Winter

by James Wittenbach

  Constantine stepped out of the shadows. He was in full Centurion regalia, the black jumpsuit trimmed with silver accoutrements. “In Vesta’s name, Hunter, you look like hell. What happened to you?”

  “Jealous?” Redfire taunted him.

  The Centurion said nothing, but instead examined the chamber. Redfire had to ask. “How did you find me?”

  “Spiked your last food pick-up with microprobes. They’ve mostly passed out of your body by now, but we were able to track you for several days. You weren’t in your other hidey-holes, so, you had to be here.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Thank you,” Constantine slowly reached for a device on his utility belt.

  Hunter armed his pulse cannon. “Don’t even think about it, Constantine.” Constantine paused. “Medical scanner,” he said. “Obviously, if I were going to stun you and take you to the freezers, I could have had both of you by now.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” but Hunter conceded this logic. “You can take out the scanner. Take out anything else, so much as twitch in the direction of anything else, and you’ll never make breakfast for Bellisarius again.”

  The Centurion took the small, clear plate from his belt. “Concussion… second degree burns on your chest, multiple contusions throughout your muscles and skeleton, minor hemorrhaging in your nasal and esophageal passages, bruised spleen and liver. You must be in a lot of pain, Hunter.” He slowly replaced the plate in his belt. “If you can restrain yourself from shooting me, I have some medicine that would help.”

  “Neg, you can keep your medicine to yourself.”

  “Suit yourself. So, what happened? Did you try to roast marshmallows by opening a plasma conduit?”

  “Someone shot me.”

  Constantine brightened. “Anyone I know?”

  “He wore the uniform of the ship’s Watch, that’s all I know.”

  A concerned look tightened Constantine’s eyebrows in the middle. “A Watchman you say. The Watchman don’t usually go around armed, and that wound is not the signature of a Watchman paralyzer.” A genuine smile came to his face. “It must hurt like madness.”

  “If you didn’t come to put me in a freezer, then what are you doing here, Constantine?

  “Bellisarius sent me to ask …” Constantine had to take a deep breath and squeeze out the last few words, “…for your assistance.”

  Despite the pain that shuddered through his body, Hunter threw his head back and laughed heartily.

  “Ho, ho, ho… Belly sends his favorite bitch-boy to ask me for a favor. All right, he may have my assistance, but I am only going to remind him one more time… socks first, then jack-boots.”

  “Tactical TyroCommander Redfire is missing,” Constantine said simply. “He was being imprisoned on the planet’s surface while being tried for murder. He escaped.” Hunter’s good humor cut off immediately. “Escaped? Murder? You’ll have to forgive me if I am not up on the latest news. What the hell is going on down there?”

  “A native of the planet was found murdered. The murder weapon was found in Redfire’s bag. He was put on trial, but escaped from his cell. Half the Ship’s Watch is hunting for him on the surface.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Bellisarius believes you would have special insight into how he escaped, and where he might have gone.”

  Hunter considered this. “And on what basis does he believe I would have any special insight?”

  “He would not say.”

  Hunter ran his tongue over his lips, while staring hard at Constantine. “All right, you want my insight, then tell me this, did he actually kill someone?”

  “We do not believe he did.”

  Hunter nodded. “If he were guilty, he would not have escaped. He values honor and would have accepted his punishment. If he is not guilty, he may have escaped, if he believed it necessary to prove his innocence, but I do not believe he would. If he did escape, he would be working to prove his innocence. If he did not escape on his own, then he is in the custody of someone else, and I do not believe I can help you.”

  Constantine spoke. “I am going to reach for a datapad, now, that Bellisarius asked me to deliver to you. I will place it on the floor in front of you and activate it. No tricks.” Hunter contemplated this for a moment, then nodded. Constantine slowly placed the small black square on the ground near Hunter’s feet. It activated, displaying a text message from Bellisarius. The woman gasped when she read it, but Hunter, apart from one raised eyebrow, did not betray a response.

