Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (10 page)

“Get out of there, Medic,” her skipper ordered.

“Sir, please. I have rolls of bandages. The fire came from only three meters farther in. I can toss a roll that far.”

“You may try,” did not sound all that happy.

She tossed a small roll of bandages into the flame zone.

It was incinerated. Only a tiny bit of fluff survived, and it burned out before it hit the deck.

Without hesitation, the Medic tossed a second roll.

It was also burned but not so quickly that there wasn’t a flaming ball of fire when it hit the deck and rolled a bit before burning out.

“Here goes a third. I hope no one needs bandaging,” and another roll went out in a long, underhanded throw.

It arched past where the others had been flamed and hit the deck just short of where the passageway opened up, to roll out of sight into the dark.

“I think we have exhausted the supply of incendiaries, sir. May I continue to advance?”

“Do so with extreme caution.”

The medic paused to remove her shoulder bag marked with a red cross. Then, swinging the bag in front of her, she advanced step by step into the beaten fire zone. Kris found herself holding her breath, but each swing of the bag brought no response from the flamethrowers, and each step was a successful one.

In what seemed like forever but couldn’t have taken more than a minute, the young woman stood at the end of the corridor. “Skipper, you’re really going to want to see what I’m seeing.”

What Kris saw on the screen was too diffuse to make out.

“Jack, let’s get down there.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s time to go.”

Kris
wanted to see for herself what the pyramid held. As her admiral’s barge dropped from orbit, she ignored the visuals, but she couldn’t help but hear a lot of “Oh my God!” and “This is horrible!” and “I wouldn’t believe this if I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes.”

Kris had never been on a slower shuttle drop.

Finally, she was walking across the glass plain headed for the entrance to the pyramid.

Professor Labao was right. Seen up close, the glass was full of dents, cracks, and striations. In those imperfections, bits of dust had collected and tiny plants struggled for life. Here and there, a small bug waddled about its business. Lichen, moss, and fungus spread out from those oases of life, doing what they could to destroy the ever-present glass.

Above it all loomed the pyramid. The reports were flowing back to Kris. The pyramid was a regular pyramid. Each side was equal in length, forming a square base, although one edge showed three millimeters of extra wear from the rest. No doubt, the prevailing winds came from that direction.

It was not quite four thousand meters on an edge and loomed some three thousand meters up.

It was very impressive.

So why build it here, where no one ever came close enough to be impressed by it?

It was also very visible from space. Was it meant to impress from that distance?

More questions. No answers. Maybe the answers were hidden within.

The passageway into the pyramid that Kris had watched being opened now showed cables along one side. Scientists were still carefully recording the markings, glyphs, or writings along the walls. They made way for Kris to pass.

Everyone was still fully suited up; no one was interested in risking their life to find out what this place smelled like.

The pit was now covered by a sturdy ramp. Kris hardly noticed it as she crossed over. Her attention was fully focused on the end of the passage.

She reached it.

It was impossible to take it all in with one glance.

Directly in front of her were a pile of bleached skulls or skull-like things. Behind them, suspended in some clear material, were six figures.

Kris knew at once that this was a family, and a royal one at that.

The tallest of the figures wore robes and a golden chain of office sparkling with different-colored jewels cut in every way imaginable. On his head was a diamond-encrusted crown marked with golden glyphs. In one hand, he held some sort of golden rod with an orb at its head. His other hand rested on the hilt of an archaic, two-edged sword.

The horror on his face showed that he’d been alive when he was encased in whatever it was that held him.

The body was long-limbed and seemed to project an insectoid feel. The face was not easy to read, but there was horror there, and maybe exhaustion.

Beside that transparent casket was a second one, only slightly smaller. The scientists would make their own determination, but to Kris, here stood the wife. Her garments were only slightly less ornate than those of her husband. Her hands were folded empty on her chest. There was no evidence of breasts, so likely she did not nurse her young.

