A Warrior's Sacrifice

by Ross Winkler

  "Stay here," the woman told Auta just before he crossed into the inner circle of vehicles.

  Auta did as he was told, aware of the eyes that gleamed at him in the faint moonlight and the quiet whispers as they sized him up for his worth in a trade with the Choxen. He also realized that she'd left him near their prison trucks. At this moment, the cages were empty, the chains coiled and hanging limp.

  The camp was quiet — noise killed out here in the space between Republic and Choxen territory — yet there was a palpable feel, like entering a predator's lair. The cages, though empty, smelled like fear and feces and many unwashed bodies. Auta shuddered.

  "What are you doing here?" a voice said just centimeters from behind Auta.

  Auta's heart leapt, and a hand clenched around his mouth to arrest his yelp. The hand spun Auta around, and after a moment more and warning eyes, let go.

  "O-oh. Od Rokek," Auta said, rubbing his hands together. "You surprised me."

  A pistol appeared in Rokek's hand and punched its way into Auta's stomach, folding him over. "I am now Ot Rokek. The Republic killed my brother. You and your fellows were supposed to warn us of any changes." From the darkness behind Ot Rokek, a dozen other Quisling warriors drifted from the forest to join their families.

  "We did! We are! I'm here to bring you an update of things in the city! Maharatha! A whole Void of them."

  "We know. They are how I became Ot."

  "Oh, I'm so sorry."

  "I debate if I should kill you now or not." The anger in the new Ot's eyes was fierce.

  "Wait! I brought what you wanted. We found the device!"

  The pressure of the gun eased. "You have it? Let me see."

  Auta fished into his pack and brought forth the object. It was the size of a man's fist and hard, hard to the point that it felt brittle. It seemed to suck in the moonlight drifting down through breaks in the trees, and a single line that stretched across the entire circumference marred its otherwise perfect surface.

  Auta didn't like the thing, it made him nervous. Besides what it did with the moonlight, it seemed to exude its own … something. Oppression, maybe. The thing seemed right at home here in the Quisling camp. As the Ot took the device from Auta's outstretched hand, a weight beyond that of the orb's unusual heft lifted from Auta's shoulders. He sighed.

  "Now that we have what we came for, we have no need of you," the Ot said.

  Auta raised his hands but was too slow, and the Ot's viper-fast strike knocked Auta to the ground. Blood dripped into one eye from a gash on his cheek.

  Auta moaned, blinking and wiping at his eye to clear the blood away. He didn't try to get up.

  It was that act of weakness that saved his life.

  In the forest, Kai's chain gun spun, spewing hundreds of rounds into the unsuspecting camp.

  The Maharatha had moved into place in a pattern that most tacticians wouldn't have liked, but it was one that Corwin knew would allow for the complete incapacitation of the Quislings. Kai fired onto the caravan from the west, Chahal covering him from a vantage high in the trees a little south from his position. Phae and Corwin had split up, Phae assaulting from the north, Corwin from the southeast.

  For the first thirty seconds, the two flanking Maharatha had little to do; the ferocity of Kai's assault pinned everyone down while Chahal fired in rapid succession, decapitating the family leadership based on markings Corwin had given her.

  Ot Rokek died with a snarl on his lips as Chahal's high-powered slug tore a fist-sized hole through his chest. The Ot's dead body fell atop Auta, who lay too stunned and afraid to move.

  The Quisling warriors turned to engage the assault force to buy the Grands and the children time to escape. They fired at random into the trees as Kai leapt from cover to cover, firing in bursts. His rounds tore their meager caravan to pieces, the vehicles wilting like dying flowers.

  His bullets didn't spare the noncombatants; there were none. Grands fired as they ran, focused on Kai so much that they did not and could not see Phae. She fired short, tight bursts from her assault rifle at the figures that glowed as bright as day through her suit's visor. They fired back, a few of them, but her cover was good, and they died before they were a problem.

  Corwin was mobile, firing and advancing towards the fleeing Quislings. An engine went critical, a ball of fire and plasma engulfing its occupants. The trees to either side caught fire, adding smoke and heat and dancing shadows to the cacophony of battle.

