Rift in the Races (18 page)

“Captain, please. We are partners, me and Orli. I need her if the orbs come back. We have a system.”

“I am well aware of your relationship with Ensign Pewter, Levi. You can thank her for forcing my hand. I cannot have a completely undisciplined member of my crew running around undermining my ability to keep my ship and my crew safe simply because she has made friends with people who may or may not be in league with our enemies. Though you’ll never admit it, to yourself or to anyone else, she almost got you killed today. That should serve as evidence enough if you cared to open your eyes, which, of course, you will not.”

Again Orli started to jump in, but Roberto gripped her arm once more. This time it would leave a bruise, but a promise was a promise, even if he had to make her keep it.

As Roberto made a few more attempts to change the captain’s mind, Orli’s free hand wandered absently to the small tarwood box she’d stuffed into a compartment on her belt. She could just feel the corners of it through the heavy nylon pouch. Altin had told her it was tuned to her. If she was sent off-world, even off-moon, and onto another ship, she could ask him to come get her. As long as the mirror worked.

But what if it didn’t? What if he wouldn’t or couldn’t come?

Panic began to set in, and the wave of it rose with the rise of Roberto’s voice. He was losing the argument, and though she was no longer paying attention to what was being said, somewhere inside she already realized it was too late. She had to do something. She was not going to go back out into space. Most of the fleet had already been gone from the Prosperion system for creeping up on a year. If this idiot Asad thought for a moment she was going to do that, to go off chasing in their wake in time to pick their bodies out of the teeth of the Hostiles somewhere … diplomacy be damned. She’d even hide from the Queen if she had to. Altin would hide her. They could just go somewhere else. He could find them another world to live on. If he could find her in the vast emptiness of space, he could find another world. There were other worlds. They knew it now for sure. Earth. Andalia. Prosperion. There were plenty of other worlds.

“It’s already done, Levi,” snapped the captain. His tone was one of absolute finality. “You’re both to report to Tinpoa immediately. A shuttle will be here within the hour. Pewter’s transfer will be worked out as soon as I can find someone stupid enough to take her. And Pewter, if I catch you back down here again, I will have you court-martialed for treason and executed.” Prosperion swords could not hold an edge as straight or deadly as the steely conviction in his eyes. “Dismissed.”

Roberto couldn’t stop the “No!” or the “But why?” that escaped her lips.

So much for promises.

“Because, Ensign, in the course of a single twelve-hour pass you managed to get yourself and my best pilot nearly killed and nearly cost me one of the two remaining shuttles I have to my ship. Furthermore, you coerced one of my officers to defy a direct order and steal that ship and, as if all that wasn’t cause enough, you’ve just gotten the fleet—and the Earth—involved in a war with a race of people we’ve never even met. There’s a fine bit of diplomacy from the ex-ambassador to Prosperion, don’t you think? Not bad for a half day’s work.” Anger burned like a magnesium flare in his dark-eyed stare. “When the admiral finds out, which I have not yet had the pleasure of enduring,” he went on, “I will be lucky if I’m not court-martialed myself. To be honest, I’m half-convinced I deserve it if this is the best I can do in keeping discipline among my crew.”

What could Orli say to any of that? Nothing she could think of, which gave Roberto no end of relief.

The captain looked back and forth between them, satisfied that neither cared to press him further on that front. “You will both have your new assignments as soon as I get them arranged. Now go.”

Orli nodded, which both the captain and Roberto mistook for obedience. It wasn’t. Orli simply knew what she was going to have to do now.

She was going to defect.

Chapter 11

T
he battle commanders arrived on a slight rise near the western edge of the meadow with Calico Castle barely a quarter measure northeast and Great Forest some hundred spans to the rear. Altin appeared among them, astride a borrowed mount and with Pernie seated behind. Next to him was Tytamon, also upon a borrowed mount, and beside the grim-faced ancient mage stood the royal assassin, on foot and, as always, at the Queen’s right hand. General Darklot upon his pitch black stallion was on her left, and to his left were the artillery and archery captains along with their signalmen and the Queen’s herald. The teleporters had set them down neatly behind the assembled lines of infantry, the collection of which seemed a great crop of gleaming spears. The cavalry was lined up directly south, in position to charge the enemy line or cut down any retreat for the forest, whichever needed to be done. The archers, last to arrive, were just now running into place, in two sections, a triple line of them along the east bank of the creek and the bulk of them at the rear of the infantry, just below the Queen and her commanders on their negligible bit of high ground.

“You see there, Tytamon,” said the Queen, surveying the vast spread of her quickly deployed force. “It may take us an hour or so to get it together, but only a few moments to put it in place.”

The ancient wizard nodded, his long white beard, charred and bedraggled as it was, blowing in the rising breeze with the motion of his head. His gray eyes narrowed as he squinted, trying to determine what was going on behind the walls, with his tower in particular.

The orc horde had the castle surrounded, with the bulk of their numbers encamped outside the gates. They had already dug forty paces of trench along the front, and several were at work sharpening stakes and burying them as quickly as they could. Others were busy constructing outbuildings, clearly planning on staying for a while.

The battlements were lined with helmeted heads and bristling crossbows, and there was no need of a seeing spell to confirm that the courtyard swarmed with the filthy orcs as well.

“Let’s hope we’re not too late,” the great mage said to his apprentice. Altin nodded silently, trying not to hold his breath. Pernie, sensing the tension in these two most powerful men, remained silent and watched in wide-eyed wonderment as she clung to Altin’s waist.

As if timed to dash Tytamon’s hope for timeliness, a loud explosion sounded, the might of it shaking the fortress and echoing off the high cliffs behind it like a thunder crack. Immediately following it, a wave of orcs came stampeding out the castle’s open gate as if swept out by the wave of concussive shock—or the fright so induced. Their arrival brought barks and obvious confusion from their cohorts already outside, the lot of them turning together to look back into the courtyard and scratch lice-infested heads or tug at the brass rings hanging from so many tattered ears.

