Into the Light by Jane Wallace

Command Sergeant Major Hauki read 03:38 on her timepiece and blew out a puff of exasperation. She raised her binoscope once more to scour the thick copses which blanketed the opposite promontory, an impermeable grey against the sable sky. If there were 1,500 rebels hiding there, she was damned if she could see them. Not a sign, not even a rustle of a leaf, and it was almost ten minutes past the appointed time.

‘Anything yet?’ Lieutenant Colonel Weffer asked from behind her shoulder.

’No, sir. Not that I can see.’ Her eyes roved over the kilometre stretch of beach below them called Oraman Bay. The visibility at this range was excellent, which, while useful now, would not help them later. On occasion, a tiny cloud would pass in front of Riddan, dimming its brutal incandescence briefly before it returned to full beam. The only sounds were the languid lapping of the ocean against the beach and the odd cry of seabirds. With the warm temperature, the setting might have been romantic if they weren’t surrounded by the 1,200 men and women of 95 Starfleet and 22 Laser standing to in the scrubby foliage of the dunes behind them.

‘Hmm.’ Crow’s feet crinkled around Weffer’s eyes. He had high cheekbones and a strong chin. Hauki considered him handsome in a conventional way, if you liked that sort of thing. Hauki preferred women and, like most of her Tarangan peer group, kept a female life-partner at home who looked after their son. Nevertheless she enjoyed the company of men, especially successful ones, which was what she liked about Weffer. He was competent and smart with the common touch which motivated the troops and earned their loyalty. His superiors rated him highly and Hauki counted herself lucky to be on his staff.

‘We’ll wait another ten minutes,’ said Weffer. ‘If no-one’s shown, we’ll send a scout party over. If there’s nothing there we’ll have to carry on as before, otherwise we’ll not make Banthan before first sunrise.’

’Yes, sir.’ It was Hauki’s job to make sure Weffer’s orders were carried out. She cast around for her own juniors, Koop and Osool, who stood a little way off by the camp table. ‘Ah, wait a minute,’ she said. A light flared on the dusky headland: one, two, three and then went out. The sequence continued several times.

‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘Koop, reply!’

The young officer lifted the flashlight he carried and returned the signal. It was acknowledged.

‘Back to the original plan,’ said Weffer. ‘Over to you, CSM.’

‘Sir.’ She turned to her juniors. ‘Koos, order to advance. Osool, send scouts out to the headland.’

‘Ma’am.’ As they passed the commands, Hauki checked her equipment, an unnecessary exercise as she had been ready for the past hour.

‘The rendezvous party will leave in five minutes, sir,’ she told Weffer.

‘Good, I’ll come with you.’

Hauki’s mouth pursed. ‘Shouldn’t you stay here, sir? With the main corps? It’ll be safer.’

He shrugged. ‘Probably, but I want to get the measure of this Kristil if we’re to fight shoulder-to-shoulder, find out what we’re working with. Farqui can take the strain in my absence. We’ll leave in ten minutes, give the scouts a head start.’

Hauki nodded resignedly and went to assemble the party of eight which would accompany them. Weffer spent a few minutes briefing Colonel Farqui, then put on his helmet, zinged his eyeshields shut and joined them with a spirited ‘Forward!’

They skirted the back of the bay, clambering over rocks and scuttling across the open sections. On the cliffs above, out of sight and earshot, 95 Starfleet and 22 Laser were moving parallel to them but more slowly, weighed down with crates of rifles for the Corazon and a field gun for each section. The going was quicker at the other end of the beach where a stony footpath led to the crest of the hill. They climbed in silence, alert to every whisper of the breeze or flutter in the undergrowth. At the top, they plunged into the forest, glad for its shelter. The woodland was deciduous and their boots rustled through drifts of dead leaves. The canopy was dense and blocked some of the moonlight, making it harder to see. They jumped when a figure detached from the bushes, but it was only a scout.

‘The rebel camp’s up ahead, sir. Safe to proceed.’

The scout led them to a wide clearing. At intervals around its edges were campfires, surrounded by men wrapped in ponchos, some sitting, some standing and drinking. They were all native Gridons, dark-skinned with tightly curling black hair, their eyes and teeth reflecting white in the yellow waver of the flames. There was a smell of woodsmoke and cooking meat. Their scout lead them to a central pitch which seemed busier than the others. There were logs to sit on and what looked like a semi-permanent shelter of woven woodstrip in the trees behind.

