War Against the White Knights (33 page)

A gust of wind whipped a spray of dust over the base of Arun’s chair, and tumbled pebbles over the lip of a nearby shell crater to rattle down the glassy inner slope.

Brutalized by decades of siege, the landscape around the Imperial Citadel was a fitting setting to formally declare the end of this phase of the Civil War. To Arun, each grain of dust was a life ruined by the war, every shell crater a world enslaved by the White Knights, and all the corpses buried beneath the sand, or atomized and fused to form that sand, would bear witness to this moment.

He would not betray them. This level of suffering could never be forgiven.

Arun ignored the breeze, waiting stoically in his chair in front of a small party of dignitaries.

They had discussed the symbolism of their appearance at length. Arun’s first idea was to be the tip of a spear of soldiers and weaponry that disappeared over the horizon. They had enough armored divisions to do that with tanks and mobile artillery alone, but Del-Marie had advised that, paradoxically, such an overt show of strength suggested weakness, a desperate need for slave races to display physical strength to compensate for their innate inferiority.

And the Emperor would seek out and exploit any hints of weakness.

So they compromised, keeping Arun at the tip of a spearhead aimed at the center of the Imperial Citadel, but limiting the spearhead to nine individuals. Indiya, Del-Marie and Kreippil were in a row behind Arun, and behind them were the four army group commanders and – because he had a hunch she still had a part to play, and despite Xin’s furious objections – Springer. She called herself Tremayne now, but it was as Springer that she had contributed to the early formation of the Legion, and in recent days Arun had tried hard to think of her as that forever-smiling girl with the blazing violet eyes he remembered from the hab-disks of Tranquility.

The vulnerability of allowing the senior commanders to be present in one location symbolized that the Human Legion was far more than a collection of soldiers following a warlord: the Legion was an idea, and that made it infinitely stronger. Cut off the Legion’s head by killing all of its principle leaders in a single stroke, and the Legion would simply regrow a new head before extracting revenge.

The gust strengthened into a wind blowing through the sandy clouds of Flek. The source of the wind made itself known: the usual scream of the aircraft’s ramjets replaced at these low speeds by a guttural roar that defeated the aural protection of Arun’s helmet and rattled his bones.

The low-flying Valiant whipped past, appearing out of the clouds for only a moment before being swallowed by the Flek.

Arun instructed Barney to play back the brief footage of the fly past, and warmed with pride at the sight. The Valiant was not as glamorous as an X-Boat fighter-bomber, nor did it impress by sheer scale in the way of
Holy Retribution
, the ultimate heavy carrier. Yet to Arun, the Valiant represented the Legion at its best: inter-species cooperation and innovation to develop a weapon that fitted its tactical role to perfection, quietly getting on with the job of winning this war.

The Valiant’s most prominent weapons were the two gamma pulse beams and their huge cooling louvres that dominated each wing. The gamma beams could be devastating against organic targets in strafing runs, but the versatile Valiant was most effective as a picket craft, defending more specialized craft such as the scour-copters. The twin railgun turrets – one mounted beneath the nose, and the other at the rear of the fuselage – looked uncannily like Tallerman heads, but the main armament was hidden inside. The interior of the craft was stuffed full of defensive munitions: flares, decoys, anti-laser reflectives, smoke, and a host of specialized defensive missiles. Even with both crew out of action, the Valiant could still keep up an outpouring of defensive munitions before returning back to its base of operations.

And every minute the Legion party waited for the Citadel to appear, another Valiant would pass overhead. Each fly past was from a different Valiant, with a large enough fleet that it would be days before one would need to make a second appearance. The Emperor would be aware of that detail, Arun felt sure.

He spat into the dust, at the thought of the Emperor.

Veck!

Arun had been born a slave. According to the laws of the Trans-Species Union, every member of the party was a jumped-up slave with a self-appointed military title, about to meet their lawful master.

Freedom can be won. Freedom shall be won!

