Tomasz Kołodziejczak lives in Warsaw, where hę works as the managing editor of a comics series at the Egmont Publishing House. His first short story "Kukiełki" (The Puppets) was published in 1985. Hę is the author of numerous short stories and four novels. His main interest lies in science fiction, although hę has published a few fantasy stories and a novel. Hę has written children's fantasy as well. In 1996 his novel Kolor/ sztandarów (The Colours of the Banners), a fragment of which is reprinted here, won the Zajdel Award. Hę has been translated into Czech and Russian.
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Prologue
"It's coming! It's coming!" came the scout's voice. Kaius Klein touched the sensor in the helmet with his tongue, resetting the suit from "waiting" mode to "alert" mode. He was instantly surrounded by the dome of a magnetic field. The soldier felt plastic reinforcements clasping his muscles and tendons stiffen. The helmet screen matted, and after a moment the cross hairs of the targeting device appeared. The glove links clung tightly to the blaster interface. He didn't see - of course couldn't - when the micros swimming in his bloodstream started to produce stimulating hormones, or when filters, that were to clean the blood °f dangerous metabolic by-products, opened up.
He felt a slight surge, and then settled into a state of controlled euphoria. They had new outfits and new weapons: field emitters, field blocks and radiation detectors. Anally they could take care of those bastards!
The Korgard tank emerged from the transport tunnel that led to Alberdan, and for a moment it hovered over the black surface of the highway.
Once, three thousand people had lived in this town. Last Year Alberdan was taken by the Korgards. Now the infers had built another fortress there, and their convoys
cruised regularly between the fortresses. Nobody knew what they carried, because the transporter columns, secured by battle tanks, were unreachable. When a single vehicle was damaged, it self-destructed instantly, and the most that could be gathered from it was a handful of radioactive dust. But the Gladian soldiers had a new weapon, and it should enable them to capture a Korgard vehicle.
The armoured tank sprang forward - an orange pyramid covered with black symbols. It gathered speed, receding further and further from Klein's position, until it vanished around the curve. The soldier's heart thumped, from the adrenaline.
"Signal!" The order in his headphones wasn't directed
at him.
Two more kilometres and hidden positions spewed fire.
"He's hit!" Klein heard the joyous voice of Rabel Korfu. Then he heard other cries and a series of screeches that marked the satellite reports.
"My hand!"
"It's working! It isn't self-destructing!"
"Klein! It's near you!"
His commander's voice roused him.
The Korgard vehicle returned. It emerged from behind the bend slowly, slightly tipped, heading for the transport tunnel. In a fraction of a second Klein's suit changed from "alert" to "battle". The military coprocessor took control of most of the soldier's reflexes. In one moment three phantoms flew out to draw the enemy's fire, his hands raised the blaster, and his eyes locked on the target.
The rifle rattled, and out of the corner of his eye Klein noticed that the others in his group were also firing. The armoured tank answered with a salvo. Two phantoms burst into flames even before they reached the highest point of their trajectory; the third, when it started to descend. Klein also saw an explosion on the other side of the road and felt a little sting in his arm - a sign that one of his men had died.
But the soldiers also scored. The Korgard transporter still flew with the force of its momentum, but it dropped
noticeably, and the tip of the pyramid pointed to the earth. Klein didn't hear it crash on the highway - his helmet isolated him from the outside world very efficiently. The vehicle burrowed onto the grey surface, ripping it's smoothness. For a moment it wobbled, was still. Six seconds had passed. Time began to resume its normal rhythm.
"Klein, we're sending in the wires! The rest are shielded!"
"All right!"
Klein stood up and slowly went forward. Next to him walked Garbich Petty and two netters - "wires".
He knew that the other soldiers from his group were now switching on the protective force bubbles, in case the tank blew up.
Two soldiers and two netters with their robots approached the machine. The humans - in their shellproof suits, with bulging appendages of antennae, barrels and sensors, with humps of cartridge pouches and life support systems - looked like beetles scurrying to a carcass.
They halted a few steps before the vehicle, burrowed with its sharp tip in the earth. It was more than 50 meters long, a strange machine of mysterious design. Just as mysterious were the technology, goals, and battle tactics of the Korgards. And everything else connected with that race.
"On automatic," Klein heard the voice of a wire. "We're trying to take control of the Korgard steering system."
"Over a Korgard computer?" wondered Petty.
"Electrons are the same everywhere, soldier."
The second wire froze, with one hand raised and the other clutched to his chest. Then he slowly changed the Position of his hands and moved forward. His partner also fell silent and went into the same trance.
Probably they had interfaced with the onboard compu-ter and were now fighting with its defence systems. Their brains tried to negotiate the electronic world created by the Korgards, breaking through the barriers that were put |*P there, while in the same time remaining in this world. ^*ein couldn't imagine this. But electrons were the same everywhere, weren't they?
Suddenly one of the wires cried out and fell. The suit took control of his inert body at the last moment and only thanks to this the engineer didn't crack his skull on the highway. He fell softly to his knees, supported by his hands on the ground. In that moment the transporter wobbled, as if it wanted to rise and fly away. Luckily nothing like that happened, but on the orange surface of the pyramid covered with black crosses a dark rift appeared.