Kris could not find words to describe the look on her face. Anger burned here, as well as disdain. There was terror that didn’t seem softened by any hint of resignation. Through it all ran a blend of other emotions Kris could only wonder at.

Then Kris looked more carefully at the other four blocks and found the source of that mother’s unnamed feelings. These held smaller versions of the parents. One stood beside the father. The tallest of the offspring, he was still a head shorter than the mother. He looked much like the father and was dressed so. One hand rested on a shorter sword. The other supported a shieldlike object that had clearly not protected him.

Beside the mother were two other figures, each encased in a smaller block as befitted their shorter stature. But it was the smallest and last clear box that drew Kris. It held two tiny figures. Their faces had none of the emotions that the others held. In their place were looks of innocence, surprise, and rising pain.

These two were small children. If they were human, Kris would have guessed an age of two, maybe three years. They looked to be just getting sure on their feet.

Kris felt a shudder overcome her. With no proof, she knew that these two had been the first to be encased in their transparent coffins. That the next younger had then died, followed in order of ascending age until the oldest child. Only then had the royal parents been granted their deaths.

There was no proof, but Kris would not bet against it, either.

Kris turned away from the tableau frozen forever in time. Her eyes filled with tears that she could not release in a battle-armored helmet. She felt all the emotions of a woman, maybe future mother, definitely human being, at this totally inhuman act.

Jack held her, as much as battle armor allowed.

Jacques came up to join them. “Maybe I should have warned you.”

“No,” Kris said, shaking herself. “It’s better to feel this.”

Better to feel it, yes.
But it would be impossible for Kris to forget for the rest of her life.

Still, she’d come to see what the pyramid held. That was her duty, as a Longknife and the king’s viceroy. With lips drawn tight, she stepped away from Jack’s unfelt embrace and looked around.

“What’s in that pile?” she asked, locking the woman away inside the battle commander.

Jacques turned to look at the pile of what Kris would have taken for skulls.

“As best we can tell, it’s fifty heads. They seem to be identical to those of the bodies you see encased here. They have an exoskeleton, but from what we think we’re seeing in the coffins, there was enough skin and muscle on the outside of the exoskeleton to give some facial expressions.”

“Yes,” Kris said. “Yes, I could read what looked like emotions on their faces.”

“Yes. That kind of haunts you, doesn’t it? There’s more to see, Your Highness.”

“Show me.”

Jacques lead Kris over to one of the internal walls of the pyramid. “This hall extends to the entire inside of the pyramid. The ceiling above us is arched. They did a tremendous job of supporting all the weight that’s above us with just these walls around us. We’re studying it. Maybe all that’s above us isn’t the same granite. The engineers are having a field day.”

Kris wondered at Jacques. He was babbling, and that was something he never did.

Then Kris saw where he was leading her and understood his need to hide behind words, empty or not.

There were more encased coffins lining the wall. The now-lit transparent blocks stretched away as far as she could see. If the pyramid was four klicks on the outside, certainly its inside walls must extend for most of that distance. And for as much of it as Kris could see lit up, there was a body every twenty meters or so.

One body preserved in a block of glass and before it, a pile of skulls.

Some were skulls. Some were the tops of carapaces. In a few cases, what was in the glass didn’t seem to have a real head of bone or chitin and what had been piled in front of it had aged away to nothing.

“Are all of these intelligent races?” Kris asked, then corrected herself. “Were all of these beings intelligent?”

“We can’t make that determination,” Jacques said, “but I don’t think so. There are creatures here that look like some of the amphibians that first crawled out of Earth’s sea to try life on the land. Over on the other wall, there’s something huge that looks like it might fit right into Earth’s age of dinosaurs. There are smaller ones, too.”

“So, they don’t care if you’re intelligent. If you’re alive and might grow into something smart enough for spaceflight, they kill you, wipe out your planet, and you become a trophy here,” Kris said. She knew Professor Labao would call this jumping to a conclusion with insufficient evidence, but Kris was looking at the evidence.

