IronStar (45 page)

“And what are we to make of the
‘curse of heaven’? It has the stink of more Kruss
technology
,” Kirrah
used the Regnum term, which had already made its way into Talamae. “But it
could well be a bluff. What do you think, Opeth?”

“I know not, Warmaster. It would be
a poor time to bluff, but the lad is so poor a warrior, he might not know
that.”

“I believe,” Issthe’s calm voice
cut across the speculation, “…that whatever the Prince meant by it, he found
the idea very satisfying. Yet I see no way to guess what he intends.”

“Ready the steamships. I want full
steam in at least two, day and night. We must be ready to move swiftly.
Whatever they plan, they have no weapon that can reach us from outside the
range of our ships’ mortars.”

“If one considers War as an act
of mutual destruction, we must of necessity imagine both parties as making some
progress.” -
General Carl Von Clausewitz,
op cit
.

That evening as they sat in the
cooling courtyard after dinner, the first screams were heard in the city.
Within two hours, there were eight more bodies in Issthe’ infirmary, each with
the same sort of tiny wound borne by the dead scouts, each wound beginning
somewhere apparently at random on the body, each tracing a bloody track through
flesh to perforate the victim’s aorta just above the heart, and out at the
nearest point on the chest or back. Eyewitnesses described a man walking in the
street falling and screaming uncontrollably, clawing at his leg. A shopkeeper
closing his windows for the night, falling in convulsions. A child waking in
her sleep, screams bringing frantic parents who were helpless to save her from
dying in convulsions in her own bed. A woman working in her garden, and most
ominously, a woman slain while coming to the aid of her similarly stricken
elderly father. Kirrah was becoming more frantic with each new case.

“How!
How
are they doing
this! No visible weapon! No projectile! No warning! And no
consistency
!
Men, women, children, at home or in the street! Ahhhh, Issthe! This is Kruss
technology
,
I am sure of it! But how can I fight something
I cannot find!
” A pale,
calm face looked back at her across the body of one of the children, a
golden-haired girl about Akaray’s age lying inert and cooling on the table
between them.

“Warmaster, everyone struck down
has had two things in common. They have all been south of Slow Water Road. And
they have all been somewhere they were exposed to the sky at the moment they
were stricken. Even this poor child, her father told me her bedroom window was
open.”

“Issthe, thank you for seeing the
obvious for me. If that is the only clue we have, we shall use it.
Mastha'cha!
”
The sturdy bodyguard appeared in a moment, saluted.

“Warmaster!”

“Muster four squads of palace
guards immediately! Send them to every
vai'atho
-block south of Slow
Water Road. They are to wake every
shee’tho’vai
, have them rouse their
entire
vai'atho
. They must close every door and window, no exceptions,
shut tight until we sound ‘all clear’ from the watchbells. Their lives depend
on it, word of the Warmaster. Hurry!”

The man saluted and left at a dead
run. Kirrah made her suit extrude its gloves and helmet, checked its seals were
intact and set out astride Whoopsie to see what she could discover. After an
exhausting four hours pacing through the dark and deserted city streets, she
and her two guardsmen returned only a little wiser. They had found nothing, but
three times Kirrah’s wristcomp had reported intercepting a signal, a very short
coded microwave burst, all with unknown format but similar to one another, all
too brief and too faint to trace. By the time they returned, six more deaths
had occurred, two of them among the other palace guards charged with spreading
the warning, all struck down while walking in the streets.

She woke soon after dawn and a
brief and thoroughly wretched two hours’ attempt at sleep. Only one more death
had occurred, a tower guard near the downstream end of the barracks section,
but the city was all but shut down. By noon, when no more deaths were reported,
she ordered the ‘all clear’ rung. By mid-afternoon the attacks resumed, four
more deaths in the time it took to send everyone indoors again.

