The Wolf Worlds (10 page)

"S'be't," he mocked.

He turned to his crew and raised a huge hairy fist, holding an enormous stregghorn.

"For the beards of our mothers," he roared.

"
For the beards of our mothers
," the crewmen shouted back.

In unison, they drank from the horns. Otho wiped his meaty lips, turned to the Bhor tech waiting by the missile bay door. He raised a paw for the command and Sten could hear the Jann squeak through the stickiplast. He almost felt sorry for the poor clot, guessing what was coming next.

"By Sarla and Laraz," Otho intoned. "By Jamchyyd and…

and… uh…"

He looked at an aide for help.

"Kholeric," she stage-whispered.

Otho nodded his thanks. "Bad luck to leave a clotting god out," he said.

He cleared his throat, belched, and continued. "By Jamchyyd and Kholeric, we bless this voyage."

He brought his hand down, and the Bhor tech slammed the BAY OPEN switch. The doors hissed apart, and the two Bhor guards lifted the wriggling Jann prisoner into the tube. Otho roared with laughter at his struggles.

"Don't fear, little Jann," he shouted "I, Otho, will personally drink your heathen soul to hell."

The crew hooted in glee as the doors slid shut. Before Sten could even blink, the tech slammed the MISSILE FIRE switch and the ship jolted as air blasted the Jann into vacuum. He barely had time to moan before his body exploded.

The ship's metal floor thundered with the footsteps of cheering Bhor crewmen as they rushed and battled for room at the porthole to watch the gory show.

Sten fought back a gag as a smiling Otho heaved himself over to him. His breath whooshed out as the Bhor slapped him on the back, a comradely jackhammer blow.

"By my mother's beard," he said, "I love a blessing.

Especially"—he thumbed toward the missile bay doors and the departed Jann—"when it's one of those scrote."

He bleared closer at a pale Sten. "Clot," he cursed at himself,

"you must think me a skinny, stingy being. You need a drink."

Sten couldn't argue with that. .

"It is good," Otho said, "that the old ways are dying."

He poured Sten a horn of stregg—the pepper-hot brew of the Bhor—and heaved his bulk closer.

"You won't believe this," he said, "but the Bhor were once a very primitive people."

He'd caught Sten in mid-drink, and he nearly spewed the stregg across the table. "No," Sten gasped, "I wouldn't."

"The only thing left now," Otho said, "is a bit of fun at a blessing."

He shook his huge head. Sighed. "It is the only thing we have to thank the Jann for. Before they came along and started killing us, it had been… in my grandfather's time that we last blessed a voyage."

"You mean, you only use Jannisars?" Sten asked.

Otho frowned, his massive forehead beetling.

"By my father's frozen buttocks," Otho protested, "who else would we use? I told you, we are a very civilized people.

"We had almost forgotten the blessing until the Jann arrived with their clotting S'be'ts. But when they slew an entire trading colony, we remembered. We clotting remembered."

He drained his horn, refilled it. "That scrote we just killed? He was one of fifteen we captured. What a treasure trove. We shared them out among the ships. And one by one we used them in the blessing. Now, I must admit a small regret. He was the last."

Sten understood completely. "I think I can solve that for you,"

he said quietly.

The captain belched his agreement. Pushed the jug of stregg away. "And now, my friend, we must discuss our business. We are three days out from Hawkthorn. My fleet is at your disposal.

What are your orders after planetfall?"

"Wait," Sten said.

"How long?"

"I assume that the credits I have already paid will hold you for quite a while."

The Bhor raised a hand in protest. "Do not misunderstand, Colonel. I am not asking for more…" He rubbed thumb and hairy forefinger together in the universal gesture of money. "I am merely anxious, my friend, to get on about this business."

Sten shrugged. "A cycle at the most."

"And then you go to kill Jannisars," Otho asked.

"And then we kill Jannisars," Sten said.

