Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (65 page)

The little men purveyed the logs from the pond, hooked them into the chain hoist, and the drunk sat against a pile of peeled logs and cheered. Naik Rai and Subadar-Major Chittahang Limbu watched approvingly.

Sten shut his model box down and the figures disappeared instantly, although he was sure that his ‘drunk’ had time to take another swig from the bottle before he vanished.

‘This is not good,’ Haik Rai said. ‘How will you remember which socks to wear?’

‘You are sure this is correct?’ Limbu echoed in Gurkhali.

‘Goddamn it,’ Sten swore. ‘I am not sure of anything, Subadar-Major. All I know is that I am detached on Imperial Service. All I know is that you are to take charge of the Gurkhas.

‘And all I know is that if you shame me, on Dashera it shall not be bullocks but ballocks that are cut off. By me, Subadar-Major.’

Limbu started to laugh, then saluted. ‘Captain, I have no idea what is happening. But I do have this feeling that none of us shall meet short of Moksa.’

Sten lifted a lip. ‘Thank you for your confidence, Chittahang. But I wave my private parts at that feeling. That is all. You are dismissed.’

The two Gurkhas saluted and were gone. Sten continued packing. Again the door signal buzzed, and Sten palmed it open.

It was Lisa. Sten noticed that she carried a debugging pouch that was on. The door closed, and he decided the first order of business was to kiss her thoroughly.

Eventually they broke. Lisa smiled up at him. ‘Everything is gaga.’

‘No drakh,’ Sten said. ‘You sound like the Eternal Emperor.’

‘You’re leaving.’

‘I say again my last. I know I am leaving. For the safe house.’

‘Nope,’ Haines said, coming back to the point. ‘I mean you’re
leaving
leaving. You and that tubby thug of yours.’

‘Uh-oh.’

‘We’ve found our famous Dr. Knox.’ And Haines threw a fiche onto Sten’s table.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Dr. John Knox is actually named Hars Stynburn. Broken out of the Mercury Corps. Court-martial sealed: I quote “for the good of the Service” end quote.’

Sten felt a first wave of relief: at least the conspiracy didn’t involve the current Imperial military.

‘It seems that Dr. Stynburn, who always was fairly militant about his views, was assigned as Med Off to a pacification team. Some world – it’s in the fiche – that the Empire had trouble bringing under control.

‘The natives on this particular world didn’t want much of anything,’ Lisa said. ‘Except steel weapons. Dr. Stynburn somehow arranged that the spearheads and so forth were highly radioactive. Is that what you people really do?’

‘Knock it off, Lisa.’

‘Sorry. It’s been a long day. Anyway, so the natives kicked – the female ones, since the planet was a matriarchy. Native life span was real short, so by the time Stynburn’s team was taken off, the planet was clean for settlement.

‘Unfortunately somebody sang like a vulture, and Dr. Stynburn got a court-martial.’

By this time, Sten had fed the fiche into his desk viewer, listening to Haines with only a quarter of his attention.

‘Busted out. No prison … clot it … should’a spaced him … drifted … no record of employment …’ He shut off the viewer and looked at Lisa.

‘No record,’ she said. ‘But we found him. He’s off Prime.’

‘Where?’

‘A little hidey-hole of a planet named Kulak.’ Haines handed Sten another fiche.

‘How’d you find him so fast?’

‘Since you pointed out that our Dr. Knox appeared more ’n a bit egocentric, I wondered if he wasn’t also dumb enough to keep his career going instead of disappearing as a potwalloper.

‘Sure enough. Dr. – his new name’s William Block – is the contract medico on Kulak.’

Sten fed more fiche into his viewer, scanned the overall description, and was scared several different shades of white. ‘I should’ve stayed in Mantis,’ he said to himself. ‘All I’d be doing is making a drop into some swamp with no more than ten thousand to one odds. But not dummy me.’

‘You’ve heard of Kulak?’

Sten didn’t bother with the full explanation, since it was fairly involved. Kulak was a small planetoid with a poisonous atmosphere and a killer environment. Its location was approximately between Galaxy’s End and Nowhere. Its only interesting feature was that crystalline metals on the planet had a life of their own, growing like plants. One of those metals was incredibly light, yet far stronger than any conventional metal known to the Empire. Its chemical properties and description were included on the fiche.

But Sten was quite familiar with that substance – he’d ‘built’ the knife hidden in his arm from it, back on Vulcan, in ‘Hellworld’ – the punishment sector for Vulcan’s slave laborers. The work area – Area 35 – had duplicated Kulak’s environment exactly, down to the point of killing over 100 per cent of the workers sentenced to it.

