In the Hall of the Martian King (24 page)

Jak swallowed hard; it was an irritating point, but Dujuv was telling him the toktru truth, just as Jak had asked. Nonetheless
… “Duj, it’s a good point, but … this is a high-stakes mission. I can’t quite bring myself to give up when we’re so close
to Freehold and to attaining all the mission objectives. Not when there’s a chance, and I think there is.”

“Besides,” Waynong said, “this is the mission that’s essential to my career.”

In the gray, gradually rising light, Jak could see Dujuv’s eyebrow go up, so hard and fast that he could practically hear
it crunch to a stop on his friend’s forehead.

“So—with reservations noted—” Jak said, “we’re going to fight, but I want everyone to stay alert and ready to roll over fast
if we have to.” Dujuv nodded deeply, once, almost bowing. Jak nodded back. “All right, what’s the axis of approach?” Jak asked.

“About nine degrees south of true west.”

“All right, then,” Jak said. “Box guard, by the numbers, just like in gen school Citizen Basic. Set the square at three hundred
meters. Northwest—Sib. Southwest—Shadow. Northeast—Gweshira. Southeast—Dujuv.” Jak was playing this very much like Citizen
Basic, the year of military training that all Hive citizen-candidates underwent in gen school at the age of sixteen. In a
solar system where war had been endemic for a thousand years, every citizen of a large, powerful republic had to have some
understanding of basic military procedures, and of what it was to command and to follow.

Box guard was a way for a small armed group to defend itself against an oncoming airborne attack; it was neither the best
nor the most effective way, but it was easy to learn, and not severely flawed, and therefore everyone in gen school basic
had practiced leading and following through a box guard deployment.

Sibroillo, Dujuv, Gweshira, and Shadow on the Frost were the best trained and the best shots in the group; the orthodox way
was to put the best shots at the outer corners. Jak added, “Sib, you’re the closest thing to an expert we have with the laser
pistol—you take that.” His uncle accepted it gravely, checking the charge and swapping in a fresh block.

Next, within that square, Jak set up the interior diamond, seventy-five meters on the side: “West—me. South—Pikia. East—Xlini.
North—Clarbo. Fire on the first shot from either side, except Gweshira—Gweshira, take the first shot, on your initiative.
It’s your call, but if you can make your first shot at their rearmost, we’ll have a pretty much classical ambush, as you no
doubt know.”

Clarbo raised a hand as if to speak and Pikia turned and handed him a slug rifle; he appeared to start at it, then to stare
at it as if he had never seen one, but it clearly made him forget whatever he was about to say.

Jak was hoping to have some good luck, for once, just for variety; if it was possible for Gweshira to hold fire until she
could hit the enemy rear, since she was the one farthest from them, it should put the foremost enemy at point-blank range
for Jak’s front shooters, and ensure that their whole party was attacked at once; whatever surprise was possible (probably
none) it would be maximized (probably to zero). “Now, places, people, and get under cover. Good luck.”

At least there was an abundance of broken terrain to take cover in. The area they had crashed in was a little spandrel, less
than half a kilometer on a side, between three very-weathered Bombardment craters. The thrice-smashed soil had collapsed and
bulged in so many different directions that there were dozens of small peaks and pits to hide in.

Jak found a position between two head-high boulders, with a good natural firing slit pointing in the right direction between
them, and an overhang to stay under until the enemy aircraft grounded. His purse told him that he was less than three meters
from the map coordinates of his assigned spot in the inner diamond. He checked and readied his slug rifle; it was Hive manufacture
and had been Hive Spatial maintained, so it was in fine shape.

Light from the gray-blue sky overhead was now bright enough to read by, though the sun itself would not rise for another half
hour. Jak laid out mag reloads even though the battle would probably not last two hundred shots or five minutes.

With the spare magazines at hand, Jak put on his goggles and sat watching his sector of the sky. “Purse, comcheck everyone.”

“All other purses in the party are set to your general channel.”

“Good. Do I have back channels to Gweshira and Dujuv?”

“You do now. I’ve set them up and their purses have acknowledged.”