Otho grabbed for the stregg again. "By my mother's beard, I like you." And he filled the horns to overflowing.

The Bhor were a wise choice in allies. If ever there was a group noted for fierce loyalties, fiercer hatreds, and the ability to keep a single bloody goal in constant sight, it was they. They were the cluster's only native people, the aborigines of a glacier world, an ice planet pockmarked with a thousand volcanic islands of thick mist and green.

In times of legend, the Bhor lived and died in these oases.

Growing what little they could. Bathing in their steaming pools.

And, when they became brave enough, hunting on the ice.

At first, it was really a question of who was hunting whom. No one knows what the streggan looked like in those days. But Bhor stories and epic poems describe an enormous, shambling beast that walked on two legs, was nearly as intelligent as a Bhor, and had a gaping maw lined with row after row of infinitely replacable teeth.

Starvation drove the Bhor out on the ice. A dry professor in a room full of sleepy students would say it was merely a need for a more efficient source of protein.

Tell that to the first Bhor who peered over an ice ledge, considered the streggan crunching the bones of a hunting mate, and thought fondly of the empty—but safe—vegetable pot back home.

It must have been an awesome sight when the first Bhor made the historical decision. Compared to the streggan he would have been a tiny figure. Compared to a humanoid, however, the Bhor was solid mass. Short, with a curved spine, bowed but enormous legs, splayed feet, and a face only a "mother's beard" could love.

His body was covered by thick fur. A heavy forehead, many cms thick. Bushy brows and brown eyes shot with red.

Although about only 150cms tall, the average Bhor is one meter wide—all the way down—and weighs about 130 kilograms.

As far as mass equivalent, this equals the density of most heavy-worlders like Alex.

And so what the streggan was faced with was enormous strength in a small package. Plus the Bhor ability to build cold-heat-tempered tools. All the Bhor had to figure out was how to club the streggan down.

There were many mistakes. Witness the gore of early Bhor legends. But, finally, somebody got it right and the streggan became a major source of that missing protein.

There was an early error, quickly corrected. The first thing a Bhor did at a kill was to rip out the liver and devour it raw. With a streggan, the Bhor might as well have been consuming cyanide.

The lethal amount of vitamin A found in a streggan liver would be double that of an Earth polar bear (also lethal) or that of a century-old haddock. Eating the liver of your enemy was the first of the Old Ways to go.

Before they could expand offworld, the Bhor first had to master the ice of their native world. With the streggan at bay, the Bhor then learned to trade. With that came the ability to kill their own kind. After all, what else was left to brag about in the drinking hall?

Unlike those of most beings, Bhor wars over the centuries were small and quickly settled into an odd sort of unity through combat.

Basic principle of Bhor religious emancipation: I got my gods, you got yours. If I get in trouble, could I borrow a couple?

When the Bhor first began expanding their "oases" by melting the glacier ice, the great cry came to "Save the Streggan." The Bhor had killed so well that their previous Grendel of enemies was nearly extinct. Today the only examples left are in Bhor zoos.

They are much smaller (we think) than before, but still fierce.

Enough for a Bhor mother to still use them for traditional boogey-men.

The streggan are now as much a legend as the saying "By my mother's beard." All Bhor have a great deal of facial hair to hide their receding chins. The females have slightly more than the males. In ancient times, it was a long, flowing beard for their children to cling to when mother was gathering veggies—or was faced with a shot at pure-protein streggan.

By the time the streggan were nursery legends, the Bhor had already established themselves as traders throughout the Lupus Cluster. Even though the People of Talamein—both sides—were moderately xenophobic, they knew enough to leave the Bhor alone.

As long as the Bhor kept to themselves and stayed within the trading enclaves, there was no trouble as the humans expanded through the cluster. The Bhor did not think much one way or another of most people anyway, so coexistence was possible.

Until the Jannisars decided they needed an Enemy. Which put the rogue, one-god fanatics against casually pantheistic armed trader-smugglers.