Klein kneeled, repositioning his rifle for a shot. Garbich leaped to the side, wanting to protect the wires with his own body. But no attack followed.
"It's only a hatch,' sighed Garbich. "Get the robots forward."
The steel mound of the armoured tank opened wider and wider, until its rim rested on the highway. The servos still tried to hold the vehicle, but they lost their battle with its weight and froze. Klein approached the hatch, Garbich two steps behind him. The engineers still danced like puppets moved by the hands of a mad puppet master.
The robots moved before the soldiers. They crawled in the direction of the hatch - two cylindrical shapes on caterpillars, the crowning achievement of Gladian engineering. It was said that even the Dominion didn't have machines able to withstand Korgard technology. Both robots examined the ground before them and sent out a constant stream of information to the satellite. Even if something happened, they had registered everything. Every bit of information could be useful.
When the robots crawled on the flap of the hatch, the armoured tank wobbled again. Then they disappeared into its dark interior.
"We're moving in!" decided Garbich. The soldiers followed the robots. A step, two steps. In the headphones were the strange sounds of the hacking wires, the reports of the fire stations, and the satellite saying that there was no requital expedition from any of the alien forts. Only now did Klein notice that the black crosses on the orange surface of the vehicle weren't painted on but engraved. Garbich set his foot on the flap of the hatch and lowered his head to
get in. Klein moved to the side, to have an unobstructed line of fire. They entered the dark compartment, which was filled with fumes of gas. "A mixture of ammonia and helium" - reported the machines after a while. Klein adjusted the filters of the helmet eyepieces and gradually distinguished the surrounding shapes. Garbich stood as if turned to stone; Klein heard his soft whisper in the headphones:
"Oh God! Oh my God, they are people...." In that instant, Klein's sight finally penetrated the darkness. Two survey robots crawled slowly along the walls crammed with boxes filled with a transparent liquid. And in these boxes...
One next to the other, tens of human bodies. Strange, deformed, battered, with scalped skulls, amputated limbs, nostrils and jaws, with the skin removed from some places, so that muscles could be seen. On every one of those bodies pulsed rhythmically dark, oblong lumps. And suddenly Klein realized something else. These crippled people lived, and their wide open eyes tried to penetrate the layer of liquid and the murkiness which filled the compartment. They were looking at him!
Part I
1
"Ladies and gentlemen." A projection of a coloured butterfly blossomed by the head of each passenger. A projection of a talking butterfly. "In five minutes we will reach Perelandra station. The train will stop for three minutes. See you again in the coaches of the Lepidopterl'me."
The butterflies fluttered with their yellow-green wings and disappeared, leaving in the air a lucid fading trace and the delicate scent of flowers.
Daniel Bondaree smiled. The coloured butterfly and the scent of flowers always greeted him when he returned home. He left his seat, instinctively smoothing his shiny
black uniform, and when the capsule halted and opened the door, he stepped out with the other passengers onto the platform.
His parents' house stood at the edge of a small town with the sonorous name of Perelandra. It was a little building with white walls and a flat roof covered with photocollector tiles. On every corner there stood a mast that held a windmill turbine. Daniel remembered the time when bright flowers grew all around the house, which his mother used to arrange into unbelievable mixes of Terran and Gladian species.
When his father died, his mother stopped growing flowers. She became more silent every day and seemed to shrink. The in-house med, which Daniel checked every time he visited, informed him regularly that his mother wasn't ill. But Daniel knew she wasn't well either - she probably wanted to join his father. Daniel was the only reason for staying; he held her to life as a pin holds a butterfly in a museum showcase. When he finished his first seven years of duty and was transferred to headquarters, she decided that he was safe now and didn't need her care anymore. She died. He didn't sell the house or rent it. He lived and worked in the capital of the province, Shangsheng, but he visited Perelandra almost every time he had a vacation, Lately there were fewer vacations. The army and its judges formations, the Thanators, were on constant standby. Daniel didn't hide his surprise when he was granted a six-day vacation yesterday evening. To be taken immediately. His direct superior gave him no reason. So Daniel closed all his most important cases, giving a few of them to his co-workers, and left for Perelandra.
Whenever he came, the neighbours greeted him with respect, and the kids stared at his shiny uniform with fascination. It was the same this time when he got out at the station and walked slowly down the streets. The town had hardly changed over the years; here even the Korgard threat seemed like a distant drug-induced nightmare.
No military actions were ever conducted near Perelandra, and its inhabitants never had to be evacuated.
"Mr. Bondaree," said the girl, more stating than asking. She stood on the other side of the fence but didn't open the
gate.
"fjo we know each other?"
"Beetles don't often come to this street." Stressing beetles.
pacifist students and the political propagandists of the
Submissive Party called the thanators that. It was short for "dung beetle". They said that that's how the judges looked in their shiny uniforms and battle armour.
The pacifists hated the executioners.
"All the old ladies in the neighbourhood faint when they remember their young defender," she said.
