Five Empires: An Epic Space Opera Page 37

  “It’s a start,” Jake muttered. “At least they’re not Cavan.”

  Still, Jake knew their situation was parlous. They’d entered Jaj space in a Cavan shuttle alongside a Cavan warship. The Jaj had every right to believe that he represented the vanguard of an attack force. The fact that the warship was severely damaged wouldn’t alleviate the suspicion in the slightest.

  The local authorities seemed content to let the warship spill its guts into the deadly vacuum of space. Cold, sure, but then the Jaj hardly had a reputation for altruism.

  Jake adjusted his course in line with his escorts, dipping into the face of the red planet.

  “We just need to be processed,” he assured Fusar, but his instincts told him otherwise.

  The shuttle scudded through the upper mesosphere with minimal turbulence. The craft was a graceful transport and handled itself well. The atmosphere was thin and stable, allowing them to cut through at a steep angle.

  Within minutes they were low enough to see details in the wide, orange landscape. An unidentified sun beat down on rocky, sandy terrain laced with valleys of bottle green. There was thick jungle in those gorges, which meant there had to be aquifers. The rest of the place looked bone dry.

  The Jaj fighters leveled out at three hundred feet, guiding them in between ancient, collapsed cinder cones and grasping mesas. The shuttle emerged over a flat plain criss-crossed with thin trenches.

  “Strange,” Jake murmured. “Irrigation?”

  “No,” Fusar said in a voice tight with fear. “Holding pens.”

  With a sinking feeling Jake realized his companion was probably right. There must have been thousands of people crammed into those narrow trenches. Bullhead Receiving Station would not be an elegant building in which they could take a number and wait for an interview - it was a proving ground, a place where vagrants and blowins were forced to prove themselves worthy of Jaj attention.

  “Who could be capable of such brutality?” Fusar asked aloud.

  There was no time to explore the notion. The Jaj escorts slowed down and hovered over an inconspicuous patch of dirt.

 

  The tone left no room for debate. Jake dutifully landed the shuttle on the dusty granite, wondering what came next.

 

  The Jaj fighters wheeled into the azure sky, probably glad to be done with their little chore.

  “Wait, wait!” Jake growled into the com. “You can’t just leave us here!”

  The fighter units hit their thrusters.

  “Fuck you, you barbaric motherfuckers,” Jake said, needing to vent. A cold yet soothing hand closed over his own - Fusar peered at him calmly.

  “The Jaj prove themselves through actions, not words,” she said. “It’s one of the few things I remember.”

  On reflection, it was a concept Jake vaguely recalled from his limited travels through Jaj space. He’d never fully understood it, rejecting the notion as meaningless chest-beating. But here on Bullhead, the Jaj value had manifested itself as a huge battle ground.

  There was a brutal logic to the philosophy. The Jaj prized the ability to survive above all else. They were expected to prove themselves throughout their lives. Perhaps their dealings with the manipulative Nostroma and scheming Cava05 had, over the centuries, pushed them to reject what they saw as the fundamental insincerity of verbal communication. For the Jaj, talk was unacceptably cheap and rife with danger.

  Physical, material communication rarely lied. If a man risked his life for another, how could they ever be enemies? If a father gave up his daughter to strengthen ties with another clan, he gained many trusted allies for life.

  But what were the rules on Bullhead? Were there any rules?

  Jake stumbled to the galley, hunting for a pain killer. They didn’t have much time and would need clear, sober heads.

  “Fusar,” he said, tossing her a booster. “Help me get the others free.”

  Jake activated the aft gangway and the pair dragged Verity and Mandie out onto the rock. The duellist left Fusar with the women and rushed back to scrounge any supplies he could find.

  “Hurry, Jake,” Fusar shouted as Jake wrestled frantically with the port gear lockers. Three plasma rifles, two protein blocks, a pair of optics and several sacs of water. He hauled the gear out in a duffel bag, sprinting as fast as his aching legs would allow.

