Miller rocked back at Ross's aggression, but then his gaze turned from anger to suspicion.
Ross noticed it and relented. "Trust me, he'll come back. Quantrill wants Temptation."
"Yeah, for a friggin' buffet table," Fitz mumbled, casting a glance at Ringo who stood sullenly outside the small ring of Rangers. The youngest Ranger hadn't said much since his return to town. He had fought willingly throughout the cleanup process, but he obviously wasn't the same boisterous youth he'd been only a few days ago.
"Well, the free meals are over," Stew said, responding quickly to Fitz's comment. "Temptation's ours again and no more stinking zombies are dining here."
"Thanks to Ross and Debbi," Miller said.
There was resounding cheer with guns upraised. Ross stared at his exultant outfit. No, not his outfit anymore. They were just as much Debbi's, if not more so. Her smiling face as she too watched their fellow Rangers seemed suddenly innocent again, but her carriage showed there was an air of command about her. She had come a long way from the young, shell-shocked woman who had arrived in Temptation fresh from a disastrous tour aboard the Cabal ore station.
Hearing the commotion, Mo quickly brought a bottle and a tray of shot glasses filled with the good hooch. Debbi held out some money, but Mo shook his head with a grin. It was on the house. A small price to pay for liberation since Mo expected customers to start arriving in droves any time now.
The Rangers eagerly fell upon the free booze, slamming back drinks. Ross himself took the glass nearest him and relished the burn as it traveled through his aching body. Unfortunately, the alcohol didn't make it anywhere near the true source of his pain. It only made his head pound harder for a moment, but then it passed.
Lord, he was tired. He needed to rest his eyes for a minute. Sit in the shade and watch the tranquil horses graze. Look at the clean laundry flutter in the soft breeze like ships' sails. He heard something behind him and he turned his head expectantly. A half-decayed figure lurched at him from the shadows and he started, quickly jerking back to reality.
He was still in the saloon and everyone looked at him curiously as he gasped for breath. He forced his face into a stern glower and brought his focus once again on the map.
In a voice that was none too steady, he said, "I—I want all the bodies placed outside the town walls. I want them . . . I want them burned."
"All of them?" Fitz asked, standing beside Ross.
Ross fixed him with a glare. "Yes, all of them. You got a problem with that?"
"Doc Dazy said he wanted a few for autopsies."
"No! I want all of them burned. Every last one."
Stew stepped forward. "Maybe the Doc's experiments could help. Find a more efficient way to kill them. Long range maybe."
Ross swung toward Stew, his eyes glassy, his knuckles white as his fists clenched. "Are you questioning my orders? What, you don't trust me any more?"
Stew shook his head slowly, taken aback by Ross's outburst, but he refused to show it. "No, Ross. I'm just pointing out other options."
"There are no other options! My order stands. Anybody who doesn't like it can get the hell out!" Ross's voice sounded like poured gravel.
Debbi stepped forward close to Ross, but didn't touch him. "Ross, no one is standing against you. We're all with you on this, but getting to know our enemy isn't such a bad idea."
"I know the enemy, Dallas," he snarled. "I got their putrid footprints all over the inside my skull!" His grabbed the sides of his head and squeezed his eyes shut as memories cascaded over him. "I don't want to know any more about them!"
Debbi grabbed his arm as he swayed. It was a miracle he had stayed on his feet this long. The whiskey on top of his exhaustion was rapidly bringing the house down on him.
Ross pulled his arm free. "You're not in command anymore, Dallas. I am. Go sit in the jail with those zombies you want to coddle. You'll get to know all about them too." He glanced for a moment at Ringo and then visibly shook. He hadn't known what was happening out at the Bone Camp, but he should have known. It should have been obvious.
Ross heard everyone whispering around him. It sounded like the syker zombies when they were in his mind. His vision swimming, he jerked his head up and glared at Fitz and Stew. "Both of you can go too! And anyone else . . . who thinks the dead . . . deserve special treatment."
The room tilted abruptly for Ross. He staggered against the table making glasses jump. His thoughts muddled together and he couldn't focus his eyes. He vainly tried to keep it together, but the cost was too much.
