Rago nodded. His eyes then lowered to Jort, who was still looking uneasy. “Ah yes, your watchdog. He’s from Scorpii, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Jort said.

  “A pity. I’ve recruited a few of these brutes in the past, Gorman. They have impressive limbs, but their brains are smaller than their testes.”

  Jort’s eyes and nostrils widened. “I have massive testicles!”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, stepping forward and reaching out to clasp Rago’s hand. He ignored my offered hand, and I eventually lowered it. My face didn’t show any sign that I’d been insulted. “It’s an honor to take the field with you. True professional soldiers—that’s what this defenseless world needs most.”

  Rago’s eyes slid off Jort and moved toward me. “Normally, I would raid this place and steal whatever they have—which doesn’t look like much. Even their women are an unappealing hue. But never mind that. Today, we’re here for a higher purpose. Present to me your defensive plan.”

  The armored hauler had sat nearby during this meet-and-greet. It was dark and still, but when Rago mentioned planning, Droad climbed out and slammed the heavy door behind him. He stepped forward and took in the group.

  “Real soldiers...” he said. “These men aren’t colonial recruits.”

  A few of the troops laughed. Rago narrowed his eyes. “You… are you really from the Chain, sir? Or is that just something you tell the locals to get free drinks?”

  “I’m Governor Droad of Garm—or at least, I was. Here, inspect my credentials from the Nexus—the government that once ruled all the colonies in the Chain.”

  Droad handed over a silvery object. Rago touched the memory device to a piece of computer paper, and he paged through the documents with a flicking finger.

  “These seem to be authentic. I don’t know why even a madman would work so hard to forge them… I accept your stated identity.”

  “Thank you, Duke Rago.”

  Rago studied Droad for a moment longer. Droad actually seemed to impress him. “So you’re from the Chain? Truly? That is remarkable… but I suppose we are halfway across the abyss to that place… Tell me, does the slip-gate from here to your home stars still operate?”

  “No. It’s been destroyed. We—the Chain is lost.”

  “Lost? All of the colonies?”

  “All that I know of have been devoured or burned. Either annihilated by the aliens, or cleansed in nuclear fires by our fleets in an attempt to stop this scourge.”

  Duke Rago looked openly concerned. “There are no survivors?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Some are kept for livestock on various planets. Others are refugees—like myself.”

  “Did you say… livestock?”

  “Yes.”

  The two men eyed one another for another moment. Droad didn’t blink or lower his eyes. Finally, the duke nodded. He offered his black-gloved hand to Droad. The same hand he’d denied to offer to me.

  They shook hands, and Droad began to explain his defensive ideas. Rago listened, and he made edits, but for the most part, he agreed to use Droad’s plan.

  “I understand that you’re going to march with Harkaman—into the nests.”

  “That is what I volunteered for.”

  Rago studied the ground for a moment. “Harkaman isn’t entirely trustworthy, I’ll let you know. Even when he wasn’t infected by some alien parasite.”

  “I understand—but I want to lend my knowledge where it can do the most good. The nests are perilous.”

  “All right then. Thank you for your suggestions. I won’t keep you here at the spaceport any longer. A shuttle has been arranged to transport you to Harkaman’s flagship. Good luck, Droad.”

  The two shook hands again, and we all wished him well. Climbing into his armored hauler again, Droad swept away toward the center of the spaceport to catch his shuttle.

  “I hope his mind remains intact,” Rago told me.

  “So do I.”

  “I will stay in reserve and push back any incursions to the town center,” Rago said. “Since the people won’t be safe in the forests or smaller communities, they can huddle in their basements here, or they can flee immediately—it’s up to them. Where will you stand, Gorman?”

  “At the spaceport. I’ll use my ship’s guns to defend her if I have to.”

  His mouth twitched, but he approved of my plan. After that, the meeting broke up.

