Shadow of the Warmaster

2

I put Chicklet into a dive, flicked her around so the gunport Pels had improvised in her repair lock faced a melter station; I balanced her on her tail while he got off a missile that a second later blew out the station and a hunk of tower under it. We went swing, balance, boom around the circumference until the wall looked like beavers had been at it.

Swarms of yizzies were converging on the Palace; when we came over from Base, we’d seen hordes of them, flying in from every corner of the Littorals like locusts on the move; they even sounded like locusts when I turned on the external ears and listened to them. The news of the Warmaster’s end was out everywhere, that was obvious. The com net, I suppose; if I were Huvved, I’d have shut down the net till I had some sort of control in the cities. Aslan said it was survival-fear that triggered Surges; looked to me like survival-hope was doing the job just as well. Airships were drifting loose over the city, abandoned by their pilots and passengers, loads of Hordar dropped to melt into the Surge that was forming there. As we flew over, I could see the devastation starting, like the destruction in gul Ukseme multiplied a hundredfold, a million Hordar as a single deathbeast striking down the thousands of Huvved living there, burning, trampling, bursting in doors and windows, destroying everything their hands and feet could smash or torch. The yizzies came clicking and clattering over them, airmarching with the landswarm moving in a blind fury toward the Palace.

As I finished the firing run, I saw that mass of Hordar crossing the waste land between the city and the Wall. I swore. I did not want to go down there in the middle of that mess. Pels came up from the lock and slid into the co’s seat. He inspected the mob. “Rrrr,” he said.

“Yeh.” I took the tug up and got ready to set her down inside the walls. “Looks like half the Hordar on Tairanna.”

“Maybe we should come back tomorrow. Or next week.”

“I doubt the relatives would pay for stewmeat.” I took another look at the mob. “Which is what’s going to be left tomorrow. Well, let’s set her down. Faster we finish, the better shape our hides’re going to be in.”

I put Chicklet down in an elaborately ugly garden which was the only space large enough for her fat little tail that was within a reasonable walk of the slavepen. The EYEs Kumari sent sniffing around told us that the techs were collected around sundown and put in the pen, the rest rounded up by midnight; that didn’t include bedslaves, but they weren’t targets anyway; ordinary girls however lovely were too common to be pricey; mostly their parents, husbands, lovers, whatever, couldn’t afford to offer the kind of reward that would get them on ti Vnok’s list. We were early; it was barely dusk, the end of a cold windy day with shreds of fog coming off the lake. On the other hand, there was the attack by the Hordar; maybe the slaves would be locked down early, if Luck happened to look our way. Pels and I, we set the barriers and the shockers to keep the locals out, rode the lift down and started at a quick trot for the pen.

I nearly bumped into a guard running for the wall. The man stared at me, lifted his rifle, but changed his mind and went loping past me. Several of the guard cats were pacing about, their leashes flopping; they put their back hair up and their tails twitched when we came along. One of them charged at us, the others followed her. Pels got the leader and I stunned the others. After that we kept an eye close to scan roof edges and the shoulders of the sturdier statues, any high place a cat could perch on. We got half a dozen more cats that way.

The situation inside the walls was getting hairier by the minute; the Huvveds and Tassalgans on the intact sections of the Wall were firing down at the Surge with hand-held melters and pellet rifles. They killed hundreds and yet more hundreds, but the Hordar came on, walking over the wounded and the dead (a distinction without much difference because anyone wounded badly enough to be knocked off his feet was trampled to death by the feet of his neighbors). Tendrils of the Surge peeled away from the main mass and fought their way into the gaps Pels had knocked into the walls. Other units had ropes with grapples knotted onto them; the Hordar climbed the ropes faster than the guns could cut them down, swarming up and over, tearing the guards to bits as they passed over them, destroying everything they got their hands on.

I was frowning as I ran, there was too much confusion inside the walls; I could understand some of it, there didn’t seem to be a helluva lot you could do to stop a Surge coming at you, but this chicken had its head cut off; talk about ineffective. Where was the Grand Sech? Was Pittipat stupid enough to execute him when the Warmaster went? Was the Sech stupid enough to let that happen? I shook my head as I pulled up before a heavy door; it was barred and locked, but there wasn’t a guard in sight.

I sliced through the bar and the lockbolt and shoved the door open.