  He heard the missiles before he saw them. He pushed Fusar to the sand, protecting her with his body. The explosion flared brightly in the corner of his vision. Chunks of flaming debris rained down on them, and Jake was forced to stomp out a few embers in Verity’s hair. At length the dust settled to reveal a vessel twisted beyond recognition.

  There would be no sifting through the rendered slag heap. The only material of any conceivable value was the raw metal, and they couldn’t exactly lug that across the plain in their weakened condition.

  Feeling the hot sun on his scalp, Jake realized they would need shade very soon. The incapacitated women wouldn’t last long out here on the exposed rock. A dark line cutting across the orange dust suggested a trench some four hundred yards to the east. Jake handed Fusar the optics so she could see too.

  Together they lugged their companions over the dust to the distant trench. Within minutes Jake was lathered in sweat, the dust irritating his eyes. Fusar, on the other hand, seemed better adapted to the conditions. At length they reached the trench and peered into its murky depths. For starters, it smelled foul, like something had been left to fester at the bottom. On the other hand, a cool breeze wafted through the incision, promising relief from the fierce sun.

  “Lower them down,” Jake muttered, easing himself into the trench. He landed on squelchy mud and was glad to see the walls weren’t much taller than he. Fusar lowered Verity’s body with surprising strength. Jake propped the cybomancer against the wall and fed her water. Mandie came next, who seemed a little closer to consciousness. Fusar joined them and peered apprehensively into the darkness.

  “All we can do is wait,” Jake said. It worried him that the women had taken so long to recover from drift travel. They would need all four on deck to have any hope of surviving this place.

  “Jake …”

  Fusar had frozen still, her eyes locked on something he couldn’t see. He pulled on his optics. The trench was filled with ice-blue specks. Fireflies, maybe, only they weren’t moving at all.

  With a start he scrambled back, Lust already in his hand. There were no fireflies in this trench.

  There was a horde of lizard men, each one coolly appraising the intruders.

  Fusar raised a hand in what might have passed for a gesture of peace. The duellist gradually became aware of a rhythmic sound and realized the lizards were stamping their feet into the mud. All along the fetid trench, hundreds if not thousands of lizards united in their cryptic reaction.

  Jake’s gun hand wavered.

  He was a duellist. A scoundrel entering middle age and searching blindly for a single scrap of redemption. He’d caused enough pain in his life to know he didn’t deserve to be alive. He certainly didn’t deserve Fusar’s trust or loyalty.

  But, here on Bullhead, where the line between life and death seemed precariously thin, he decided he had something to live for.

  He tossed his gun to the mud, following Fusar’s lead.

  She had become his moral compass, his north star, his everything.

  This wasn’t the retirement he’d expected, but he stood tall and loose. Finally, thrillingly at peace with himself.

  Jake Le Sondre was a duellist. He’d spent most of his life in a tandem, wired to serve another of his own kind. And yet it was only now, as he placed his worthless life in Fusar’s hands, that the icy specter of loneliness seemed to melt away.

  The duellist had come in from the cold, that much felt certain. And, by the grace of a lowly Jaj girl he’d found in a pit, he was finally wi
lling to cherish what lay on the other side of survival.

  III

  52

  Empire Profile 21

  The Jaj Empire

  Battle and family - the twin obsessions of the Jaj Empire.

  And yet, for more than a century the Jaj have enforced a closed border policy and refused to go to war unless attacked first. Such insularity seems, at first glance, at odds with the species’ warlike nature, but very much fits the Jaj psychological profile.

  The Jaj aren’t curious. They value what they know as long as it serves their immediate needs. Each citizen has a role to play and that is precisely the limit of desired knowledge. They have large, powerful bodies to carry around - to be ‘physical’ is to be divine. Knowledge is useful up to a point, but too much can be a dangerous burden.

  Action defines the man, not words. Ideas are like air. Unless they could be turned into something tangible they are to be treated with suspicion.