When Sten met them, the outnumbered Bhor were as headed for extinction as their old enemies, the streggan. But with no one to drink their souls to hell.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"HAWKTHORNE CONTROL, THIS is the trader
Bhalder
.

Request orbital landing clearance. Clear."

Otho closed the mike and looked over the control panel at Sten. "By my mother's beard, this be an odd world. Last time we put down here there were three different landing controls." Otho rumbled slight merriment. "And they swore great oaths that if we followed anyone else's landing plot they'd blow us out of the atmosphere.

"Enough to drive a Bhor to stregg, I tell you." He grinned huge yellow teeth at Sten. "Of course, that doesn't take much doing."

Sten had noticed.

The speaker garbled, then cleared. "Vessel
Bhalder
. Give outbound plot."

"This is the
Bhalder
. Twenty ship-days out of Lupus Cluster."

"Received. Your purpose in landing?"

"My chartermate is hiring soldiers," Otho said. "Vessel
Bhalder.
this is Hawkthorne Control. Received.

Welcome to Hawkthorne. Stand by for transmit of landing plot.

Your approach pattern will be Imperial Pilot Plan 34Zulu.

Caution—landing approach must be maintained. You are tracked. Transmission sent."

"And if we zig when this pilot plan says to zag," Oth grumbled,

"we'll be introducing ourselves to interdiction missiles."

Even mercenaries have to have a home—or at least a hiring hall. Hawkthorne was such a "hiring hall" for this sector of the Galaxy. Here mercenaries were recruited and outfitted.

Hawkthorne was also where they crept back to lick their defeats or swaggered back to celebrate their victories.

It was a fairly Earth-normal world around a G-type star. Its environment was generally subtropical.

And Hawkthorne was anarchic. A planetary government would, be created by whatever mercenary horde was strongest at any given time. Then they'd be hired away and leave a vacuum for the smaller wolves to scrabble into. Other times the situation would be a complete standoff, and total anarchy would prevail.

The mercenaries hired themselves out in every grouping, from the solo insertion specialists to tac-air wings to armored battalions to infantry companies to exotically paid logistics and command specialists. The only coherence to Hawkthorne was that there wasn't any.

The
Bhalder
swung off final approach leg, Yukawa drive hissing, and the flat-bottomed, fan-bodied, tube-tailed ship settled toward the landing ground.

Weapons stations were manned—the Bhor took no chances with anyone. The landing struts slid out of the fan body, and the
Bhalder
oleo-squeaked down. A ramp lowered from the midsection, and Sten walked down, his dittybag in one hand.

A dot grew larger across the kilometer-square field and became a gravsled jitney, Alex sitting, beaming, behind the tiller.

Alex hopped out of the jitney and popped a salute. Sten realized the tubby man from Edinburgh wasn't quite sober.

"Colonel, y'll nae knowit hae glad Ah be't t'sae y', lad."

"You drank up the advance," Sten guessed.

"Thae, too. C'mon lad. Ah'll show y' tae our wee hotel. It's a magical place. Ah hae been here n'more't aye cycle, an' thae's been twa murders, aye bombin' an' any number'! good clean knifmt's."

Sten grinned and climbed into the gravsled.

* * *

Alex veered the sled around two infantry fighting vehicles that had debated the right of way and now blocked the dirt intersection with an armored fenderbender.

The main street of Hawkthorne's major "city" was a marvel, filled with heavy traffic, which consisted of everything from McLean-drive prime movers with hovercraft on the back to darting wheel-drive recon vehicles to a scoutship doing a weave about forty feet overhead.

The shops, of course, sold specialty items: weapons, custom-made, new or used, every conceivable death tool that wasn't under Imperial proscript (which of course meant the Guard-only willyguns. as well as some other exotica). Uniform shops. Jewelers who specialized in providing paid-off mercs with a rapidly convertible and portable way of carrying their loot and accepting on pawn whatever jewels a loser needed to hock.