The City Who Fought
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Стирлинг Стивен Майкл
- Серия: brainship #4
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The City Who Fought». Краткое содержание книги:
Simeon's love of wargaming would find unexpected uses when the brutal Kolnari attack the nearby colony planet, Bethel. Sheltering the colony's refugee's brought the city an invitation to serious trouble with Kolnari pirates.
"Here," she gasped, wobbling under the burden of the clumsy thing. Between them, Seld and Joat got it up into the duct. Then she bent and grabbed one of the Kolnari's arms. She heaved and her heels skidded. The juddering, twitching body was heavy, far heavier than a man dressed only in a belt and briefs ought to be. Patsy darted back.
"It's not him," she said.
"It'll do for starters," Joat said with a grunt. "C'mon!"
Together they dragged the body to the airlock around the corner and cycled it through.
"Meet you at N-7a x L," Joat panted, trotting back to the open diaphragm. "Need that stuff on the list."
"I'll be there," Patsy said.
"It will work," Joseph said reassuringly. "At least once," he amended. "Joat is an odd child, but any contraption she claims will function, will function."
Amos nodded dubiously. I have never found reason to doubt you in matters of violence, he thought. That was comforting. On the other hand, no man was infallible, and even Joseph was an amateur at war.
They were in the lower-equatorial park, near the central core of the station's upper globe. For a wonder, there were no surveillance cameras here. By Central World law, there had to be such places in any substantial habitat. Most of the inhabitants being law-abiding types, SSS-900-C's was in the park. It was fairly large, several hundred hectares, with part of the station water-reserves deployed as lakes and ponds. Currently it was in night-cycle, and the Kolnari seemed to find that fascinating. Amos could understand that. He had found it heartbreakingly like, and yet unlike, Bethel. The scents were strange, greener, and fresher than the arid hills of the Sierra Nueva estates, milder than the irrigated lowlands. Strange birds-or was it small animals?-chirred and rustled in the undergrowth. He was an outdoorsman, but these were not the fields he knew.
"They come," Joseph said. "To stay," he added.
He moved off into the shadows of the bushes, bent low, moving with a skill he had learned in the alleys of his childhood and the hunting grounds of his leader's properties in later years.
God was not entirely unfair. The Kolnari hearing was not quite as good as human norm; it need not be in the thicker air of their homeworld. Amos crouched with hunter's patience, waiting as if for sicatooth.
God of our fathers, be with me now, he prayed with utter sincerity. Strengthen my arm against the children of Hellmouth.
"Hai, dog-turds, what brings you out this fair night?" Joseph's voice rang clear. "Tired of banging your mothers or looking for sheep?"
Amos felt a lurch of fear. They were counting on the enemy's inexperience with guerilla tactics, their arrogance. That was perilously close to counting on the Kolnari being stupid, and that was dangerous.
Pounding feet came closer: Joseph's heavier tread, and the lighter, faster sound of the folk the hell-planet bred. Joseph flashed between the trees with his head down, arms and legs pumping. The pursuers seemed to float by contrast, loping effortlessly like men on a low-gravity moon. Their eyes and trailing manes glowed lambent in the simulated starlight, and their movements had the aching gracefulness of swans taking flight. They were beautiful, and horrible beyond belief, and he feared them in a way that had nothing to do with the long knives in their hands.
He stepped out. They stopped with a plunging abruptness. Their heads turned to scan him with the smooth accuracy of gun-turrets tracking under computer control. Joat had counted on that in designing her gadget. A scanner detected the alignment of their eyes.
The thing he carried strapped to his chest yawped. Then it was red-hot, and he was scrabbling to rip it loose and toss it away. The pirates stumbled as if they had run into a wall of iron. They screamed as if that iron were white hot and dropped their knives to tear at their feces in a frenzy of pain.
Scream, dogs, Amos thought, gratified. Scream as Bethel screamed, as Patsy screamed, scumvermin filth.
Cries of pain were not going to attract attention on the SSS-900-C: not while it was held in the Fist of High-Clan Kolnar.
A dozen men and women edged out of the shadows. Cutting bars and lengths of dull-gleaming synth tubing were in their hands. Amos reached over his back and drew a long curved sword from its sheath with the slender sound of steel on steeclass="underline" the motion so long practiced from blade-dance training that it was as unconscious as breathing. The heads of the Kolnari turned toward the sounds he made; their ruined eyes were circles of blood-red now, and tears of blood dribbled down their cheeks. They moaned in their agony, but they moved toward him, teeth bared in a rictus of pain and savagery.
"Quickly, but carefully," Amos said to the others closing in on their victims.
Afterwards they must throw their clothes into disposal and go through full decontamination cleansing.
Joseph was behind the blinded pirates, a half-dozen stationers at his back. Two knives glinted in his hands.
"Now!" Amos said.
Chapter Nineteen
"Shall I perform an autopsy, Great Lord?" the eunuch medico asked in its shrill whine.
Belazir t'Marid looked down at the bodies in their separate bags. Separate bags, but who knew what went where? One bag might be a few parts short or extra, for all he could tell.
"Creature," he said to the eunuchs, cuffing one aside, "when men have their skulls crushed by heavy blows-as these have-and their eyes gouged out-as these have-and their throats cut to the neckbone-as these have-and their bodies cut to pieces, as these have, then generally speaking, as a rule, they die. An autopsy seems somewhat superfluous."
The noble's voice was even and pleasant, as it usually was, but the slave medico sank deeper and deeper into a crouch of abasement with every word, as if they were blows from the powered whip normally used on such. At the last, all the eunuch could do was whimper.
"Cease," Belazir said. "Now, this other; in that, I have interest."
The medico sealed the bags containing the body-parts of the two dead Kolnari and hastened to the intact casualty. Relatively intact. He stroked a hand down the opaque material, and the stuff turned utterly transparent.
"Whatever killed him, he was not pleased with it," Belazir remarked to Serig, looking at the dead man's bulging, staring eyes. Shifting to the interrogative tense: "Creature?"
"It is uncertain, Great Lord. Either the electrocution or the explosive decompression would be fatal, of course. Here, the dart struck. See, a burned patch, high on the shoulder, towards the angle of the jaw. As he was turning to confront that which killed him, it struck from the rear."
"Blindingly obvious," Belazir said facetiously. "Go. Preserve the bodies."
"And what do you propose to do, t'Marid?" the third Kolnari noble present said.
"Do, lord Captain t'Varak?" Belazir said, turning with an expression of perfect courtesy.
T'Varak's presence provided a welcome distraction. A kin-enemy was always more entertaining than outsiders, if more predictable. He waved a languid hand about them, at the dew-cool grass, at the holos far overhead that mimicked the blue cloud-scattered sky of Earth. The temperature was far below what Kolnari preferred, but they could endure anything down to and below freezing without undue discomfort. None of them needed to wear more than briefs and shipbelt for utility. For status, the nobles wore long open-necked robes of watered silk, jewelry of fretted silver, and homeworld fire opals. Their hair was brushed to shining shoulder-length waterfalls, pinned back with combs of sea-ivory and precious metal, and the knife-sharp feathers of Kolnari birds.