Children No More-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  I held up my hands in surrender. I caught Gustafson and Schmidt staring at me and realized they had no way to know I was talking to Lobo—nor did I particularly want them to have that information. I smiled and said aloud, "Too many choices. I give up." I pointed at the harness Lobo and I had been discussing. "I'm going with this one."

  I unpacked and repacked the unit as Lobo ran a complete set of diagnostics on it. As I expected, I found no flaws in the physical setup, and Lobo said everything electronic was in order. Good. I was set.

  I stood and looked around.

  The others had already finished.

  It had clearly been too long since I'd done this kind of work; I was slow.

  "Yell now if you're not good to go," Lim said. She glanced at each of us. When no one spoke, she said, "Let's get out of here so the next shift can come in. Tonight and tomorrow, we meet with our squads, review the plans, and rest. Tomorrow night, the inspectors arrive for a formal dinner with rebel and government representatives."

  As she was heading for the exit and we were falling in behind her, she added, "We go then."

  Chapter 21

  Dump Island, planet Pinkelponker - 139 years earlier

  We stood at attention under a large rock overhang that provided welcome shade—and also shielded us from any overhead surveillance, because according to Benny the government had machines that could watch us from the sky. He hadn't cared if anyone noticed that we were running or wrestling bags or even punching each other; apparently, fighting among prisoners was common. For what we were about to do, though, he wanted more secrecy.

  The ground was a thin layer of dirt over more rock. Here and there clumps of grass fought to hold on. None looked like they could withstand a strong breeze.

  Benny spoke to us from his cart on the other side of the open cave. "You've all ridden here in the ship, so you know they have guns. We don't, and we can't expect to get our hands on theirs. Even if we do, we have no way to practice with them. What we can do, what we must do to succeed, is make it a close-quarters fight. We've been training hand-to-hand combat, but now we're going to move to something different: knives."

  Tyra, a girl half my height who had a thick body and a bigger head than I'd ever seen before, walked in front of us and from a woven grass bag handed each of us what looked like a piece of white rock. She moved slowly and precisely and seemed to be concentrating very hard, so a few minutes passed before she finished the job.

  "Go ahead," Benny said. "Study your weapon. It's your new best friend. From now on, you never go anywhere without it."

  Mine had a knob on the end and was thick and round for a section a little longer than the width of my hand. It then tapered to a point. The sides of the tapered bit were narrower than the handle and sharp, as was the point. I tested the tip of the knife with my thumb, pressed a bit too hard, and a dot of blood appeared.

  "Human bone," Benny said. "Shaped and polished and sharpened by some of the others from the legs of some of those who died here before us. Weeks of work went into making these."

  I dropped my knife and felt sick. I grabbed my stomach and tried not to throw up.

  "Pick it up!" Benny yelled. "You never let go of your weapon. It's your best chance at taking out one of the guards."

  I didn't move. "Why did you use bones from people?"

  "Because it was the best material available," Benny said. "We tried stone, but the blades snapped too easily. We didn't have any other large animals available. If we did, you'd know, because you'd have been eating their meat, or they'd've have been hunting us."

  "Did you know any of these people?"

  "What does it matter?" Benny said. "They're dead, and we're not, and we have to do the best we can with what we have."

  "Did you?" I said, my voice rising despite my efforts to control it.

  Benny stared at me for a moment before answering. "One of them, yes. The others died before I arrived here. If you're really asking if I can tell you whose leg your knife—or any other weapon—came from, the answer is, no, I can't. We've been working on them a long time, passing them around, different people sharpening them, and long ago we forgot who contributed what part."

  "That's awful," I said.

  "Yeah," Benny said, "it is, but not as awful as staying on this island until we all die. These are the best blades we could make from the strongest material we had."

  Another of the surprising connections hit me. I liked that I was making more and more of them, but they still surprised me; I had been slow mentally for a lot more time than I'd been quick. "If you've been doing this for a long time, why haven't you attacked the soldiers before now?"

