Date Point: The ensuing 16 months… Planet Gao
Fiin, of Stoneback
Fiin’s promotion to Champion came both sooner and less climatically than he’d imagined.
There was the necessary duel, of course. It was tradition, and Great Father Daar had if anything grown exponentially more fond of tradition recently. If his theories about Hierarchy meddling in Gaoian culture were accurate, Fiin could see why.
Accurate or not, Daar’s conviction with regard to Gaoian spirituality was as unshakable as mountains. He’d reached out to Gyotin and the Starminds almost as soon as he could find the breathing space, and thus had entered into Gaoian military life something new, alien, and profoundly powerful: The chaplain.
The idea came straight from the Humans, of course. Fiin had, at the Great Father’s insistence, watched one Father Elliott Riddle in the hours before the Eighty-Second had gone to work in the Three Valleys. Watched him pluck a ball of white-hot inspiration out of the air and drop it down the men’s collective spine with words alone. He’d taken fearsome deathworlder troops, already more than a match for most anything Gaoian, and made them more somehow…
Nor had Fiin been immune. He couldn’t even honestly remember the words that Riddle had spoken in the quiet, cold dawn light to a circle of bowed heads, but he’d remembered knowing in a place below his bones that whatever happened that day, even if the sun set without Fiin there to see it, he’d have served and that there was nothing more important.
He had watched the sunset, though. They all did. The paltry force of biodrones holding that agricultural station got their best shot in on Brother Yajgo who, if Females really did go for scars, was destined to sire many cubs after he healed.
The Great Father had been moving death. The Humans had been a war machine—relentless, methodical, thorough. Fiin wasn’t sure which had impressed him more.
…But that was just the first battle.
There were more. So many more that Fiin stopped thinking of them as separate battles entirely. Returning to base, briefings at High Mountain Fortress, higher strategy sessions at Farthrow…all of it was just a pause to reload.
And the army grew. Every day, the ‘Backs and Humans became a smaller and smaller component of it. Every day more earnest, skinny Clanless swelled the ranks. Farthrow, High Mountain, Three Valleys, all of them rang day in and day out with the shouts and cadences of training…and at sunset, with the clear notes of mourning bells. The breeze smelled permanently of pyres.
They were learning, too. Quickly. New recruits would join a unit, were held in reserve and told to watch carefully. They did. Then they would participate in rear-guard action. Then, far too soon, they would end up near the front. The complex tactics of urban breach and such were left to the professionals, of course—that took years to properly teach anyone—but there was much dangerous work behind the tip of the spear that needed doing, and Great Father made clear there was no loss of honor in doing so.
Casualties were high. That was unavoidable. But the Clanless were proving their worth.
It was a genuine shame there were simply too many too quickly to arm. For the newest recruits, all they had were their natural weapons. Whenever Daar committed the reserves, in fact, the standard policy was for the unarmed living to arm themselves with the weapons of the dead. A tradition got started—nobody was quite sure how—of scratching a mark on such weapons, and a paradoxical legend grew up around the most marked. They became…favored, somehow.
It came as a shock to Fiin when he was summoned to the Great Father’s presence and got his first look at a calendar in what felt like years only to learn that they were barely two months into the war.
That was the day his ascension was set in motion.
There were quiet words, in private. Then appropriate loud words in public, and the duel for the Championship. Daar walked away bleeding from a scratch on his muzzle. Fiin limped weakly off the stone dais with his dignity intact and many new scars. There was nobody who could possibly claim that Daar had lost—Fiin felt nearly certain that Daar had let him land that scratch, too—but tradition was satisfied. Great Father Daar stepped down from the dais, declared himself a simple Brother of Stoneback and offered his personal loyalty to Fiin, now Champion of the Clan. Fiin formally accepted the oath and permanently released Daar of any Clan obligations beyond his duties as Stud-Prime, then bent knee and exposed throat to the Great Father of the Gao.
They finished just in time, too; Fiin had started to feel a little light-headed from the blood loss and the pain, and had barely enough left in him to dash off to a side room where his Claw’s medic had been waiting. None of that made for a perfect arrangement but times were dire and the Gao didn’t have formal government like the Humans did. No doubt there would be quiet grumblings in the Clan about this day, and Fiin would face an ambitious Challenger eventually, but all that was just part of the job.
Let the challenger come—if he won, he’d deserve it.