  Fire and move. Fire and move. Corwin kept his mind on the pure physicality of the task. There was a piece of him, deep down, that felt every death at his Void's hands. He'd been here before. He knew the fear and horror that these people felt, fear that he visited upon them. Bullets ricocheted off Corwin's armored hip. He turned, sighted, fired. The girl, barely ten, collapsed backward into a tree. Corwin observed her death from a place detached from emotion and ticked her off from the total number of enemy combatants.

  "Close in," Corwin said. His voice was distant, disembodied. A Grand came at him from behind a tree, a knife in each hand. He was bloody, burnt, but the bloodlust, apparent in his eyes, prevented him from feeling anything. He was no threat to Corwin, but it didn't matter.

  The Grand slashed. Corwin parried with the barrel of his gun, stepping back and to the side. A quick reorientation of his gun and a twitch of his finger sent a slug tearing up through the Grand's armpit and out his neck.

  Movement caught Corwin's eye, and he rounded the tree, rifle ready. A child, maybe six years old clutched at a knife with wide, fear-filled eyes. He stood trembling over his crying brother — just an infant — who bled from shrapnel wounds.

  Corwin knew what would happen. The older brother would take the younger's life, then end his own — it was how he had been taught. Corwin kicked as the knife flashed downward towards the infant's throat. His foot caught the older boy's hand in midair. The wrist snapped, the knife flew wide. The boy fell backward, crying out as he clutched his hand. With a controlled motion, Corwin struck the boy in the temple to knock him out.

  Corwin left the brothers where they lay, pushing back memories of his own.

  The gunfire was over, replaced by the crackle of fire, the hiss of electrical wires, and the moans of the dying. With pistols in hand, the four Maharatha stalked through the wrecked caravan to finish clearing it of enemies.

  Phae paused. "You sure about this, Corwin?"

  "You know the rules. There is no place for Quisling adults in the Republic."

  A gunshot rang into the night.

  A muffled cry came from the cab of the vehicle Corwin approached. He nudged the door open with his foot. A child wept, her face buried in her mother's bloody coat. Corwin lifted her from the corpse, and the girl shrieked and hit and kicked at Corwin's helmet until her hands bled. Corwin deposited her into one of the slave cages, a cage that the Quislings had used to house captured Republic children.

  The Maharatha continued their search. They found four more children tucked away in armored compartments, but these were not by any means the only children in this Quisling family. Under Corwin's command, the Maharatha had not checked their fire, and Grand, warrior, and child had died alongside each other.

  Corwin retrieved the two siblings that he'd left behind the tree and placed them into the cages with the others. These two, and five others, were all that remained of the forty-two Quislings that the Oniban had sent him here to destroy. These few were lucky to have survived.

  Though perhaps they weren't so lucky.

  Corwin knew what they'd just been through, saw himself reflected in their pale faces and withdrawn eyes. The Republic would split them apart, send each to a different crèche in different parts of the world, and deny them any contact with one another. Some of them, the two surviving infants, wouldn't remember a thing, and those a few years older might recall a life before the one in the Republic, but those would be glimmers of memories, just impressions. The oldest ones would recall all of this in horrifying detail.
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  They will relive this moment in their waking nightmares, as I have, Corwin thought. Maybe one day they'd even become Maharatha, and the Republic would send them out to kill an entire Quisling family like he'd just done, and they'd collect the surviving children and the process would begin again.

  Corwin's finger traced around his pistol's trigger guard. Was he really helping these children? Maybe the real help would be to end their future misery here, now, with a bullet.

  "Corwin," Phae said as she put her body between her Void Commander and the children. "We've killed enough today."

  Corwin nodded, but a minute passed before he holstered his pistol. "Kai," Corwin's voice broke and he cleared his throat, "Kai, call in a patrol to come pick us up. Chahal, see to the kids' hurts. Phae and I will stand guard."

  The dead Ot's body moved. Corwin's pistol flew back into his hand. With a kick, he sent the corpse rolling away, revealing the dazed Human underneath; a Human who was not associated with the Quislings.

