Speed of Darkness

by Tracy Hickman

  The dark, curving hull dropped away below him in the fading twilight. Pools of light emanated dimly from the windows of the Command Center and from the anticollision markers that blinked mournfully from the various equipment pods jutting from the main hull. Just beyond the curve of the hull, a large bright patch of yellow light extended from the main doors of the Command Center across the small patch of compressed dirt between the dark patchwork of the base buildings.

  There, a long shadow emerged. It was cast by a single, small female figure struggling to run with a heavy case.

  Ardo glanced at the power indicators just below the lip of his helmet. He had not yet dipped into the power reserve. It would be plenty to catch up with her.

  In a single movement, Ardo pulled himself through the window opening and began running down the slope of the Command Center. His booted footfalls rang against the hull as he made his way down the various sensor armatures around the hull. Such a suicidal dash would have been impossible without the combat suit, but despite the whine of the servos in complaint of the abuse, he quickly made his way down the ever-increasing slope of the outer hull. Merdith was running west toward the factory unit. Ardo checked her position as he ran. Within moments the slope became too steep to support him, but he was already within twenty feet of the ground. He held on to a protruding thruster pod for a moment, then jumped into the air.

  He landed hard, rolling on the ground as his training had taught him. The suit absorbed most of the impact, the servos whining as he rolled to his feet and set off in pursuit at a dead run.

  Turning the corner, Ardo saw an array of vehicles in front of him. Each had been parked outside of the automated factory that had churned them out on demand, only to be abandoned. The evening wind was whipping blinding dust between the various SCVs, ground support trucks, and a line of enclosed Vulture cycles.

  Ardo stopped. She was in there somewhere, he knew. All he had to do was find her.

  The wind was howling around his head, but he turned up the external audio sensors anyway. He switched the tactical channel to Standby. He knew Breanne would start asking after him soon enough, and he did not want the distraction.

  Ardo moved slowly forward through the machines, stepping carefully and quietly. He thought absently how amazing it was that as complicated a piece of military hardware as a battlesuit was, it could still move with deadly quiet when required. He raised and readied his weapon. He knew that he was perfectly willing and able to shoot Merdith through the head if necessary—and quite possibly even if it was not necessary.

  The sand-obscured SCVs stood as still as sentinels. The armored titans were just over ten feet tall. Ardo wove his way between them smoothly, his rifle at the ready.

  Something creaked in the wind to his right. He spun around, his rifle quickly leveled in the direction of the sound. The vision augmentation in his closed faceplate illuminated the culprit at once: an open maintenance hatch on an SCV leg flapped in the wind. He turned back again on his ragged course, picking his way forward.

  An engine turned over with agonizing slowness somewhere just ahead of him. Ardo smiled thinly to himself and stepped smoothly around another SCV that was blocking his line of sight.

  It was a hauler, a truck nearly as tall as an SCV. The chassis was suspended between six massive balloon tires, three on a side. The control cab jutted out from the front. Ardo could just make out the glow from the cab’s windows through the wind-whipped sand.

  Getting into the cab was something of a problem. One had to climb up a vertical ladder to get to one of the side hatches. He could do it in the combat suit, of course, but he suspected the lieutenant would prefer Merdith alive. A direct assault was not the best way to achieve this objective. He suddenly had a better idea. Smiling to himself, he made his way around to the back of the vehicle, being careful to stay out of the sight lines from the extended mirrors on either side of the control cab. Then he ducked down and began crawling down the length of the truck chassis. Halfway down, he heard the low agony of the starter motor once again. He began to hurry. The engine sputtered twice, then died.

  Under the cab, Ardo slowly brought himself into a crouch just below the driver’s-side door. He could see shadows moving in the cab, heard various switches being toggled and Merdith’s low mutters.

  Ardo quickly stood up and wrenched open the driver’s-side door. With his free hand he grabbed the astonished Merdith by the arm, intent on pulling her out of the cab and throwing her to the ground.