The battle cries of the Human Legion had never been the apologetic mumblings of humble slaves, and yet they had maintained the legal pretense that all they had done was in the name of the Emperor, that they would free him and return the Emperor’s rightful property – the worlds and lives the Legion had fought and died to liberate.

Every party knew that was a pretense, a diplomatic dance that had allowed the Human Legion to forge an alliance with the Emperor.

And now the music had finally stopped. The dance was over. It was time for the partners to look each other in the eye without the covering cloak of their dance. Arun’s heart was filled with loss and bitterness, of loathing for the Emperor. When he finally met the bastard face to face, his eyes would not conceal his hatred. He would rather die than prostrate himself before that foul creature, and every soul in the entire Legion felt precisely the same way.

The barrier that hid the Citadel was only fifty meters away, a smearing away of the world into absolute void that was hard to look at for more than a few seconds without feeling so dizzy you had to shut your eyes and fight against the nausea. It was difficult to be certain, but Arun thought the quality of that fading away into oblivion was changing – shimmering. Yes, it was finally going to happen. The Civil War was about to end, and the bargaining begin.

Arun took a deep breath, and held his right hand out, his left still encased within a healing cast. His hand was steady, not even a hint of shaking. Good. He was re-learning his relationship with his body, still unsure what it could do.

Then his shoulders slumped as a wave of emptiness crashed over him.

Xin should be holding that hand.

For years he’d imagined this moment of confrontation with the Emperor, and Xin had always been at his side in his dreams, the two of them facing the galaxy head on, hand-in-hand. But Xin was in disgrace, still heading for a court-martial unless Arun could find a way to pardon her. He’d had to fight hard to permit her to be present at all, and she was standing in the back row, alongside the only other woman Arun had ever loved.

There was movement up ahead, and Arun forgot his troubles with Xin. A single figure loomed out of the Flek mists, larger than a man but not too large to take down with a single shot from the plasma weapons concealed inside Arun’s chair.

The clouds parted to reveal the majesty of the Emperor.

Arun gasped.

And bowed his head before his master.

THE CULL

HISTORY OF THE LEGION

– Introduction to the Cull

To understand the White Knights, you must first understand the poisonous rusty-brown clouds that choke their homeworld: the Flek.

Originally a natural phenomenon that has long been re-engineered and updated to better serve the will of the White Knights, the key to the Flek's significance lies in its mutagenic properties. The ancestors of the White Knights evolved into a world where the only constant was change. Natural selection rules unchallenged across every world that gave birth to living creatures, but nowhere has it cracked the whip so furiously as on the White Knight homeworld.

To the outside world, the White Knights appear obsessed with change. With the super-accelerated forces of creative destruction hardwired into every cell of their biology it could be no other way.

The White Knights celebrate change. And they fear it. Change created them, and change will destroy them. The rest of the galaxy accepts this as an intellectual fact, but not an emotionally relevant one, because the evolutionary timescale for the rest of us is measured in mega-years, not decades as with the White Knights.

New branches of the White Knight family are constantly generated, some deliberately. Many are harnessed by more dominant members of the species, others are exterminated, and a tiny proportion will overcome ferocious odds to become dominant themselves.

Constant renewal.

Incessant conflict.

Their supercharged evolution is the key to the White Knights' strength, but it does not lend itself to stability.

Insurrection, coups, and civil wars are commonplace, but the White Knights are not fools, and they have remained the dominant force in this region of the galaxy since long before
Homo sapiens
emerged to become the principal hominid of Earth until the modern period.

Whatever faction prevails in the Imperial citadel on the White Knight homeworld, they enforce the rituals of submission upon their vassal races with a ruthless consistency. Chief among these rituals is the most hated aspect of submission across hundreds of worlds.

The Cull.

Every single being across every world that swears fealty to the White Knights is subject to the Cull.

On their homeworld, the Flek accelerates the randomness of White Knight mutation, and provokes the extermination of the branches of the family who outlive their usefulness or choose the wrong side in the endless power struggles. In honor of their masters' nature, each world and each race devises their own form of Cull, combining randomness and competition in a manner acceptable to their overlords.

