Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water Read online

  Smoke on

  the

  Water

  Gammalaw

  Book I

  Brian Daley

  Synopsis

  Though they contemplated a final suicide mission of blood, guts, and glory, the Exts knew their warrior superskills were no match for the LAW—Legal Annexation of Worlds—who were sent into space by the mighty Periapt potentates to colonize new populations against the evil, alien Roke.

  Among the Ext draftees bound for Periapt were Allgrave Burning, his technowizard cousin Lod, and beautiful, death-scarred Ghost, all sworn to a greater purpose, destined to fight in a star-torn war like none other. For a mysterious, danger-shrouded planet beckoned them—along with a disgraced starship captain and a powerful high priestess—for the greatest battles of their lives...

  In memory of my father, Charles Joseph Daley, and of meteor watching on warm August nights

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to express his heartfelt thanks to the following people, who aided and abetted him over the many years: Officer Michael Kueberth and Cpl. Garland Nixon of the Maryland DNR Police Hovercraft Hunter; Dr. Yoji Kondo of Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD; Calvin Gong-wer of Innerspace Corp., Covina, CA; Ray Williamson, formerly of the Office of Technology Assessment; Professor Conrad Neuman, Oceanographic Department of the University of South Carolina; Drs. Frank Manheim and Allyn Vine of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Masaaki Hirayama, for the crash course in Korean history; skipper Richard J. Severinghaus and men of the USS Annapolis; the boys and girls of sensei Tom Fox's "American Rock and Roll Karate," for massive intrusions of reality; physicist Dr. Charles Melton and the late Dr. AI Giardini of the University of Georgia; Drs. John Camerson and Eric Seifter, for both their concern and their efforts on my behalf; and to Lucia Robson, Owen Lock, and Jim Luceno for their love and support.

  Some features of the LAW 'chetterguns are drawn from the research and recommendations of Lt Col. Morris J. Herbert, formerly Assistant Professor of Ballistics and Associate Professor, Department of Ordnance, U.S. Military Academy, West Point.

  The ocean encompassed everything, and everything could be understood in terms of it. Everything true about it was true about life in general.

  Robert Stone, “Outerbridge Reach”

  * * * *

  God's gonna trouble the water.

  From "Wade in the Water" Traditional Spiritual

  Contents

  Concordance

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Periapt

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  Smoke on the Water

  Concordance

  Chapter

  One

  Digging his own grave was the most peaceful thing he'd done in a long time. Past exhaustion, past any hope of survival, Burning engaged the hard mountaintop soil of Anvil Tor with his entrenching tool. Better to die in a shallow fighting hole, he had decided, than in some dark muddy corner of the command bunker. He labored with an exactitude born of the Exts' war against the forces of LAW. Once ingrained, the Skills kept a hand-eye vigilance of their own.

  Burning already had his field of fire marked out, the scrub cleared away with measured whacks of the e-tool's machete edge. The hum was still in his ears despite the fact that his hehnet phone's gain was turned down and the lapped neck-shirt was open so that he could hear what was going on around him.

  The hum had followed him around for weeks, building steadily in the background since he had faced the reality of their situation. There was simply no way the Exts could survive, much less prevail against the Periapt forces. When the last Ext fell dead, the LAW moguls and the proxy detachments that had been bribed or pummeled into shifting allegiance would control every square centimeter of Concordance.

  The hum was like the vague precursor of a quake or an incoming tidal wave; it coursed in his ears all the time now, waking and sleeping.

  The mindless exertion of digging in made it less painful to contemplate the string of disasters that had driven the Exts onto Anvil Tor for a last stand; it dulled Burning's awareness of his own culpability in the whole sickening business and helped shut out the heartrending sounds from the plain below.

  The winds that scoured Anvil Tor's cliff face carried shrieks and screams and the din of turncoat mop-up weaponry. Occasional major detonations punctuated the white noise as fuel reservoirs and missiles in wrecked Ext armor exploded.

  A string of three blasts made Burning pause for a moment They couldn't have come from his men and women—any that had been left behind were surely dead by their own hands. Shortly he began to hear the far-off jubilee of victorious First Lands Alliance and Concordance Liberation Army units as they sounded sirens and vehicle horns and fired delirious volleys into the air.

  Burning grunted as he pitched a bit more of the hard-baked dirt aside, then stopped to check the sky. The clouds were continuing to close in, and so LAW airpower might be hampered a bit. He doubted that the Periapts would screw up their courage for a nighttime ground assault, though a clash in the dark, perhaps in driving ram, would certainly suit the Exts.

  His drill instructor in the student reserves would have approved. Damn fine infantry weather! she might have said.

  But Burning was not about to applaud a couple of clouds. To hell with the everlasting glory of the infantry, he told himself. That day alone he'd had to give two good people the knife—people who had been relying on him to supply another glorious Ext victory. A few of the survivors were so far gone that they still expected it.

  "Burning!" a voice called.

  He glanced up and immediately returned to digging.

  "Allgrave Orman," the voice drawled, mocking the name and the title. "It's about your sister. Seems she's wandered off from the operations bunker."

