Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
Comrades in Arms (4 page)
— 8 —
They had been on the run for days.
Before he and Click set off again, Rader had insisted on burying the other scout he had instinctively killed. He remained tense, all of his sensors alert, knowing that the third recon scout would report to Base.
With the two soldiers buried, showing a last glimmer of responsibility, Rader had activated his helmet communicator and transmitted the location of the two graves. He added a brief message to let Commissioner Sobel know he was going offline and not to expect any further reports from the field, then he tore out the locator, disengaged the built-in comm, and told Click they had to move.
The Earth League would want to deactivate and analyze Rader. It was absurd to believe he could surrender, explain what he had done, and apologize to his superiors for his mistake. That wouldn’t bring the dead soldiers back to life. Now that he had proved to be dangerously unreliable as a Deathguard, he would be “retired,” and the Commissioner would quietly remove his name from the books.
And the Earth League would kill Click.
Addressing his own situation, Click was certain he would be decapitated in a public ceremony if he ever turned himself over to the Jaxxan military. They could not surrender to either side. Rader didn’t know how much time he had left, but he refused to waste it. They were on their own.
On the day after Rader met Click, five Earth League trackers had found them, set up an ambush, and attacked. Click, the first to spot the trackers, set up a clumsy energy-web that knocked out one of the fighters. When the other four turned their weapons on the Jaxxan deserter, Rader let his Werewolf Trigger take over, and he eliminated them with professional efficiency.
More blood on his hands.
During Rader’s training, the counselors had insisted that Deathguards had no conscience. Although he didn’t think that was true, Rader did not let the guilt paralyze him. While he would not have chosen to kill other Earth League soldiers, they had given him no choice. The best solution to protect himself, and Click, and other soldiers would be to avoid any further encounters.
— 9 —
Commissioner Sobel’s shuttle touched down on the Détente Asteroid’s shared landing field, as had been previously arranged. It felt strange to be here at the same time as his Jaxxan counterpart. Uneasy, Sobel glanced behind him at the five specially chosen soldiers who rode in the shuttle—not as an honor guard, but as candidates for the unorthodox mission Kiltik had proposed.
It had taken Sobel some time to realize that the Jaxxan Warlord was serious; the idea proved that the alien military leader was in fact
alien
. Sobel would never have suggested such an insane approach, and yet …
A joint team composed of both human and Jaxxan soldiers to hunt down and eliminate the two deserters as swiftly as possible? If it was a trick, then Sobel would lose five good fighters … but he had already lost almost three times that many in his solo efforts to control the situation. He decided to risk it. This mess had to be cleaned up, swept under the rug, and the fewer people outside of Fixion who knew about it, the better.
Deathguards were the best fighters in the Earth League, although not necessarily stable or controllable, as Rader had proved. His hand-picked soldiers were specialists in their own right; Kiltik had chosen similarly talented Jaxxan hunters.
His five specialists crouched on the benches, anxiously shifting their laser rifles from hand to hand. The Commissioner had given them strict instructions not to open fire on Warlord Kiltik or any other Jaxxans when they disembarked on the Détente Asteroid. That would ignite a powderkeg, and Sobel did not want to deal with the resulting paperwork.
As the door split open and the disembarkation ramp extended, the men jumped out and stood protectively beside their Commissioner. A line of warrior caste Jaxxans greeted them, and the two groups faced each other, as if daring someone to break the agreement.
Sobel said to his team with a scowl, “Enough posturing. We’ve got work to do.”
An alien, obviously the Warlord, walked across the landing field, sliding through the line of stiff Jaxxans. Sobel actually recognized Kiltik after only two viewscreen conversations, picking out distinctive features on the alien face.
Kiltik bowed his head, bending his stalk of neck. “Commissioner Sobel?”
“Good to meet you in person, Warlord!” He reached out to shake Kiltik’s brittle hand, but the Jaxxans reacted as if it were a hostile gesture. The air thrummed with building energy-webs, and the human specialists brought their laser rifles to bear.
But the Commissioner knocked the nearest soldier’s rifle aside. “That’s a friendly gesture among my people, Warlord. We’re not here to kill each other now.”
Kiltik stood silent, as if reading Sobel’s emotions. “I sense hostility in you, but it is not directed at us. For the moment.”
Sobel nodded. “I’m glad your empathic ability can break the ice.”
The Warlord fought back a spasm of coughing. “Please pardon my cough—it comes from breathing this thin, dry air for years.”
“No problem at all.” The Commissioner gestured for his five specialists to follow him toward the normally empty embassy buildings. “Is the conference room ready? We’ve got important things to do.”
— 10 —
For several days, Rader and Click made their way across the landscape, remaining hidden, staying alive, but without a plan. Each still possessed high-density ration packs, but the food would run out soon enough.
Despite the Deathguard’s best attempts to remain out of sight, they were repeatedly attacked by patrols—both human and Jaxxan—eluding some, killing others.