And now Sten was required to go back to Area 35. He was as terrified as he’d ever been in his life.

Sten told his swirling stomach to shut up and scanned on. After discovery, Kulak had been abandoned by the discovering company, but it was reopened years later by independent miners, tough men and women who were willing to crapshoot their settlement on Kulak. Since Kulak was not considered a plush assignment, their co-op had jumped at the chance to get a for-real doctor, especially one willing to pact on a two-E-year-contract. Since many of the miners were themselves on the run from Imperial justice, no one was much interested in exactly what Dr. ‘Block’ – Hars Stynburn – had done. On Kulak, Imperial treason rated up there with nonpayment of child support.

Sten corrected his features and yanked the fiche. ‘Yeah I’ve heard of Kulak.’

‘I have a tacship standing by,’ Haines said. ‘Destination sealed, even for the pilot. And I ordered the necessary environmental suits.’

None of the replies that occurred immediately to Sten was suitable – and then Kilgour thundered through the entranceway, tapping a fiche angrily.

‘Wee Sten,’ he said. ‘Y’dinna ken where this daft lass is tryin’t to send us noo.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Sorry, Lieutenant. Ah dinna see you f’r a mo.’

‘Never mind, Sergeant. Your fearless leader doesn’t look as if he’s any happier than you are.’

‘Sten, d’we hae t’do this? Canne we noo con a wee battalion ae Guards to winkle this dog oot?’

‘And put him on the run again?’

‘Aye, lad. Aye. Ah guess y’hae a point. Nae a good point, but ae point. So where does this leave us?’

‘It would appear,’ Sten said dryly, ‘that we’re doon th’ mine.’

‘Dinna be makit fun ae th’ way Ah speakit,’ Alex said. ‘Ah’ll hae m’mither on y’.’

And Sten went back to packing.

Jill Sherman was the only law on Kulak. Sherman had been chosen by the Kulak cooperative to provide some species of order in the single-dome village that was home base for the miners. She was at least as mean as any miner on the planetoid, she was generally brighter than the miners, and she had a laissez-faire attitude toward law enforcement. She had only three rules: no weapons that could injure the dome; no crooked gambling; every miner got an honest count on his crystals.

Sherman had found it expedient to take the contract as the only law on Kulak after her previous assignment had become somewhat spectacular. She’d been a police subchief on a world plagued with continual riots – understandable, since that world was
entirely
composed of minorities, each of which put its foot down the throat of the less fortunate after achieving power. Eventually Sherman decided she had seen one too many riots and dropped a mininuke. The explosion had not only blown the current party out of power, but Sherman into flight just ahead of a wave of charges – murder, malfeasance in office, and attempted genocide.

She eyed Sten’s credentials, then looked at the two men, who were still recovering from landing sickness.

‘Dr. Block’s done a fine job here. Why in clot should I help you two Imperials take him out?’

‘I won’t read the warrant again,’ Sten said tiredly. ‘But there’s little things like treason, multiple murder, conspiracy, flight to avoid prosecution – you know. The usual stuff.’

‘This is Kulak, my friend. We don’t
care
about what someone did back in civilization.’

‘Lass,’ Alex began. ‘P’raps we could buy you a dram and discuss—’

‘That’s enough, Sergeant,’ Sten snapped, perhaps unwisely, but his stomach was still doing ground-loops with the tacship that had fought its way to a landing on Kulak. ‘You people operate under an Imperial charter. The charter could be lifted with one com message by me, and Imperial support would be on its way. Are you prepared to escalate, Officer Sherman?’ If Sten’s guts hadn’t been sitting in his throat, he probably would have found a different way to go. He had certainly made a mistake as Alex’s near subvocal moan underlined.

‘Sorry, uh, Captain was it? Dr. Block can be found in C-Sector, Offices 60.’

Sten then made his second mistake. He nodded brusquely, took Alex by the arm, and was on the way out.

Sherman, of course, waited until the double lock on her office cycled closed, and then was on the com.

Even the streets of the domed city were primitive. They were temp-controlled and oxygenated, but that did not keep the condensation within the dome from continually fogging, raining, and creating much mess underfoot.

‘Y’blew it, lad,’ Kilgour murmured as he and Sten slogged through the mire. ‘Yon lass wa’ admirable. In one wee hour, Ah could’a had her eatin’ out’a mah hand.’

Sten probably snarled at Alex because he was scared – scared of the world, scared of what it brought up in his past, and scared of the many ways to die slowly that Area 35 had shown him.