Fitz grabbed Ross before he slid to the floor. He lifted him under his arms and clutched him tightly against his chest despite having only one arm. Ross weighed close to nothing nowadays. Fitz regarded Debbi sadly.
"About time," she muttered. "He's got the constitution of a mule." She glared at Mo. "Took you long enough to bring the whiskey over."
Mo prickled. "Hey, I was waiting for the right moment. Sick or not, Dave Ross can smell a setup a mile away."
"Should I bring him to Doc Dazy?" Fitz asked, holding the limp form of his captain as tenderly as a newborn babe.
Mo gestured to the stairs. "I got plenty of rooms. Some of 'em clean. Just use one of those."
Debbi considered it for a second and then nodded. "Thanks, Mo."
Fitz wasted no time bringing Ross upstairs.
Debbi turned to Stew. "Carry out the rest of the orders."
He glanced up at the ceiling as Fitz's heavy footfalls echoed above them. "Is he going to be okay?"
"I hope so. But God, I can't blame him for being rattled. The things he must have endured . . ." She couldn't even voice the horror. She had seen a glimpse of it with her own eyes and it still haunted her every time she looked at Ringo.
"I'll send for Doc Dazy."
Stew's voice interrupted her dark thoughts and she brushed them away with a hand as if they were tangible things. She had business to take care of. There wasn't any time for remorse.
She cast a curt nod to Stew and the fair-haired man departed quietly, a squad of Rangers on his heels. In the ensuing silence, Debbi found herself sitting at the table with her hands clutched in front of her face. She closed her eyes and prayed for Ross.
It was fatigue and stress that had triggered his paranoia and sudden rage. She couldn't help but think of all the traumas he was going to try to suppress for the rest of his life. He would be able to keep several psychiatrists busy for their entire careers. Too bad psychiatrists weren't a dime a dozen these days on Banshee, and too bad that most of them were hucksters anyway. And besides, in the end, no Ranger would ever admit to needing one.
She mounted the stairs slowly. Another black thought entered. What if Ross's paranoia wasn't a result of his exhaustion? What if he wasn't back like she thought? What if there was permanent brain damage? Her stomach bottomed out. She had been prepared for that contingency before the rescue went down. But now, after having him whole for these last few hours, the thought that she might never really have had him at all was almost more than she could bear.
A door creaked open in the hall and Fitz emerged from a room. "Do you want me to stay?"
Debbi shook her head. "No, it's okay. Doc will be here soon enough. Go help Stew."
Fitz laid his remaining thick hand on her shoulder as she passed. She could feel the strength and willed some of it into her. She straightened; she hadn't realized she was hunched over.
"Thanks, Fitz," she whispered.
"You need me, you call."
She slipped inside the quiet room and stared down at Ross in the bed. He seemed small all of a sudden, his hair plastered to his scalp with sweat, his breathing quick and shallow, his body curled into a fetal position. There was a blanket tucked around him. Fitz's doing. The big bear of a man was a pillar of strength that she had come to rely on lately. He was always around and always solid.
She grabbed a wooden chair and placed it at the side of the bed and began her vigil.
Doc Dazy st
raightened from the bed and began to pack his things.
"Well?" Debbi roughly chewed on a fingernail. The Doctor hadn't said two words the entire examination. And Ross hadn't so much as twitched through it all.
Doc Dazy adjusted an IV drip that hung over the bed before looking over at the agitated Ranger. "You want it by the books? He's undernourished, dehydrated, and worn flat out."
"Is he going to be all right?"
"Physically?" Doc's gaze was sympathetic. He scrubbed at his gray hair and sighed. "He can recover from this easy. He's been through worse. Your last jaunt to the Red River comes to mind."
"And mentally?"
Dazy shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I don't have the right equipment to determine neurological damage. All I know is his brain is intact under that thick skull of his. However, what was done to him by those Legionnaires and how deep that damage goes, I couldn't tell you. Only time will tell."
"How much time?" Debbi knew she was being curt but she couldn't help it. Her chest was in a vice and breathing was becoming a chore with the not knowing. She needed answers.