A slim but muscular man of about forty stood up as they approached, holding a dull red blanket around his shoulders. He was grubby from active service but the raffish bandana knotted around his neck was clean and his straight black hair was neatly tied into two long braids.

‘Colonel Weffer? I am Commandante Kristil,’ he said in Standard but with the nasal twang of the Altan accent. He touched his right hand to his forehead, then turned to Hauki. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Command Sergeant Major Hauki,’ she told him. He performed the same salute to her and his lips parted in a wide grin. Hauki drew a sharp breath. The teeth inside were transparent, clear enough to see the pink gums and tongue behind. They glistened too, not just with saliva.

Kristil chuckled at her consternation. ’The Gharst interrogators disposed of my real teeth. When I got out, I had to get me some new ones. You like ’em?’

‘They are, unusual,’ Hauki replied as truthfully as politeness allowed.

‘Sure are! Now at least you know how I got my name.’ He looked at Weffer. ‘So, Colonel, you got weapons for my men?’

‘As agreed. How many are they?’

‘We have 1,500 here and 500 in the city.’

‘Good. My troops are waiting southeast of here with the rifles. We can progress westwards to meet you for the handover. And then, when you’re armed, we’ll advance to Banthan as one force to attack at first dawn!’

‘Excellent! We have been waiting a long time for this day to come.’

He turned to the aide standing behind him and rattled off orders in Gridin. The man nodded and diffused into the darkness. The rest of the entourage watched carefully, ready to fulfil the next command.

Watching Kristil with interest, Hauki became aware of cries carried on the wind. She listened carefully then turned to Weffer.

‘Blaster fire, I’m sure, coming from the mainland. Can you hear it?’

‘Yes. It’s getting louder,’ said Weffer. Both he and Kristil put their hands to their ears as they received messages simultaneously.

‘It’s the Gharst,’ said Kristil. ‘They’ve surrounded the whole of Oraman Bay!’

‘Infantry mainly, some artillery. And morphs,’ Weffer added.

‘Yes, same,’ confirmed Kristil, his face drawn. ‘You are lucky, Weffer, your troops have rifles. Mine have only knives.’

‘And if they’ve surrounded the whole bay, they’ll try to push us back onto the headlands. We’ll be trapped!’

Above them, five dark cones rushed past in a deafening whirlwind, bending the tree-tops as they passed over. They were valostraal, Gharst low-altitude fighters. Small yellow spheres, glory balls, were falling out of the back of the craft which exploded in one lightning strike after another.

‘Fires out, into the trees!’ ordered Kristil, plunging into the foliage with his men.

‘Come on, sir!’ Hauki shouted at Weffer, tugging her rifle’s carry strap over her head. She motioned to their party to follow Kristil and took a last look at the clearing. The Corazon had disappeared like rabbits into holes, smoking piles of ash and embers left behind. A bolt of intense heat scorched past her ear. Then she saw Weffer face down on the ground.

‘Weffer, no!’ She sank down beside the prostrate figure, exploring the arm-length gash in his back. It was bleeding freely, the bodysuit around the wound was charred to threads.

Weffer rolled his head to one side so that his left eye looked up at her.

She stroked his forehead gently. ‘You’re okay, sir, we’ll just wait for the medicos.’

‘Save yourself,’ he mumbled. His eye drooped shut.

’Oh my gods! Sir, stay with us, sir!’ Hauki was fumbling in her belt for a basic first aid kit when a powerful force from behind hauled her to her feet. She registered that the arms imprisoning her were sleeved in navy lartex before a knock on her head blotted out her vision and her consciousness.

θ

Alpha group made it to the back of the disused factory and clung for shelter to its grime-stained walls until they felt the intense heat from within. They could see flames through the arched windows halfway up and the air was thick with soot and smoke.

Sevin edged along the outside wall to the building’s façade, Cantor and the two corporals behind him. He took a quick foray around the corner and cursed. Ahead to the left, the back exit of Valentine was a hundred metres away. Between it and their current location, there was a forecourt milling with morphs. They’d never get through, they’d have to go the long way round to the front of Valentine.