  Most importantly, the Jaj are family-oriented. Clan-oriented. They enjoy surrounding themselves with clan blood, erecting enclaves purely for that purpose. The gentle delights of the homefront are vastly preferable to the isolation and risk of deep space exploration. According to the scholars at the Caravan of Light, there hasn’t been a Jaj explorer of note for more than three thousand years.

  The long-term outlook for the Jaj can only be classed as perilous. With the expanding influence of the Cava05, a more ambitious race by far, the Jaj appear to have reached a watershed moment in their long and proud history. Military analysts insist the Jaj are on borrowed time unless they can muster a quality they have shown a steadfast resistance to for several hundred years - innovation. Widely considered to be the ‘sleeping giant’ of the galaxy, many billions of oppressed peoples remain hopeful that the Jaj will are capable of reversing what has been a long and tragically stubborn decline.

  The stamping of clawed feet was a warning. If Fusar and her companions were to be eviscerated, it would’ve happened by now. Unless the beasts were simply waiting for them to die. The brutal sun alone could take care of that.

  Jake had propped Verity up in the only sliver of shade available. Almost every inch of cool blackness in the trench was occupied by the bipedal lizard creatures, whose stomping had only receded in the last few minutes.

  Jake had one of his beloved pistols in hand as he stripped away the ragged threads clinging to his sister’s gory abdominal slash. The body armor she wore was incredibly tough, but that mad monk on Tranda IX had been even tougher. The wound had re-opened in the shuttle crash.

  Fusar still couldn’t quite believe she was actually on another planet after so many years of abject misery in the monks’ thrall. And yet there was no time to reflect on her miraculous rescue, and her situation had hardly improved.

  For the past half hour Bullhead’s punishing sun had scorched their small section of trench. The prison gullies criss-crossed the desert for miles in every direction and were filled with tens of thousands of starving, decrepit inmates.

  All Fusar had seen so far were lizards, who were about as low on the galactic pecking order as you could get. Jake told her there were probably factions of various species, including humans and irians. It was just bad luck they wound up falling right in the middle of the hostile reptiles.

  Sure, the beasts had held back so far, but they had probably seen Jake’s pistols. Fusar hadn’t spotted a weapon that came close to matching those, so as long as Jake was hyper-vigilant, they were safe for now. Of course, there was every chance of being rushed, but Jake had taken great care to maintain non-threatening body language.

  Verity’s breathing had become a little ragged. The girl was as tough as they came, but her wound was deep and liable to fester. Here in the dry air there was less chance of infection, but who knew what microbes played in the foul trench. Already Fusar and Mandie had been forced to relieve themselves against the hard-packed wall. There was simply nowhere else to go.

  The human mercenary was currently on Verity’s far side, acting as a bulwark against potential attack. She looked tired and drawn. They all needed sleep, but that sun wouldn’t shift for at least another hour.

  “We need to trade,” Fusar muttered.

  Jake broke one of the colored balls he carried in his belt and rubbed the powder into his sister’s wound. Verity groaned but was too weak to mount a vigorous complaint.

  “That’s the plan,” Jake replied, watching the paste absorb some of the blood and gore. “I might have to give up one of the pistols.”

  Fusar didn’t like the sound of that. Mandie was carrying the other one and knew how to use it. Having both meant they could shore up both potential avenues of attack.

  Fusar had good reason to feel vulnerable. For starters, she was Jaj. Secondly, she’d heard the word ‘zasta’ uttered many times in a deep, guttural growl. Jake seemed to think it meant something like ‘rare beast’. Female Jaj were so rare, they’d probably never seen one. It was a good idea to stay right away from the creatures.

  Who knew what grudges they held? Lizards had been hounded and persecuted all over the galaxy. The Jaj, in particular, had a woeful record when it came to subjugate species. Slavery wasn’t practiced like it was in the Cavan Empire, but so-called ‘inferior species’ were treated abominably. Bullhead was a grand testament to that.

  A low rumble rose in the distance as Jake finished dressing Verity’s wound. The lizards up and down the trench immediately grew agitated, grunting, snorting and stomping. Fusar exchanged a worried look with Mandie - what did it mean?