  Benny looked at me even longer this time before answering. His expression was the saddest I'd yet seen on him. "Probably because we didn't have you." He inclined his head to take in the others. "Look around, Jon. Look at all of us. You're the only one whose body and mind are both complete and strong. You're the only one who really has a chance against the soldiers. We needed someone like you to make sure we would eventually succeed."

  "The others work as hard as I do," I said, "and some, like Alex, work harder."

  "True," Benny said, "and you still have a lot to learn before you will be as good at everything as they are. Your body, though, gives you an advantage they can't match."

  I glanced at the others, wondering if my questions were upsetting them. They all looked as if I was the only one surprised by Benny's words.

  "Look, Jon," Benny said, "I'm not saying you have to do this on your own. In the end, each of us will play his part. As the training progresses, we'll see what skills you all develop, and we'll devise the best plan we can. We might, for example, have to attack in waves, with the others going first, to tire and disarm the soldiers, and our best, maybe you and Alex, following and surprising the guards with a second attack."

  "Wouldn't that make it even more dangerous for the first group?"

  "We probably won't all make it," said Han, the guy with scaly skin. "But some of us will." In a voice a little louder than a whisper, he added, "Maybe even all of us will."

  "Maybe," Alex said.

  "Wait a second," I said, turning to face Han. "You mean you expect to get hurt or even die, and you're still going to do this? I don't understand."

  "Yes," he said, his voice tight and louder than before, "I know bad things will probably happen to me."

  "So why join the attack?" I said.

  "Because I'd rather die trying to escape than rot here forever!" he screamed at me. "Because maybe I will make it. Because even if I don't, at least I can help the only people who've ever really cared about me." He paused and struggled to regain control. When he continued, his voice was soft and flat. "This lets me do something, and anything is better than waiting here to die."

  I shut up while I thought about what they were saying. Life on Dump wasn't great, but it was life. The springs and the bushes and the grasses provided enough food that we didn't go hungry, though I definitely wasn't getting as much to eat as I had on Pinecone, and my body was leaner after even these few weeks here. We could swim and watch the ocean and enjoy the night sky and count the clouds and do many of the same things I'd done on Pinecone. Dump definitely was a prison, because we couldn't leave, but it was a nice enough one that I didn't hate it the way they did.

  Of course, I'd been here only a few weeks; some of them had lived on the island for years. Even a nice cage is still, in the end, a cage. Plus, every day I stayed here made it harder for me to track Jennie, and I remained determined to find her.

  As I thought of her, of the government taking her away from me, my anger rose and my breathing quickened and my heart raced. I forced myself to take long, slow breaths through my nose and fought not to lose control of my temper. As Benny regularly explained, we were supposed to keep the anger but contain it and use it to help us, not let it consume us, like a torch that we carried carefully to light our way but would never use to burn down the grasses.

  I
looked again at the people around me. They were all staring at me. I didn't really know them, and yet they were counting on me. At the same time, with Jennie gone, and with our parents long dead, these other dumped victims were as close to family as anything I had. I could help myself, help them, and later, rescue her. A cold part of my mind also noted that I couldn't get out of here on my own, so I either had to work with them or plan to remain stuck on Dump.

  No matter how I thought about it, I ended up with the same decision.

  I bent to pick up my knife. It was thick enough that it fit well in my large hand, strong, and yet light. I'd sliced meat and bread with one back on Pinecone, and I'd used a larger, curved blade to clear grass and underbrush, but that was the end of my experience with knives.

  "Okay," I said, standing as I spoke. "Teach us how to fight with these. I'll do whatever you need—but I'm not giving up on anyone. We're all going to make it. Understand?"

  "You bet," Alex said.

  The others murmured their agreement, but none sounded as if he believed his own words.