  “Did you see that?” Jort demanded as soon as Rago and his troops were out of sight. “He shit on me and ignored your hand, Captain. He only seemed to like Droad.”

  “He respects Droad,” I explained. “He’s impressed by a man who has lived through horrors and yet still keeps fighting.”

  Jort spit on the spaceport’s pavement. “Rago is a prick!”

  I shrugged, unable to argue the point.

  Trask seemed amused by Jort’s reaction, but he didn’t comment. “I’m going to mass my troops here. Rago has twice my numbers, so he’ll cover the rest of the city. You can hide inside your ship if you want. If you run out on us—well, I could hardly blame you for that, but I might feel compelled to shoot you down.”

  “You’re all heart, Baron. I’ve always said it.”

  Baron Trask walked off, snorting with amusement.

  “Another false-penis of a man,” Jort complained when Trask was gone. “Why do we tolerate allies of this caliber?”

  “Because they each brought an army with them when we called for their help. Do you have an army of men from Scorpii behind you, Jort?”

  He studied the pavement in angry dejection. “Your words humiliate me. I will take my station at the aft cannon.”

  Jort had always been moody about his status in the group, so I let him go back into the ship to sulk.

  Huan was the last man lingering behind. As usual, he’d said little, but watched everything.

  “I know of Droad,” he said at last. “He was among the first to face the alien menace. He’s older than he looks… I wonder if parts of his body are now artificial? It would be hard to imagine organic organs lasting so long…”

  “You know him, huh? Have you met him before?”

  “No, but I know of his reputation. He was considered a harbinger of death by some. A herald of destruction and mayhem. Each planet he visits, he’s always one step ahead of the alien horde… but these unlucky worlds always fall in the end.”

  I eyed Huan with interest. “I noticed that you didn’t say much. Why didn’t you introduce yourself to the governor if you knew who he was?”

  Huan’s two eyes both focused on me at once. “That might have been… disadvantageous.”

  “How so?”

  “He would know my homeworld. He would say it wasn’t reputable. He might even cause you to… distrust me.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Huan shrugged. That was an oddly human gesture for him. “You may have noticed that I’m not entirely human. Portions of my body and my mind are artificial.”

  “You don’t say. I would never have guessed it—about the mind part, I mean.”

  “It’s true. There are people from the Chain who harbor certain… bigoted feelings about my kind. A blended person, such as myself, can’t be certain of their reactions.”

  I nodded, accepting his odd explanation. I rather suspected that these “blended” persons had caused havoc somewhere back among the colonies of the Chain, but I didn’t want to ask about it. Huan had been loyal and effective enough for me. A smuggling captain couldn’t be overly choosy about his crewmen, after all, if he wanted to fill his ship with able hands.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The battle for Vindar intensified the next morning, just before dawn.

  Together, Trask and Rago had brought thirty thousand men to the capital city. It was an impressive force, an army larger than anything Vindar had ever seen.

  Dividing his troops into three divisions, the duke placed one division at the spaceport commanded by Trask. The second division was spread thinly over five times more land. That force was to ring the city and hold any smaller attacks at bay.

  In the center of town, Rago took charge of the final defense. The Duke’s personal army numbered over nine thousand, and he placed them there. They were the best-trained and equipped of the lot, from what I could see.

  The aliens moved faster than we expected. After the colonial forces had crumpled and been destroyed in forests to the south, they ran all night to press their advantage. They marched tirelessly, eating up hundreds of kilometers and circuiting the burning forests that had been set ablaze to slow them down.

  They no longer seemed to be daunted by flames or feel the need to hide among the dark, purple-leaved trees. Instead, they raced ahead to take a city they must have imagined was undefended.

  Digging in all around the spaceport, Trask’s army was soon entrenched. Drones and men with shovels worked for hours to set up this most basic defense.

  Not all of Trask’s men had Sardez rifles, I couldn’t equip them all with such gear. But in the center of our formation, a full battalion of troops was armed with the best of the best. When the aliens came pouring down from the hills south of the spaceport, they were given a rude shock.