On worlds that please the White Knights, the numbers Culled are far too small to impact their economies, but there is a profound psychological impact from having each and every person on that world knowing they are, or were, eligible for the Cull.

Worlds that displease the White Knights suffer accordingly, often with additional forms of Cull being imposed. The Littoranes of Shepherd-Nurture-4 suffered such a punishment Cull in what they call the Year of Sorrows. An entire generation was exterminated as a lesson, though what it was that had so displeased them was a detail the White Knights never passed on.

The form of Cull employed in the Human Marine Corps was far more severe than civilian populations would all subjected to, but typical in the way it combined randomness with competition. Cadet battalions competed with one another, attempting to outscore each other in their martial competence to escape the Cull Zone of the inter-battalion rankings. If your battalion was caught in the Cull Zone at the end of each season, then a tenth of your number of final year cadets would be selected at random, and executed by members of your own unit.

To the leaders of the White Knights, whatever their faction, the Cull was the keystone of their empire: the ritual that must be enforced at any cost.

Those who had experienced the Cull, executing their own comrades in honor of their overlords’ nature, also saw the Cull as a keystone of the White Knight empire. If they could destroy the Cull, they reasoned, the entire edifice of White Knight supremacy would crumble into the dust of history.

After the Liberation of Athena, as the victorious Human Legion prepared to meet with the White Knight Emperor in the wasteland beyond the Imperial citadel, there were those who dared hope that the Cull would soon be ended.

Although Arun was glad of the opportunity to be involved once more – he would have given anything to feel useful again after being forced to sit out so much of recent events – he could have wished for better circumstances. The techs were designing him legs that could be grafted onto the stumps of his thighs and would feel ‘better than the originals’, or so they claimed. He wasn’t convinced: soothing rhetoric if ever he’d heard it, but they were sticking to their guns. He would have been happy to adopt the sort of prosthetics that Springer – Arun still found it painful to think of her as ‘Tremayne’ – and so many others relied on, but the techs were having none of it.

Apparently the wounds relating to the amputations were not yet healed enough, the risk of damaging the still-delicate stubs of his truncated limbs too great to expose them to the crude friction of standard prosthetics. No, they had to be cosseted and allowed to fully heal so that there would be no possibility of a reaction to his new lower limbs once they were ready.

So it was to be a mobile chair for him; a contraption that encased his lower body from the waist down, its stylish curved-lozenge front resembling the nose of a Valiant to Arun’s mind. As well as taking care of bodily waste in much the same way a battlesuit did, the chair was armored, motorized, and capable of limited flight and hovering – not enough to send him soaring off into the clouds but enough to handle tricky terrain when necessary. It also made Arun feel self-consciously… short.

He had recovered from his immediate sense of awe at sight of the Emperor, but only to a degree.

Physically, the White Knights were unlike any other race of Arun’s experience. He was accustomed to conjuring a mental image of a Jotun, a Littorane, even a Hardit, when he thought about each race, but there was no chance of doing so with the White Knights. They possessed so many varied forms – some of them radically divergent – that it was impossible to contemplate a single generic image. On first arriving at the capital, he had been impressed by the number of races in evidence, all of them new to him. He assumed that what he was seeing were various subject races, those high in the White Knight’s estimation and deemed worthy to attend the homeworld. He found the truth astounding, that these were all forms of the White Knights.

Arun saw crusted chitinous forms that made the worst mutated skins of the Wolves seem mild in comparison, and rotund, almost spherical beings that initially seemed to roll across the ground, until he realized that short stout legs sat beneath their corpulent bodies and the impression that they rotated was just that: illusion. There were frail-seeming skeletal beings who stalked across the ground on tripedal legs, towering over the majority of their contemporaries; reptilian vermillion-scaled individuals with compound eyes, and amorphous blobs whose faces seemed to be their only immutable features. The latter flowed across surfaces in a disconcerting manner, evidently untroubled by how steep or narrow the path before them might be.