The true challenge of the Champion came afterwards, out of sight from everyone. An ancient scholar from Highmountain met with them both, and many things were told to Fiin. Things about their deep past he would have enjoyed never learning. But there was no turning back, now.
Daar nodded sympathetically. “It’s yours now, Fiin. Keep it.”
To Fiin’s own shock, he turned out to be extremely good at the Champion’s Game. Even simplified and aligned as the Clans were in this time of war, there were still wheels within wheels turning. Healthy competition, keeping them sharp. He was going to have to work hard and catch Genshi on a bad day to outmaneuver the Whitecrest Champion…but Fiin knew he could do it.
On the same day, Gyotin was invited to appoint his own Clan’s first Champion, an invitation which placed the young clan of philosophers and spiritualists firmly at the table alongside the oldest and most powerful of the Gao.
The invitation was a kind of test. Gyotin passed it, by a whisker—he was too modest to nominate himself for the role, but arrived at the table bearing a nomination by all the Brothers of his Clan. For all his virtues, a Champion still needed savvy ambition to defend his Clan’s interests.
Gyotin threaded that needle admirably, and did what all the other Champions had done two months before—he exposed his throat to Daar and cemented the alliance that put Gaoian chaplains among Gaoian troops.
There was no scripture to quote. The Humans had bible passages, hymns, prayers, devotionals or just a thought for the day, and their chaplains had whole libraries to draw from. The Starmind chaplains were almost making it up as they went along, but as Fiin watched them work he could see them work their claw into whatever crack might let them find a grip, and work it.
They learned just as fast as the recruits. Within another two months, they were seasoned veterans at kindling a raw, warm kernel of hope in even the most depressed reservist’s skinny belly.
By six months, they had an army. Sharp. Professional. Seasoned like an iron skillet.
Suddenly the Humans seemed less untouchable. Merely…experienced. They knew their shit and knew how to teach it, and it wasn’t that they were better than their Gaoian charges, though the capability gap was still there and maybe always would be—it was more like they were tapping into the same kind of old library that their chaplains had. They had history to draw from, while the Gao were only just starting to write theirs.
The real history of the Gao had begun.
Great Father Daar wrote the introduction. The Humans sketched an outline. But the Gao would write the story themselves.
Writing the first chapter took more than a year, all told. A hard, bitter, hungry year that the supplies of rich food from Earth and Cimbrean never quite fully relieved. Saving the Naxas herds in the Three Valleys helped, saving the Nava hatcheries along the isthmus coasts helped even more, but if an army marched on its stomach then the great army of the Gao was always only a few days from coming to a halt with groaning, aching bellies.
Somehow, that never happened. There was always, whether by a miracle or by epic effort, another meal. There were always more bullets, bandages and bombs just when they were needed. Whenever the war effort wobbled, somebody somewhere found the will to keep it spinning.
There were breakout assaults. As the army surrounded the cities and penned the biodrones in, the result was inevitably a struggle, like trying to wrangle an especially ornery Naxas. Each city’s horde needed subduing the hard way, and they didn’t fight like people. People could be demoralized. The only way to get biodrones to sit still was to annihilate enough of them that whatever algorithm passed for a decision-making process in those metal-infested heads decided that it was getting nowhere and chose to save its strength for a better moment.
There were guerrilla forces, biodrones that somehow were a little smarter or maybe just had an open line of communication to their master. Lavmuy came alarmingly close to being scoured off the map when the Bat-Yu Gorge Dam was targeted by a surprise assault that only failed thanks to the sacrificial heroics of the dam’s tiny garrison. Their deaths were the currency that brought enough time for the HEAT to arrive via HELLNO jump, their only other action of the whole war after Dark Eye.
There was an enemy nanofactory, somewhere. Its products made three stabbing attempts at the system defence field that were thwarted first by the USS San Diego, and then her sister ship the young USS Robert Heinlein. When they finally figured out where it was, the Humans deployed a weapon that left a neat little hole on the surface and crushed the nanofac bunker underground like a frozen bubble.
Clan One-Fang had survived, thanks almost entirely to the Racing Thunder. Newly promoted Grandfather Yefrig was overseeing the final designs for the first of their new warships, the Vengeance class drop-troop carriers that would soon see service in the re-taking of Gorai and retribution for the other colonies. Firefang had seen massive and effective recruitment among the Clanless and was almost ready to resume command of Gaoian airspace. Even now the Humans were preparing to re-deploy back home.