  Chapter 22

  Over the jungle near the rebel complex, planet Tumani

  All fifteen of us in Black Squad were crammed into Lobo, the other four team leads and I in his front area, the rest sprawling from there down the side hall. We all wore our harnesses and the combat helmets Maggie's people had bought. Each of us carried about forty kilos of gear in addition to the harnesses, but we had no right to complain on that front; soldiers have been packing about the same weight for as long as there had been soldiers. We could handle it. The combination of the people and the harnesses and the packs made for a tight fit, cramped enough that you had to look twice before you turned around, but I'd been in worse crowds and for longer times—and so, from their resumes, had the rest of the squad. Lobo had opened displays in his front wall and at several points along the left side, so we could all see the landing area and our flight path.

  "One more time," I said, because in mission planning repetition can help, even when it's annoying, and we'd been rushed on this one, "I don't want to have to carry any bodies out of the jungle, so take it slow and easy when you near the tree-tops. Aim for the center of the village, and clear to the sides immediately. You've all done at least one jump into a wooded area, so you know how tricky it is. We'll gather at the southwest corner of the village and leave the harnesses there. If you hit a tree and get stuck, send a quick comm burst downward and set up an IR pulse beacon so we can find you. We won't leave until we know everyone's status."

  "Target areas remain free of hostiles," Lobo said privately. "Two minutes to jump," he said aloud.

  "Keep off comm," I reminded the team. "If there's an emergency, transmit a burst to me. No cross-chatter." As far as we knew, the government troops had never attacked the complex. The target villages were still deserted, and the rebels had always fought with minimal electronic help, so we didn't expect them to be monitoring transmissions as far away from the base as our landing zone. Still, it would take very little for them to know someone in the jungle near them was on a comm, so we were playing it as safe as we could and limiting all conversations to short squirts.

  Our LZ was the village five klicks from the complex. We were starting from beyond the most distant side of the village and doing everything we could to minimize the chance of anyone seeing us. We hoped the combination of the distance, the hour, our avoidance of comm use, and the activefiber camo covering us would mean that if our intel was wrong and rebels were patrolling the area, they'd have trouble seeing us.

  "IR scan continues to show no hostiles," Lobo said privately. "You should be good to go." Aloud, he said, "One minute to jump."

  The displays winked out. I made my way out of the front and along the wall to where Lobo would be opening the side hatch when he came to a stop. "Stay sharp," I said as I went. "Let's execute the plan, and by morning we'll be resting in their camp."

  The ten men and four women murmured their agreement. A few even raised their battle cries, the particular word choices reflecting the four different outfits with which they'd fought.

  "Black one, you'd better close that helmet," one of them said to me, "or even rebels twenty klicks away will think their moon is crashing into the jungle and come to investigate."

  The rest chuckled. I was far and away the palest of the unit—most of them were darker than Lim—and I took some grief for it. I was okay with that; the sooner a squad can joke together, the better.

  "We can't have that," I said, "because then I'd have to save you all from a bunch of terrified rebels wondering why the sky was falling."

  "Brace for opening," Lobo said before any of them could respond. We were low enough that we didn't need breathing gear. The winds weren't terrible, but we'd feel them when his hatch opened. Once we were out, our harnesses would have to work to hit our targets.

  My helmet's faceplate slid shut, sealing in my head.

  "Opening," he said. The hatch slid aside and revealed the night.

  I stepped to the middle of it, a man one meter away on either side of me. I glanced at each of them and nodded slightly.

  We dove headfirst out of Lobo into the night.

  The helmet filtered the sound so I could hear the rushing air only as a background noise, not an overwhelming roar. Its display showed targeting data from the harnesses, which we'd programmed earlier. The village was about a klick in front of us, but for now we were falling almost straight down, the harness doing nothing until its programming said it was time to deploy the chute. We could have opted for manual control, but none of us had done this recently enough that we felt we could beat the harnesses at what they were built to do. I sure didn't; it had been close to a decade since I'd parachuted anywhere.

