he spoke them.
“…I gotta face facts,” he said. “I’m good at what I do. Tyal picked me into the Clan for a reason. I passed the Rings quick, got big quick, became a Fang leader young. I guess I got so used to knowing I’m good at this stuff that I forgot how to know when I’m not.”
This got a humorless chitter out of Daar. “Humility ain’t a ‘Back’s strength, Brother Fiin. It’s good you got it, I know I don’t. But…now I gotta ask, ‘cuz this part’s important. You gonna fuck up again?”
“…The best I can promise is that I won’t if I can help it. And I’ll never fuck up the same way twice.”
“Good. We live through this, I’ll share some truly epic fuckups of mine that’d make Keeda’s nuts crawl up his ass.”
Fiin couldn’t help himself and chittered slightly at the imagery. Daar favored him with the ghost of an amused look before his expression of break-everything focus returned. “But now ain’t the time,” he said. “I got something else buggin’ me. You’re afraid of me. All of you are. I can smell it.”
“You’re terrifying,” Fiin told him, simply and truthfully.
Daar betrayed no reaction to that statement. “I can’t have that from you, Fiin. I’ve already lost one good successor to exactly that, and I can’t help but wonder if that swipe at his self-confidence is the reason he’s dead now.”
“…I promise this, Champion—I don’t lack for confidence. It’s just that I never considered myself your equal in the first place, while Tyal fancied himself your eventual replacement. He was wrong. Me, I’m gonna strive for seeing reality.”
“Good.” Daar duck-nodded. “Don’t underestimate ‘yerself but don’t be deluded, either. Give it time…Anyway. I am sorry I ever doubted you, Fiin. You ain’t gotta fear a Fyu-damned thing from me. Just do your job, lead like ‘yer meant to.”
Fiin politely disagreed with a respectful shimmy of his head. “Right now? I’d rather be following somebody who scares me. I think scary is what we need to make it through this.”
Daar didn’t say anything, just stood there lost in thought. Presently one of Fiin’s Brothers approached respectfully. “The charges are set, Fangleader. Champion,” he nodded at Daar. “Set like you taught us.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Daar replied, sternly. “Everyone withdraw to the rally point!” Daar favored them with the single most fearsome, toothy grin Fiin had ever seen, re-seated his helmet, and led the charge back up the stairs.
From street level, the demolition was beyond impressive. As soon as the charges went off the entire street rippled like a Nava grub on the verge of splitting open, then fell into itself, sinking into a trench that dropped the fronts of several glass-fronted shops and offices. Several severed water pipes and sewers started to drain their contents into the newly-dug channel, and if Fiin was any judge the whole street would be a filthy, stinking bog of a canal in a couple of days, assuming the water pressure stayed up.
“…Not bad.” There were voice ports in Daar’s helmet which did little to mask his feral growl. They didn’t have much time, though, because the ‘drones reacted instantly to the tactical change, and started boiling out of buildings exactly like one of those Human horror films. There were so many they almost moved like a fluid.
Daar gave them a steady look and audibly sniffed through his mask, as though he was looking at a handful of vermin rather than a tide of mind-controlled berserkers. “Well, we got more important shit to do than slaughter ‘em all by claw,” he declared. “Mount up! On to the next job! We’ll roll right over ‘em!”
Fiin obeyed immediately, as did the rest of the Claw and shortly thereafter the rest of First Fang. In only a few heartbeats, almost two hundred of Stoneback’s finest had mounted their Growlers and proceeded along the egress path, grenades and kinetic pulse weapons blasting apart any resistance like the pitiful wall of bodies it was.
That gave Fiin a moment to reflect, while his driver and gunner thoroughly enjoyed themselves. And his Champion; he was practically wallowing in the bloodshed.
If Fiin was honest with himself…he was beginning to, as well.