"All the old ladies in the neighbourhood were friends of my mother and know me since childhood," he said sharply. "What do you want?"
"It was you who knocked at my door. I just wanted to be polite and tell you personally that we're neighbours. The Habergens decided that it was time to move to the Rest Palace. I bought this place from them. As you can see, the house has changed a bit. Did you shoot anybody today? Did you catch a bad guy today?"
"No, but two days ago I saw a woman your age, after a bad guy cut off her nose and legs. She was still alive." Turning away, he said quietly: "Thank you. I'm sorry."
As he opened the door of his parents' house, he noticed that the girl was talking to her gate, waving her hands vigorously.
2
It wasn't really an occupation. Gladius hadn't been defeated or conquered. All the state's institutions operated normally; people worked and played. Yet they lived in a state of war.
The colony on planet Gladius, in the Multon Star System, was founded two hundred years ago as one of the so-called Free Worlds.
It had been a gigantic undertaking. Investors had to buy the data from private prospecting companies, which
looked for the worlds that could support human civilization. Then they sent small groups of scouts and engineers; later they had to finance the construction of automated factories and other infrastructures on the surface of the planet. In the meantime the new colony had to be legalized, to get its laws approved by the Solar jurisdiction. The final step was to charter the enormous cooling ships, jokingly called "morgues," and to buy access to hyperspace routes. Now the Code of Law could be pronounced - a collection of rules that would be in force in the newly formed state - and they could start recruiting settlers.
Humans settled successive worlds, founding states ruled by different laws, espousing various religions and morals, connected in different degrees to the growing Solar Dominion. Each of these world-states had the right to exploration and colonization of its own systems and to sustain outposts at the nearest hyperspace gate. But it was the Dominion that controlled and protected the spiderweb of hyperspace routes that determined the borders of human expansion. It also retained the right to represent human beings before alien civilizations and mediate in arguments between the various colonies.
It took "morgues" two years to fly from Earth to Gladius, one and a half year of that in normal space at sublight speed. The hyperjump technique was imperfect, the coordinates could be calculated only approximately, and the next gates had to be reached with conventional propulsion. Because of relativity the one and a half year of travel at sublight speed equalled almost twenty-five years on Earth.
Colonization started, and closer ties with the Solar Dominion were established ten years later. At this time in the centre of the human empire the crystallization of new authority hubs followed, and science, its progress impelled by the War of the Four Worlds, had no trouble transcending the next conceptual borders.
Eventually it turned out that Gladius was some thirty-five years behind the Dominion in technology, which the Dominion didn't want to share anyway. The charter al-
lowed the colonists to take the big continent on the northern hemisphere, leaving the southern island to the Dominion. Since that time the political history of Gladius was the story of rivalry between two options: to maintain their political and economical independence or to join the Dominion. During the last hundred and fifty years the followers of the first option had had a clear preponderance. But in recent years every defeat in battle with the Korgards strengthened the position of the advocates of submission to the Dominion. It was common belief that in reward for its obedience Gladius would receive military and technological assistance, which would allow them to rout the aggressor.
When the Korgards arrived, Gladius held a population of over six hundred million people. They cultivated the continent, colonized other planets of the Multon System, and preserved official relations with diplomatic and commercial outposts of the Dominion located on the southern continent. Gladian science was still below the average of what human civilization had attained. True, because of the slow import of technologies and Gladius' own research this gap wasn't growing - as usually happened to independent worlds on the edges of the hyperjump routes. But it turned out that the Korgards were still too strong....
The first one to spot them was Ferdinand Konig, the second pilot of the transport ship Iron Queen, which delivered bioproducts to the mining trawlers in the Flamberg Asteroid Belt. Konig ignored the initial report of a vessel that didn't answer hailing requests. First, because he was a professional and knew that every stochastic computer sometimes behaved erratically. Second, he knew his colleagues, who would do anything to have a little fun during the week-long journey from Gladius orbit to the exploration station in the Flamberg Belt. Even feed misinformation to a ship's steering module.
But when Konig received confirmation of the initial data, he decided to switch on the hailing signal. Around the ship's control room - a sphere of three meters diameter, filled with neuronic gel - gathered the other crew members. They
destroyed it. After the Korgard tanks left, only huge radioactive fields were left.
Each of these actions had a tremendous impact on public opinion, and led to ineffective retaliatory operations by the survivors of the Gladian army and increasingly acrimonious political clashes. In the meantime more and more of old - and even new - inhabitants returned to the depopulated areas near the forts. Living there was safer because any other town of the free planet Gladius could be attacked and destroyed.
Special paramilitary evacuation services were formed to warn the people of the Korgard expeditions and organize the evacuation from the threatened area. The stable settlement structure of the planet was shaken, floods of refugees moved to places thought as safe, and migration to the satellite bases and other planets in the Multon System increased. Those however couldn't accept all the refugees. Very few could afford the hyperjump. Simultaneously more and more inhabitants of Gladius demanded that the Electors Council pay homage to the Dominion and call for its mighty help.
(fragment of the novel)
Translated by Małgorzata Wilk