Preview: Chapter 10. The Battle of the Palladium

Preview: Chapter 10. The Battle of the Palladium

The arrival of Lys and her entourage revived the sagging morale of the slave underground. The women had always expected they would have to fight for their freedom. Most expected to die. But now, for the first time, they expected to win.

Yet ahead lay several months of planning, many frustrations, mistakes, betrayals and losses. Word spread slowly among the slaves, but spread it did. They’d had a hundred years to perfect their clandestine networks. The spacer intelligence agency dispensed propaganda and misinformation to counter the sedition. In response to increased repression, hundreds of slaves volunteered to arrange for their own arrest and interrogation, to mislead the authorities about their plans and their associates and the whereabouts of Lys. So when it finally came, the revolt took everyone by surprise, except its meticulous planners.

The opening moves were scheduled to occur at precisely the same time. To this day, it remains unclear how the astonishing coordination was achieved. Out of habit, the women have kept their secrets. In what has come to be known as the “night of the razors” – though only a fraction of the victims actually had their throats cut – thousands of masters were murdered in their beds by their slaves. In their bloodlust, many slaves exterminated entire spacer households; and in reprisal thousand of slaves were killed. But even as the citizens awoke to news of the carnage, reports were coming in of a far graver setback. During the night, a force of two or three hundred slaves, led by Lys herself, had launched an assault on the central transmission station for the punishment implants. Designed for the purpose of instantly disabling every slave in the city in the event of a crisis, the system by necessity included an emergency shut-off that could be used to neutralize the devices. The vanguard of the attackers had only seconds to reach their objective before the implants activated, and in that time more than half their number were put out of action or cut down; but the rest, with the momentum of sheer willpower and hatred, made it inside the station; and once they had lost possession of the transmitter, the spacers had lost control of their slaves.

The government did not lose its nerve. Rather than attempt an immediate, poorly organized counter-attack, the Tyrannos ordered all citizens to withdraw to the security of the Palladium, the vast, elevated, heavily guarded compound built in the early days of slavery, the last time that the threat of rebellion had been taken seriously. Barricades were set in place, and weapons were distributed to all able-bodied adults. Most citizens, of course, did not make it into the Palladium. With the streets now teeming with jubilant, angry slaves, they deemed it safer to remain locked in their homes. Some householders, deranged by fear, summarily executed their slaves, which merely added to the ferocity of the mob outside.

At around high noon, Lys ordered the advance on the Palladium to commence. The spacer commander charged with its defence was no fool, but he underestimated his opponents and made a serious mistake in putting just ten thousand men on the barricades, with a few thousand in reserve. Against them, a quarter of a million women and girls – half the slaves in the city – were massed. Lys sent the younger ones to the rear, but she made the hard-headed decision to throw into the first wave the old women and those slaves who lacked the education or skills that would be vital in building a new society and defending it against those determined to destroy it. Not one balked, and in places women argued and fought with each other for the honour of advancing in that first wave. A hundred years of pent-up rage was about to be unleashed.

The attack began not with shouts and battle cries but with a slow moan, rising in volume and pitch until a quarter-million voices echoed in crescendo through the enormous cavern. The first wave surged forward, staggered under a withering hail of gun blasts. In the opening minute of the battle, thousands of women fell. Without hesitation, the next line went forward. With nothing to lose, the slaves had nothing to fear. Yet it was naked flesh and bare hands against fire and missiles. They fought with the most makeshift of weapons, and those with no weapons at all fought with teeth and claws. They scrambled over the bodies of the dead and the dying.

Lys was seen to be everywhere during the desperate struggle before the barricades. She pushed her way to the front of the lines, rallying and steadying her troops, encouraging those who wavered, deploying them at points where the defences appeared weakest, exposing herself to constant danger. Wounded three times, she was physically restrained and finally dragged out of harm’s way by her subordinates. She protested that her life was of no more importance than any other’s, that she was not the revolution. They did not listen. Many women died throwing themselves in front of their commander, shielding her with their bodies.

The corpses piled up. The streets radiating from the Palladium literally ran red with blood. The air was filled with the stench of burning flesh and the cries of wounded and dying women. Each wave hurled against the barricades was cut down with a fearsome slaughter. And each wave lapped closer to the lines. The bodies stacked up ten, twenty deep, and yet they kept coming. They just kept coming. The spacers had been reassured that the slave rabble would falter at the first volley, and would disperse on the second. But they had not stopped. And it began to dawn on the alarmed defenders that they were not going to stop. Nothing was going to stop them.

The panic began as isolated murmurs of unease, that the attacks would just keep coming. Superbly skilled in the arts and science of interplanetary warfare, the spacers had no experience or training in hand-to-hand combat. Their weapons were old and unreliable. Many had answered the call to duty and left their families behind in the city, at the mercy of the rampaging slaves. Others feared that if they fell on the barricades, their loved ones in the Palladium would be defenceless.

