by Rick Partlow
“Should I stay up?” he asked me, eyes darting around as if there were Helta on the other side of the wall, waiting to grab us. “You know, for, what did you call it? Fifty percent security?”
“Let me ask you something, Doc,” I murmured, pain and exhaustion closing in on me, “if you’re on watch and the Helta come, what exactly do you think the two of us are going to do against them?”
He seemed to think about that, then nodded.
“So, get some sleep then?”
“Yes, Doc,” I said, closing my eyes. “Get some sleep.”
***
“Wake up, Andy.”
My eyes snapped open and I tried to sit up, but I was staring into the muzzle of a pistol.
“Shit.” The light in the room was dim, from a fixture in the hallway outside, just bright enough to see by, not enough to blind me even waking up from a dead sleep.
I looked past the pistol to the hand holding it. The furry, thick-nailed hand holding it. Then past that to the face of the Heltan, a face I would have recognized in a crowd of the aliens from across the room, the very first one I’d ever met.
“Joon-Pah.” I didn’t quite hiss the word, but that was only because I was half-awake. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“What?” Patel popped awake a day late and a dollar short, tossing the sleeping bag off of him and blinking in confusion. “What’s going on?”
“We have a guest, Doc.”. Moving slowly and carefully, I sat up, grimacing with the pain in my ribs as I did. “Someone I sure never expected to see again.”
“Oh, dear,” Patel said, eyes wide as they fixed on the gun.
And then I looked at it again. It was a Glock. It was my Glock.
“I know you must believe I betrayed you,” Joon-Pah said. “It had to have looked like I abandoned you. But I knew what was going to happen, and I judged I would be of more use to you if I were not dead or confined.” He shrugged. “It was a gamble. She might have had you killed immediately. But had I stayed and fought, it would only have ended with both of us on the run and me not very well qualified for it.”
“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked him, delaying admitting I understood because I was still angry and didn’t want him to be right.
“Right where you dropped it, Andy,” he said, putting an almost human tinge of teasing into the words. “I took my flyer and tracked your route until you went deep into the woods, then I had to give up and hope you’d find a way to contact me.”
“We didn’t intend to contact you,” I said. “We asked Brannas-Fel to call someone he trusted.”
“And he trusts me.” He tipped his head, then turned the gun around and offered it to me. “The question is, do you?”
I looked into those eyes, alien but so very human, and tried to read them.
“All right,” I said. “I guess we don’t have much choice.”
I took the gun and checked the load. It still had a round chambered, just like I’d left it, which meant Joon-Pah had been pointing a loaded fucking Glock with no safety at me. I wanted to slap him upside the head for violating the first rule of gun safety, but it would probably have hurt me more than it hurt him. I rolled over and slowly, painfully got to my feet, then tucked the gun into my belt.
“My flyer is outside,” Joon-Pah said. “What do you wish to do now?”
“First thing,” I told him, “I need to get somewhere you can take care of my cracked ribs. Because I can barely stand up right now. You know somewhere we can do that?”
“There’s a clinic I could take you to,” he said. “No one should be there right now. And then?”
“You’ve rescued us,” I said. “Now we’ve got to find the others. The Jambo is on its way, but we’re not leaving anyone behind.”
Chapter Seventeen
“You’re sure this is the right place?” I asked, face pressed against the clear bubble of the flyer. It wasn’t plastic, for all that it looked like it. Instead, it was, or so I’d been told, transparent aluminum, which was a real thing and we even had it on Earth before the Helta came.
“It is where my sources tell me your people are being held,” Joon-Pah confirmed, eyes forward, concentrating on keeping the little aircraft in a tight spiral about a thousand feet above the structure. I felt completely exposed inside the transparent bubble, but he’d assured me the surface was polarized and you couldn’t see in from the outside during the day.
