IronStar (63 page)

“Margaret, look at me. Look right
here, at my eyes. Good. I want you to understand that, while appropriate
punishment shall fall on you, I am even more interested in
teaching
you
something. So let me ask you this:
At exactly what point in this morning’s
mission did you relinquish command of your vessel to its passengers?
” The
young ensign’ jaw actually dropped as the Admiral’s point found its mark. She
goggled a moment, swallowed, started to speak but fell silent as her Admiral
continued.

“You are a damned fine young pilot.
You also happened to be in command of one of my shuttles. Your
worst
mistake,
Ensign Piersall, was that you were still thinking like a
pilot
, when you
should
have been thinking like a commander. Everything that followed,
rests on that lapse. If Ms. Roehl had not had the presence of mind to ask your
gunnery officer for a warning flash, twenty or thirty helpless indigs would
have been permanently blinded by your weapon’s firing. Then the drek would have
fallen on you
and
Mr. Cavenaugh, but it would have been
you
the
Navy would have held responsible, Ms. Piersall.
Why is that
?”
“Ma’am, because I was in command of the vessel.”

“That is correct, Ms. Piersall. May
I trust you will remember that, if I let you have one of my shuttles again?”

“Ma’am!
Yes, Ma’am
!”

Kirrah had not thought someone’s
eyes could actually
shine
like that.
Study this Admiral
, she
noted to herself.
This is what real command looks like - that immaterial but
decisive thing that was thrust on me here, that I’m making up, barely, as I go
along.

“Very well, Ms. Piersall. As to
your punish…
What was that!
”

Simultaneously the late afternoon
sunlight was overwhelmed by a bright white flash stabbing through the shuttle’s
side windows. The warning whoop of at least three different alarm systems began
to clamor on the shuttle’s flight deck, and one from the
Argosy
, audible
over the comm. Kirrah and Margaret both instinctively grabbed the nearest solid
object for support, and in another two seconds the shuttle shook and rocked on
its oleos as a shock wave rolled over it. As fast as the door could cycle,
Kirrah was outside and looking to the southeast, where a quarter-kilometer-wide
column of dust, smoke and glowing debris was climbing into the glorious
blue-green sky, feeding a growing, distinctive, dark mushroom cloud over the
southern part of the city.
Her
city.

“
Tac-nuke!
” Kirrah screamed,
“That goddamned lizard left us a mini-nuke!”

“We will either find a way, or
make one” - Hannibal Barca, 2
^nd
century B.C. warrior and General;
Carthage, North Africa, Terra.

Kirrah fought down her black anger
again, enough that she could at least think and see. The school courtyard was
serving as a clearinghouse for the damage reports still pouring in, and as an
emergency government seat, and as one of several hospitals. The Kruss bomblet,
now estimated at a 0.37 kiloton blast, had leveled an area of the city some
eight blocks across, centered on the waterfront. Imagery from the
Argosy’s
sensors
showed heavy to moderate damage in a ring three to four blocks wide around the
direct blast zone, just brushing the palace. An eighty meter wide crater marked
the center of the fireball, where Kirrah had stood on the waterfront watching
the Kruss drag Akaray onto the raft eight hours earlier.

A decontamination team from the
Utterson
had landed less than an hour after the blast and reported very minor
radioactive fallout from what seemed to be a pure fusion explosion. The team’s
best guess was that the Kruss had somehow rigged a small fusion bottle, and
found some way to override its failsafes. A device no larger than a loaf of
bread, and an explosive yield that could have been anything from a warm sputter
to three or four kilotons.
So we were actually lucky,
Kirrah had
commented bitterly.
It could have been ten times the blast it was
.

Luck. Luck was king in the city
tonight. Everything depended on one's position at the moment of detonation.
Were you on duty at a tower on the north wall? Lucky, you lived. Did you happen
to be facing south on that tower? Sorry, unlucky. Blinded.

Were you standing behind a solid
wall, one of the thick defensive walls that crisscrossed the city? Lucky, you
lived. Did you happen to be crossing the street at the wrong second, exposed to
the waterfront? Burned to the bone. Unlucky.