“What was that?” asked the Queen.

“They are working through the locks,” said Tytamon sounding grim. “That was my fourth ward.”

“How many are there?”

“Six.”

“Ironic,” she said.

“Indeed.”

The last of the Queen’s archers had taken up positions.

The Queen surveyed her army, then looked to the general. “General,” she said. That was all.

He nodded to the archery captain who nodded to the signalman standing near. His banner waved and a trumpeter blew his horn.

A thousand arrows went up into the sky as if fired by one man. They arced through the air, hissing as they flew, and fell with deadly accuracy upon the unsuspecting orcish host. The great brutes fell by the hundreds, their arms twisting this way and that as they reached to pull the painful missiles out. The anguished howls rose from the injured and dying in a single hoarse chorus, the guttural grating of it rising up and echoing off the gray stone of Mt. Pernolde before being carried on the wind back across the meadow like a gift for the Queen and her companions on the knoll.

The archers fired another volley which met with similar results. The orc host roared together now, enraged by the hail of broad-head arrows ravaging them from out of the vacant sky. Their confusion was apparent as they cast about frantically, yellow eyes scanning from the line of trees to the west across the open meadow and beyond the meandering creek to the east. There was nothing for them to see. They’d spot the next volley for sure. They were watching now.

Her Majesty’s illusionists dropped the shroud of invisibility after the third rain of arrows had come down upon the enemy, letting the sudden appearance of the great human army set the orcs to howling even louder as they clamored for weapons they’d either dropped or set aside as they dug defensive works.

The horn sounded for a fourth volley of arrows, and that was immediately away. While the orcs ducked behind shields in anticipation, the royal conjurers took the time to add fireballs, ice lances and lightning bolts to the mix of death descending upon the enemy. The horn sounded again and again, and for the orcs, it was as if the sky had opened up and sent the whole of humanity’s might down at them in less than ten heartbeats. In a manner of speaking, it had.

Soon after, a huge swath of the defensive perimeter the orcs had been working on stood undefended. Over a thousand of their number lay as little more than a great swamp of black blood and steaming flesh with a forty-pace ditch running through it all and slowly filling with the fetid soup of so much bleeding and pouring out of entrails. Orcs from either side, from fortifications that were being built to the east and west of Calico Castle, came running to reinforce, though slowly and slapdash, for too little time had elapsed for there to be much order in the effort yet.

The Queen glanced once more at the general, who nodded and looked to the signalman. The command for the cavalry was blown.

Moving as one, the mounted men charged. Lieutenant Andru and his brigade of heavy horse thundered at the front, their long lances down and prepared to ride straight through the open gates.

The orcs from the east and west faltered, some turning back, while others rushed out from the inside expecting to help hold the vital center ground. The earth rumbled beneath so many hooves.

At a command, the wave of horses split neatly into three parts, the outer thirds breaking off to clear out their respective flanks, while the heavy horse continued straight for the gate. “Wrath of the War Queen!” cried Lieutenant Andru, his lance level, his grip steady as he charged.

“Wrath of the War Queen,” thundered four hundred horsemen.

Archers from the battlements leveled crossbows and pulled back giant bows, waiting for the instant the riders were in range.

General Darklot muttered a single magic word, and a bright green light flared in the air above the assembled illusionists—a signal that set a smile on the general’s face. The illusionists had been his unit coming up through the ranks, and their work was a particular point of pride.

The green light had barely faded away when the chanting hum of eighty illusionists filled the meadow with its sound. A moment later a thousand harpies appeared above Calico Castle’s walls, a whirling mass of filthy vulture wings and half-vulture bodies, feathered legs and groping talons, topped by human torsos and hideous human heads. The grotesque mouths spat curses in hoarse screeching voices while tail feathers lifted to accommodate the spray of gray fecal rain sent down at the orc archers on the wall.

Stricken with terror at this sudden manifestation of their most feared enemies, the preeminent symbol of inglorious death in their barbarous religions—not to mention the favored evil in the stories they scared their children with at night—the orcs on the walls threw down their bows and crossbows and leapt from the battlements, oblivious of injury, as much for themselves as for whomever they might crash down upon. Even the primitive comprehension of the most base amongst the orcs understood well enough the deadly diseases that were borne upon harpy stool, all of them slow and agonizing, devouring and maiming, and most of all, no way for a warrior to die. No greater disgrace was there in the culture of the orcs than to die by the work of a harpy.

Lieutenant Andru and his wave of armored horse rode straight through to the gate, to a man free from the slightest projectile injury. Had they not been so focused on their task, many of them might have laughed at the chaos the illusionists’ fecal rain had caused. The east and west cavalry groups set to work clearing out the orc host on either side, bent on cutting them down or squeezing them back toward the infantry, while Andru and his heavy horse brigade were tasked with taking the keep itself.

“Send the infantry,” ordered the Queen when she saw that the cavalry assault was successfully underway.

At a word from the general, they began to move in, the cavalry circling round on each flank now and driving the remaining orcs before them like sheep toward the middle of the field. Altin couldn’t help but think the whole thing looked, for a time at least, like an exquisite dance of military efficiency. The heavy horse hacked their way into Calico’s inner courtyard as the foot soldiers marched in to help, great shields up, formation tight and disciplined. The orcs who’d been outside the eastern and western walls tried desperately to get around to the front, hoping to get inside. They retreated from the Queen’s horsemen, coming around the corners of the keep only to be chewed up like wheat stalks running toward the scythe. Altin was just beginning to feel as if things might work out after all when another tremendous explosion echoed off the cliffs.