Sevin looked ahead to the right at the boxy warehouse set twenty metres from where he stood. The way to it was clear and a couple of maintenance vehicles were parked on its far side. They might be useful. He motioned Cantor and Fenne forward, pointing out the route.

‘Yrim and I’ll cover you. Go go!’ he said, unleashing a torrent of continuous pulse on the periphery of the unsuspecting morphs. Two sank to the ground.

Cantor and Fenne dashed across the gap, the morphs sending lassoes of red after the retreating agents. Sevin heard a cry and saw Fenne stumble, a hand clasping his shoulder, before Cantor tugged him into the lee of the warehouse. Sevin and Yrim kept up the assault but the morphs had spotted their position and were moving towards them in ranks, blaster arms fully operational. Cantor tried his hardest to deter them, kept to orders, lacerating the vanguard and signalling to Sevin to come across.

Sevin paused, wondering if he could make it in time. The morphs were so close he could see the circuit lights glimmering inside each thorax. He was about to dash forward when a wind started to tease at his jaw. It strengthened into a gust, as did the sound of swooshing. A searing light broke through from above, picking out the clusters of glistening robots between the buildings, their empty visages tilted upwards to analyse the new phenomenon. As they watched, the ship descended slowly, hovering over the forecourt between the factory and Valentine, unbearably close to the ground. There was a shlock of gear fitting into place and then the gun port in the belly of the ship began to revolve, spitting out laser fire like a Catherine wheel and reducing the nearest morphs to smears of tar.

’Marik!’ said Sevin, recognising the hopper. He checked his timepiece. He hadn’t expected Marik to be on time, let alone fifteen minutes early. He watched in amazement as the hopper swooped around the complex, perilously close to the buildings, its forward beamers scything down the remaining morphs. From the triumphant yells and exclamations resounding through Sevin’s invox, the rest of Special Ops were equally astounded.

‘All units fire at will, bring them down!’ Sevin ordered, levelling his own rifle at the nearest targets. It was easy work. The morphs appeared stunned by the threat from the sky as if they could not compute the notion of defeat. The clean-up operation was correspondingly swift.

‘Alpha leader to all units, cease fire, I repeat, cease fire,’ he instructed his outvox. ‘Foxtrot, Papa, organise a search and destroy team and secure the compound. Bravo, maintain position. Alpha and Quebec follow me to Valentine. Out.’

Cantor and the corporals fell in behind Sevin as he crossed the forecourt. The hopper was settling on the vehicle park in front of Valentine. As Marik disembarked, several agents ran to greet him, shaking his hand and slapping his back. He nodded agreeably, joking and returning the gestures until Sevin approached.

‘Sir.’ Marik saluted him.

‘Some extraordinary manoeuvres, Air Captain.’ Sevin flipped back his eyeshields so Marik could see as well as hear Sevin’s discontent.

‘Ah, yes sir. Sorry sir.’

‘And you completely ignored your instructions to return at eleven minutes past the hour.’

‘Er, yes, I suppose I did.’

‘Standard hopper design does not support rotating gun-ports. Are you authorised to carry those weapons?’

‘Well, ah, technically no, but Wing Commander Stanton lets me make adjustments to the craft before a mission, sir. Sometimes.’

‘Like adding cannon?’

‘Ah, well, er …’ Marik wilted under Sevin’s stare.

‘You disobeyed orders but your timing today was impeccable, Air Captain, as was your piloting. Special Operations owes you our lives,’ Sevin said, smiling.

The tension drained from Marik’s face. ‘No problem, sir, any time!’

‘Tell me, why did you come back so early?’

‘I got to the wait-out and had nothing else to do so I thought I’d try out the secure channel, but it didn’t work. I played around with it for a bit, but I still couldn’t get it going so I thought, oops something’s gone wrong here, better go back for a look-see!’

‘Lucky that you did.’ A thrumming overhead interrupted them and they turned in its direction to see a formation of six star-shaped craft coming in from the east. The noise intensified to earbursting as the Coalition supernovas shot past.

‘They’re headed for the space port,’ said Marik.

‘Air support. Regis must have started the offensive,’ Sevin said.