Were you one of the people at the
Stone-in-a-River school at the critical moment? Just outside the blast zone,
and protected by a defensive wall. Lucky. Unless you happened to be passing out
the school’s west gate, like Kirrah’s bodyguard Corporal Mastha’cha, and
looking south down the street at the wrong time. Alive, but definitely not
lucky.

Were you one of the few people
working near the waterfront? Unlucky. Incinerated, or smashed to pulp by the
blast wave. Or perhaps you were in the industrial section and
not
looking west, or in the south end of the farming section and
not
looking
east. Lucky.

Now she could actually
thank
the
Kruss for the plague-of-screams. The smartshots had killed, but only a few each
night. But they had forced the evacuation of the entire south half of the city.
Over eleven thousand inhabitants, more than half the city’s population, were
still in tents on the plains along the Upper Geera, waiting for the Navy
volunteer teams to sweep up the last of the smartshots.

Kirrah shuddered to think what the
casualty list would have been, if the south-central
vai’athoz
had been
fully occupied as usual. Easily seven thousand more would have perished.

Her fleet was gone. Every ship in
the harbor or on the lake was blown to flinders, or washed up like so much
kindling on the south shore by the huge tidal wave from the blast. Except for
the four steamships she had sent down-river, under Captain Og’drai’s command.
Lucky. Alive.

Casualty list, yes indeed. The cavalry,
safely away escorting the O’dai column to their border, lucky. Half the
military quarter was inside the circle of total destruction, all of it had
sustained significant damage. Two thirds of the resident horses dead, burned or
blasted to shreds or buried under rubble. Major Doi’tam, asleep in his
quarters, finally, after thirty hours or more on duty, unlucky. Eighteen of her
Wrth warriors, at practice in the yard, unlucky.

Lord Tsano, sitting at his desk in
the palace when the windows blew in. He’d end up with a few more fine white
scars on his face. Lucky. Delima shu’Maakael, Guildmaster,
looks very young
for a hundred five indig years, don’t you think?
Sitting in a meeting room
at the Guild Hall, one city block closer to ground zero. Crushed with three
others under a collapsed wall, unlucky.

Opeth shu’Teeklae, Armsmaster,
experienced military guide and tutor, friend. Wrong place, wrong time. Unlucky.
Janna’tha shu’Paddo, Kirrah’s young page, sorter of papers, reader of minds.
Just starting to get the hang of a wristcomp. Drawn to a window in Kirrah’s
second-floor palace offices by the bright flash, just in time for the blast
wave to drive daggers of glass into his face and throat. Unlucky.

Maka’ra the shipwright, missing.
Do’thablu the carpenter. Unlucky. Wai’thago, the big, hairy, cheerfully
skeptical blacksmith. Missing. Irshe, off on some gods-beknownst errand
somewhere, missing.

The Regnum embassy and two shuttles
on the ground, lucky. Hullmetal skin, and the best armor of all, distance. The
afternoon shift of Navy volunteers busy sweeping the city for smartshots: mixed
results. She could thank the smartshots for the full combat armor that
protected some of the teams where a Talamae would have been flayed alive.
Lucky. Others, working in the wrong
vai’atho
, dead even in their suits.

Where is Irshe
?

Kirrah paced back and forth in the
narrow space between two of the outdoor dining tables now serving as gurneys in
the school’s courtyard. Peetha stood nearby, self-appointed replacement for her
Warmaster’s newly blinded Talamae bodyguard. Doris Finch looked up from beside
one of the tables, her face grimy and streaked with a smear of blood from the
casualty she was working over. She ran her fingers through her black hair, gave
Kirrah a grim smile and bent back to the medpack screen. Half a dozen other
Regnum personnel and more of the medpacks from the three destroyers overhead
were working in the courtyard and adjoining rooms, alongside the blue-robed
Talamae healers. Two other Talamae schools and the Regnum embassy were
similarly engaged.

The casualty list will easily
top three hundred dead,
Kirrah thought grimly.
Plus God knows how many
injured, plus others we’ll be digging out of the rubble for the next few
frantic days. And what’s happening to Akaray this night? And where is Irshe?

