Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) (47 page)

The escape plans were going extremely well, Ffillips thought. Those mercs with any experience at losing war had secreted some kind of minor edged weapon on their uniforms. These had been put into a common pool, and those most suitable for digging or cutting assigned to the smallest, beefiest, and least claustrophobic of the mercs.

The flagstones that made up the dungeon floor had taken only two nights to cut around and lever up, and the digging had commenced. At each prisoner count and guard shift change, they were dropped back into place and false cement – made from chewed-and-dried bread particles – went around them.

Viola, who’d taken over the Lycée section after Egan’s death, had triangulated a tunnel route using trig and what little could be seen from the barred windows at the upper portion of the huge dungeon.

Some of the more devout mercenaries and those who could sound religious had entered study groups with Mathias’ instructors.

While listening, asking intelligent questions, and pretending to be increasingly swayed, they also pulled loose strings that held their uniforms bloused over boot-top and scattered earth from the tunnel across the pounded-dirt courtyard.

It was going very well, Ffillips thought, as one shift of naked, grimy soldiers oozed out of the hole and was replaced by another. The first team immediately began swabbing themselves clean in the last remains of the liter-per-day wash-and-drink water ration that their captors allowed.

Very well indeed, Ffillips thought. We have only three-hundred-plus meters of rocky earth to dig through before we stand the possibility of being beyond these walls. Then, once we break out,
which should be in the cliff edge, all we need to do is figure out how to rappel down one hundred meters of rock and disappear into the heart of Sanctus’ capital. All of which we can easily accomplish given, say, ten years.

Sten, Sten, where are you, Colonel? Ffillips shucked her tunic and, in spite of fairly pronounced claustrophobia, dropped into the tunnel and crawled toward its face, past the sweating, pumping airshaft workers, to begin her own digging shift.

The team sat, considering. Each was working, in his or her own mind, possible alternate solutions to the one Sten had presented. The tigers had thought out the prospects through their somewhat single-track minds, had presented paws with claws out, had the kill-everything plan rejected, curled up, and started cleaning each other’s face.

Ida summarized the situation: ‘A fanatic. With soldiers. Declared religious war. After our awesomely perceptive Emperor blessed any little atrocity they would want to commit, unto the seventh generation, amen.

‘We have mining ships on the way – ships that shall surely be ambushed by these Companions.’

‘Ae braw summation,’ Alex agreed.

‘One solution,’ Doc tried. ‘We wait until the mercenaries are tried, sentenced to death, and brought out for execution. Your Mathias will undoubtedly attend, and it will unquestionably be a public ceremony. At the height of the roasting, or however he chooses to kill your former subordinates, we take him.’

‘Negative,’ Sten declared flatly. ‘The plan depends on saving as many of them as we can.’

‘Does Mahoney know you’re figuring it like that?’

‘No,’ Sten said. The other members of the team dropped the subject. Secretly all except Doc agreed with Sten’s romanticism.

‘Agreed,’ Bet said. ‘The only option is to take out Mathias before the holy war can start.’

‘Joyful day,’ Ida said dubiously. ‘By the way, as long as we don’t know how we’re going to get onto Sanctus, let alone how the clot we’ll slither into the capital, has your brilliant mind considered how
we’ll get into this Temple fortress to take out Mathias, assuming we can do all the rest, O my commander?’

‘Not my brilliant mind,’ Sten said. ‘My cold butt.’

‘What?’ Ida asked.

‘My cold sitter – plus Mahoney sent a geo-ship over Sanctus three days ago, for a seismochart.’

‘You realize none of us has the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Sten.’

‘Of course not, Bet.’

‘All right,’ Bet shrugged. ‘That’ll be your department. My department – I just figured out how we get onto Sanctus and inside the capital.

‘No creepy-crawly, by the way,’ she went on. ‘First of all, it’s hard on my delicate complexion.’

‘Ah dinna ken whae y’be goint,’ Alex said. ‘You pussycats, Doc, an’ th’ braw gross fishwife be hard to hide in th’ open.’

‘Not when we’re completely in the open,’ Bet said. She tried to keep a straight face and failed. ‘Boys and girls, we are going to have a show.’

Puzzlement, and then Sten and Alex got it, and the room dissolved in laughter, except for the tigers, who looked upset, and for Doc, who had no idea what they were talking about.

