William Forstchen - Down to the Sea

Equally evident was what Velamak was offering.

“This half-life of radiation that you mentioned in our last conversation, what is it?”

Jurak smiled. “The rate of radioactive decay. Do you understand what I speak of?”

Velamak smiled and shook his head. “Perhaps those of my people who study such things do. Remember, I am just a messenger of the emperor.”

“And a priest of your order,” Jurak added.

Velamak said nothing.

“Tell your people they need to achieve a fissionable mass through a controlled and uniform implosion.”

He smiled as he spoke, knowing that the words were meaningless to the envoy but would be faithfully reported. Perhaps someone back in their capital would vaguely grasp the concept, but to make it a reality, would take far more than a nation that still used steam power to propel its ships and weapons.

“Achieve that, and you can bum a city, a hundred thousand die in an instant, a hundred thousand more die later from poisoning of the air. And no one can return to that place until the half-life of the fissionable material has resulted in a drop below fatal levels of radiation. Does that explain it?”

Velamak gave him a cagey smile. “You talk in riddles.”

“Not on my old world. Every student learned it. The question was how to make it. We were in the eighteenth year of the war of the Pretender before it was achieved by the False One’s side. A spy stole the secret and gave it to our side. On the day I left my world, eleven years later, more than five hundred such weapons had been made and exploded. Entire continents were wastelands. I got dosed at the Battle of Alamaka.”

He rolled his sleeve to show a bum scar on his arm where the hair did not grow.

“The warriors to either side of me were looking in the direction of the blast and were struck blind.”

“A weapon that blinds, how fascinating.”

“Not if you were there,” Jurak whispered.

He remembered the way his tent companions had thrashed in their trench, eyes scorched to bloody pulps, while the blast and shock wave thundered over them. He recalled the terror of wondering if he had been fatally dosed. He had been ordered to shoot his blinded companions, since they would be a burden if allowed to live.

Jurak sighed and took another drink. “I suspect someday I’ll find a lump or start coughing up blood and it will kill me at last.”

“I suspect that even if you did know how to make this thing, you would keep it hidden from us.”

Jurak smiled. “You can be certain of it.”

“Even at the cost of the people you now lead?”

“Believe me, Velamak, everyone dies in the end from it. Stick to the weapons you already know.”

“Yet part of the reason I was sent here was to gain information so that we might have weapons to defeat the Yankees when the time came.”

“And what time is that?”

“When we are ready.”

Again Jurak laughed. “We have been playing this game of words for months. You are torn apart by war. How many contenders to the throne are there?”

“That doesn’t matter. In the end, the Kazan shall be reunited. We will destroy them with ease.”

“Who is ‘we’? I suspect that this order of yours is far more concerned with its own advancement than any unity of the Kazan Empire or who is upon the throne at the moment. For all I know, you represent only your order and serve this distant emperor only with the left hand.” Velamak shook his head and laughed. “Very adroit.”

“Don’t patronize me. I might be the ruler of a fallen clan, but I am the Qar Qarth, who can still field thirty umens of the finest cavalry in the world.”

“We know that. It is one of the reasons we sought you out.”

“And, oh, how we shall pay if war does come. There are forty million humans in the Republic. A million of them can be mobilized in a week. And we shall be the first target.”

“The emperor never asked for you to sacrifice yourself.”

“Nor would I. The emperor is how far away? Two hundred or more leagues by land to the sea. Then how far, a thousand leagues? Two thousand?”

“Something like that. Remember, we knew of your defeat within months of its happening. If we had known your danger earlier, we would have sent aid. We have had twenty years to ponder this question and to prepare.”

“And to fight amongst yourselves, thereby diverting your strength. Velamak, you have been here for months. Over the last week you have seen one of their leaders from a distance, their finest general.”

“Small even for them.”

“Call him that when he is leading a charge, as I once saw him do.”

“I think you almost like him.”

“I do, damn it,” he growled, and he poured another drink. “He has the ka, the warrior soul. It’s told among us how he alone killed more than thirty thousand Tugars in one night, breaking a dam that flooded their camp, sweeping away their elite umens. Some of us believe as well that he has the tu, the ability to read the souls of others.”

“And that is why you forbid me to ride escort and reduced me to watching from a distance?”

“Precisely.”

Velamak nodded. “We know the tu and the ka. But I doubt if the humans have mastered it, at least their humans.”

“Their humans?”

“Ah, so I have piqued your interest.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that there is much of the Kazan I have still not told you.”

“We’ve talked endlessly of this before, and it always seems that I learn precious little of you and your empire in reply.”

“The less you know, the less you will reveal to the humans.”

“Oh, yes, such as your foolishness in giving a revolver as a present to Ogadi of the White Taie clan.”

Velamak stiffened. “I noticed it was missing shortly after I arrived in your camp. Ogadi was the one who escorted me here from the coast. He demanded a present for his efforts. I gave him a few gold trinkets, nothing that could be identified as not being of your Horde. I had hoped the revolver had been lost when fording a stream. Now I know different. He stole it.”

He had never trusted Ogadi. Then again, he rarely trusted any of his Qarths. The damn fool.

“They know of you, Velamak.”

“Only a rumor.”

“I think they know more. I could sense it from Hawthorne. The revolver was enough to cause concern, but he has seemed pressed these last few days, anxious, as if bearing more information than he would ever share with me. Perhaps one of their ships has finally located where you are.”

“As I have already told you, we’ve met three of their ships. Primitive things, actually. They were defeated with ease, their crews annihilated.”

“The humans are incessant, Velamak. You can’t stop every leak, every hole in that invisible wall you try to maintain while settling your own differences.”

Velamak shook his head. “Only rumors. Remember, the ocean is as vast as your steppe, dotted with a thousand islands, archipelagos, and then our homelands. Yes, there are humans out there, some we have never located. They spread widely across the last twelve thousand years since the Portal to their world mysteriously opened up after being asleep since the Downfall. We have set them to our purpose when necessary, slain them when they didn’t fit, but never did we allow ourselves to become enslaved to our slaves as you did.”

“Not I, those who came before me,” Jurak replied coldly. “Whatever. What I am saying is that in the years since we have learned of the rise of this human nation, we have maintained a zone of destruction on the islands where they might venture, leaving no trace.”

“And again, why did you not just attack?”

“To what gain at that moment? When the blow is to be struck, it must be annihilating, not a half measure. We knew we had gained a small edge on machines thanks to those from your world who had come through the portal nearly a hundred years back.