‘Whoa, look at that! That’s coming out of the space port, right?’ Lauden pointed a few kilometres westwards where four dots of pale-blue light were rising into the night. A faint roaring reached their ears.

‘Gharst battlecruisers. Hopefully they’re on the run.’ Sevin turned back to the group. ‘We’ve got to finish the job,’ he said. ‘You coming with us?’ He held out a spare rifle to Marik.

‘Course!’ said Marik, taking the weapon.

‘Lauden, Yrim, Cantor, with me. Remember - they know we’re coming.’

Sevin lead them towards the front of the low-rise building, all dark now except for the top storey. The ground floor looked gap-toothed with dark patches where the windows had been and piles of rubble underneath. The plaster had blown off the concrete blocks in between the holes but the structure seemed sound enough. A body in Coalition uniform lay where it had been flung by the blast. Lauden went to take a closer look.

‘Leave it, too late now,’ Sevin said. ‘Cantor and Yrim, go up the ladder at the back. We’ll go in here.’

They slipped away and Sevin pushed at the front entrance, a pair of polypro doors with fancy handles which belly-flopped to the ground in a brume of dust. He stepped over them and picked his way through the wreckage of reception, a powerful shaft of torchlight from his helmet searching among the debris for the way up. Behind a door hanging off its hinges, they located a staircase and slowly scaled the flights, listening out for a potential attack. Marik lunged at a shadow, causing them all to jump unnecessarily. The squelch of boot soles on linex filled the stairwell, along with Lauden breathing hard and cinders floating on the air.

They reached the fifth-floor landing which was lit by day simulators. With Lauden and Marik covering him, Sevin darted through the autodoors which led into the main corridor. The door at the end was labelled with the Gharst runes for ‘Morph Control’. Sevin motioned to the others and they entered a long, narrow room sectioned into three by sliding doors drawn or open at varying widths. The sides of each section were lined with screens and banks of controls. In the first section, it seemed as if a chunk had been broken out of the worktop, leaving behind a few unconnected leads.

‘Check the room,’ said Sevin, inspecting the bald wires then hurling them back into the recess. ‘Bah! Bastards have taken it away, we’re too late,’ he said angrily.

’Whoa!’ Lauden stepped backwards from the opening to the third room, his hands in the air. The blunt nose of a rackarmen, a type of laser pistol favoured by the Gharst, poked around the partition.

‘Hands up, all of you, or I’ll shoot!’ A middle-aged Gridon man wearing a badly-fitting sturmganger uniform stepped out.

‘Hey brother, put the gun down,’ said Lauden, recognising a fellow homeworlder. ‘We’re Coalition, we’re here to help,’ he added in Gridin.

‘You look like enemy to me!’ the man replied nervously in Standard.

‘You’re the one wearing a Gharst uniform. Who are you?’ Sevin asked.

‘I’m … I’m technical support!’

‘What for?’

‘This.’ The man flapped a hand around the room. ‘The defence against the enemy coming to eliminate us. I had to initialise and run the strategy program.’

‘The defence?’ asked Lauden, raising an eyebrow at Sevin.

‘They knew we were coming.’ Sevin took a few steps towards the Gridon. ‘Where’s the masterboard now?’

‘I don’t know, they took it away.’

‘How long ago?’ Sevin kept coming closer.

‘I don’t know, a few days … Aarrgghhhh!’ The Gridon fell to his knees and the gun slipped from his fingers. He cradled his head in his hands.

Sevin grasped his shoulder. ‘Are you alright?’

‘My head,’ whimpered the Gridon.

‘The masterboard. Where did they take it?’ Sevin repeated.

The Gridon looked at him pleadingly.

‘Where?’ said Sevin. ‘We have to find it and deactivate the morphs. If we don’t, the Coalition offensive will fail and you and your people will remain under Gharst control forever. D’you want that? Tell me where it is!’

‘I think it’s in the palace,’ he forced out. Each word seemed to be costing him. He gave an electrifying howl then banged his head with his fists. ‘There’s a bunker…’ He jerked upwards then collapsed face down on the floor.

‘What happened to him?’ asked Lauden.

‘No idea.’ As Sevin felt for a pulse in the man’s neck, his fingers found a rectangular protusion behind the left ear.