‘You have it,’ Sten said when he stopped laughing. ‘Also do you know what that gives us?’

‘Of course,’ Bet said. ‘You set things up for what happens after we burn Mathias, his Companions, and the Faith of Talamein into ashes. The solution to the whole Lupus Cluster.’

Sten shrugged. So his thunder was stolen. He’d never believed much in the livie detective who said ‘ah-hah’ and then everybody else sat listening in awestruck wonder.

‘Otho is going to love this,’ he said, heading for the door.

‘By my mother’s beard,’ Otho roared, and one chandelier swung and two suits of streggan-hunting armor rocked on their stands, ‘you are making a fool of the Bhor and of me.’

‘My apologies,’ Sten said. ‘But it is one solution and, should it work, it will keep you from having buttocks as frozen as those of your father.’

‘I will not do it,’ Otho said.

Sten poured two stregghorns full and pushed one to Otho. He knew the shaggy Bhor would eventually agree. Sten just hoped he’d be able to handle the hangover that was about to be constructed.

*

Sten huddled in the bed under the heavy furs. His mind was fuddled with too much stregg, but he couldn’t sleep. His mind wouldn’t shut off as he reviewed the plans for the hundredth time.

He heard the soft-scraping sound outside the door and then came fully awake as it creaked heavily open. His fingers curled for his knife and then relaxed as the small figure stepped in.

It was Bet. She shut the door, walked to the bed, undid her robe, and let it slide to the floor. She was naked under it.

Sten had almost forgotten how beautiful she was. Then she was under the furs and cuddling up to him.

‘But I thought … we were going to be just friends.’

‘I know.’ She laughed. ‘I was just feeling—’

Sten gulped as she began kissing her way down his bare chest.

‘—real friendly.’

With logic like that, who was Sten to argue?

The bearded man stood at the mouth of the beach, his net and fishing pike across one shoulder. He stared without much curiosity at the odd assemblage on the edge of the surf. Then he thoughtfully sucked at a tooth and ambled forward to the brightly painted cluster of boxes in front of which stood the Mantis team and a glowering Otho.

With a single island continent, it had been very easy for a Bhor ship to make planetfall on the far side of Sanctus. Sten and his people had then offloaded to a lighter that had blazed only meters above the sea to land them on a beach near the northern tip of the island. Sten knew that was the easy part – any merchants as skilled as the Bhor would also be capable smugglers, easily able to insert anyone almost anywhere without triggering a radar alarm.

‘Yahbee ghosts, Y reck,’ the fisherman said, unsurprised.

There were far more people on Sanctus’ main island than just church officials and Companions, and, Sten hoped, they would provide the key for the success of the operation.

Mostly the residents were illiterate rural or seacoast providers. Peasants. And, as with peasants everywhere, they had the virtues/failings of suspicion, superstition, skepticism, and general pigheadedness However, this fisherman was a little more superstitious and stupid than even Sten thought possible.

Sten figured that if he himself was a fisherman and wandered down at dawn to his favorite fishing spot to find a short bear, a large hairy being, two oversized cats, and four humanoids, the most logical option would be run howling to the nearest church of Talamein for shriving.

Instead the local sucked at his teeth again and spat, almost hitting Hugin, who growled warningly.

‘No, gentle sir,’ Sten began. ‘We are but poor players whose coastal ship was wrecked early this morn. Fortunately we were able to salvage all our gear, though, alas, our faithful ship was lost.’

‘Ahe,’ the fisherman said.

‘Now we need assistance. We need help in assembling these our wagons – and can pay in geld. Also we shall need beasts of burden, to draw the wagons.

‘In return, not only shall we pay in red geld, but shall perform our finest show for the folk of your village.’

‘Shipwrecked, y’sah?’

‘That we were.’

‘Stick to beint ghosts,’ the fisherman said. ‘It hah a more believable ring to it.’

And, as Alex’s hand slid smoothly toward the miniwillygun slung under his red/blue/green tunic, the fisherman turned.

‘Y go t’mah village. P’raps one hour b’fore Y hae beasties an’ workers for you.’ He spat again, turned, and trudged, still without panic or hurry, back the way he had come.

Puzzled, the Mantis soldiers and Otho looked at each other, then they started breaking down their gear – five ten-meter-long wagons, hastily built by Bhor craftsmen. They were loaded with the various properties needed for Bet’s ‘show,’ plus det-set lockboxes full of full-bore Imperial weaponry, including tight-beam coms, willyguns, and exotic demo tools.