The building we were circling wasn’t built on a platform like most of the others we’d encountered in the Helta city…but then, we were a good fifteen miles from the center of what I thought of as their city. The forest had thinned out as we’d flown, redwoods giving way to smaller, thicker trees and then to scrub, and finally to grassland as we’d approached the river.
It was broad and fairly shallow and reminded me of the Mississippi where it runs through Louisiana, though the surrounding land was hillier than I would have expected there, and I could see mountains in the distance, rounded and green. The Helta had taken advantage of the broad grasslands to build great, sprawling domes halfway into the dirt, the natural curve of their roofs mostly covered with turf, making them hard to spot from the air. There were no other flyers around, but massive hovercraft cargo barges traveled upriver and sometimes overland, clouds of dust billowing behind them from fans powered by fusion reactors.
“Are those warehouses?” I asked Joon-Pah. “Factories?”
“Distribution centers. The goods are made in orbital factories and brought down in heavy-lift shuttles to a spaceport downriver in a desert where the landing will cause the least ecological damage, then shipped up by the float barges.”
“So all your production is in orbit? Or on uninhabited moons?”
“Of course.” His tone was incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe I would ask such a thing. “Why would we do it any other way?”
“Because you’re at war,” I suggested, “and if the Tevynians do try to strike in this system, they don’t even have to land here to cripple your economy. All they have to do is fire railguns at you from millions of miles away and destroy your orbital factories.”
“They don’t have railguns,” he reminded me. “Because we did not have railguns and they make nothing of their own, only steal what we make.”
“For now. The Tevynians may be backward and savage at the moment, but humans have a way of adapting quickly. And despite what Delia Strawbridge told your Council, the Tevynians are humans.” I nodded toward the domes. “Are there workers down there?”
“No, the work is done by robots. It is tedious and considered unsuitable for sentient beings.”
“Must be tough for a kid to get a summer job here,” Patel commented from the back seat.
“Why did they move them out here?” I asked. “And why, for that matter, have they not executed them yet? Not that I’m complaining.”
“For all her rhetoric at the Council meeting,” Joon-Pah replied, “a formal execution, even of a Tevynian spy, takes a prescribed period of reflection and debate. Gafto-Lo-Mok has seized control of the government, but she still adheres to its forms. The Council would not accept her otherwise, regardless of the outcome of the challenge. If she tried to set herself up as what you would call a dictator, they would oppose her.
“As for why she had the prisoners moved out here, I believe it is to keep our friend Delia from talking to anyone. The woman can be most persuasive, as I’m sure you know. The new Prime Facilitator was hesitant to leave her anywhere the other Facilitators in the Council might fall prey to her brand of careful reason, since she was able to convince them to vote for her before.”
“How much opposition should we expect?” I asked him, suddenly conscious of the odd, bell-muzzled shape of the sonic stunner wedged into the seat next to me. There was one for each of us, and those had been the only weapons Joon-Pah had been able to secure on such short notice. Personally, I thought he’d only gotten us nonlethal weapons because he was afraid we’d kill other Helta.
Which I suppose I could understand.
“I can’t say for sure. I know there will be guards, but the cells will have sonic stun fields built into them to render the prisoners unconscious at the touch of a button, so Gafto-Lo-Mok may be overconfident.” He motioned at the dome we’d been circling. “I see only a single cargo flyer. It wouldn’t carry more than twenty individuals. That would be, at most, the fourteen of your people and six guards.” He paused. “However, they will know the minute we enter. They will send others to recapture us.”
“We just have to get to the shuttle,” I said, chanting it like a mantra. “We get to the shuttle, get to the Truthseeker. Then they can’t touch us until the Jambo gets here.”
“If I take you in the Truthseeker,” Joon-Pah said quietly, “I can never come home.”
“Oh, I’m fairly sure they’ll welcome you back with open arms,” I assured him, “when the Tevynians invade your system.” I craned my head around to check on Patel. He looked fidgety, nervous, touching the sonic stunner cradled in his lap like it was a totem. “You ready for this, Doc?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, his smile shaky and unconvincing. “I was born ready. No problem at all. You can count on me, Andy.”