More litters bearing injured were
being carried in even as the thought crossed her mind. She strode over to the
east entrance, directing the cart and three cloth stretchers onto the last area
of open flat ground, in the northeast corner beside the remains of the damaged
Kruss flier. She kicked several pieces of the wrecked vehicle aside to make
room. Issthe and another priest came over and began examining the wounded.
Kirrah looked down at a middle-aged woman with skin crisp and peeling from half
her face, hair scorched and melted into a gruesome helmet. Probably she had
just returned to one of the
vai’athoz
on the south side of Slow Water
Road, cleared of smartshots that very afternoon. Unlucky.

Issthe rose from beside one of the
other litters, was standing beside her, one hand lightly on her right shoulder.

“Kirrah. Kirrah,” she said softly.

“Yuh. Yes?” Her voice sounded dull
and listless, seemed to be coming from someone else’s grief-clogged throat.

“He will live. Come.”

“What?” Her brain felt fogged, shut
down. Issthe’s slim, strong fingers lifted her wrist, gently urging her
forward.

“Do not fear the blood. It has
stopped leaking. His
ath’la
is intact, and with the help of
Reg’num
care,
I believe his skin will heal.” Kirrah stepped forward robotically, looked down
on the pile of filthy rags on the stretcher, the blood-encrusted dusty black
hair, the raw, glistening meat where skin should have covered the back of a
neck.

“Here,
aska
.” Issthe’s voice
was gentle, like a mother’s. “Come to this side. Have a care, bones are
broken.” Kirrah stepped around the other side of the litter, careful not to
touch the injured person lying there. The tall, pale, dark-haired man. She sank
to her knees before Irshe’s body, her chest suddenly locked tight in
mid-breath, her very heartbeat feeling suspended. In a face bruised and smeared
and crusted with blood and worse, a pair of gray eyes opened, wandered a
second, focused on her face.

“Hor…” A cough, obviously painful.
A small gasp, another shallow breath.

“Horse. Threw me. Never…” Another
cough, more carefully.

“Hap’n before. Stupid. Hurts.
T’irsty.” Kirrah barely stopped herself from flinging both arms around him and
hugging him fiercely, despite his injuries. Her right hand rested on the stretcher,
cupped itself around his tangled bloody hair. Issthe took Kirrah’s left hand
and placed it in Irshe’s left, then held her own hand briefly over the two.
Kirrah could feel her own warmth seeping into Irshe’s cold fingers. Issthe’s
hands flowed in two graceful arcs down the injured body, sweeping from head to
toe, once, twice. Irshe groaned, took a deeper breath, let out a sigh.

“Better,” he whispered. “Hnk you.
Back hurt. Akaray. Not good.
Aska
…” His fingers squeezed Kirrah’s hand
slightly, two tears made clean lines sideways down his grimy reclining face.
Kirrah found her own face was wet, her ears buzzing. Everything seemed far
away. Something dark and powerful was
pushing
again at her ragged sense
of control, pushing
hard
.

“Sleep now,” Issthe said, holding
her hand over his brow. His breathing gradually eased, his body relaxed.

Something
black
, Kirrah
could feel it. Something now full-grown, and
strong
, so strong, and
ready
.
Her control seemed to tear, like cloth ripping. Like a cocoon opening. Her
voice was surprising to her, sounding soft and clear, almost like a stranger's:

“I will take care of it, Irshe-
aska
.
Rest now. I must go, work to do. See to him, Issthe.” She stood, beckoned
across the macabre cluttered courtyard to Peetha, and missed seeing Issthe’s
eyes on her, widening in a rare look of surprise.

“Ask Doris to my quarters,” she
said quietly. When the Wrth girl tapped on her shoulder, Doris looked up,
followed the hand gesture. She saw Kirrah’s face, turned her medpack over to
another Regnum officer just coming on duty, and accompanied the two women into
Kirrah’s sitting room at the south side of the courtyard. Issthe moved
decisively, swiftly beckoning another healer to oversee Irshe’s injuries, and
hastened to follow the other three women.

Kirrah sat wearily behind her desk
for the second time that day. She let out a tired sigh, and gestured Doris and
the priestess to two of the chairs, and Peetha to close the door.

“What…?” began Doris, but paused
when Kirrah raised her hand.

“They just brought in Irshe,”
Kirrah said. Her shipmate made a little gasp, one brown hand lifting in front
of her open mouth.