  As we hurtled downward, I couldn't help but smile; the feeling was a rush of sensation and adrenaline, and the view was spectacular, the ground details changing rapidly as we descended. There was something about going fast with minimal protection that I loved. Sure, Lobo could fly enormously faster than I was moving now, but sitting inside him I had no sense of that speed. Here, with just my clothing and pack and harness around me, I was part of the sky, moving through it at terminal velocity. I was glad no one else in the squad could see my huge grin.

  I tuned into the machine frequency to check on the harness. Even though I'd insisted on disabling the communication between the devices—a move others thought might be too paranoid but which I insisted we make because I didn't want any comm traffic flowing around us—I knew each harness would talk to itself. Even when no one's around to listen to them, machines keep on talking. They don't need audiences; they can amuse themselves, carry on lengthy monologs, and they'll do so until they die.

  "Woo-eee!" it said. "Is this fun or what? This is what I was born to do! Meat sack here almost certainly doesn't appreciate me, but when do they? Never, that's when. We harnesses do all the work, handle the targeting, and deliver them safely to the ground, and what do we get for it? Not appreciation, no sir, not us. No matter what, though, they can count on us. Speaking of which, it's too bad fluid-and-tissue didn't understand how good I am, because if he had, he might have given me a more challenging target than that gigantic clearing. He could have dropped a sliced sandwich anywhere in that village, and I could have put him down on the half of his choice—assuming, of course, that he didn't screw up his landing. I can't control that part, no sir, that's the one thing fleshy here has to do on his own."

  I suppressed a giggle and tuned out. The helmet warned me we were about to deploy the chute, so I braced myself for the quick lift.

  As the chute burst free and filled, I shot upward, my stomach feeling for a second as if it had stayed where I was and was pissed at me for leaving it behind. I clutched the harness handgrips, and in a few seconds the sensation passed. I was falling much more slowly now, the harness making minute adjustments to keep me on track for the target. I switched the helmet to clear and my vision to IR—another ability Jennie gave me, on
e I took a long time to discover—and scanned the jungle below me. It generally read cool, with no signs of people, though that didn't mean much because I couldn't see very far past the canopy. I trusted Lobo's more powerful scan, though, so I wasn't worried.

  I tuned back into the harness as the treetops drew closer.

  "I hope squishy and breakable knows enough about what he's doing to stick this landing, because I'd hate to drop him on precisely the right point and have us look like amateurs because he doesn't know how to absorb the momentum. Given the total weight they've made me carry, there's only so slowly I can bring us in."

  We descended to parallel with the tops of the trees around the clearing, missing them by just a few meters on my left. The helmet flashed its landing warnings. I don't know why, but I cared about not letting down the harness, so I relaxed, bent my legs, and braced myself for impact.

  A couple of seconds later, my feet hit the ground. I relaxed into the collision with the earth, using my legs as springs to absorb and dissipate the small amount of downward force—the harness really had done a great job—and started to fall to my left as I jogged forward to discharge the last of my forward momentum. I pulled to the other side and managed to stay standing. I came to a halt only half a dozen meters past the target.

  I pressed the recall button on the harness, and it quickly sucked in the chute. At this point, repacking was not a concern. As the last of the fabric disappeared, I followed my helmet's guide and ran to the rendezvous point on the edge of the cleared area. As I did, I scanned the area in both standard and IR views and also tuned in for a last listen to the harness.

  "Who's the machine?" It was practically screaming, even though it thought nothing could hear it. "I am, oh yeah, that's right! I hit that mark, couldn't have been more on target. If untalented and uncoordinated here had been able to handle the tiny bit of energy I left for him, he could have stood tall on that spot and the others would have known just what kind of master had led them down. But, noooooo, he had to run forward and almost lose his balance. I'm glad there are no judges, because I'd hate to have his limitations ruin my reputation."