  Through the haze of smoke in the air, the blood in his eyes, the light reflected off the burning trees and vehicles, the man saw the Maharatha. He started to crawl away on his hands and knees.

  Corwin grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and lifted him off his feet like a dog lifts her pup. Something big and black slipped from the man's hands and rolled, stopping itself on Corwin's armored foot. Ignoring the grapefruit-sized object, Corwin focused on the man struggling to free himself.

  "Who are you?" Corwin asked. A small part of Corwin's mind noticed the difference in his own voice. He'd heard it projected through his suit's external speakers before, but it sounded stranger this time — hollow, almost robotic.

  The man squirmed harder and clamped his mouth shut with both hands.

  "Who are you?" Corwin said with a shake.

  "A-Auta, sir. A Republic Citizen," he said through gritted teeth. "Thank the First Exiles you saved me! They were going to t-turn me into their slave!"

  Corwin forced his voice to relax. "A Republic Citizen, you say?" He set the man down and straightened his coat. "My apologies, Citizen. You were lucky indeed." Corwin bent down and scooped up the object that had rolled into his foot.

  "I am Void Commander Shura," Corwin said, stowing the orb in a pouch at his hip. He looked in Chahal's direction. "Take care of Auta's injury." Turning back to Auta, Corwin said, "I'm going to continue my search of the area as she tends to you. Have a seat, relax. Your troubles are over."

  With a mental command, Corwin switched to a Void-only com channel. "Give him a shot of some sort and get a tracker into him."

  "What are we going to do with him?" Kai asked. "He's not what he says he is."

  Corwin climbed atop the wreckage of a truck; he tried to ignore the bodies still inside. "Mayor Yanmao warned me that…" Corwin looked at his Voidmates, nodded. "He warned me that the Ashi-Kage was at work in the area. Auta might lead us to them."

  Kai growled into the com.

  "The Ashi-Kage isn't our mission," Phae said.

  "Yes, I know that," Corwin said with more snap than he'd intended. "But here we find a Citizen passing something to the Quislings, who we also know to be working with the Choxen. I want to know why." He patted the sphere in his pocket.

  "Besides," Corwin glanced at the cage of Quisling children, "I want to be thorough, understood?"

  "Aye, sir," Phae said.

  From her medic kit, Chahal pulled a hypodermic gun and loaded a half tube of nanite trackers along with a tube of sedative. She held it to Auta's jugular, cooing, "This will take the edge off. Soon you'll be back in bed, with nothing to worry about."

  With a hiss, the hypogun sent the medicine and nanites flooding into his system. The nanites would disperse throughout Auta's system to avoid detection, but they would join together at random intervals just long enough to send out a tracking pulse.

  Auta drifted off to sleep, a smile of relief creeping across his lips.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was dawn by the time the Maharatha returned to the small city, the summer sun illuminating the sky and treetops in reds and oranges. Even at the early hour, the city's denizens were awake and active, as all in frontier cities are. Farmers shouldered packs and tools, and weary soldiers changed shifts, eager to eat and drink and sleep. Yet they all paused to watch as the tired Void dismounted from their Wei transports and limped to the infirmary.

  There were the visible signs that told the story of their evening exploits. Leaf litter stuck to the mud on their boots, alien blood spattered across their weapons and armor. Most of the city had heard about their part in the rescue of the settlement, of how nightfall had brought with it the Quisling raiders, and how the night had then birthed their saviors, the Maharatha, who fought the enemy and chased them into the woods. Those things were part of what the citizens saw now, but there was something more about the Maharatha that hadn't been there before.

  Now they were blooded. Proven. They had engaged Humanity's enemies, fought, been injured by, and killed them. Combat had changed the Void. Though stumbling from exhaustion and pain, they walked with their heads high, emboldened in the way that only combat outside of the practice grounds and training halls could provide.

  They stepped into the room they used for storage, a three-by-three meter windowless box with a door on one side, armor racks on the other, and shelves and cubbies in between.

  "Hold on," Corwin said as he locked the door and did a quick scan of the room with his helmet. Satisfied that everything was in order, he nodded. "For the rest of the time we're in this city, I want us all to stay together — at minimum groups of two."