“When we get inside,” I told him, “stay behind me and watch our backs. Make sure no one sneaks up behind us, because I’m gonna be entirely focused on the guards and Joon-Pah is going to work on freeing our people.”
Which would make sure Patel’s gun was pointed in the opposite direction from us.
“Will do, no problem.”
“Take us down, Joon-Pah,” I said.
I was overthinking this. I was imagining all the things that could go wrong, all the traps that could be waiting for us, but if the Helta were capable of thinking like that, why would they need our help? They’d ambushed us, captured us, but only because we’d trusted them. They weren’t going to have anti-aircraft defenses and they weren’t going to have elaborate traps set up.
I shut it all down and opened my senses, aware but not thinking. The flyer touched down beside the cargo bird, only thirty yards from the main entrance. The doors were oval and ten yards wide, designed for cargo, but they were only open a quarter of the way, just big enough for two people to pass through abreast. I kept my eyes glued on that opening as I yanked the release of my safety harness, but I didn’t see any Helta through it yet. The canopy raised silently and a warm breeze washed in with the smell of the river, a familiar, homelike scent, just one more thing that made this place eerily Earthlike.
I could have opened the door, but I didn’t bother with it, instead clambering over the side and dropping the five feet to the ground. A few hours ago, the impact would have had me rolling in agony from my ribs, but the clinic Joon-Pah had smuggled us into had healed the fractures as if they had never been injured. All that was left was a lingering soreness and the memory of pain, as well as three small, blackened holes in the right side of my chest where the lasers had burned through. It was a huge improvement over the weeks it had taken me to heal the last time I’d cracked my ribs, but it seemed surreal. Would this become the new normal? Would there be a time on Earth when every hospital was basically an outpatient clinic?
Goddamn it, Clanton, stop being a fucking science fiction writer for one minute and be a Marine!
I considered for a fleeting moment walking up to the entrance at a casual pace, pretending I had every right to be there, and if I’d been dealing with humans, I might have done it. But, no amount of chutzpah would disguise what I was, so I sprinted instead. Because like my old company commander used to say, if you can’t do something smart, do something fast.
Patel was squawking something behind me, probably calling on me to wait up, and Joon-Pah was probably still shutting down the flyer, but I hadn’t honestly been counting too much on either of them. Joon-Pah was a sailor, or the closest thing to it, which didn’t qualify him for grunt work, and Patel had probably never fired a gun in his life. All either of them were good for was to absorb enemy fire, and I wasn’t cynical enough to use them that way, although I was still pretty young.
I plunged into the dim shadows of the warehouse, and if I’d been dealing with an experienced human security force, I would have died an ignoble and embarrassing death right there, my eyes still trying to adjust to the low light. I survived because I was facing what were basically local cops, or maybe the equivalent of DC police if Washington DC had the crime rate of a small village in New Hampshire. They were also a lot more worried about keeping their prisoners in than any attempt to break them out.
I was a good twenty yards inside the building before they saw me.
Details blurred at the periphery of my vision, filled in later by my subconscious as if I’d noticed them right away. The Helta kept their manufactured goods in sturdy, metal lockers about ten feet by six feet by six feet, resting on sets of four heavy, rounded pads a few inches off the ground. The cargo loaders they used to maneuver them were parked by the far wall, massive, tracked vehicles operated from a standing position at the front, their lifts at the end of articulated arms. I didn’t know what was in the containers, but there were dozens of them lined up, from one side of the dome to the other, some looking like they’d been there quite a while.
What had not been here nearly as long were the cages tucked in on the right side of the building, by the far wall. I tried to consider them prison cells, but what they looked like more than anything else were eight-foot-tall chicken coops, except built as domes and anchored to the metal floor by electromagnets. There were two of them, and our people were split evenly between them, seven in each. I was nearly a hundred yards away and the lights were dim, but I found Julie and relief surged through me.