  Ardo jerked Merdith from the driver’s seat in a single motion, his combat suit bringing him incredible strength. The woman tumbled out of the cab, her hands desperately fastening on Ardo’s grip. Her flailing legs kicked against the truck cab, pushing Ardo unexpectedly backward with additional momentum. Ardo fell away from the cab, dragging the panicked Merdith with him.

  Both of them tumbled to the ground. Ardo quickly rolled to his feet, his weapon already in hand by the time he was standing. Merdith lay painfully on the ground, groaning in the wind at his feet.

  “Get up,” he said. “You’re going back.”

  Merdith looked up, gasping for air.

  “You’re my prisoner,” he said flatly, raising his weapon.

  “Prisoner?” she coughed, her words derisive. “Prisoner of what?”

  “Prisoner of the Confederacy,” Ardo explained dutifully.

  Merdith snorted derisively. “That makes two of us.”

  “Shut up!” Ardo growled.

  “Listen, I’ve been monitoring the com traffic from here.” Merdith pointed up to the cab of the truck. “The Confederacy forces are done with their evac, soldier-boy. Hell, they’re probably already out of the system by now.”

  “So we’ll find another uplink!” Ardo was beginning to sweat. “We’ll call for an evac. They’ll come back and—”

  Merdith snapped. “Wake up, Ardo! We’re supposed to be dead! You think that nuke just dropped out of the sky on its own? We were all supposed to eat that nuke, soldier-boy! CHQ sent you and your pals out there to find me and my box—that goddamn poison box—and the moment they knew you had it they called off your evac and lobbed a big one with you and me and that box as ground zero. They knew your situation top to bottom. They set you up. The only reason they sent you out there was to find me and that lousy box and die with it!”

  “We’re soldiers, lady.” Ardo’s face flushed red. “Soldiers die! It’s our job to die!”

  “No.” Merdith’s voice lowered but remained intense. “It is your job to fight. You fought today and we lived. CHQ cut you off without a prayer and you still fought and you still lived. Make no mistake about it, Ardo. As far as they are concerned we are all dead and they prefer it that way. Jeez, they planned it that way! No one is supposed to know about this box. If you show up with it at CHQ, they’ll make sure that you’re all a whole lot deader than they think you are now.”

  “Shut up! Why the hell can’t you just shut up?”

  She pleaded with him over the screaming wind. “Don’t throw away your life on phantoms, soldier-boy! The Confederacy lied to you, robbed you of your love, your family, and your entire past. They sent you here to do a dirty job for them, and once you did it they casually tried to murder you. Underneath all that programming and brainwashing and ‘social reconditioning’ there is still a man—Ardo Melnikov—who deserves to have a life and to live it.” Merdith sighed into the wind. “There must be something left deep inside of that noble boy who was raised by loving parents.”

  Ardo blinked. He was sweating, and the combat suit cooling systems did not seem to be helping. “What . . . what are you suggesting? What are you saying?”

  Merdith nodded, their eyes locked. “I’m saying we get out. They think we’re dead—let’s just leave it that way. We get off-planet and find a new life somewhere else and let someone else do the dying for us.”

  Ardo smiled sadly. “And just how are we supposed to leave? Walk? The Confederacy left. They took the last of the commercial t
ransports with them. Even if I said yes, even if I trusted you, there’s no way off this rock.”

  Merdith stepped forward, smiling. “Oh, yes, I think there is one way off this rock.”

  Ardo raised his gun slightly. Merdith took the hint and stepped back.

  “The Sons of Korhal,” she said levelly.

  “The Sons of Korhal?” Ardo snorted. “A handful of delusional fanatics?”

  “Yes.” Merdith nodded, smiling. “Because a fleet of transport ships of those ‘delusional fanatics’ is five hours out and inbound to this same rock right now. They’ll be landing here to evac anyone they can—anyone who’s left—and, my good soldier-boy, I suspect they will be especially anxious and grateful to accept our ticket.”