The infection rapidly spread. While most men held their ground, a few timid individuals, and others sickened by the butchery, abandoned their positions, opening up small gaps in the lines. Exploiting these, or simply taking refuge against the storm of fire, hundreds and then thousands of women poured into the breaks, widening and deepening the breaches. Within just a few minutes, the defenders found themselves being outflanked in two dozen places as the multitude surged past and around and behind them.

Before most of the spacers even knew it, the tide of battle had turned. The anguished screams of the dying were now drowned out by blood-curdling screams of fury and vengeance. Suddenly, discipline dissolved, the line wavered, and it was every man trying to extricate himself from the enveloping chaos. They knew that any still on the barricades when the lines collapsed was a dead man. The spacers were, in general, brave. Each man who chose to stand and fight took out ten, in some cases twenty of the slaves. And they were hacked to death by a hundred more.

Finally, the pressure became too great. The remaining defenders broke and ran. Those who could not outrun their frenzied pursuers were brought down and torn to pieces. And as the first tsunami swept over the barricades, a second rebounded off it and back across the city, overwhelming everything in its path. The destruction and looting and killing continued for hours. To slow down the rampant slaves, the Tyrannos ordered the artificial sun to be dimmed, but that just made it harder for the citizens trapped outside the Palladium to defend their homes. And anyway, to light their way, the slaves set fire to anything that would burn. The rain was turned on to douse the flames, and the giant air filters ran at full capacity to clear the atmosphere of choking smoke and poisonous fumes. The Tyrannos of Pallas, most feared warlord in the Solar System, was reduced to cowering in his citadel, fighting fires and freshening the air.

It was eventually simple exhaustion which ended the first and last battle of the great slave revolt. The carnage had been appalling. Forty thousand women lost their lives in the assault on the barricades. Fifty thousand more were maimed, and many of these would soon die of their wounds. Freedom had been won at a terrible cost, but it had been won. The spacers had also suffered. It is estimated that five thousand men died in the night of the razors, another five thousand on the barricades, and more in the house-to-house fighting. The survivors were hiding throughout the city or entrenched inside the Palladium. Yet the spacers’ position should have been unassailable. The slaves outnumbered them by just two to one, and they had on their side overwhelming firepower. But the impact of the revolt, after a century of complacency, was devastating; and the spacers now discovered what the slaves had known for a hundred years, that once demoralization sets in, it quickly turns to paralyzing despair.

Lys was still having her wounds tended, receiving reports of casualties and continuing action in various parts of the city, making plans for the next phase of the campaign. And then a remarkable thing happened. A message came down from the Palladium. The Tyrannos had called for a truce. He summoned Lys to negotiate. He proposed an alliance.

Lys immediately guessed the reason for this change of heart. Already, the other spacer colonies would be gathering their forces for an expedition against Pallas. The incipient slave rebellion had to be quashed before the contagion spread; and as a bonus, the arrogant Palladians could be put in their proper place. Old scores would be settled. The Tyrannos and his advisers remembered the lesson about overweening pride their predecessors had taught to the people of Ceres.

Although some of her lieutenants warned of a trap, to avoid needless further bloodshed, Lys had no real option but to answer the summons. She went alone, and was escorted to the senate house along an avenue lined with tens of thousands of angry, frightened citizens. She chose to go naked, as the slave she still was, and she did proper obeisance, prostrating herself at the feet of the Tyrannos. Then she stood up, raised her head, looked him in the eye and spoke two words. “Freedom, now.”

The Tyrannos offered Lys and her closest supporters immediate freedom, and an amnesty for all other slaves.

She said nothing.

He promised a gradual, phased-in emancipation, with all females not born into slavery to be liberated forthwith.

She said nothing.

He patiently explained that it was a complex situation, and that quick solutions would lead to confusion and disorder.

She turned and began walking towards the exit. He yelled after her. She kept walking.

The Tyrannos shouted: “Arrest her!”

And another remarkable thing happened. No one moved.

The spacers were, above all else, men of honour. Their word was a sacred bond. For a man like the Tyrannos, a pledge to a slave meant nothing, but to the rest, a guarantee of safe passage carried more weight than a fleet of battle-cruisers.

As she reached the threshold, Lys heard the voice of the Tyrannos, reduced to a thin whisper.

“Under the legislative, executive and judicial powers invested in my person and my office, as Tyrannos of Pallas, supreme leader, commander and protector of the Palladian people, I hereby decree that all females enslaved under our laws are hereby free, and that the institution of slavery as established in our constitution is hereby abolished.”

Alysha Sarton stopped, smiled and turned around.