‘Implant,’ he said, standing up. ‘A bit like the comms chip the sturmgangers use, except it’s fatal. There’s enough electrical impulse to kill, triggered by certain actions, gland secretion or even spoken words. Telling us where the masterboard is cost him his life.’

‘Grim,’ said Marik, appalled.

‘Yes,’ said Sevin.

There was a scrabbling from the ceiling. One of the skylights shattered and a hand broke off pieces of the window. Boots first, Yrim then Cantor dropped down into the room.

‘What’s up?’ Cantor said, looking at the glum faces. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the dead man.

‘The last morph master, now terminated. They took the works away a long time before we got here.’ Sevin looked at the body on the floor, then at the agents around him and finally at Marik. ‘You’d better take us to the Kraton,’ he said.

ι

The autodoors whisked apart and Fleet Commander Brodie marched into the Briefing Room where a field HQ had been set up.

‘What’s the latest, Reverre? Are we winning yet?’ he asked.

Reverre was hunched over a touchpad plotting troop movements, sharing a table overflowing with print-outs and half-empty beakers with seven other officers, also busy with the bureaucracy of an offensive. The air was stale and dry.

‘Not quite, sir.’ Reverre seemed distracted, even stressed, Brodie noted with concern. He glanced at the screens ranged around the back wall.

‘Damn morphs still running? What’s the time, 04:51? They should be shut down, what the devil’s Sevin doing?’

‘Gods know, sir.’ Reverre shook his head. ‘We’ve lost contact with him.’

‘Lost contact? How d’you mean?’

‘He hasn’t called us and we can’t reach him. Either he’s taken the wrong code for the secure channel or…’ Reverre left Brodie to make the inference.

‘You don’t think he’s absconded?’

‘Hard to say. It seems a simple enough error. Far be it for me to cast aspersions, but sometimes the most improbable go astray.’

‘I doubt Sevin’s done that. Whatever the case, we can’t have those morphs running loose, someone’s got to turn them off. Get some more men down there!’

’I’d like to, sir, but I really can’t spare them. Regis is making heavy weather of the space port and the supernovas are engaged with the valostraal. Farqui is only just holding that headland. They need every active they’ve got.’

‘What about the Corazon?’

‘Crippled by the Gharst, about a thousand dead or wounded and five hundred prisoner, I believe.’

‘Dear gods, what about the sleepers in the city?’

‘With Kristil out of the picture, we’ve no line of command to activate them. We’ll have to rule them out.’

Brodie sucked air between his teeth. ‘And no news on Weffer yet?’

‘Still missing presumed dead.’

‘On my life! This isn’t going to plan, is it? Much, much harder than we anticipated.’ Brodie gave a deep sigh. ‘Oh well, carry on Reverre.’ He made to leave.

‘What about Sevin, sir? What about the morphs?’

‘Sevin’s a Special Operations man, he should be able work his way out of whatever situation he’s in, if he’s still alive. We’ll reconsider in another hour or so. Keep me informed, I’ve got a few enemy ships to track.’

κ

When splinters of light pried Hauki’s eyelids open, she thought she was lying in her bunk on Vehement. She shifted on to her back, trying to get comfortable. She tried to brush away the annoying thing over her mouth but couldn’t lift her hand. Realising it was a gag, she awoke with a jolt to find herself staring at her own startled face in the visor of the sturmganger leaning over her.

Yanked into a sitting position, her wrists bound behind her back by the thick bracelets of magnetic cuffs, she caught a glimpse of the cramped cell with its peeling walls before she was hustled to her feet. A shove on her shoulder propelled her towards the door, narrowly missing the legs of a body on the floor wrapped in a red blanket. It was a native Gridon whose face was so battered she nearly didn’t recognise the rebel leader, Commandante Kristil. Before she could confirm he was still alive, another shunt forced her into the relative brightness outside where another sturmganger waited.

They marched in silence down a maze of corridors, Hauki sandwiched between the two guards and trying to piece together how she had arrived at this place. She remembered being in the glade with the Corazon before the Gharst attacked and felt a physical blow of grief as she relived Weffer’s death. Other pictures surfaced: the Gharst hitting her; coming around to find herself in the bottom of a land vehicle; the jeering sturmgangers who knocked her out again. They must have carried her to the cell, but how long ago she couldn’t tell. The windowless passageways gave no clue to whether it was day or night.