  The rumble grew louder. A ship was approaching from the east. Fusar couldn’t see it, but whatever it was seemed to stop and hover a half click to the south. A heavy thud preceded the screech of several creatures. The lizards to either side howled a war cry and vaulted over the lip of the trench.

  Amazed, Fusar pulled herself up to the edge for a look. A brutish container vessel rose swiftly. To her astonishment two rockets soared gracefully in pursuit, only to impact harmlessly against an energy shield.

  The rockets had been launched from a distant trench. Fusar stored the intel away for later. The real action was occurring on the sand between the trenches - the container ship had dropped five large cages containing leathery, bird-like creatures. At full height they towered over even the tallest lizard and looked extremely aggressive.

  A wave of lizards were sprinting toward the beasts, who were struggling free of their shattered cages. Fusar wondered why the reptiles would risk energy and hydration on such a futile exercise. Surely it was safer in the trenches? Only a few lizards have been left behind, mostly females and smaller children. Fusar’s stomach lurched when she saw the juveniles.

  The delivered beasts looked to be strapped with various supply items. One was saddled with saline barrels, another carried what looked like medical kits.

  The lizards were risking their lives to scavenge what they could from the furious beasts. Fusar watched on as several of them tried valiantly to sleigh the beasts using jagged shards of scrap metal. Through sheer weight of numbers they were able to bring a couple down, but at the cost of at least a dozen lives. The cowering female lizards shielded their children from the bleak sounds of carnage.

  The brave creatures were to be denied the spoils of victory at the last minute. A contingent of humans arrived from the south and took advantage of the chaotic situation. Flanking the birds, they used well-made spears and crude halberd-shaped weapons to slice through their soft underbellies. Purple ichor sprayed across the sand as the raptors were felled mercilessly.

  But the humans didn’t stop there, turning viciously on the fatigued lizard ranks. They maintained a disciplined front line and were careful not to over-commit. More lizards were slaughtered and their hard-won supplies lifted from their twitching corpses. They fought bravely before one of their elders gave a signal to retreat. Some thirty lizards made it back to the trenches, to their grief-stricken families. At least sixty had ventured forth.

  Ja
ke was also watching on grimly

  “We’re in the wrong trench,” he said brutally. “The humans have access to better steel and might have even welded pieces together.”

  Fusar recoiled from the hard pragmatism, but knew deep down that the duellist was right.

  “They have rocket launchers,” she added. “Tried to take the Jaj ship down.”

  “Gonna take a lot more than trium-fueled rockets to bring one of those down.”

  Jake checked his wrist pad. “Noon, local time,” he mused. “I wonder if this ‘entertainment’ happens every day.”

  Fusar’s stomach churned. The idea of watching such violence for fun made her feel ill. How could her own people be so cold-hearted, so depraved?

  The surviving lizards hissed and spat at Fusar. She resisted the impulse to grab Jake’s weapon.

  “They’re angry we didn’t help them,” Mandie said.

  Fusar blinked. It was a useful insight. Perhaps these trenches were like badges. An obligation. If you take up space, if you use valuable shade, you fight for the cause. It made primitive sense.

  Jake nodded. “Next time, we fight.”

  “Next time, we win,” Fusar corrected.

  Jake looked at her with admiration. Maybe there was a glimmer of hope here. If they could gain the lizards’ trust, their chances of survival increased tenfold. Shared resources would be a bonus, not that the lizards appeared to have much. Fusar would’ve settled for being able to rest without fearing for her life.

  “We need them,” Jake said, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “And something tells me we’ll soon get to prove ourselves.”

  “Then we start thinking about taking one of those ships down,” Mandie chipped in, settling into the sliver of shade that had just appeared alongside Verity.

  Fusar sat down with the others. There wasn’t much else she could do. Jake sat to her right, as if to shield her from the wails and other grieving sounds. She was grateful - it wasn’t the first time he’d demonstrated an ability to sense her needs.