  Like the attack on the militia I’d witnessed on the monitors, the aliens used their culus flocks to move ahead and scout in force. Seeing the troops encircling the spaceport, which was their most valued target for capture, the flapping creatures screeched and wheeled.

  Suddenly, the great mass of them turned in the air and came plunging down toward the humans. Trask’s people called out loudly, but calmly. If they were flustered, they didn’t show it.

  Trask had ordered his troops to load spreading shot, and it turned out to be a wise move. The Sardez rifles could operate like shotguns, but they fired their loads with such force behind each tiny projectile that a region twenty meters in diameter was impacted at exceptional range.

  When the cloud of culus bodies swooped near, a thousand rifles cracked. An accelerated storm of tiny pellets sprayed the skies. A moment later, the aliens fell like rain.

  Most of them died in that initial volley, unable to flap close enough to do more than drop into a field and thrash there, dying. A few, however, managed to fall among the outer trenches. Some of the shrades wriggled away from their dead hosts, and they began to do their worst.

  Trask’s troops were again ready for this, however. Unlike the poorly trained and equipped militia, these professionals slaughtered their strange assailants. Within ten minutes, men walked among the blast pans holding up tattered scraps from the twisted, bloody corpses on the tips of their rifles.

  I then took the time to find Trask, who sat in the shade under his destroyer. He was watching the battle with interest.

  “This is a joke,” he said when he caught sight of me. “I can hardly believe these aliens had us sweating. Here we are, blowing them down like swamp-geese. This is no frozen planetoid with a few men around. This is an organized army destroying a flock of predators with big ideas.”

  I nodded, accepting his boasts without comment. My eyes were on the hills to the south. “I see movement, Baron. To the south.”

  Trask, for all his bragging, wheeled around and stared. He ordered his lieutenants to provide him with drone recon and a satellite feed.

  “The satellites were all shot down before we even got here, Baron,” a lieutenant told him. She was young, and she seemed nervous. “We sent out drones earlier, but those flying monsters—they destroyed them all, sir.”

  “Send out new drones! We killed ninety percent of those flapping freaks, they’ll be fine. I need to see the battlefield!”

  The lieutenant rushed away to enact Trask’s orders. In the meantime, Trask and I frowned toward the hills in the south.

  “What do you think that is?” he asked me. “I’m at maximum range with my scope… and I can’t see them clearly.”

  “A swarm of killbeasts, probably.”

  He looked at me in alarm. “If that’s what they are… I’m seeing a hell of lot of them.”

  “Many thousands, I would suspect.”

  “But how could they reach here so quickly? They were on the other side of that burning forest killing the militia just yesterday.”

  Shrugging, I admitted I had no clear idea. “They must have run all night.”

  “Hundreds of kilometers overnight… such stamina… no human army could move half as quickly without vehicles.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  We watched together as the enemy approached and spread out. They hadn’t managed to break a hole in our defenses yet, and this was exactly the position we’d hoped they would assail first.

  “Call Rago—or Droad,” Trask said, never taking his eyes from the approaching horde. “Tell him what we’re facing. Tell them we need reserve forces.”

  Baron Trask was in command of the spaceport defense, so I did as I was told. Unfortunately, I was rudely rebuked, and the connection dropped while I was mid-sentence.

  “Rago says he knows of the enemy attack. He’s watching everything from his new bunker in the center of town. He will not release reserves unless our lines crumble.”

  “That’s a fine thing. I’m usually the man hiding in safety while my subordinates toil on the front lines. I’m not enjoying this change in my status, Gorman.”

  I didn’t answer, as I’d never liked how Trask would hide and cover his own posterior in rough moments like this one. It only seemed fitting that the roles were reversed in this case. I’d actually have been glad to see it—but for the fact my own ass was also stuck defending this ground alongside him.

