Weapons of War (3 page)

The shooting stopped.
 

He got back up, running toward the trees. He could see the light of rifle fire to his right, back at the clearing. It had to be Diaz and Ehri covering him.
 

A face appeared to his left. A clone soldier, nearly on top of him. He didn't hesitate, swinging the Dread rifle like a club, smashing it across the soldier's jaw. The clone collapsed into a heap, replaced with a second a moment later. It tried to tackle him, but he fell to his knees, turning the rifle and shooting, catching the clone in the chest. He rolled away before the body fell on top of him.

"Matteo," he shouted. The enemy already knew he was here; it didn't matter if they heard him.

"Donovan," his friend replied.
 

"Where are you?"

"Help!"

Donovan followed the sound, rushing through the trees. He had managed to break away from the attack, to escape the Dread's attention.
 

He caught sight of Matteo a moment later. The tech's back was against a tree; the rifle cradled in his arms. His expression was fearful and tense. A dead clone was on the ground in front of him. Three more were approaching his position.

Where had this group come from?

Donovan dropped below a stump, resting his weapon on it and taking aim. He didn't have time to worry about accuracy. He started firing, sending bolts of plasma across the distance and into the enemy line.
 

One fell. Then another.
 

Something came at him from his left, cracking through tree branches and landing right beside him. A bek'hai warrior. It kicked the rifle away from him, giving him just enough time to stumble back and fall onto his ass.

"Shit," Donovan said, eyes frantically searching for a way out. The soldier said something to him in the alien language as it approached, rifle pointed at him. Why didn't it shoot?

"Surrender," the soldier said, switching to English.
 

Information. That was why it didn't just kill him. The rest of the Dread didn't know everything that had happened on top of the mountain, but they wanted to.

"Go to hell," Donovan said. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but he wasn't going to tell them anything.

The soldier came at him, faster than Donovan could believe. It grabbed him by his throat, lifting him easily and shoving him against a tree. "Druk'shur. How did you defeat Orik?"

"He had help," Ehri said, appearing from the brush.
 

She fired, the bolt tearing through the Dread soldier's helmet and head and passing out the other side. Donovan felt the pressure on his throat release, and then he slid down the trunk as the soldier collapsed.
 

"Thanks," he said, looking back to where he had last seen Matteo. He wasn't behind the tree. "Where's Matteo?"

"I didn't see him," Ehri said.
 

"What about the pilot?"

"Diaz is with him."

"The enemy soldiers?"

"Dead."

"Your clones, too?"

"I told you, they couldn't be permitted to leave."

He watched her face for signs of remorse. There wasn't any. Death didn't have the same meaning to the bek'hai as it did to humans. Not when they reproduced like toys in a factory, instead of unique living, breathing, feeling creatures with hearts and souls. Ehri was starting to see the truth of that perspective, but she wasn't there yet.

He found his rifle on the ground, picking it up before heading over to the spot where Matteo had been standing. He was half-afraid to find his friend's corpse among the dead clones, half-relieved when he saw it wasn't. Where had he gone?

"Matteo," he said as loudly as he dared. "Matteo."

There was no reply.
 

"Did any of them escape?" he asked.

"I didn't see any fleeing, but their numbers are hard to judge in the cover and the darkness."

"Did they take him?"

"It is possible."

Donovan cursed, leaning against the tree. If the Dread had ordered Matteo to surrender, it was likely that he had. Matteo was smart, creative, resourceful. He wasn't a soldier.

"What am I going to tell Diaz?" he said. He felt responsible for losing him, and he knew she was going to blame him, too. Even if she didn't admit it. Even if she would never say it. He had been so close. He should have protected him.

"It isn't your fault," Ehri said. "He may still be out here."

A soft rumble in the sky caused Donovan to look up. A Dread fighter streaked overhead, momentarily blotting out the stars.
 

"We don't have time to look for him," Donovan said. "They're going to send more soldiers."

"Mechs," Ehri said. "I can hear them in the distance. We don't want to be near here when they arrive."

Donovan wasn't going to run away from his responsibility. He led Ehri back to the downed fighter, where Diaz was positioned over the pilot, keeping an eye out for more of the enemy.
 

"Diaz, we have to move," he said, approaching them. He glanced down at the pilot. He was small and thin, with a delicate frame and a kind face. "Can he be carried?" he asked, looking over at Ehri.

"Do we have a choice?" she replied.

"Where's Matteo?" Diaz said.
 

He kneeled down next to her. "I'm sorry," he said.

She kept her expression flat. "Dead?" There was no emotion in the question.

"I didn't find his body. They may have taken him. I was close. I should have-"

"Shut up, D. We're not going there. We're all doing our best." She blinked away a tear that found its way to the corner of her eye.
 

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I told you to shut up," she replied. "We need to get this guy out of here, or we lost him for nothing."

Donovan nodded and then lifted the pilot over his shoulder. The man was unconscious, but he groaned slightly as he was moved. The Dread fighter passed over a second time. It would be sensing their heat, communicating their position. They had done well so far, but they were nowhere close to being safe.