  Ardo shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  “Ardo, we give them that box and we’re off on the first flight out!” Merdith pressed her point fervently. “All we have to do is get out of here with that box and stay alive for the next six hours. I know where there is an enclave, the last place the Zerg are going to move against. The Zerg will almost certainly move against the cities first.”

  “What?” Ardo suddenly realized what she was saying.

  “The enclave should be able to hold out until the fleet arrives. The cities will slow the Zerg advance so we’ll have enough time to—”

  “The cities?” Ardo was suddenly galvanized by his own thoughts. “Civilians being slaughtered by those nightmares—thousands of them—and all you can do is count them by the number of minutes that they buy for your escape?”

  Merdith swallowed hard. “We all have to make sacrifices, Ardo. Sometimes they’re hard, but . . .”

  Patriarch Gabittas was speaking to him in the seminary class. “What profit it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul . . .”

  Melani smiled at him under a golden sun.

  “And so their sacrifice—thousands of lives—has meaning because you and your precious rebellion can live?” Ardo shook with his anger. “Littlefield gave his life for you! He stepped up and threw his life down so that you could live. Isn’t that enough? How many people is your life worth, Merdith? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  Merdith’s eyes flashed. Ardo turned angrily and raised his rifle overhead. With an outraged cry, he smashed the butt of the rifle through the lower window in the cab door. It didn’t seem to help. He threw the weapon through the vacant pane into the cab with another howl. He turned back to Merdith, gripping her shoulders roughly with both hands.

  “What about my life, Merdith? How many people is my life worth? How many should die for me?”

  Ardo’s grip tightened. Merdith winced in pain.

  “What about my soul, Merdith? My soul is mine. No one can have it. Not the Confederacy. Not your precious rebellion. You can’t buy my redemption. What is my life worth, Merdith? How many . . . how many people can I buy with my life?”

  His father was reading to the family. “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

  Ardo stood frozen, transfixed.

  Merdith looked up, still in his painful grip. “What is it?”

  Melani stood in the field of golden wheat. She was handing him the box and reciting something from Scripture.

  “Please.” Merdith grimaced. “You’re hurting me!”

  “It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief . . .”

  Ardo suddenly let Merdith go. “How many ships are coming?”

  “What? Maybe a hundred—whatever they could scrape together, I guess—but they’ll never reach the cities in time.”

  “No, but what if the Zerg didn’t make it to the cities?” Ardo turned back to the truck as he spoke, pulling open the door and climbing up into the cab. “Thousands could be saved, couldn’t they?”

  “You can’t stop the Zerg, soldier-boy!”

  Ardo jumped back down from the cab.

  In his hands he held the metal case.

  “No, we can’t,” Ardo said. “But we might—just might—be able to slow them down.”

  CHAPTER 20

  SIRENS

  “YOU ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR FRAGGED mind, you know that?” Ardo looked around the Operations Room. The faces he saw looking back at him for the most part seemed to be in agreement with Cutter’s statement.

  A cascade of sparks rained down from the ceiling of the Operations Room. Tinker was outside in an SCV. The technician had managed to clear most of the broken antennae and sensor probes away and lifted the fallen section of the hull back up to where it belonged. Now he was welding additional plating over the acid cuts in the metal overhead to hold it all in place and reinforce the structure.

  The rest of the surviving detail had been called back into the Operations Room. Ardo was facing all that remained of the platoon that had left that same morning—a morning that seemed to Ardo to be years in the past. Private Mellish sat wearily on the catwalk, his legs dangling down over one of the console covers. He was all that was left of Jensen’s original squad and now apparently wanted to look anywhere but at Ardo. Privates Bernelli and Xiang stood leaning back against the floor consoles opposite Mellish. Xiang’s eyes seemed unfocused and distant while Bernelli’s appeared to bore right through Ardo with laser intensity. Lieutenant Breanne stood with her back turned to the room on the catwalk behind Xiang and Bernelli, her arms folded across her chest. One might have thought that she was gazing out the still broken window into the darkness beyond, but Ardo knew that she saw nothing out there and that her mind was very much in the room.