"It could be days; it could be years. You said he was acting fairly rational up until near the end, right? That's a good sign. Have faith, Dallas. Ross isn't the type to lie down and die because some damn zombie tells him to. He's been through a lot. He'll have his ups and downs for a bit. Ride it out with him. Give him support. He needs that more than anything else right now." He slipped on a threadbare suit coat and picked up his bag. "I've pumped him full of antibiotics, vitamins, and whatnot. The IV will hydrate him. Try to keep it in him if he wakes up and gets ornery. Get him to eat something too. Soup would be good. Nothing heavy. Your landlady, Miss Etta, makes a great chicken soup. That would be perfect. He won't eat much, not as emaciated as he is, but every little bit counts."
The Doctor made for the door.
Debbi stopped him. "That's it?"
Dazy's kind eyes regarded her. "I'm sorry if it's not enough, but for right now it will have to do. Call me when he wakes up." He glanced back towards his patient. "It won't be for a while yet." He smiled at Debbi. "I gave him a sedative to let him sleep. He needs that as much as anything right now."
He lifted her chin with his finger, eyeing the discolorations on her face. "You look like hell."
"Gee, thanks." Debbi pulled her head away and returned to Ross's side. "I'm fine. My skull's pretty hard too."
"Yes," he said. "I can see that." He opened the door. "Take care, Dallas. Call if you need me."
The room was silent again. Debbi eased herself down carefully into the chair to avoid any creaking noise even though she knew that Ross wouldn't wake up if a marching band of anouks came through the room.
She turned on her com again and listened to the chatter over the headset. It calmed her. Miller was complaining. Ngoma was overly calm and efficient. Fitz offered roughneck support to all. Stew had everything under control. She felt herself relaxing. Things might not be where she wanted them to be, but it was a hell of a better place than where they had been. It would do for now.
Chapter 14
It was just like the old days with the crackling sound of fire and the dense smoke filling the air over a devastated anouk village. Bodies of dead natives littered the ground, and amidst the carnage stalked triumphant Syker Legionnaires.
The battle, such as it was, was long over. The majority of the Legion already had withdrawn from the native village called Czimizir. They were drawn up in formation on the plain outside the settlement where they stood patiently without an apparent thought in their heads. Only the 3rd Division was still active, hunting stragglers and searching for weapons. They also collected the dead bodies of the natives because, after all, an army traveled on its stomach.
Quantrill strode through the burning village, noting with pride the thorough job his men had done. It was a massive victory; complete enemy casualties and none among the Legion. Something on the order of four hundred anouks lay dead including the all-important women and children who served to replenish the enemy war machine.
Quantrill paused to examine the greatest battle trophy, the body of a dead Skinny. It had been nailed to the side of a native hut with a hastily scrawled note pinned to its homespun tunic reading "Courtesy of 1st SpecOps - Reformed Syker Legion. Kill Some More in '94!" Quantrill was somewhat surprised by the appearance of the note. He had not ordered it done. It demonstrated a level of independence that surprised him; his troopers had more autonomy than he had believed.
The dead Skinny was the product of intelligence, innovation, and execution, hallmarks of Quantrill's leadership. He had been forewarned of the presence of this evil thing in Czimizir thanks to information extracted from several natives which the Legion had found and tortured several miles from the village. Quantrill didn't want to risk a stand-up fight with the Skinny. Even though he had his own Skinny, Tekkeng refused to aid in the destruction of one of his own kind. He wouldn't do anything to prevent it, but he wouldn't help. So Quantrill called in his Special Operations unit. The General had been disappointed to find only found three troopers in his Legion who were skilled infiltrators. And he only had four TSAR rifles.
The TSAR had once been the standard weapon of the Syker Legionnaire, but only four had been recovered in working order from the soil of the Red River Valley with a small amount of ammo. The TSARs fired unique gyrojet ammunition that locked on and homed in on the brainwaves of the target. Normally, the rifleman himself acquired the target's brainwaves on the battlefield through line of sight and fed them to the weapon via a psionic cable that ran from the gun to a socket in the back of the soldier's brain. But thanks to the network that connected the Legion, Quantrill could take the TSARs to a new level.