“Good.” Jak pressed the reward spot and his purse chee-bled softly, happy to have pleased him. “Now put a situation map up
on my goggles, transparent, overlaid on a five-power real-time view.”

A ghostly map faded into existence before Jak’s eyes; the surrounding landscape seemed to leap closer. The approaching green
wedges of the enemy would have cleared the horizon within two minutes, had they continued flying at that speed and altitude.
But even as Jak made that estimate, the oncoming flyers began a quick descent to cover just over the horizon. So far, whoever
their pursuers were, their tactics were just as by-the-book as Jak’s were.

Jak’s forces as yet had no way to engage the enemy; their one laser pistol could only fire in a straight line, and the slug
throwers were treaty-limited for the Harmless Zone, and reached only about two kilometers at best, not even to the horizon.
Jak regretted that very much because right now would have been the perfect time to hit the enemy, before they were down and
into cover. At least the other side seemed to be at a complementary disadvantage; though they apparently had non-Harmless
Zone-legal tech, they weren’t firing, which meant, probably, that they hadn’t specked the positions of Jak’s team closely
enough to use their far superior firepower.

As soon as the other side had gotten off their flyers, they sent them on robot pilot at Jak’s forces, the tiny craft coming
over the horizon zigging and zagging close to the surface as if scouting or doing close air support. The buzzing wing-and-rotor
craft were supposed to draw fire and cause Jak’s force to give away positions, but they were backlit by the bright predawn.
Everyone could easily see that they carried no weapons and that their trapeze seats were empty.

Jak kept his attention on the now-flickering green wedges on the map. Now that the nine fighters from the other side were
on the ground, the purse was having a hard time assembling enough information from overhead satellites, stray radar, and all
the myriad other clues out on the net. Consequently the green wedges flickered in and out of existence and instead of an identifying
number often bore only a yellow x, indicating that there was definitely one of them there but the purse was unconfident about
which, or even a yellow question mark, indicating the purse only thought that it was more likely than not that one was there.

But the flickering green wedges, when they existed, were drawing ever closer, and as they came closer, some of the party’s
own instruments began to pick up the enemy forces, so that the green wedges flickered less, and bore black numbers more often.

The terrain was just as broken for the attackers as it was for Jak’s team; their cover was as good, and they darted and zigzagged
their way toward his position. Eventually he had a clear fix on all nine of them on his map, and had settled on following
the guide dots in his goggles to find Enemy Number Five, the one at the center of the formation who might possibly be the
commander. (Though Enemy Number Three or Enemy Number Eight might also be.)

Almost, it might have been a fight between the beanies in a friendly game of Maniples, except that through the map, in the
real image with its steadily improving light, he caught glimpses of the tiny black stick-figure of his target, crossing between
two rocks or coming over a low ridge. Jak waited for the moment and hoped the figure would be in his sights when it was time
to pull the trigger.

Enemy Number Nine, the rearmost green wedge, crossed the faint, blue line on the map overlay that indicated the outermost
accurate range of Gweshira’s slug rifle. For a long breath nothing happened, and then Enemy Number Nine must have exposed
himself, for a single shot cracked from her rifle. The green wedge with the black 9 on it stopped moving on the faintly glowing
map; he had taken cover or been hit.

Jak spared that no thought. The side of Enemy Number Five’s head was just emerging beside a big rock, and Jak fired at it
less than a heartbeat after Gweshira’s shot. The figure fell forward into the open and lay still. Jak tracked with his rifle,
looking for another target.

To his right, a laser drew a white line between Sib and Enemy Number Three; there was a flurry of activity around that green
wedge and Jak saw the indicator for a grenade launch flicker next to the green wedge with the black 3. Then the wedge turned
white—shortwave IR had come from it—Sib had scored a hit with the laser, and a puff of superheated steam had emerged from
the body.

But then the grenade landed. Sib’s position, the cluster of rocks ahead and to Jak’s right, lit in a blue-white glow, an instantaneous
five-meter dome the color and brightness of a welding arc.

When Jak’s goggles had cleared, two seconds later, dust billowed up from that point, the center of the cloud glowing dull
red from the furious heat within. Gravel and small rocks spattered down around Jak.