By the third day of curfew and
sudden random deaths, Kirrah called a full meeting of the
shee’tho’vai
Council
for that evening. She paced like a caged tiger in the courtyard of
Stone-in-a-River school, as near to the makeshift morgue Issthe’s infirmary had
become as she could get without actually looking over the shoulders of the busy
priests. Students and guardsmen and the occasional messenger wisely gave her a
wide berth, going about their duties and making their reports with
barely-concealed eagerness to be out of her irritable orbit. As the door to the
street opened and banged shut behind her, she whirled and demanded:

“
How many this
… Akaray! What
are you doing… sorry,
aska
, I am not angry with you.” A little cautiously
her ‘borrowed’ son came and embraced her. She knelt and wrapped her arms around
him and said over his shoulder: “I am afraid for you, that is all. For all of
us. Where are you coming from?”

“From school, Kirrah
’sho
.
Two days each tenday I attend Master Brai'klao’s class in history, he teaches
it at the new academy where your Wrth children learn.” The boy gestured
somewhat tentatively to the north, where the new school was located in a
hastily converted warehouse outside the city walls.

“Sorry,
aska
, I forgot which
day it was. You are probably as safe there as anywhere. Whatever is killing our
people, seems confined to the south part of the city. Why do you look at me
like that?”

“You treat me like a small child. I
am not afraid, Kirrah’
shu.
I am not worth more than the people who were
killed last night.”
Oh yes you are… and how did I fail to notice when
exactly you started calling me ‘Kirrah-mother’?

“You are alive,
aska
. They
are not. I have already failed them. If I cannot …
what!
” Again the outside
door banged open. Peetha stopped at Kirrah’s exclamation and stood at immediate
attention, effectively halting the four Wrth trotting behind her.

“Peetha! I apologize, my foul mood
has been a burden to my loyal soldiers all day. You bring news?”

“More than news, Warmaster. I bring
…this.” The girl turned and gestured to the man and woman behind her, who were
supporting a pale-looking Wrth with a tourniquet tight around the stump of his
right forearm. The very
fresh
stump, from the raw, bloody look of it.

“Where is Issthe? Guard, call for a
priest! This man is injured!” The guardsman hurried to the infirmary door, and
Peetha added:

“…and
this
,” and the fourth
Wrth stepped around the trio and carefully unwrapped the bloody severed hand,
laying the gruesome burden on a nearby stone bench. Kirrah’s first thought was:
On a Regnum world, you would be going into regen to have that reattached.
I’m sorry, but you’re just too early
. Her second thought was to notice the
small puncture wound on the heel of the palm,
just like on all the other
mysterious casualties
… Her hand rose to her mouth and she felt the hairs on
her neck rising.

“…and
this!
” Peetha finished
triumphantly and held out a medium-large cloth bag. With trembling fingers,
Kirrah unwrapped the modest package and stared at a jumble of fine metal links
and rings - someone’s chain mail vest, twisted and wrapped into a small bundle.
In the center of the mass of wires and rings, something
moved
. Kirrah
started and looked more closely. Carefully she unwrapped a few layers of the
mail cloth. Ensnared within, tiny eyes stared back at her. No not eyes,
sensor
heads
. She re-wrapped the bundle. One of the priests arrived and made to
escort the injured man into the treatment room. Kirrah called to the priest:

“Ask Issthe to come here when she
can spare a moment. Peetha, tell me everything.”

“Warmaster, this man was at drill
in the training field next to the barracks. He reached for a practice-pike,
from a stack that had not been touched since yesterday, and suddenly the
plague-of-screams was on him.”
Apt name
, Kirrah thought,
wonder who
coined it
…

“I happened to be near, and I could
see that he was about to die. It was starting at his hand, so I ordered his arm
extended, and I severed it with the Kruss blade. I know you told me to care for
your Wrth warriors, it was all I could think to do at the time.”

“Peetha, you saved his life. You
have acted well. How did you acquire this?” She gestured to the contents of the
bag.