  The enemy moved around us, at the edge of our sensor range. They were jockeying for position, surrounding us. Unlike the impulsive attack from thousands of flying culus and shrade teams, this time the aliens were more cunning. The killbeast army spread out on the far side of a low row of hills. They were about five kilometers off, but they were on the move and clearly setting up another attack.

  “Classic encirclement,” Trask said. “Whoever named these creatures ‘beasts’ was a fool. They understand tactics.”

  “What are we going to do? Wait for the attack?”

  “I’m not that foolish. I will use my ace card right now.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “The high ground,” he said, and he turned his attention to the grounded ships. My eyes followed his, and I understood his intent.

  “Send one of the destroyers back up into orbit,” he ordered me.

  I was operating as his executive officer, which didn’t seem to sit well with his own staff—but I didn’t care. If Trask trusted me to get things done, I wasn’t going to question it.

  “Your own ship, Baron?” I asked.

  “Certainly not! Are you mad? If my own ship leaves for space now, how will I escape if things go badly down here? Send up Knight-Captain Caswell’s.”

  There it was again. Trask never dug a hole to hide in without carefully creating a second exit for his own personal escape.

  I passed the orders on to Knight-Captain Caswell, who lifted off a few minutes later. He was to move into low orbit and bombard the enemy formations from space.

  What happened next shocked us all. Small rockets with fiery red trails behind them leapt up from the approaching killbeast army. These deadly slivers of metal followed the ship up into the clouds.

  “No…!” Trask shouted. He took a half-dozen steps toward the blastpans, and I followed, craning my neck. We both stared up at the scene overhead.

  Caswell knew he was in trouble, so he released his chaff in a flurry. He jinked and swooped away from the chasing missiles, but they gracefully turned with him. They dove into the clouds of glittering chaff and plunged right through it all without detonating.

  The chase continued into the upper atmosphere. We could no longer see the action—but the waiting was no less grim to endure.

  “Deploy shields!” the baron ordered. “All ships, deploy full domes—deploy them now!”

  The grounded fleet captains hastened to obey. We’d been lulled into a sense of superiority and false security. The enemy had brought their ground forces very close indeed, and our ships were all grounded.

  Trask was stomping around in his boots, raging. “Rago should have launched the fleet and kept it in the skies. He’s always thinking of his escape paths. His mother was a whore, just like they’ve always whispered among the Sword Worlds. I always knew it.”

  In my own mind, I couldn’t help but think Trask would have done precisely the same thing for precisely the same reasons. But I kept this unwanted observation inside my own head.

  A nearby ship’s engine flared brightly, but the power generated wasn’t used to create lift. Instead, the sitting vessel was enclosed in a shimmering field of force. It wouldn’t stop a direct hit, but it was better than nothing.

  A second ship wrapped itself in a shield, then the third. I dared to feel my guts unwind in my belly. Perhaps we weren’t doomed to die with the Vindari here on their lonely planet.

  Then something flashed white in the heavens above. Hidden by the cloud layer, we couldn’t see the strike—but everyone knew what it was… what it had to be.

  The red-tailed missiles had caught up with Caswell and brought down his fleeing destroyer. Shrapnel and chunks of smoking debris began the slow fall back down to the surface.

  Trask turned to me. His face was red, and his teeth were bared. “Have we got any more tricks to play? What have you got, Gorman? How can we strike back? Don’t just stand there, man! Do something!”

  I thought about it for a moment—then I began running for my ship.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  One weapons system that I’d held in reserve was the mortars I’d brought with me from the Sardez system. I suspected such weapons might exist elsewhere in the Conclave, but colonials didn’t normally have access to them. They weren’t like anything else we had out on the Fringe.

  The mortars could launch plasma shells over a great distance. The shells caused a serious shockwave upon impact, releasing an explosion that’s energy-to-mass ratio was only surpassed by nuclear or antimatter weapons.