What the hell was going on? There were dozens of Imperials there, a whole army of…
An army.
There was an entire Imperial army coming through the warp.
An invasion!
The Empire was invading!
They were actually invading Faerie!
How could they be so stupid?
And that explained the smoke…or did it? Blasters didn’t work here, and the Empire had no conventional firearms, so far as he knew; what weapons would they be using that might start fires?
Angry and worried, he gathered more of the energy of the matrix into the wind that carried him.
* * * *
These funny-looking natives were deucedly hard to kill. Puckett’s troops were not particularly skilled swordsmen, and their space suits had gotten in the way at first, but all the same, Puckett thought they ought to have been able to handle a bunch of mostly unarmed wogs, regardless of what sort of wogs they were.
Maybe half a dozen of the natives had turned up with ornately carved spears, but the others had had only bare hands. Slaughtering the lot of them should have been easy.
But they dodged. And they hid. And they ran, without ever seeming to hurry, and those abnormally long legs of those could really cover territory.
None of them had said a word, none had shouted or screamed, even when Puckett’s swordsmen surrounded them and hacked them to pieces. It wasn’t natural.
And there must have been a hundred or more in the village originally, but Puckett could only confirm four killed-and he’d lost five of his own men to those spears.
Now, though, the natives had been driven away, their huts burned, and the village was, he could say with some confidence, secured.
And it hadn’t been a slaughter at all, really. That was almost a relief. Puckett didn’t need to worry about being another Major Blackburn.
Of course, with so many wogs still out there, they’d need to be constantly on guard for counter-attacks, snipers, and the like, since they hadn’t killed the villagers; that wasn’t in accordance with doctrine. Colonel Scarborough and the rest of the brass might not like it.
Well, Puckett thought as he scanned the situation from his position at one end of the wide steel steps leading up to the warp, the Colonel and the others could just stuff it-it wasn’t Puckett’s fault that the natives had fled and faded away, or that his men had to arrive in those bulky, awkward suits that were never meant for use on a planetary surface, or that they had to use archaic, unfamiliar weapons.
At least matches worked here. And dropping the steps through at the very first had made transit through the warp easy enough.
The first supply dumps were arriving now, and the men were clearing away the last burning wreckage of the crude native huts; they would have some tents and probably a few more substantial shelters up well before sunset. Swordsmen were patrolling the perimeter, ready to fend off any wog counter-attack. Order and organization were arising out of chaos.
If this campaign was going to last long, though, Puckett hoped the brass would see about getting some different armament. These swords they’d been issued were a bit flimsy-they were just ceremonial swords that had been sharpened, not serious fighting blades, since that was all that was available in quantity on short notice. Some of the men were using their standard-issue knives, instead, and it wasn’t just because the knives were more familiar.
And some sort of missile weapons-bows, crossbows, powder firearms, something like that-would help considerably. Even some decent spears or pikes would be useful.
“Captain!” someone shouted.
Puckett turned, and saw men pointing skyward. He shaded his eyes and looked up to the northeast.
“Damn,” he muttered.
The brass had assured him that aircars didn’t work here, any more than blasters did-and of course, any number of his men had tested blasters; he had, himself. Blasters didn’t work, so the assumption had been that aircars didn’t either.
But something did, because that wasn’t any bird or bat or airfish or pterosaur approaching. For that matter, it wasn’t any sort of aircar Puckett had ever seen before, either. Puckett didn’t know what it was-it blazed almost as brightly as the afternoon sun, but in a thousand changing colors. Tendrils of light and smoke trailed out in all directions, shifting constantly.
Was it a weapon?
The glare dimmed momentarily, and Puckett thought he glimpsed something at the thing’s center-something that looked like a man.
Not a man in an aircar or any other sort of machine, just a man, flying unsupported through the air like a leaf in the wind, in the middle of that great insubstantial thing.
And flying fast, too.
Puckett wished more than ever for a squad of crossbowmen.
Or rocketeers; would rockets work here? He couldn’t see how they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t a scientist. When he sent his next report he’d suggest bringing rockets. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that sooner?
But right now he didn’t have rockets, or anything else that could shoot that thing down.
“Maintain your positions,” he called. “It may be a diversion-keep alert!”
He hoped it wasn’t a serious attack-after all, there was only the one man in there. Maybe someone was coming to parley.
But how would the enemy have known they were there? Had the displaced villagers gotten word back that fast? Base One had said the enemy’s central fortress was over three hundred miles up the coast; did the enemy have telepaths, or some equivalent?
Maybe this thing was from a local garrison somewhere.
The flying thing was coming closer; it was crossing the perimeter. Puckett cursed under his breath; he supposed no one at Base One had even thought about air cover.
But after all, it was just one man in there.
* * * *
The ground looked as if it had measles-purple measles. The whole area was speckled with the purple spots of Imperial uniforms. Pel stared down at them in annoyed amazement.
The Empire could organize an entire invasion, but they couldn’t turn over two bodies.
The invaders were interestingly arranged, Pel thought; almost in a target. The thickest concentration was right in the center, where he knew the warp was, where dozens of uniformed men were hauling boxes and beams about; then there was a broad ring where they were relatively scarce. Outside that was a ring of men, and then another clear area, only a few advance scouts moving quickly at angles through the scrub.
The warp made a perfect bull’s eye.
He passed directly over it, and saw faces turned upward, watching him-but no one was shooting at him.
They probably didn’t have anything that could shoot at him.
Now, what had this place been before the Imperials arrived? Where were those strange people he had sensed? What had made all the smoke he had seen?
The smoke he could partially explain, at any rate-there were heaps of ash still smoldering. But what had they been originally?
And the people were mostly still alive, but not in the circle the Imperials had established as their beachhead-he could sense them on all sides, a few hundred yards away, as inexplicable as ever.
That was reassuring-at least the Imperials hadn’t butchered them all.
He looked at the piles of ash, at how they were arranged, and suddenly Pel realized what they were.
They were houses. This had been a village of those strange people, and the Imperials had come in and burned it all.
They had just marched in and burned people’s homes.
What right did they have?
Those people weren’t Imperial citizens. They weren’t rebel slavers, like the ones on Zeta Leo III. They were Faerie folk, going about their own business.
They were Shadow’s subjects, not the Empire’s-except Shadow was dead.