Theirs was no longer a deniable operation, Sten knew. Either he would succeed, and it wouldn’t matter, or he would die. In which case, within six months the Emperor would be forced to commit a full Guard assault into the Lupus Cluster.

And if that was the necessity, something as minor as a blown Mantis team would be the least of the Emperor’s worries.

Besides, Sten told himself, if the worst came down, they’d all be dead anyway.

The campaign that Doc projected had a twofold aim. First and most important was to provide a means for some extremely odd-looking beings to be able to insert themselves into Sanctus’ well-guarded capital in time to lift the mercs and end Mathias’ dreams of a holy war. One of the most effective ways to run a clandestine operation is to run it in plain sight, since the opposition generally figures no one can be
that
stupid and obvious. Covert-ops specialists frequently lose themselves in a maze of double-crosses and triple-thinking.

The second purpose was to emphasize the increasing split between the people of Sanctus and their church. So the jokes, the play, and the after-performance casual asides were designed to make the Companions and the hierarchy look abysmally stupid – so stupid and corrupt that no self-respecting peasant would give a damn if the regime fell. At least no self-respecting peasant who hadn’t been able to figure a way to get his paws on some of the graft.

Doc knew that in a largely illiterate, partially repressed culture, a good joke or whispered scandal would spread almost as fast as if it had been broadcast on a livie.

If the campaign succeeded and most peasants were chuckling over the latest anti-Companion joke, and the Mantis section successfully penetrated the capital to start the shooting, hopefully the local populace would stay neutral. If they rose up in support of Mathias, Sten, all his team, and the imprisoned mercs would probably have very brief lifespans. And of course, if they decided to overthrow the palace in support of Sten, the result could well be civil war, and a civil war with religious overtones can last for generations and totally waste a culture.

Doc had spent long hours with his computer before the Bhor
inserted the Mantis team. Working within the 28 Rules of Humor (Doc, like other Altarians, had less than no sense of humor), his innate dislike of humanoids, and his massive contempt for any cause beyond basic selfishness, Doc had come up with half a hundred jokes, some fairly juicy scandals, and one play.

The play was less normal drama than a cross between the Medieval Earth mystery cycles and the early, crudely humorous com-media dell’arte, with a great deal of improvisation.

Casting the play was somewhat of a problem. Since Sten and Alex were well known by the Companions, their onstage and off-stage presences had to be disguised.

For the play, it was easy. Sten and Alex were force-cast as the troupe’s clowns and were completely unrecognizable under white-mime makeup, black-outlined facial features, and fantastic fright wigs and costumes. Offstage, though, there was a bit of a problem.

A basic rule of makeup is that it’s unnecessary to change much of a person’s features for him to be unrecognizable. And Mantis knew those rules very well indeed. So Sten shaved his head and put a rather unsightly blotch on one cheek. Alex grew a walrus moustache and trimmed his hair into a monkish half tonsure.

The plot of the play was idiot-simple. Bet played an orphaned village girl whose virtue was threatened by a corrupt village official (Alex, with a long beard and a battered non-accent), in cahoots with a somewhat evil churchman of the late and not-much-lamented regime of Theodomir. The official was played by Ida in drag.

Bet’s only hope was her handsome lover, who had left the village to join the crusade of Mathias and his Companions against the evil Jann. By then official doctrine wasn’t admitting that the mercs had done anything but sit on their duffs, pinch chaste women, and swill alk.

The lover would never be seen, which was a relief since the casting potential was running a little slender.

About twenty minutes in, after appropriate menacings by the official and the churchman, the girl sobbed and caterwauled and sank in prayer to Talamein. And the voice of Talamein – Ida again – spoke from offstage and told her to flee into the forest.

There she was menaced by hungry tigers and saved by a shipwrecked mendicant Bhor, played by Otho – who roared when told that he would have to make nice noises about what he considered to be a ridiculous faith, and then roared louder when told that he also had lines suggesting that
all
the Bhor felt the same about Talamein.

Then the Bhor mendicant led the girl to the shelter of two clownish woodsmen, Sten and Alex.