He and Click sat together at night, quietly brooding, thinking of what they could do next. Night on Fixion was oddly different from how Rader remembered nights should be. The dark sky was strewn with brilliant clumps of asteroids from the Fixion Belt, glittering almost-moons that added to the feeble starlight. He didn’t think he would ever get used to the low gravity, the thin atmosphere, the wrong constellations.
He would not see the skies of Earth again, no matter what. Even if he hadn’t fallen in with Click, if he’d been a good and loyal Deathguard, he would have rampaged behind enemy lines until the alien soldiers destroyed him, or until his systems shut down from cascading failures in the cyborg process. What remained of his human body—wired up and intertwined with weapons and armor—could not withstand the shock for long. Maybe biological tissue rejection would get him, or faulty mechanical and electronic integration.
The Werewolf Trigger was oddly quiet inside his head, and he felt no compulsion to rampage among Jaxxans and slaughter them. Maybe that compass of violence had also gotten skewed, the neural hookups damaged somehow by his second thoughts. But no, it was more than that.
Each day, Click focused his thoughts and manifested the shimmering holystal. After watching his comrade’s meditation, Rader had begun emulating the process as best he could. The Werewolf Trigger could send him into a murderous frenzy at any time, but he was learning to quell the urges. He hadn’t known that a Deathguard could control the trigger—no one had mentioned it in his training.
Now, Click rotated and inspected the glowing image he had manifested, and even Rader could see the extreme changes in the crystal pattern. As his mistakes piled up and his options became more limited, the three-dimensional map of Click’s life became more jumbled. The holystal was a sorry mess, a lump with no discernible paths leading into the future.
“We can’t just stay here and hope no one finds us,” Rader said. “We’ve got to get off of this asteroid.”
During basic training with his squadmates, Rader had studied the layout of the Fixion Belt. He knew the handful of human outposts and remembered one of the first facilities the League had built here: an automated observatory on a small outlying asteroid, established before the initial encounter with Jaxxans. Observation dishes mapped the deep cosmos and monitored the Belt’s other asteroids. Years ago, those telescopes had been the first to spot Jaxxan incursions into the asteroid belt, watching the aliens build their own bases on the handful of habitable rocks.
The observatory was out of the way and uninhabited, but with functional life support installed and left behind by the original construction crew.
“I know someplace safe. We’ll have time and breathing space—if we can get there.”
After Rader described the observatory, Click said, “But we cannot live there for long. It can only be a temporary measure.”
Rader’s voice was bleak. “My life is just a temporary measure. If we reach the observatory, maybe I’ll stick around long enough to help you find a safer place. One step at a time. First, we’ve got to get from here to that little asteroid.”
Click pondered for a moment. “If we need nothing more than an in-system ship to take us through the asteroids to the observatory, the Jaxxan base’s landing field has many capable vessels. We could take one.”
“I couldn’t fly it,” Rader said. “How about you?”
“That depends on the specific type of vessel. I flew several of those craft during my team’s work on the System Holystal. We could try.”
“We could try,” Rader agreed.
Click looked across the landscape to where the distant Jaxxan base and its landing field glowed above the foreshortened horizon. Suddenly his holystal shifted, adjusted itself to the new reality—and one new bright spire emerged.
— 11 —
Commissioner Sobel traveled in secret to a landing field near the main Jaxxan base, where he would meet with Warlord Kiltik. Together, they would unleash their special team behind battlefield lines to take care of the embarrassing situation before rumors could leak out.
Sobel could cover up the problem for another few days, but high command would know about it before long. He wanted to be able to announce that he’d eliminated the defective Deathguard before uncomfortable questions came down the pipeline. He didn’t have much time. Although he had no understanding of Jaxxan politics or military protocol, he sensed that Kiltik felt just as much incentive and anxiety.
As he and the alien Warlord watched the ten human and Jaxxan trackers demonstrate their cooperative efforts, Kiltik startled him with an unexpected comment. “I have learned that your people call us ‘cockroaches,’ Commissioner.”
Sobel tried to cover his embarrassment. “Roaches? Yes, I’ve heard that. It’s just an Earth insect. There are some … physical similarities.”
“Not just an Earth insect, Commissioner, but one that is considered filthy, one that wallows in or feeds on garbage. In reality, the Jaxxan race is quite fastidious.”
Sobel gave an unconvincing laugh. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a common practice among grunts—er, lower level soldiers—to create derogatory names for the enemy. I’m certain your race does the same. Don’t you have any insulting terms for humans?”
Warlord Kiltik twitched. “We call them
humans
. That is all the insult we need.”
The ten-member hunter squad continued training. The human soldiers had already been briefed specifically on how to kill a Deathguard (details they would not reveal to their alien counterparts). The current exercises showed the team members how to effectively combine Earth League laser weaponry and Jaxxan energy-web techniques. Most importantly, they got used to working with one another. That was the big barrier to break.
Kiltik said, “I find it discouraging that ten trained fighters are necessary to combat two deserters.”