  Burning—born Emmett Orman, the tenth and current All-grave of the Exts—planted the e-tool. On Anvil Tor it was not especially bizarre to see Zone wearing a major's trefoils instead of a lieutenant's stars or, for that matter, a sergeant's stripes. As Ext units were attritted, field promotions had become daily, even hourly commonplaces. Hell, what would it matter now if General Delecado bucked the patho bastard to field marshal? When one came right down to it, Zone's new rank was no more unmerited than Burning's being named All-grave, which he owed to a chance of lineage and had been granted against his will.

  "I gave word that Fiona was to be watched," he said at last

  Sucking at his teeth, Zone offered a languid salute. His raw-boned muscular body never even approximated the position of attention, but almost nobody else's did anymore, either.

  "Sweetmeat was doing just that, sir, t
ill he stumbled into a LAW recon floater packing a coilgun."

  "How long has Fiona been gone?"

  "Excuse me, Allgrave, but I've had better things to do than watch over her. She hasn't passed through the perimeter, if that's any consolation to you."

  Zone's hollow-eyed stare was different from the thousand-meter gaze so many Exts wore those days; Zone's was more daring. And he had always had a special bad eye for Burning, one that said, Yeah, you're right to be afraid of me, and we both know why. Only I'm not gonna put it into words just yet, and you're too rule-bent to.

  Burning stepped out of the fighting hole, adjusting his battle suit and then taking up his boomer. The heft of the big battle rifle gave him pause for just a moment. Why not just toad-crank Zone now, square away accounts while he had the chance?

  Two years earlier the idea would have appalled him, but the LAW conquest had changed that In any case, it wouldn't be the first time Burning had boomed another Ext as a matter of wartime necessity. But Zone was staring straight at him, maybe expecting it. Then, too, Zone was the best fighter on Anvil Tor, perhaps in all the Broken Country, and he was going to be needed soon.

  Burning slung arms. "Where are the Discards?"

  Zone nodded toward the cliff face. "Over that way, maybe."

  "Fiona's probably with them, but I'll check it out. If anybody needs me—"

  "In fact, Allgrave, Daddy D's been yelling for you in the bunker."

  "Tell General Delecado that whatever it is will have to wait."

  "Don't think so," Zone said, shaking his head. "Somebody's out across the perimeter, asking to summit with you."

  "Who?"

  "That's the mystery of it"

  The muscles in Burning's jaw bunched. "We all dug in?"

  Zone spit on the ground. "Getting there. Fireball mortars, triple-A batteries, rest of the crew-served weapons. Counter-sonics and ECM are in place. Ran outta landline fiber, but we've got runners set up. Daddy D's got everybody consolidated, chain of command patched—half-assed, anyways."

  They headed for the operations bunker, passing small groups of Ext soldiers hastily preparing fighting positions, all of them descended from the exteroceptive implant-controlled slaves who had claimed a bloody freedom when the Cyber-plagues had reached Concordance and had gone on to forge themselves into the planet's most stoic and fearless guerrillas. Filthy, damaged battlesuits showed patches and unit flashes from all across the Broken Country: the Gray Flats Gang, Murderers' Col Heavy Arty, Riyoko's Ronin…

  As they passed, a catapult paratrooper from the Rumpstake Glacier Airmphib muttered, "We get 'em at close quarters tonight, and we'll baste 'em all. Santeria Corners all over again, you just watch."

  It had been the only clear Ext victory in the latter part of the war—Murphy's Law at critical mass. All Concordance and Periapt warwares had malfunctioned or canceled each other out: SAT/counterSAT systemry, airpower, antiaircraft weapons. Command and coordination nets had failed, rain had set in, and the brutal terrain around Santeria Corners had become the scene of a far-flung two-day-long gutter fight.

  Even so, Burning faked agreement whenever Exts cited the battle to bolster themselves and modesty when they commended him for it. He and the command staff had been powerless to direct strategy. It had been Ext company commanders, platoon and squad leaders, and linedog privates who had given LAW a savage mauling.

  The memory did nothing for Burning's morale, however. He hadn't been truly glad or grief-stricken for some time, and he often wondered if he had dissociated completely from what was going on around him. He no longer felt anything like what he presumed he was supposed to feel when friends, comrades, and kin met their end. He suspected that he was an unwell man.

  "Heard some sniper rounds a couple of minutes back," Zone said casually. "Zazzing through the bushes whistling, 'Where's Burning? Where's Burning?'"

  "Why don't you take the knife now, Zone, and save us the trouble of giving it to you later?" Burning kept walking. There was no reply.

  A square pit ten paces on a side, the Exts' operation bunker wasn't much to look at. It was roofed with hastily felled logs and polymer sheeting and covered with mounded soil and rock. The only openings were blackout-draped observation and firing slits and two small entryways.

  As Burning approached, the rain began as a light drizzle, scarcely more than a mist The mountaintop chilled, but few of the subcommanders, runners, and others marking time near the bunker bothered to close their battlesuit collars. Without interrupting what they were saying or doing, they just shifted their boomers to sling them muzzle-down on the weak-side shoulder. Keeping moisture out of the barrels was more a reflex than a reasoned response.