He may also have been afraid of the suits they wore. Everyone on Kulak wore suits, even in the dome, unless immediate physical necessities suggested otherwise. The suits were interesting – large, armored, so bulky that even a lithe man like Sten had to waddle in them. One reason they were so bulky is that each limb contained a shut-off element. If a suit limb was holed, the wearer could cut off that segment, instantly amputating and cauterizing the affectcd limb.

Regardless of the reason, Sten was as afraid as he had been for years.

Dr. Hars Stynburn/Dr. John Knox/Dr. William Block had gotten the tip from Sherman. He hastily finished strapping himself into his suit then armed himself with the usual long, evilly curved near-sword and ‘harvesting tool.’

When a miner harvested a ‘ripe’ chunk of the metal that grew outside the dome, he used a spade-gun, a double-handed, spring-powered
rifle that fired a spear about one meter long and faced with a 25-centimeter, razor-edged shovel tip. The spear’s velocity approached 500 meters per second, which made it quite a lethal tool.

Stynburn had been expecting an attack – not from Imperial law, but rather from one or another of Hakone’s pet thugs. He wasn’t angry either way, since he felt it was perfectly legitimate for a covert operation to police up all traces. That was why he’d fled Prime World in the first place.

That was also why his office/quarters had its back wall close against the dome itself, and why Stynburn had set his inner office door as an airseal.

Stynburn closed his faceplate and checked the readout. No leaks. He dumped his office atmosphere back into the dome and kept his hand ready on the button. His eyes were on the vidscreen over the entrance, the vidscreen that showed his outer office.

He did not wait when the door opened and he saw two men enter.

His hand went down on the red switch, and instantly his back wall and the dome’s outer seal exploded outward, pinwheeling Stynburn out onto the surface of Kulak.

Even through the chamber, Sten could feel the
chumph
as the inner office decompressed. Reflexively, both he and Alex slammed their faceplates shut. And waited.

The gauges, present in every room and every office in the dome, dipped then recovered.

‘Th’ lad’s gone out,’ Alex said through the suit com.

Sten didn’t bother to answer – he was headed back through the entrance, for the nearest dome lock.

But the mucky street outside was filled with miners. Sherman was at their head. Sten stopped and flipped his faceplate open.

‘We’ve decided,’ Sherman began, sans preamble, ‘that you have your law, and we have ours. We need a doctor. And we’ve got one. And we’re going to keep him.’

Sten couldn’t think of a lot of threats that made sense.

‘We’ll take whatever comes down afterward when it comes down. If it comes down.’

‘Which means, lass,’ Alex put in sadly, ‘y’hae nae intention ah lettin’ us gie away?’

Sherman nodded.

Sten’s suit roughly duplicated the same type the miners and Sherman wore. But being of Imperial design, there were small changes. Sten hoped desperately that one of them wasn’t known.

He took a square container from his belt and twisted the cap open as his faceplate closed. A thin, visible spray hissed out, and Sten tossed the container into the midst of the miners. He flipped his com level button to full and roared ‘Gas! This is a corrosive gas!’ as he began running. For a few seconds the miners were too busy seeking shelter from the squat container as it hissed, buzzed, and danced around the street to worry about where Alex and Sten were headed.

By the time Sherman’s outsuit analyzer had figured out that the container was nothing more than an emergency air supply – carried as a liquid for compactness – Sten and Alex were at the dome’s outer lock.

‘Och,’ Alex moaned, booting Sten into the inner chamber. ‘Ah’ll be th’ wee lad wha’ hold ’em a’ the bridge.’

Before Sten could answer, Alex cycled the lock closed, leaving no option for Sten but to go out after Stynburn.

Alex turned, as the near-mob elephanted up to him. ‘Aye noo, an’ who’ll be the first?’

The first was a miner who dwarfed Alex and his fellows. Alex blocked his blow and then swung. The block smashed the man’s suit arm, and the punch cartwheeled the monster back through the air into the middle of the crowd. Kulak was a light-gee world – and Kilgour was a heavy-worlder. The mob closed in, and the situation became desperate.

Moderately desperate, since the knives that most of the miners carried were inside their suits, and they didn’t have enough room to aim and fire their spade-guns – at least not without taking the chance of sending their bolts through the nearby dome wall.

So Alex-at-the-lock deteriorated into a vulgar brawl. In any other society, it would have been called a massacre, but on Kulak it was merely a fight that would be told about for a few years until the people involved struck it rich and moved off or died.

And there was nothing that Kilgour enjoyed more than a vulgar brawl. In motion, he looked like a heavily armored ball that ricocheted away from the lock entrance to connect with a target and then spun back to position, an armored ball confusedly quoting half-remembered and terrible poetry.