  “His proposition is that I accompany you to the surface. If Redfire is found, with my aid, he will promise to grant me amnesty, within the UnderDecks. If Redfire is not captured, I remain on the planet.

  Connie, shall I explain to you all the reasons why this plan is flawed?”

  “It’s better than being put in stasis and shot back to Republic,” Constantine answered.

  “But no better than the life I have now.”

  “You would no longer be hunted,” Constantine reminded him. “You would no longer wonder if every meal, if every drink of water, has been infested with micro-molecular tracking probes.”

  “What about her?” Hunter said, nodding toward the woman.

  Constantine bristled. “I am not empowered to negotiate. If you have nothing to offer, I will return to my regular duties, and inform Bellisarius that you turned him down, and have nothing to offer us.” The two men glared at each other across the deck. They hate each other, Ghost thought. It was an obvious thought, too obvious not be thought.

  Hunter finally broke the silence. “Even if every instinct wasn’t screaming at me that this is a trap…

  and really, Connie, if this cliched set-up really is a trap, then the state of creative thinking in the Notorium is truly is pathetic … I know better than to make any deal with men who are bound by neither law nor honor.”

  “Then, our business is concluded,” said Constantine. He briskly turned and began walking away.

  “Wait,” Hunter called back. “This Watchman… the one who shot me… does that not bother you.

  Now, first, someone in the Watch may be making unauthorized trips to the deep UnderDecks with a dangerous weapon, which would not be good. Second possibility, one of us could have gotten access to a Watch uniform and a weapon, which is worse. Third possibility, someone from the outside his infiltrated this ship, which would be as bad as bad can get.”

  Constantine paused at the hatch. “Rest assured, Hunter. We will investigate.”

  “Most of your personnel are on the surface looking for Redfire, and I am the only one who has actually seen this guy. I also know my way around down here. If you want to get to the truth of this, you’re going to need me.”

  “If you think I would work with you…”

  “Connie… you can not neglect something like this, and you can’t investigate without me.” Constantine paused a moment. His lips moved as he worked through Hunter’s suggestion. Then, he asked. “What’s in it for me, Hunter? Why should I sweat a guy who goes around shooting you UnderDeck trolls?”

  Hunter slowly began to replace the pulse cannon in his bag. “All right, Connie, you opportunistic bastard, as soon as we find the guy who shot me… I’ll go to the surface with Bellisarius and help you hunt down Redfire.”

  Constantine looked slightly crushed, and it was obvious, he had been hoping Hunter would reject the offer. Reluctantly, he approached again, saying, “Then, the deal is made. You’re going to love working for me. As we say in the Notorium, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He offer Hunter his arm.

  “Does that mean the friend of my friend is my enemy,” said Ghost.

  “It does, very often,” said Constantine.

  Hunter took the arm and lifted himself painfully from the deck. It hurt to put weight on his legs, but he imagined it would pass as he moved around more.

  “There is just one more thing,” with a lightning swift movement, Constantine jamm
ed a hypodermic into Hunter’s shoulder.

  Hunter jerked away, put could already feel a warm pulse spreading through his body. “What the hell was that?”

  “A healing accelerator and a pain suppressant. I won’t be carrying you all over these UnderDecks.” Winter – The Alcazar of General Ziang

  A sunrise and sunset had passed as Keeler had spoken with Ziang by the light of the fire, and the conversation continued. “The enemy took advantage of a vicious, in-dwelling alien species that incubated inside a living human host and emerged as an almost unstoppable killing machine.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear about that,” Ziang waved him off. “That barely counted as a Crusade.

  Let me tell you about the Fifth Crusade. The Fifth Crusade was known as ‘The War of The Strange.’ The Strange were devoted to order, conformity, and homogeneity. They were humans who altered themselves to gray-skinned, unisex bodies, and shaved heads. They wore dark gray uniforms with numbers printed on the left breast patch. Their ships were spherical, and unmarked.” Keeler tried to look smart. “I have some notes on that. The spherical design minimized surface-to-mass ratio, making the ships difficult to attack.”