The Helta guards were as close to useless as they could get without being Air Force, all six of them in a cluster, seated on the floor about twenty yards from the chicken coops playing some game that involved rolling tiny, rubber wheels along the smooth metal of the floor until they hit a curving, carved-wood ramp and rebounded onto a checkerboard pattern drawn on the floor in chalk.
I thought for a second I could get a clear shot at them without any of them even knowing I was here, but the rubber tire bounced completely out of their circle and rolled my way. Helta facial expressions weren’t the same as human versions, but there’s something universal on the face of a mammalian when it’s let a threat get way too close. It lasted for a good second before they scattered, lunging desperately for their sonic stunners, left carelessly on the floor behind them.
I fired from the hip, not bothering to try to aim the thing, not least because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how. Joon-Pah had barely been able to explain to me how the damned trigger worked, and when he’d tried to tell me about the complicated combination of multicolored arrows that they used to try to hit anything, I had a better idea of why they had a near terminal case of stormtrooper aim and why all the Tevynian rifles I’d seen had the damned sights torn off and replaced with something akin to the iron backup sights on a US military rifle.
Even from behind the protection of the bell muzzle, the shriek of the discharge was nearly intolerable and vision blurred slightly. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the sonic waves distorting the atmosphere or the feedback vibrating my eyes. It was a bit harder for the Helta and I managed to hit two of them with the first shot. They convulsed and thrashed and then went limp as a dishrag, and if Joon-Pah hadn’t assured me the sonics were nonlethal, I would have thought they were dead.
Four left and I knew the weapon worked from capacitors that took a full two seconds to recharge, which was damned inconvenient. Luckily, I also knew from firsthand experience that being anywhere near where one of the sonic blasts hit was disorienting, which gave me the time to reach the guards before they could grab their weapons.
In any group of enemy, there’s always a hierarchy of targets. Jambo taught me that a lifetime ago.
“You enter a room,” he’d said, his eyes closed as if he was envis
ioning the scenario in his mind, “and you can see it in their faces, in the way they’re standing. Some of them are scared shitless and just want to un-ass the area, get the fuck out of Dodge. Those are last on your list of priorities, the ones you can wait and clean up when you’re done with the others.
“Some are running the other end of the fight-or-flight equation and hyped on adrenaline, ready to rip you to shreds with their bare hands, but they’re also shaking and keyed up and not thinking straight. They’re dangerous, but we’re not nomads who just climbed down from the trees. We got guns and those require thought and accuracy and precision. Those are your second-tier targets. Still a significant threat, but you’ve got an extra second.
“It’s the others who are the real problem, the ones who can stay cool under pressure, who either have enough training to do the right thing out of instinct or think fast and make decisions in a heartbeat. You can tell them because they’re not moving away from you or toward you, they’re moving to the best place to shoot you from.”
There was only one of those types in this group, probably their NCO or officer, or whatever they put in charge of these Keystone Cops. He had his hands on his sonic and was trying to get up to one knee to turn and fire it when I slammed the buttstock of my rifle into his chest. I could have gone for the head, but I’d promised Joon-Pah I’d try not to kill any of these guys. The Heltan fell to his back, hands going to his chest, gasping in pain, and I kicked his weapon away from him. I figured I had a few seconds before he recovered.
My sonic was charged again and I used it on a Helta who was rushing at me, teeth bared, hands curled into atavistic claws. He slammed backwards to the ground and didn’t get up and that left two. One was still trying to pick up his rifle and not quite able to do it, too scared to wrap his hands around it. I swung my gun like a bat and took his legs out from under him, bouncing his face off the floor. He wasn’t quite out, because it was a lot harder than it looked in the movies to knock someone unconscious, particularly if that someone descended from bears, but I had time for the last one.