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.
"Time," he muttered. Time was wasting, and the margin for error with it. He stood. "Computer. Kolnar, noon at Maridapore."
White-blue light flashed across the parkland, hurtful even to him in the instant before his pupils shrank to pinhead size.
Jekit nor Varak prowled the corridors. He was not in powered armor. There were not enough suits to go around and their maintenance requirements were fierce. The patrol was to enforce curfew and prevent sabotage, which was becoming a problem. He was in a flexible suit, with a comlink and a plasma rifle. The corridors in this section were darkened, which gave his IR-sensitive eyes the advantage over any scumvermin.
As if I needed it, he thought. His main enemy was tedium. The corridors were changeless and identical. Ten paces left, take a turn at random. Trot down a long length, checking that the seals on the doors were unbroken. Flatten to a wall and wait. He did isometrics then, muscle pulling on muscle against the strong flexible bones of his body. Nothing much else to do; except that he tired too soon, probably because of the damnable light gravity he had been living in on this station. It would be a relief to get back to Kolnar-standard on the ship.
Although there were compensations. Keriholen, for example. Jekit's teeth clicked together as he remembered how they had taken her, he and his brothers. Many times since the first occasion.
Worth the trouble, he thought. Limber as an eel and tireless as a real woman. Women were scarce for commoners. The nobles took so many. He and his four brothers-they were born at one birthing-had only two wives between them, held in common, and a mere eight children.
Jekit was sweating. He wiped his face on a sleeve and resumed the pacing, trying to push such thoughts out of his mind. Not until after his watch. It was hot, whatever the gauge said. His stomach felt odd. Maybe the plundered food was bad, although the Divine Seed could eat pretty well anything organic.
Simeon watched the pirate. This Jekit was a perfect choice. Definitely had the Mark-II virus, too pig-ignorant to know it and he was almost asleep from boredom anyway. A little surprise would be good for his circulation.
He checked the progress of the relief party, ten soldiers and a squad leader. Plenty of witnesses, also perfect. Timing was the key. They had only two guards to relieve before they reached Jekit.
Hurt my people, will you, Jekit? he thought. Okay, now let's see how you like being on the other end of the stick.
He began whispering. The words were loud enough to be audible, but not loud enough to be understood. Just nonsense syllables pronounced in inflections similar to the Kolnari language, minute after minute, not steadily but rising and falling and stopping altogether for random intervals. Then an increase in the volume until the nonsense was a tease, tantalizingly on the edge of audibility. Add subsonics guaranteed to have the hair standing up along the spine, although Kolnari didn't have body hair.
Goosebumps, then, he decided. Jekit paced, stopped, shook his head and brought the plasma rifle to port, thumbing off the safety.
Doesn't this snardly have any nerves? Simeon asked himself in frustration. Then he added the refinement; things flickering at the edge of vision. The pirate was probably seeing things without Simeon's visual aids since the sensors said his temperature was five percent over normal and rising. Sweat poured down his face. That was rare since the Kolnari metabolism didn't waste moisture.
Simeon constructed a less transparent image. Ah, that made him jump, Simeon thought. "Rahkest!" he whispered, just loud enough to be understood.
Die, in Kolnari.
"Who's there?" Jekit called out, swinging his weapon around. "Who goes? Answer me!"
Simeon had a conversation going now, male and female voices whispering vehemently. He moved the whisperers down the corridors, through chambers and halls and galleries. Now they were around the corner, now they were overhead, now right behind him.
Jekit spun, his weapon leveled. "Scumvermin!" he shouted. The warning indicator flicked as his forefinger took up the slack on the trigger key.
The squad had exited the elevator on Jekit's level and were marching towards his station. Trotting like a wolf-pack, rather; the leader was in armor, moving at the same pace. Slam-slam-slam, half a tonne pounding down at every step.
The Kolnari had his back pressed to the wall. Simeon overlaid the powersuit's footfalls, turning them into drumbeats in time with the fevered warrior's own heart. His head was snapping back and forth wildly, rims of white showing around the amber of his eyes.
Off to the right, around the corner from which his replacement would come, a voice called.
"Jekit!" His officer called. "Turn to, idler, fool! Report."
Jekit almost moaned with relief opening his mouth to call back. When he did he found the words matched, overlaid, neutralized by something. Shout, scream, nothing but the same blurred yammer.
"Painrod for you, seedless slothman," came the warning from his officer.
Jekit crouched and began making his way along the wall towards the voice. Halfway down the long wall, he jerked and vomited convulsively, bewildered. It had never happened to him before, that he lost his food.
Footsteps sounded from around the corner as the replacement squad advanced smartly towards him. He heard a soft hiss behind him and turned. He screamed as he looked into a shape out of homeworld legend, a twenty-eyed worm with gnashing concentric mouths, thicker through the body than a man was high.
"Ancha!" he screamed and fired. Grinder. There was nothing wrong with his reflexes yet, and the spear of nuclear fire lanced through the monster.
Gotcha, Simeon thought again. He'd been pretty sure that worm program was modeled on something native to Kolnar. So its name was "grinder"! Appropriate enough.
"Grinder" vanished. Behind it was a figure in power armor, slowly toppling over backwards with the whole upper part of the torso gone. The squad behind had already gone to earth and returned fire. A line of light touched Jekit's right shoulder, and the plasma gun fell away. The blurring, blanking wall of un-sound fell away from his ears so suddenly that he could hear the slight whine as the weapon automatically cycled another deuterium pellet into the chamber. A plasma beam licked out at Jekit and his legs vanished from the knees down.
And he was still hot. His wounds did not hurt yet, insulated by shock, although he could smell the heavy fried meat odor. But his head hurt, it hurt… The others were rushing forward to secure him for interrogation. It would go very badly for them if he died first.
Awright! Simeon thought. Still, it should be fun listening to Jekit, the mighty warrior, explaining why he freaked like that. Now, who's next?
Belazir and Aragiz knelt together before Pol t'Veng. She was wearing the black robe and hood of an adjudicator and, in the dim light, that left only the yellow glow of her eyes visible. Belazir knelt with grace. The t'Veng was inferior by rank and birth, but she was efficient. Also a woman, of course, but that meant less these days than it had on Kolnar. Everything in space was a protected environment, like the fortress-holds. You either lived or died, generally. Aragiz knelt in quivering tension and the smell of his rage was musky, irritating to Belazir.