“Warmaster, the other warrior
continued holding this man’s severed hand, and after a moment this
thing
fell out of the cut end. First I thought it was blood or a piece of bone, then
it
moved
on the ground. It turned upright like a dung-beetle does when
flipped on its back. Then it
sprang
at him. It jumped two hab’la through
the air and landed on the other warrior’s belly. It tried to burrow into his
skin, but the chain mail there delayed it. I was able to wrap it between folds
of the mail, and stripped off the armor. The thing was struggling hard to
escape, but when I wrapped it tightly it was trapped. Did I do as you wished?”

“
Thank you
Peetha! Your
quick wits and that man’s bravery have given me our first real clue. Let us see
what you have brought. Everyone back, this may be dangerous.”

When the others had moved back
several meters, Peetha held the wrapped object and Kirrah pulled a probe from
her suitpack’s analyzer. She studied the readings for a few moments,
maneuvering the pickup into the jumbled mail until she could get a clearer
view. On the wristcomp’s screen was a greatly magnified scene of two or three
bits of shiny metal, a pinhead-sized bead of black plastic, two tiny rods one
or two millimeters long and as thin as a thread. Another tiny piece of gray
material was shaped in a four-millimeter helical spiral. Issthe arrived.

“Issthe, look! Peetha has caught
our killer! Look at the screen on my
object-which-speaks
. See, there,”
she indicated the magnified view of a tiny sensor head, “and
there
, this
is a
machine
. This tiny thing is what is killing our people! It is a
Kruss device. I cannot say certainly, but it looks like the tip of one of their
field probes, like the one I used to look inside an injured body.

“And see this little green cylinder
at the other end. My
analyzer
tells me the device is powered by a Kruss
microcell
,”
Kirrah realized she was using the unfamiliar Regnum term for their enemy’s
high-density energy storage technology. “They have given the device a supply of
strength so it is not tethered to a suitpack like mine is, and they have simply
reprogrammed it.” At Issthe’s quizzical look, Kirrah continued:

“It is like training an animal. The
whole device is about this long and this wide,” her fingers framed a
five-by-fifteen millimeter space. “They trained it, no doubt to seek human
scent… no reports of animals dying? No… so it is somehow thrown across the
river, and wherever it lands, it either lies waiting for a person to pass near,
or it moves and seeks a human body.”

Suddenly Kirrah’s wristcomp
beeped
,
indicating another of the mysterious microwave burst transmissions, but this
time clearly emanating from the tiny object.
Ok, that’s enough of that…
She reconfigured her probe and lanced the thing with a short, intense pulse of
microwaves. It ceased moving, and several of the probe readouts on her
wristcomp screen dropped to zero. She unwrapped it and continued her
explanation:

“Now it is safe, dead. When it
touches human skin, it burrows underneath like my
medprobe
does, the
part of my suitpack used for healing, and follows the blood to the heart. After
killing, it leaves the body and probably seeks another target. How very
…clever.”

“Made from a device for healing.
How very
wicked
.” Issthe closed her eyes, and held one slim white hand a
few centimeters over the ruined device. “It tastes like those bodies we have
been collecting, a faint, cold, distant hate. Is this another weapon from the
‘greater Civilium’?”

“Your question carries a deserved
condemnation, Issthe. But by Civilium law,
no
weapon can be active
within the body of a sentient being. There is an outlawed weapon which throws a
similar device. But this thing, I believe, was improvised from a medical
probe’s design, and manufactured for this specific job. When word of this gets
back to the Civilium court, the Kruss will be punished.” Issthe’s eyes looked
bottomless and very disappointed, somewhat sad, as though some student had
failed a critical test.

At the pause, Peetha asked,
“Warmaster, how do we fight it?”

“We cannot, Peetha. There is no
good defense. I alone would be safe in my suit, until I opened the helmet or
got out to sleep or urinate. But unless you happen to see it land, it will seek
you by breath and scent. It will crawl over your armor and find skin. Then you
die. That man you brought is the only one to survive an attack, and that only
through luck and at a terrible cost. I want him honored as one injured in
battle, for that is exactly what has happened to him.