  “The Strange did not attack in that manner,” Ziang told him. “Their preferred method of conquest was to infest a planet with pods. These pods took over people’s bodies when they slept, replacing them with a Strange replica, tied into a single hive mind. Eventually, the Strange had established themselves on 100 worlds. They chose, at that point, to stop expanding and to consolidate their hold on the worlds they had conquered.

  “We knew they conquered a hundred worlds, but history does not record what happened to them.” The old general yawned. “I’ll get back to them later, but now the hour is late. And I grow fatigued.” He rose gracefully and gestured for Keeler and Toto to follow him down the long passageway. Keeler shook Toto awake.

  “I don’t have much in the way of guest quarters, but I should be able to make you comfortable.” Ziang stood.

  “Do you have any books or anything?” Keeler asked. “That coffee will keep me awake for hours, and if you had any histories, I would be…”

  “Books, you want?” Ziang said, and chuckled haggardly. “Books were almost extinct in my era.

  Heirlooms. We mainly used data storage devices… like this.” He tapped the datapadd on which the Commander had been taking notes.

  “On Sapphire, only our most revered texts are preserved on paper,” Keeler conceded. “I probably couldn’t read the language anyway. It was worth a shot.”

  “If it’s books you want, I may be able to arrange something of great interest,” Ziang said.

  “Like what?” Keeler asked.

  “Later,” said Ziang. “Sleep now.”

  Keeler muttered something under his breath about Ancients, cryptic comments, and foreshadowing.

  The night would be short, Keeler knew. Ziang showed him to a snug, sleeping loft Ziang provided, and made his way to his own chamber. Keeler waited until his footsteps had faded, and then longer enough to make sure the general had retired for the night. Then, he crept back to the sitting room, intending to raise his ancestor from whatever it was he did in the matrix and have a word with him… probably many words, a number of which would be profane.

  He was surprised to find Lexington Keeler up and about, a pale, luminescent presence standing beneath Ziang’s skylight, staring out at the stars. Technically, this was something he did not need a manifestation to do. That he had taken on a physical form meant that he wanted to be seen. “I knew you’d come back,” said the ghost.

  Keeler was blunt. “Why are you being so rude to our host?”

  “He has no business telling you about the Crusades.”

  “If some of the things he’s said are true, you and the rest of the Dead Guys have been lying to us for centuries.”

  “We have not been lying to you,” the ghost protested. “We just have been making sure the best possible version of the truth was the one that you all accepted. The truth that the Crusades were a noble struggle of good versus evil, good triumphed, evil was driven out, and humanity was the better for it.”

  “Nothing he has said has contradicted that view.”

  “Tomorrow, Ziang may tell you more about the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth Crusades, in which our side had the Holy Spunk beaten out of us. Think too long on his facts, and you may see The Crusades not as a moral struggle that we won because God was on our side, but as something the side we happened to be on happened to win, so we could then say that because we won, God must have been on our side all along.”

  Keeler seated himself on a cold stone bench. “The only one in this room who has suggested that is you…”

  The ghost took on a pained expression. “Perhaps, because, at the time, it is what I believed, until I was proven terribly terribly wrong.”

  Dead Keeler shimmered in the light as a brief small cloud passed between him and the starlight.

  “Ziang was always a true believer. He never questioned the righteousness of our cause.” Live Keeler interrupted. “It feels more personal than that.”

  “Reckon it was.”

  “Was there a woman involved?”

  “No, it was a boy.”

  Live Keeler was taken aback. “I had no idea.”

  “Bend over and pick up your mind out of the gutter. That’s not what I meant. The boy was a child we found in the ruins of Ninevec, the capital of Miracle Colony, after a horrifying attack by the Annihilation Swarm, under the last Dark Lord, Enoch.” He paused and looked his descendant over. “Come here, I want to show you something.”

  The ghost approached him, and reached his hands toward the captain’s temples. They began to glow more brightly. The ghost’s face became a grinning rictus. “You should feel privileged, only a few of your kind have ever experienced this. Now, this might hurt a lot.”