They traversed a softly carpeted hallway at the bottom of a stone staircase that, from its furnishings, seemed to be the formal part of the building. Turning into a lobby of numbered doors, Hauki saw the walls were hung with oil paintings in traditional frames. The air was musty and rarefied, like a library or monastery, and she wondered if these were the state rooms of the Kraton, the old palace. Eventually they reached a door unlike the others, made of a metal like a dull bronze with a complicated security panel in a bracket at the side. They stopped outside and waited to be admitted.

It had to be Gharst Central Control, she thought as they entered. A purplish radiance flickered and danced across the narrow room generated by the action playing out on ranks of monitors lining the left-hand wall. The windows facing the door were turned to black out, presumably to facilitate the viewing of those monitors which showed belligerent morphs bashing seven kinds of hell out of Coalition infantry.

Underneath the screens was a set of three workstations in white, the central dashboard larger and more elaborate than the others. Here three Gharst clerks sat, all female, working the touchpads and viewers. Behind them, a Gharst man in the rittmeister dress uniform of navy belted jacket and jodhpurs was watching, the sharp planes of his face accentuated by the eerie twilight.

’In kontor,’ he ordered, indicating a white door in the wall behind him. The sturmgangers hauled Hauki past a large oval table alongside the windows. The man sitting at it with a high forehead and upturned chin, she realised, was the Gharst hauptleiter, Stor Jenalt, an aide at his side. Then they were through the white door and into a three-metre square office which had no furniture other than a single chair bolted to the floor. Hauki struggled against her captors when she saw that straps hung off its metal arms. Eventually she was forced to succumb to being restrained around her wrists and waist.

’Va horne,’ said the rittmeister from the doorway. The sturmgangers retreated to the corner as the senior Gharst came to stand in front of Hauki, perusing her with a lordly contempt. She met his hostile red eyes. He was just another Gharst with the usual sickly pale skin and white-blond hair. He said nothing, trying to unnerve her, she supposed. She didn’t speak Gharst but knew enough runes to work out his name badge read Olav.

He leaned forward suddenly and ripped the tape off her mouth. She gasped as it took a layer of skin with it.

‘Who the hell are you? Where I am?’ she demanded.

Olav regarded her coldly. ‘You are the prisoner of war, you have not the right to ask the question,’ he said in Standard, drawling out the vowels.

‘Prisoner of war? Not for long, the Coalition will overpower you,’ Hauki said, pulling at the wristholds.

‘We already defeated one half of your army and the rest will come soon.’ His tone became gentler. ‘We are both officer, Command Sergeant Major Hauki, high-ranking. We can co-operate together, yes? I can help you, make things easier for you. But you have to help me first. I need some information.’

Now Hauki understood what had happened to Kristil. She wondered what he had told them, if anything.

‘There is a fleet somewhere, yes?’ Olav said. ‘The Coalition ships, where are they?’

So they hadn’t worked that out, she thought gratefully, and she wasn’t about to tell them either. She summoned her anti-interrogation training from memory. Say nothing, that was it. Say nothing or they will turn it against you, the instructor had said.

‘You tell me. Where is the fleet?’

She did not reply.

He smacked her across the face.

‘How many ships?’

Her mouth stayed shut. Say nothing, say nothing, she repeated in her head.

He slapped her from the other direction.

‘Who is in command?’

He punched her in both ears but she kept silent.

Olav stepped back, irritated by her fortitude. ’You saw what happen to the Corazon? I broke him, after a long time, a very painful, long time. You morken have no strength, that is the problem,’ he said, whisking a crisp handkerchief out of his pocket and pressing it against his nose. ‘It is the black in your blood, it comes out in the skin, the brain. You are contaminated with the dark! That is why the Gharst must clean ourself of you, wash your filth away to purify humanity and allow the one True Light to shine!’

He bent down to Hauki’s ear.

‘We can do the easy way,’ he whispered. ‘You tell me where is the fleet, how many ships and who is the commander. Or you like to do it the hard way?’ He straightened up. ‘You choose.’