“No one is more annoyed than I am, but those two have already killed fourteen of my fighters and six of yours. I should be proud of our Deathguard’s fighting skills, but I cannot help but wonder if your soldier somehow corrupted him.”
Kiltik choked his dry, rustling cough. “Who corrupted whom? Remember, Jaxxans are empaths. How can one of us possibly remain normal when constantly bombarded with your Deathguard’s alien perspectives? Our deserter was already flawed, in the wrong place after being removed from the System Holystal project. Your Deathguard has irreparably damaged him.”
A Jaxxan trotted up from one of the outpost buildings and handed the Warlord a small geometric crystal. Kiltik turned the object over in his hands, feeling the facets and reading its shape. When he finished, the crystal vanished from his hands.
“I have just been informed by my reconnaissance that the two deserters were spotted in the wastelands, moving away from the front. Then they vanished again.”
Sobel frowned. “If we knew where they were going, our hunter squad could intercept them.”
The Commissioner remembered visiting Rader in the med-center when he was no more than a few mangled lumps of flesh wired up to life-support; he’d had high hopes for his newest Deathguard. Now, he just wanted him removed from the equation.
He and Kiltik stood together, admiring their special team.
***
High above the ecliptic, bright starlight reflected off of the giant planes of polished cometary ice and majestic crystal spires being assembled there by Jaxxan imaginers and psychics.
The human military did not know the location of the System Holystal construction above the asteroid belt. Even if they did stumble upon the site, they wouldn’t understand it. Warlord Kiltik did not understand it himself. Holystal interpretation was not the duty of his caste, but he trusted the skills and knowledge of those who manifested such a representation. They could read the lines of fate, the fractures and angles that showed which paths Jaxxans could take into the future.
Thousands of workers operated here in space. While high-powered imaginers used their mental powers to create holographic portions of the ever-changing structure, teams of builders pushed small chunks of orbiting ice and diverted comets to deliver the materials here.
The Jaxxan race now inhabited five star systems. In each one, a revered System Holystal such as this one guided their decisions. The Jaxxan deserter who had joined forces with the human Deathguard had once been a skilled holystal imaginer who could understand subtle nuances in the cosmic constructions.
Now the Warlord flew in a small observation shuttle, piloted by his chief adviser. It was part of Kiltik’s regular briefing to plan the next week’s tactics, but he was losing confidence in the adviser’s recommendations. Any decent interpreter should have been able to warn against the current mess. The chief adviser knew his failing and desperately wanted to return to the Warlord’s good graces.
The observation shuttle approached the gigantic holystal, and Kiltik marveled at its facets, saw the distant starlight that reflected from the shining surfaces. He realized that it had been a mistake to demote the holystal engineer and turn him into a mere battlefield soldier. Observing the facets and angles, the Warlord could see how easy it would be to predict a different future from all the complexity. Even his chief adviser now suspected that some of the deserter’s contradictory warnings might have had some merit.
However, the deserter’s actions were indefensible: collaborating with a human—and not just any human, but a Deathguard who was single-handedly responsible for the murder of dozens if not hundreds of Jaxxan soldiers! It was shameful, an embarrassment, and Warlord Kiltik needed the situation resolved. In that, he was completely aligned with his human counterpart.
Reticent and chastised, the chief adviser flew the survey shuttle in a tight orbit over the giant holystal. Kiltik remained silent, his disapproval hanging in the enclosed cockpit. The adviser devoted his attention to the kaleidoscopic facets, the ever-changing fissures, crystalline angles, cracks and impurities, each of which indicated a different future, a path of fate that must be heeded.
Finally, the Warlord expressed his impatience. “I am not sightseeing. I am here to ferret out information. You are my interpreter. If you wish to regain my respect, then find answers.” He turned his polished eyes to the nervous chief adviser. “Look at the holystal, find the portions that are relevant to these deserters. I need to know what their plans are. Our hunter squad must know where they intend to go.”
The adviser’s voice was thin and warbling. “The holystal is still under construction, Warlord. Even if we find the proper facets, any answers are merely within a locus of possibilities.”
“Then I need those possibilities. Narrow them down so I can make my decisions.”
The chief adviser guided the survey shuttle over an expanse of stalagmite-covered ice and broken shards, a jumble that meant something to a Jaxxan properly versed in interpretation. “There, Warlord!” The adviser pointed to a flurry of cracks and warped transparency in the polished ice. “That appeared since my last visit here.”
“What changed?”
“The deserters have made a concrete plan, which is reflected here. This allows us to draw conclusions.”
Kiltik was careful not to praise the man too much. “How accurate can you be?”
“I have a … reasonable certainty.” He was cautious, not wanting to commit to what might be another error. The chief adviser stared through the windowport, assessing the ripples and distortion in the crystalline structure. “We cannot extrapolate far into the future, but I can project where they intend to go next.”
Kiltik felt pleased. “If that information is accurate enough for our hunter squad to intercept them, then we won’t need any further projections.”