  Chahal, the least injured of the three, removed her suit first. "You really think that's necessary?" she asked as she hung her suit on the rack and attached the nutrient feeds.

  "I do. We caught one of them, but who knows what they really have planned."

  With her injured arm, Phae couldn't pull herself out of her suit, and she struggled, cursing. Chahal reached out to help, and the suit snapped shut, the vine-like tendrils clawing at each other and scraping Phae's bare skin in haste.

  "Ahh, wickt!" Phae shouted, rounding on Chahal, who stepped backwards and put her hands up. "What do you think you're doing?" Phae put her faceplate down to Chahal's nose. "Huh?"

  Kai turned, ready to jump in to Chahal's aid, but waited. Even that simple action took effort, and he leaned his weight onto the nearby wall. Corwin sent a mental command for a team of Medics to meet them at their storage room with a litter.

  "I'm helping you."

  "I don't need your help, or you getting your Exilist hands all over me. Got it?"

  "Exilism isn't a disease you catch; it's a heritage, a choice, and a privilege earned." Chahal pushed Phae's helmeted face back. Phae stumbled a couple steps. "And through that choice I have a family who knows and cares who I am."

  No one moved. No one breathed. Chahal had been soft-spoken, quiet, and contemplative up until this point. Even when faced with an entire family of slain Exilists, she'd remained stoic and detached. Yet everyone had a breaking point, and Phae and the day's events had pushed her to it.

  Phae could have smote Chahal with one armored fist — everyone knew it — but Chahal stood her ground. Phae didn't move. The bruises on Chahal's forearms and neck, the jagged gash along her thigh, were evidence of her sacrifice today, a sacrifice made for the Republic and for her Voidmates. Chahal's eyes glared anger, and hidden underneath and escaping around the edges, pain.

  She saw a little of herself reflected in the Exilist's eyes.

  "Wickt, fine," Phae said, turning, "no need to get all uptight. You can help if you want." The suit opened again, and Chahal worked the torso open, then the thighs and the calves and boots. Phae pulled her right side out, and Chahal supported on her left. Phae groaned through gritted teeth as she moved her injured arm. Then together they lifted the suit onto the rack and attached the feeds.

  Kai was next, and he was flagging. He'd taken the brunt of the fightin
g, killing half again as many Grunts as the other three. Phae worked one side, Chahal the other. As Kai came loose, Corwin snaked his arm under Kai's uninjured side, across his chest and onto his opposite shoulder, using the suit's musculature to pull him free.

  There was no way they could have done it without someone in a suit; Kai was 130 kilos of dead weight. His side, while bandaged, had bled a long time, so much so that blood had run down his leg and pooled in his boot. His suit snapped shut the instant he was free, the force of closure shaking the sneak suit like a marionette.

  The three unsuited Maharatha now wore only their torn compression suits.

  Corwin was aware of the near nakedness of the women of his Void in an uncomfortable way. He tried as best he could to keep from staring.

  A bang at the door. "Check it," Corwin said to Chahal.

  She slid the door open a crack. "All clear. Just the Medics."

  "Good. Chahal, stay with Kai; Phae and I will follow you soon."

  "Sir," Chahal said, sliding the door the rest of the way open.

  Corwin deposited Kai onto the stretcher, the motors groaning as they accommodated the Variant's bulk. The Medics jogged off down the hall, one pushing, one scanning Kai. Chahal limped behind, pistol at the ready.

  Corwin slid the door closed and locked it again. Phae leaned against the wall beside the door, her right arm folded under her breasts, accentuating them somehow. "All right, Corwin, what's going on? Do you really think that was necessary?"

  Corwin pulled at the fissure forming down his back. "If I didn't think it necessary, why would I do it?" If he just kept working, kept his mind focused elsewhere…

  "I don't know. You want to be a wickt?" She stepped forward to help, rolling her eyes as Corwin struggled to remove his leg from the suit.

  "I hardly think I want to be a two-meter-tall bladed penis." His leg came free. Phae held the suit steady with her good arm.