It might take the boffins more time to reach her conclusion, but battles were lost or won by commanders who could reason to the right conclusion before all the facts were in evidence.

“I think you might be right,” Professor la Duke said.

“Thank you, Jacques,” Kris said. “You better go find Amanda. She’ll need you when she comes in here.”

“Amanda’s still outside. I suggested she study the construction of the pyramid before she came in. She’s looking for any evidence that can be found at this late date of how the thing was built.”

“A safer study,” Kris said.

“I thought it might be,” Jacques admitted.

A thought came to Kris. “Have you identified the remains of the aliens from the planet we found in the long search sweep?”

“Yes we have,” Jacques said. “They’re on the other wall, down near the end.”

Kris turned away from the wall she’d been walking down and cut across to the other wall. It was easier to pass the royal family that way. There was less to see from their backs.

“Do you think they were the rulers of the planet that got hammered down to bedrock?” Kris asked Jack as they passed them.

“I tend to think so,” he said. “They must have really hated them to bury them alive in whatever that stuff is.”

“Bury the husband and wife only after they’d watched their children killed before their eyes.”

“You can’t be sure,” Jack said.

“Look them in the eyes, then look at me and say that.”

Even in battle armor, Kris saw the tremor go through Jack’s body. “I can’t,” he admitted. “But think, Kris. Where did the hatred come from that would do that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m thinking. We really need to date the bombardment of this planet. I’m thinking that if it was ten thousand years before the one that beat up the other planet, they might have been the aggressor, and the people they hit took ten thousand years, but they came back and hit hard.”

“I’m thinking the same thing. Ten thousand years of anger welling up would be a terrible thing to see.”

“And a hundred thousand years later, that anger, or fear, is still driving them to kill anything alive,” Kris said.

“It’s sure looking that way,” Jack admitted.

They passed a lot of creatures as they walked down the line, hunting for those whose planet had been the warning to Kris. They passed encased bodies of beings that looked out with stunned and dumb looks or intelligent gazes. Most they passed had the dull look of animals, unaware of why they had suddenly been transformed from the top of the food chain to trophies in a war they hadn’t started and had no part in.

There were two scientists working with the pile of chitinous skulls that Kris was interested in.

“We’re trying to get a better date of death from these,” one told Kris.

“We estimate it at two hundred years ago. I doubt you can get any closer,” Kris said.

They ignored her and continued about their work.

Kris looked at the insectoid. Now, it looked back at her. Like the family at the entrance, this one, too, had grown skin and muscle on its face. Kris wondered if the ability to express yourself in body language and facial expressions was critical to the development of a civilization. No doubt, the boffins would be looking into that.

Certainly they’d never be able to study so large a set of different evolutionary tracks as had been so brutally arranged for them around these two walls.

Two more worlds were represented between Kris’s planet and the end of the line. One looked like a vicious animal, something like the shark that swam in Wardhaven’s seas. It was named for something equally as toothy in Earth’s own oceans. Strange, Kris hadn’t noticed any other fish in the collection. The other looked out with no spark of intelligence in its eyes, only dismay at its treatment.

Kris again found herself wanting to cry. To weep for all the futures and hopes and possibilities that were cut short and brought here.

As much as she wanted to weep, Kris found only a cold anger growing in her. She stood guard over three intelligent species. Two of them, the human race and the Iteeche, had stumbled into each other, and, though it might have been a struggle, found they could share space without having to kill each other. The third, the Alwans, had offered to share their life-giving planet with desperate human refugees.

Her Royal Highness, Kris Longknife, Commander of the Alwa Defense Sector, Viceroy and ambassador at large, looked down the line from where she stood.

“I swear by you who have lost everything that no more will be added to this trophy room. It stops here. We will stop you.
I
will stop you.”

“Yes we will,” Jack echoed.