  He plunged his fingers into Keeler’s brain. There was a flash of light and a sensation of icicles working their way deep into his cerebellum. Then, there were visions in his head, washed out of color like faded flowers, and he knew the old man was sharing memories with him. He could here the voice of his ancestor both in his mind and in the room ou tside, from everywhere at once it came, forcing itself onto him.

  “The Swarm were a force of destruction consisting of millions of soldiers who had been altered, genetically manipulated and fused with technology until they were no longer recognizably human. Their arms looked more like insect legs, they had wings that buzzed and enabled to leap or fly over short distances. They sprayed acid and biotoxins from stingers on their backs.” Keeler could see it. The skies of a world darkened with millions of horrific creature, like human faces had been pasted onto insect heads.

  They opened their mouths to scream, but all that came out was a horrible, insect screech.

  “They laid waste to every city on Miracle, and any other world they came across. They didn’t use the quantum bombs that dusted cities in an instant, they didn’t use fast molecular disrupters that instantly vaporized people … and painlessly. They used fusion bombs, concussion blasters, and fire-blazers; weapons designed to inflict maximum agony. If you got hit with a fire-blazer, your skin would be flash-fried and you’d be horrendously disfigured, but it might take you days to die… or worse.”

  “Worse?” the captain gasped.

  “You might live. These weapons didn’t destroy planets, they transfigured them into Hells. Miracle had been a pretty nice planet at one time. Not a lot different from Sapphire, there used to be a nice beach on the Beta Southern continent that served the best Tequila Fanny Bangers in the Libra Sector. The swarm began their attack by firing nuclear incendiaries into the planet’s petroleum deposits, splitting open the fault lines with resonance bombs, and just to make sure the atmosphere was completely poisoned and choked with dust, bombarding the surface with asteroids. By the time we managed to fight the Swarm into retreat, the sky was burning red, filled with acrid black smoke and
the rain was pure sulfuric acid.

  “Ninevec had been a city of four million people. The Swarm didn’t leave anything intact. What had been tall gleaming buildings were nothing but twisted, blackened skeletons. The homes where people had lived had all been burned.

  “In the ruins that city we found one survivor, a boy. It was me, who found him, underneath what had been a temple in the city center. He was about twelve… twelve was younger then than it is now… he was

  … starving, filthy, poisoned.” Image fragments spun through Keeler’s mind. He could not focus on any one image, hold it in his mind long enough to really see it, but he could almost remember seeing a small, thin white body, covered in with ashes, lying on a metal plate, and shivering. He could almost remember feeling the weight as he picked up the thing and carried it in his arms.

  “I had him taken to my flagship, Ark Royal. The boy was an orphan, no family, not even a world. As he recovered, I grew very fond of him, as did my crew. We encountered two more of Enoch’s units in the next solar year, the Lesion Legion at Carrabas and the Black Watch at Gabriel III, and we defeated them easily.

  Some even suggested that the boy, whom we came to call ‘Johnny,’ was like a good luck charm.”

  “The only one whose heart was not turned was General Ziang. Our fleets met up at Charlemagne Base, and as soon as he saw the boy, it was like two cats meeting in an alley. They did not fight, but you could almost see their eyes narrowing to slits as they regarded each other, fur standing on end, sizing each other up.

  “When were alone, he related his doubts under no uncertain terms. He doubted one small boy could survive a holocaust that killed fourteen million people. The mark of darkness was on the boy. What if the Swarm had ‘left him alive,’ to spy on us, or worse. He warned me to be careful, but I would not listen, I was even offended that he would so distrust this boy, who was almost like a son to me and a kid brother to my crew.”

  Images drifted through Keeler’s mind. Ships, people, planets, but never long enough to focus on them.

  It might have been a function of the old man’s fragmented memory, but Keeler had feeling the old man was hiding details from him. Feelings, however, were bright and clear … terror and remorse foremost among them.