Quantrill sent two of his infiltrators into the village under cover of night. They located the Skinny, tagged his brainwaves, and transmitted the information to Quantrill. The General passed the psygnature onto his four TSAR marksmen. When the SpecOp infiltrators scanned the Skinny, he rose in a murderous fury to seek out the offending troopers. Before he could lash out, however, three TSAR gyrojets zipped into the village and homed in on his brainwaves. To the Skinny's credit, he destroyed them. But the last shell, fired late to strike when the Skinny believed he was safe, penetrated his defenses and killed him.
With silent efficiency, the Skinny was dispatched and the battle became a matter of killing the sleeping anouks as quickly as possible to minimize the risk that one of the natives would get a lucky hit on a Legionnaire. This raid was not for spoils, and no prisoners were taken. The attack on Czimizir was the first paragraph in a bloody message that Quantrill intended to deliver to the savage aborigines of Banshee. It was all about killing.
Quantrill yanked the tannis necklace from the Skinny's neck. He hefted the heavy talisman in his hand with pleasure and made a mental note that the Skinny should be served at his next captains' conference.
The General then checked reports with his ever-present adjutant, some written, some verbal, some psychic. He waded patiently through the standard post-battle checklist of friendly casualties, of which there were none, and the assessment of the achievement of tactical goals, which was total. He accepted the reports of his captains and stored them for later study. Finally his adjutant came to the last item, and the one that most interested and disturbed Quantrill.
The silence from Temptation was deafening. There had been no contact with Captain Marat for two days and it deeply disturbed the General. He suspected Marat had pushed the Colonial Rangers and the loss of contact would seem to be the proof that the Rangers were capable of killing Legionnaires quite handily. It was the very reason Quantrill had worked to avoid an open fight. He respected the Colonial Rangers as a skilled and cunning lot. They were forged and tempered by the fires of brutal warfare between the Reapers, the UN, and the anouks. If they hadn't evolved to be a little smarter than those other larger forces, they would have been crushed long ago. Now, Quantrill had likely lost fifteen precious Legionnaires
needlessly, while two bloody battles at the front had only produced two killed.
Also, Quantrill could no longer sense Ross. Had the wily veteran Ranger somehow freed himself from the hold that Quantrill and Avernus had placed on him? Knowing the depth of the control they had exerted over Ross, however, the General found it difficult to believe a simple Ranger could've broken free. Sadly, this meant Ross was likely dead too.
Tomorrow, Quantrill would hold a war council to discuss the Temptation matter. The campaign, which had begun with two magnificent victories at Ghost Rock City and Czimizir, was already threatened with a dangerous crossroads thanks to Marat's failure. Quantrill had planned to spend the next month or two reducing anouk power bases in the south. Now he had to consider the possibility of returning north and attacking Temptation, expending men and resources on the conquest of what already had been his. He had no desire to contest the Colonial Rangers for that city, particularly with their black guns. Ultimately, he knew he had to take the blame for his decision to leave Marat in charge of Temptation; it had been bad generalship.
Quantrill continued his examination of the ruined village and took comfort in the sight of dead anouks. His Legion was efficient and powerful; if he had to fight for Temptation, he knew he could take it. Perhaps, in the end, it would be better to go ahead and erase the city from the map rather than depend on its loyalty or fear its antagonism.
Ahead of him, through the smoke, he saw a platoon of four Legionnaires carrying TSAR rifles. They were led by Captain De Klerk, commander 3rd Division and attached 1st SpecOp squad. De Klerk limped and much of the skin was gone from his head. The remnants of his right ear dangled just over his collar.
In their midst walked a Skinny and an anouk.
Quantrill froze, and then he realized the Skinny was his "ally," Tekkeng. The anouk next to the Skinny was a tribal shaman, easily distinguished by his elaborate headdress and mystical talismans. But there was something different about this particular anouk. Most of this irritating species had a misplaced sense of arrogance as if they owned this planet. This one did not. In fact, he was hunched over and his face slack. The shaman's garb was disheveled and dirty, but it hadn't been caused by his sykers.
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