The fat lip was a miner’s smashed faceplate and a near-fatal concussion. Alex was too busy to see the man fall as he grabbed a swinging, grab-iron-wielding arm and shoved the grab iron into a third miner’s gut, exploding the pressurized suit.

That miner gurgled into oblivion.

The miners pulled back to regroup. Alex turned his suit oxy supply to full and waited.

The mob – only half of it was still interested in fighting – grew hesitant.

That was too much, and the miners phalanxed forward. A phalanx works very well, so long as nobody takes out the front rank. Alex went flat in the dome’s muck and rolled toward the onrushing miners. The front rank stumbled and went down, effectively blocking the airlock. And Alex was running amok in their rear. The ram of his helmet was as effective as his feet and fists, and then the mob was hesitating, turning, and running down the narrow passageways, away from Alex.

He collected himself, chopped his suit’s air supply, and opened his faceplate, breathing deeply to let the euphoria and adrenaline ebb somewhat.

Alex looked around, hoping for an appreciative audience. There was none – the battle casualties were either terminal, moaning for a medico, or crawling away at speed. But Alex wasn’t bothered.

‘Tha,’ he went on, ‘wa a poem Ah learn’t a’ m’ mither’s knee an’ other low joints.’ He looked worriedly at the lock behind him. ‘Now, wee Sten, if y’ll be snaggi’t th’ doc so we can be away afore thae dolts realize Ah’m guardin’t a lock ’stead of a bridge …’

The dust was metal filings, quickly being blown into the yellow fog that clouded the outside of the dome. Sten briefly looked at the exploded walls that had been Stynburn’s chambers, then went after the footsteps in the dust.

They sprang, one every ten meters, up into what might have been called – had they not been swelling constantly, pulsating, then collapsing into ruin – hills.

The trail led around a boulder. Intent on the ground, Sten almost died, jerking aside only as the growth on the boulder matured, blossomed, and explosively ‘spored.’

The trail led along the edge of those hills, then down into a widening valley past a river of liquid metal.

Too easy, Sten’s mind warned him. Sten fought to see through the yellow haze, trying to track the quickly vanishing prints as they led up from the valley, then disappeared on a germinating pool of rock. Sten used his hand to sweep in a circle around the last truck, his arm-stretch a rough indicator of a man’s tracks.

He looked up. Below the rock bed was a small grotto. The winds hadn’t yet brushed the metal dust on the floor, and Sten could see footprints leading out of the cleft, headed down toward the river.

He was in the grotto, pacing carefully. Three steps in, and all systems went to red with an old joke: How can you tell a Mercury Corps man? By his tracks. He always walks backward. Sten rolled awkwardly in the suit as Stynburn dove at him from ambush at the edge of the grotto.

Stynburn’s clubbed spade-gun went for Sten’s faceplate, but Sten’s smashing feet sent Stynburn sailing over his head to roll in the dust.

Sten righted himself just as Stynburn came up firing the spadegun. Having seen the spade-gun, Sten was turning, to offer as small a target as possible; by chance his suited arm intersected the spear’s trajectory, deflecting the projectile harmlessly.

Two men, wearing suits that turned them into blobbed caricatures of humans, faced each other in an arena of metal dust that whirled and dissolved in the yellow wind.

Stynburn turned on his com. ‘Who are you? Who am I facing?’

Stan was not a man for dramatics. ‘Captain Sten. On His Imperial Majesty’s Service. I have a warrant, Dr. Stynburn.’

‘You have a warrant,’ Stynburn said. ‘I have a death.’

‘We all do, sooner or later,’ Sten said, looking for a strike point.

‘I will tell you one thing, Captain – Sten, was it?’

‘Doctor, you sound like a man who wants to die. I want to keep you alive.’

‘Alive,’ Stynburn mused. ‘Why? Evidently it’s all failed. Or perhaps it has not.’

Sten’s eyes widened. This wasn’t the first time he had faced someone who appeared mad, and Stynburn’s words were proclaiming just that.

‘Failed? What’s failed?’

‘You want me to talk, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Captain, you must know what I was.’

‘Mercury Corps. So was I,’ Sten offered, maneuvering toward the man’s left.

‘In another world, another time, we could have been friends.’

Sten deliberately stood straight, as if considering. ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly, musingly. ‘Maybe we could have. Clot, I always wanted to be a doctor.’

‘But that would have been another time,’ Stynburn said. Sten realized the man was playing games.

‘I have two deaths is what I should have said. Yours and mine.’

‘Then it’s your move, Doctor.’ Sten braced in suit close-combat position.

‘Not that way, Captain. You shall die. Here and now. But I shall give you this. No man should die in ignorance. I shall give you an explanation. That is Zaarah Wahrid.’