How the hell were they going to get out of this alive?

Tea'va dur Orin'ek stood in the antechamber to the court of the Domo'dahm. His mottled face was wearing what he intended as a scowl but was distorted by the overall structure of his flesh and bone into something closer to a smile. It was an unfortunate side effect of the cloning process that had made him, and of the in-between state of the bek'hai and human genetic splicing. He was ugly as both a pur'dahm and a human, trapped in a phase of change that had left him alienated from the other dahm, while at the same time revered by the scientists that had created him.
 

Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and to them, he was the future.

The Domo'dahm's antechamber was a dark place, lit only by a thin line of luminescent moss that had been compounded and packed into narrow channels along the surface of the lek'shah; the material that was used in nearly all of the bek'hai construction. Super strong, impervious to nearly everything, it was the only reason they had survived for as long as they did. From what Tea'va had learned, when their homeworld had started to die, it was the lek'shah that had saved them.

That was all history. Ancient history. For hundreds of cycles they suffered under the weight of their failures, each rotation of time leading them closer to the final destiny.

And then they had found this Earth. A planet rich in resources, including an intelligent life form that had not only overcome its failures, but that held the key to saving them as well. It had taken the prior Domo'dahm little time to decided that the planet would be theirs and that these so-called humans would be both savior and slave.

So it had been for fifty of the planet's cycles. They had first conquered the humans and then begun to use them, harvesting the strong to assist in their splicing experiments, using the middling as labor while they replenished their strength, and breaking down the weak for sustenance. Of course, some of them had evaded their grasp. They were intelligent life forms after all, able to think and reason and learn. It didn't matter if some escaped. It didn't matter if they tried to resettle their planet, to learn to live alongside their masters. And the bek'hai were the masters. They both knew it.
 

Most of them, anyway.

A hatch slid open. A female lor'hai in the traditional white robes of the sur'Domo'dahm, the servants of the Domo'dahm, stepped through it to meet him. Unlike many of the clones within the capital, she wasn't a copy of the un'hai. She was one of the Mothers, a larger-framed model that was being produced for their higher levels of fertility and genetic compatibility. The idea of the clone type was lost on Tea'va. Some of the dahm, like Tuhrik, had been adamant that the key to their survival was to re-learn to reproduce in the fashion of the humans, a method they had abandoned long ago. He could still remember Tuhrik's impassioned plea for Tea'va to open his mind to the idea. He was one of the few pur'dahm who had fully functional genitals, and who had the potential to impregnate a Mother.
 

The idea of it disgusted him, and as a pur'dahm he couldn't be forced. Turhik had gone so far as to attempt to lure him to first experiment with his si'dahm, Ehri, a clone of the un'hai. Rorn'el had always been infatuated with the human who had sourced Ehri's genetics, and some of the other pur'dahm had found the si'dahm particularly intriguing. He wasn't one of them. The bek'hai had abandoned sexual reproduction for a reason.
 

"Domo'dahm Rorn'el is prepared for you," the Mother said, smiling widely at him. Her face was soft and gentle. He saw nothing appealing in it.

Tea'va followed behind her, into the court. It was a large, open room, though the lek'shah here was molded thickly to protect their leader, hanging from the ceiling in wide spines and covering the floor in intricately carved plates. There were a few other pur'dahm already present, those that had positioned themselves into the top ranks of their pecking order. One of them would be the next Domo'dahm within thirty cycles.

Tea'va knew he should have been standing there with them, instead of approaching them under these circumstances. He had played the game differently than the others, his more successful splicing leaving him with no choice but to prove that he was, in fact, superior to them. The scientists wanted to believe that he was because it would validate all that they had done since they had found this planet. Subjugating another intelligent race had never been a desire.
 

It had been a necessity.

The assembled pur'dahm stood beneath the warm glow of bright lamps that mimicked the sunlight outside and cast shadows across the space, shadows that hid the Domo'dahm from clear view. It was a tradition that had continued after the death of Kan'ek, the Domo'dahm who had brought them to Earth. The original bek'hai form was against their laws to be gazed upon. It had been decreed that the human design was their future and that looking upon their past would predispose them to reject it.
 

Tea'va understood why Kan'ek had made it so. He had never seen what a true bek'hai looked like, and he still rejected being more human. He knew he wasn't alone in that. Though Rorn'el had been taken with a human slave, he had little love for the rest of the lesser species. It was the reason he had decided he would no longer tolerate their presence on the planet. They had what they needed from them, and their consistent uprisings were a wasteful distraction. There was no logical reason to risk that they might ever find a way to overcome the lek'shah.

Tea'va lowered his head at the thought, staring at the floor plates as he approached the gathered pur'dahm. They had been etched with a written and pictorial history of the bek'hai, from the early days before they had invented an alphabet, to their first forays into space, to their arrival here on Earth. Parts of the design had been scorched over; the images that had once depicted the original bek'hai body.
 

"Domo'dahm," Tea'va said, reaching the front of the room. He fell to his knees, prostrating before his Master.