Somehow, through a plot twist Doc could never figure out but one which didn’t bother the audience at all, the tigers turned into friendly tigers and did amusing stunts to keep the lonely girl laughing between chanted hymns while the woodsmen were out being woodsy.

She was threatened by an evil fortuneteller (Ida again), and only saved by a mysterious cute-and-cuddly furry creature (Doc, despite his howled protests).

More chanting, more prayers, and then the Voice of Talamein spoke again, saying that the evil official and prayerman were coming into the forest with their private army (Sten and Alex, playing peasants drafted as soldiers).

The army killed the woodsmen (very deft rolling from the wagon’s stage into the curtained-off backstage and slapped-on steel helms for Sten and Alex), leaving the girl doomed to submit to the embraces of the official.

But then, once again Talamein spoke, the tigers and Otho roared onstage, ate the villians, the soldiers recanted their ways, then, in a blinding finale, word came of the success of Mathias’ Crusade against the Jann. Unfortunately, Bet’s lover had been killed, doing something unspeakably heroic. But the Faith of Talamein was triumphant. Amid chanted praise, clown rolls by Sten and Alex, prancing tigers, the play came to a close, and
exeunt omnes
amid applause.

Then, of course, Sten and Alex would move among the crowd doing simple magic gags, clown stunts for the kids, Bet would stroll with her tigers, and Ida would set up the fortune-telling booth while Doc barkered.

And it went over in every village, from the opening performance in the fishing town through the farming villages even to a couple of command performances before rural clergy.

Not that it had to be that great to succeed, when the only ‘entertainment’ available to the villagers was the drone of the Talamein broadcast in the village square screens, church worship, and getting as drunk as possible on turnip wine.

Slowly the troupe moved closer to Sanctus’ capital.

‘We’re two kilometers from Sanctus’ gates,’ Ida announced from inside the cart.

Sten nodded politely at a glowering guard team of Companions
as they passed in their gravsled, then tapped the reins on the hauling beasts’ backs. They grudgingly moved from a stagger into a slow walk.

‘An’ noo,’ Alex said, ‘w’be’t goint into tha’ tiger’s maw.’

‘Hugin and Munin’s maw’s back on Prime World,’ Bet added from her position, sitting just behind Alex and Sten, who were on the cart driver’s bench.

‘Sharrup, lass,’ Alex replied. ‘Ah’m dooncast. Ah fearit this scheme wi’ nae workit oot f’r th’ benefits of Kilgours.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Sten agreed. ‘We’re doomed. And doomed without hearing the last of Red Rory.’

‘Red Rory, aye?’ And Alex brightened. ‘W’noo. Wh’n last w’sawit Red Rory, an entire Brit comp’ny wae chargint up thae hill, a’ter his head, aye?’

Sten nodded wearily. The things he did to keep morale up.

‘So tha’ screekit, an’ scrawit, an’ hollerint, and ae kinds ae goin’ on, an’ then heads come doon thx hill, bumpit, bumpit, bumpit.

‘Anh’t’ thae Brit gin’ral’s consid’r’ble astonishment, here’s his wholit comp’ny, lyin’ dead in thae dust.

‘But b’fore he hae a chance to consider, yon giant on tha hillcrest screekit again:

‘“Ah’m Red Rory ae th’ Glen! Send up y’ entire rig’mint!”

‘An the gin’ral turnit sa red hi’ adj’tant fearit he gae apoplexy. An’ he holler, “Adj’tant!’

‘“Send up tha’ wholit blawdy reg’mint! AH WAN’ THA’ MON’S HEAD!”

‘An’ tha’ whole reg’mint fixit thae bay’nits an’ thae chargit up thae hill. An’ thae’s screamint, an’ screekit, an’ shoutint. an’ carryint on, for aye half ae day.

‘An’ thae’s dust, an’ thae’s shots, an’ thae’s aye battle.

‘An’ th’ gin’ral’s watchint frx doon below.

‘Ah sudden, thro’ thae dust, he see’t his adj’tant comit runnin doon thx hill.

‘An’ tae adj’tant screemit. “Run, sah! Run! It’s ae ambush! Thae’s two ae ’em.”’

Very complete silence for many minutes.

Finally Sten turned to Alex, incredulous. ‘You mean,
that’s
the story I’ve been waiting for, for the last year?’

‘Aye,’ Alex said. ‘Dinnae it b’wonderful?’

Even more and longer silence …