  As was Cutter, the mammoth islander in the plasma Firebat suit, who was having no trouble expressing his views. He stomped back and forth across the newly welded floor plates in front of the elevator bay. “You are absolutely meltdown fragged in the head!”

  “Maybe I am,” Ardo said, fingering the metallic case resting awkwardly on the bent floor of the command island next to him. Merdith was leaning against the back of one of the crushed panels of the island, her hands in the pockets of her jumpsuit, her eyes cast down toward the floor in thought. “Maybe I am, but I don’t see that it makes much difference to us, and it might make a lot of difference to someone else.”

  “Not much difference to us?” Cutter gaped. “You want to turn that Zerg homing beacon on—draw every Mutalisk, Hydralisk, and I-don’t-know-what-lisk within a thousand clicks right down on top of us—and you figure we won’t care?”

  “That’s not what I said.” Ardo shook his head.

  “By the gods, I hope not!”

  “What I said was, it won’t make much difference to us.” Ardo set his combat helmet down on top of the case and removed his combat gloves. “Look, the Confederacy left us for dead—hell, they flat-out wanted us dead! They’re not coming back for us even if they knew we were here. They’ve written off this entire world—and every colonist on it. Just think, Cutter! The Confederacy’s little secret device here called the Zerg down on this world. We’ve got the proof right here in this box. You think they want anybody to know that they’re responsible for the flat-out cue-balling of this entire planet?”

  Bernelli spoke up. “But . . . but what about these Sons of Kohole or Korhal or whoever. They got evac ships coming. Can’t we hook up with them?”

  Ardo nodded. “We could barter with the Sons of Korhal. We could trade them this box and probably find a way off this planet, if anyone can. We’d have to break through the Zerg front, find them, and make the deal. But these Sons of Korhal have their own plan. The rescue ships they have coming certainly aren’t enough to evac the entire planet. It’s just public relations—show some pictures of them rescuing a few left behind. What they do not want everyone to know, however, is that they are also responsible for the Zerg coming here.”

  Xiang turned to Ardo suddenly. “The Korhal bunch? I thought that was a Confederacy gadget.”

  Ardo turned to Merdith.
“Tell them.”

  Merdith squirmed uncomfortably. “It’s true that you could make a deal with the Sons of Korhal—”

  “No,” Ardo said, and Merdith winced at his tone. “Tell them who activated the device!”

  Merdith continued to look at the floor. “Some sacrifices have to be made for the continuation of the Cause. The . . . atrocities of the Confederacy leave the rebellion no choice . . . ah . . . but to use the device against further Confederacy aggression. By using their own weapon against them—”

  “By the gods, Melnikov!” Xiang was shocked. “It’s mass murder! Planetary genocide!”

  Merdith looked up, her eyes flashing. “The Sons of Korhal have a legitimate claim to—”

  Mellish spat on the floor in disgust. “Oh, shut up, lady! The Sons of Korhal don’t give a shit about the civilians any more than the damn Confederacy does. Near as I can tell, they’re just the flip side of the same coin—and just as tarnished.”

  Ardo shook his head sadly. “And when this is all over, this Korhal bunch certainly won’t want us breathing any more than the Confederacy will. The Confederacy may have made the box, but it was the Sons of Korhal who opened it. We know what happened here and how many died . . . because of both sides.” He sighed. “No, boys, we’re all dead. About the only thing left for us to decide is how we die and what we die for.”

  “Well, isn’t that a pretty speech,” Cutter sniffed, his large nostrils flaring. “So you’re all hero and sacrifice, are you, Melnikov? I’ve seen just how much of a hero you are, boy! You were perfectly willing to sacrifice Wabowski back there at Oasis—plenty willing, by my reckoning! Now you’re all the big man wanting to sacrifice the rest of us!”

  “There’s families out there, Cutter.” Bernelli sounded tired. “Women and children . . .”

  “Yeah, and some of them are mine!” Cutter’s deep black eyes were wide and watery. “But I didn’t sign up for this!”