The thunder of that explosion fell to tolerable levels and Jak’s headphones let it in. Momentarily Sib’s laser pistol swung
its white cutting beam crazily about the sky, like a wobbling column of light lashing out from the dust cloud. The charge
ran out, and now there was only the black plume against the gray-pink sky.

“Truce.” The voice crackled in Jak’s ears. “We have three men down and need to retrieve them. Invoking Harmless Zone war protocols.”

“Truce accepted,” Jak said, cuing it through his purse to his whole team. “We have a man down ourselves.”

As he ran to where the grenade had gone off—to where Uncle Sib had been—his heart in his throat and unable to breathe, a far
distant corner of his mind was grateful that Dujuv was not the sort to say “I told you so.”

Clarbo had actually gotten there slightly ahead of him—he wondered for an instant if the fool had broken cover before getting
the truce notice. The grenade had been one of the standard military issue used all over the solar system, just a blob of hot-jet
fuel blasted into a little flask of liquid oxygen by a pinhead-sized bit of explosive, so that they mixed at high temperature
and energy release was complete. The base of the dust plume was already cooling and the last gravel was pattering down from
above. In the clearing space between the rocks, Jak could see the crumpled, burned body, flames still flickering from parts
of it.

The flash of high-temperature gas expands so rapidly that it flows in a nearly straight line out from the grenade; the parts
of Sib that had been pointed toward the grenade had been burned deeply, through clothes and skin and into the internal organs,
at the same time that the shadowed parts had barely been touched. One elegant eyebrow still arched over one unseeing, dead
eye, but the other side of Sib’s head was charred and mostly gone.

Pikia raced past him, holding a fire extinguisher she must have grabbed from one of the wrecked hovercars, and sprayed foam
on the evil green dancing flames that sprang along the rib cage and washed the separated arm; when she stopped, a moment later,
most of the corpse was mercifully swathed in thick gray-brown goo.

Jak continued to stare, his eyes fixing on where Sib’s unburned left hand stuck from under the foam, at the thick raised veins
that ran under the soft skin, between the hard bulges of the bones;
a hand that worked hard and well for a long time,
Jak thought,
that’s how they get to be so developed and yet so coarse—

Another blur shot by Jak, and Gweshira was kneeling beside the body, on the ground, pressing that hand to her face the way
a child holds a crumbling, aged teddy bear, and it seemed to Jak that he really only began to be able to hear again when she
opened her mouth and wailed, a long, gasping shriek that ended in gut-punching sobs.

“Who’s in command here?” a voice said. Jak turned to see the tear-streaked face of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old wearing
the field uniform of the Greenworld Royal Palace Guards, the preposterous drum-major-in-a-gay-porn-movie, too-tight and too-gaudy,
good-only-for-dancing-and-posing outfit that Jak himself had worn during his time in Shyf’s service.

Jak didn’t dak, didn’t even speck, the question. Then he felt a hand tighten on his shoulder—when had Dujuv arrived? How long
had his toktru tove’s hand been resting there?

“This is him but things are pretty bad right now,” Dujuv said. “I guess I’m the second.”

“I’m the third myself,” the young man said. “Brimiyan Presgano. I hate to ask but … well, most of our ‘force’ wasn’t trained
people like you have and a lot of them are just sitting down and crying—and they won’t listen to me, they know I was only
an officer because I was the captain’s cousin—”

A sinking feeling hit Jak even as he felt Dujuv’s hand tighten on his shoulder, but it seemed to help clear Jak’s head—leaving
him horribly conscious and functional in the middle of this grim little battlefield, with the sun just coming up and everyone
standing around as if at the scene of an air crash. “Kawib Presgano was your captain, wasn’t he?” Jak asked.

“He was … he’s dead now, over there …” Brimiyan seemed about to break down.

Kawib Presgano and Sibroillo Jinnaka had killed each other. Kawib lay flat on his back, and two young men holding each other’s
hands wept beside him. Brimiyan whispered, “I know you were in the Royal Palace Guards so you know what it is and what it’s
all about. Well, I never knew Xabo, but people always said he and Kawib were like mom and dad to all of us, and we
needed
somebody. You know why—”