  General "Daddy D" Delecado was outside looking at the sky, his Adam's apple bobbing. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a head of thinned-out white hair. The war had taken a lot out of him, and his battlesuit fit him like a clown costume.

  "This rain'll give their pilots something extra to reckon with," he remarked to Burning.

  Burning nodded out of respect If the Periapts chose to make air strikes with all-weather fighter-bombers, a little rain wasn't going to thwart them. The enemy was just as capable of marching an artillery unit up the slopes and pasting the whole mountain for hours or days or, for that matter, employing orbital kinetic or directed-energy weapons. That was what Burning would have done in their place.

  Only Bigtimers were unlikely—for the moment, at least. Ensnared by Concordance-wide intrigues, civic affairs considerations, and political priorities, LAW had to make a pretense of using measured force against the Exts. Mass surrender would have made AlphaLAW Commissioner Renquald look good, but no Ext would be taken alive, knowing what LAW had planned for them.

  Daddy D motioned Burning through a blackout drape. Zone followed without waiting to be invited. Inside, the general fingered an A/V touchpad, bringing up a holo, while Burning leaned in close to the display field.

  "Recon team's got a contact at a hundred meters south of LP niner."

  That was well in front of the projected forward edge of the battle area, practically at the foot of Anvil Tor. "They're trying to sneak recondos past us?" Burning asked in surprise.

  "Not hardly," Delecado said.

  Burning was confused, and the hum in his ears was bothering him again. He wanted to locate Fiona before the whistle blew and the shit flew, and now there was this. Over the holo's shielded hardwire line came a blurry image from the recon detail. It was foggy down below, but the infrared and lightamp showed a lone figure sitting on a boulder as big as a tank.

  "The contact came in waving a white bicycle flag and singing," Delecado explained. "I think you'll recognize the voice."

  Audio pickup was only fair, but Burning instantly recognized the words to "I'm a Decent Extian Girl, So Get Your Finger out of That."

  "Lod!" he said in greater surprise.

  "The little cumwad," Zone muttered.

  Burning had liked his puckish cousin well enough when they were growing up, but Lod had long since quit resisting LAW unto the death. Burning opened a mike to the recon team leader and said, "Fetch him up."

  At the same time Daddy D instructed all other elements in the area to stand fast at full alert. What could it be, after all, but some kind of 'scatbrained diversion?

  But when LP niner's team spread out to move in on him,

  Lod scrambled down behind cover. "You cannot touch me, who do not love me!" Over the A/V his tenor voice sounded even thinner than usual. "Be good enough to tell the Allgrave of the Exts that his kinsman's come to talk sense with him. Burning! Are you listening?"

  "He's working some angle of his own," Delecado said. Given that they were talking about Lod, that was like predicting the direction of sunrise.

  "Burning, you don't have to die up there!" Lod added. "Cousin—can you see this?"

  Burning squinted at the holo display as Lod came out from behind the boulder, holding something high.

  "Romola asked me to show
it to you. She apparently doesn't want you dead, either."

  "Close-up, zoom in!" Burning grated over the hardwire. The recce leader's boomer-mounted optical pickup showed Lod's extended hand in the crosshairs. The thing he was holding was the engagement bracelet Burning had given Romola forever ago. "Bring him here, nowl"

  But Lod skipped back from the scouts. "My tailor won't tolerate my being manhandled! I talk to Burning down here or not at all."

  "Trap." Daddy D made the call flatly.

  "Hold position; don't let him leave," Burning said to the recce detail. He enhanced the image of the bracelet as well as he could; if it wasn't his fiancee's, it was a perfect copy. "Make sure he's alone. I'll be right down."

  Chapter

  Two

  The wealthiest and most populous of Concordance's score of nation-states, the First Lands had once lorded it over the entire planet, especially over the Broken Country, whose citizens had been pacified by means of drugs and turned into ex-teroceptive chipslaves. But the reign of the First Lands had endured for less than a century when the Cyberplagues found their way across the stars to Concordance and swept away the old order.

  Of unknown origin, the Cyberplagues had liberated the chipslaves from their behavior-modification implants, killing countless thousands in the process, but the survivors had dug in wherever their labor units had been deployed—typically in the planet's harshest and most unforgiving terrains. Military esprit became the social value essential to survival, and in defending their newfound autonomy, the Exts had evolved quickly into ferocious, disciplined fighters. They probed the Flowstate and used it to arm themselves with the Skills—an array of mind-body disciplines that were unique to them.

  Bitterly vengeful, they had gradually reclaimed the Broken Country, and for some fifty years after the Cyberplagues an uneasy coexistence had prevailed between the Broken Country and the First Lands nations.

  Until the coming of the LAW starship Sword of Damocles.

  The military wing of the Hierarchate of Periapt—a world distant from Concordance but at the very center of things nonetheless—LAW was short for the Legal Annexation of Worlds, dispatched across the reaches of space to restore unity in the wake of the Cyberplagues and enlist new populations in the centuries-old conflict against the Roke, an alien species whose unprovoked assaults on human-colonized worlds had left millions dead.