The Dominion was nowhere to be seen. Cowards. They had declared Gao a class ten-point-two deathworld and effectively severed all contact, though to be fair they had a point given the war, the constant threat of famine, and now disease. The Human’s common cold had against every measure crossed the quarantine and made the jump between species. It spread slowly and undetectably, and only after a week or two would the symptoms become obvious—far too late to stop fur ther spread. Thankfully the sickness was usually mild and most gaoians who were unlucky enough to contract it survived, left with only with a memory of what a sniffling, congested misery it could be.
In fact only the Corti had the balls to show their faces at all, in the form of a gargantuan Directorate ship called the Common Denominator that rolled into orbit way out-system some months into the war, under the watchful eye of a pair of heavy escorts and equipped with the biochemical equivalent of a nanofactory perfect for replenishing Gao’s decimated pharmaceutical stocks and, more importantly, delivering an entirely new medicine.
The Goldpaws showed their worth to the war effort that day, quickly negotiating the Corti’s asking price down to something that wasn’t just sustainable, but downright reasonable. Cruezzir-derivative, Gaoian-specific formulation became common. Crue-G, as it was known. It didn’t have quite the same…alarming…effects that calculated Crue-D abuse could help bring about in a Human, but it required far less medical observation to use and healed injuries almost miraculously. Over time, it would help their army’s rag-bones volunteer Clanless grow into a strong and capable force fit to fight the worst the galaxy had to offer.
That day was coming. First they needed to rebuild.
But before they could rebuild, they had to destroy.
Naturally, that responsibility fell to Daar. He was the only one with a back strong enough for it, and he chose to do so from a spot where he could see—just, on a clear day—five of the cities he was about to annihilate.
“If you’re gonna pass judgement, be the one to carry out the sentence,” he said. Fiin knew better than to add anything to that. Not that there was anything to add.
It was summer, a year and a half after the war’s first days, and Gao had changed dramatically. Only one hundred million females had survived—Ten percent of their original number, and catastrophically fewer than they had hoped. Nobody cared that a hundred million was still a borderline-miraculous success compared to the most pessimistic projections. Their species had been gravely wounded and barely survived.
The social effects were even more profound. With so few females left alive, the survivors had become almost…holy in Gaoian society. They lived cloistered and highly protected lives now, a dark rhyme of the ancient past. Stoneback of course gave them complete freedom of movement and choice, but how free was anyone if simply leaving the commune required an armed escort? When their very presence could grind anything to a halt, and inspire something akin to worship from the un-mated males? That terrible segregation became a sad necessity after a few opportunistic males had taken advantage of the wartime chaos. Daar was not pleased, and had personally hunted down the offenders to make such extreme examples of them them that even Fyu might have balked.
It was no wonder so many of the Females had fled to Cimbrean and their new colony-commune there. It was still a cloister, but it was their cloister under their own guard. They were clawing back what little freedom they could claim with all the tenacity of a Stoneback. Fiin respected that, even as he regretted its necessity.
Of course, the Mother of the Guard was a Stoneback, in a sense. The Great Father’s own and only surviving daughter, Myun. She…occupied a lot of Fiin’s thoughts, when he had time to think.
Daar was taking his time with the button. Not dithering, just…giving it the respect it deserved. He shut his eyes and lifted his nose to a wind that was fragrant with the scent of plains flowers and rain.
“…You smell that, Regaari?” he asked. Father Regaari was never far from the Great Father’s side these days, and was among the few Gaoians in the world whom Fiin would never have chosen to challenge. He was the most…Human Gaoian around.
Regaari lifted his own nose. “…It reminds me of the Badlands on Earth,” he said eventually. “Not as strong, though.”
“…Fitting,” Daar commented. He took another sniff, and then pressed the button without further ceremony.
RFG strikes were nowhere near as powerful as a nuclear weapon, individually…but they were cheap, and that meant there were a lot of them. It didn’t take long for the first of them to hit, and when it finally did it helped Fiin figure out why the breeze had been so important to the two older males.
It was going to smell very different, in a few minutes.
Daar waited and watched until the wind changed and the hot smells of ash and devastation rolled over them. Some fraction of that scent would be all that remained of the last biodrones.
“Well…” he sighed, and raised his paw to squint at the mushroom clouds on the horizon as they destroyed the Gao’s great cities and reduced millennia of history to nothing.
“…We won.”