by Nick Cole
Casper came to himself, experienced a brief moment of clarity. There was no dragon in the treetops. It was merely the taller trees shifting back and forth, making a shape like something his drug-addled mind might contrive to be a dragon.
I’m hallucinating.
And why the dragon? he asked himself.
And it was black.
It was coming for him just as it had in the Quantum Palace. Just like the nightmares of the prophetesses in that permanent midnight. Except it hadn’t been a black dragon… it had been the Dark Wanderer.
“We shall stop and rest, master,” announced THK-133 without fanfare or sympathy. “Perhaps you will feel better by tomorrow.”
And just before Casper fell once more into that reality-turned-hallucinogenic nightmare, he saw all the mushrooms everywhere, spreading like wildfire. They were big and pulsing, at times beautiful and luscious, like sugary candy in a candy store to end all candy stores, at other times like big corpulent Cheshire spiders, swollen with sinister menace, biding their time until they might scurry forward and fill him with their strange poisons and intoxicating nightmares.
He heard himself screaming as he went down the well of darkness.
He wouldn’t come out of the drug-fueled nightmare until they’d reached the mountains in the numberless days to come, where the giant statue watched over the desert wastes.
For now, as he lay in the dirt, howling like a wounded animal, Urmo smiled and offered him a small stone.
Chapter Seventeen
What remained of First Squad left by the body-filled back alley in patrol formation. Nogle, Rex, Barr, Duhrawksi, Casper, Esmail, Bones, and Trask, with LeRoy bringing up the rear. They threaded the alley, picked up the larger one that paralleled the main road, and headed in the direction opposite the way the Savages had retreated. In time they left the small city, each of them wondering at its enigmatic purpose, its lost history that would never be known.
“What was it?” asked LeRoy as they moved down a lonely road that ran roughly toward the pyramid.
“A city,” whispered Casper.
Trask was probably in too much pain to tell them to shut up. The cuff’s meds would be wearing off by now. Soon Casper would have to give him something from the medical bag. Something that would definitely take the edge off.
“Why ain’t there anyone livin’ in it?”
“Dunno,” answered Trask matter-of-factly.
Casper turned to see the sergeant’s face. It was ghostly white in the near darkness. Even though Casper’s medical training was the bare minimum required by the Terran Navy for damage control operations, he knew things did not look good for Trask if they didn’t get to a medical facility soon.
Then again, things didn’t look good for any of them. And as Casper knew, when it came to the Savages, there were fates far worse than death. To be enslaved by them was a kind of living death that made one wish for the real thing. And so who was to say that Trask, dying of his wounds out here in the dark, might not be better off in the long run?
And even if they weren’t captured by the Savages, what then? What were the odds the Moirai would survive contact with the Dead Zone?
But… maybe they weren’t even in the Dead Zone. Maybe they’d changed course. Maybe the Lex was still on the hangar deck. Maybe they could find their way back. Maybe the Savages would remain in retreat. Maybe there was a way out of this in the end.
Or maybe not. As his mother had always said, if wishes were fishes, beggars would ride.
Casper pushed thoughts of other places, safer than this one, away. He tried to move as quietly as the soldiers in front of and behind him. They moved off into the fields, keeping low, following ancient canals that were sometimes bone dry, sometimes filled with a foul-smelling water. After four hours, far out into the middle of nowhere, seemingly no closer to the distant pyramid above their heads on a land with no horizon, they halted and formed a small perimeter. They took turns sleeping in an enigmatic depression near a maintenance road.
Nothing moved. All was silent.
Rex and Casper took the first watch. They lay on their backs and listened to the nothing of the ambient night. There was no need to stand, to look. If anything came at them, its sound would be heard in the fields, or out across the still air.
Casper lay there, telling his mind to stop searching for stars above, because there weren’t any. He told his mind to just accept the dead cities, roads, and stranger structures that hung above him where a night sky should be. Occasionally, out across the distance above, ghostly lights came on and went off just as abruptly as they had appeared.
“You think she’s still alive?” asked Rex.
Casper knew exactly who his friend was talking about. Some part of his mind had been wondering the same thing.
Long ago the three of them, and many others, had been captured attempting to make contact with an old lighthugger. The members of that ship weren’t called Savages then. Some called them the Lost Children, affectionately forgetting that they had been the elites who’d abandoned Earth, and their fellow human beings, at the most dire of hours in human history.
But, as some say, time heals all wounds.
Casper had never agreed with that. Hadn’t found it to be true. Some wounds never healed. Some things were never forgotten. No matter how long one lived, some hurts remained fresh.
“We won’t leave until we know,” he whispered in the darkness.
He felt Rex, who Casper would’ve described as the most immovable object in the universe, relax. Just a bit. Just a little. Imperceptibly… unless you’d been through what they’d been through together. Had known one another in what some measured as lifetimes.
She had rescued them both. She’d broken through the mental desert their minds had been cast into by the Pantheon aboard the Obsidia. She’d awoken them to their condition as slaves. When they’d come back to themselves, they would have told you they’d been wandering a desert with no nights. That their minds had thought of only one thing for all the years they’d been slaves inside that slow-moving ship. In those years when their bodies were alive and active—fighting wars, being experimented on, used—their minds thought only of putting one foot in front of the other, of crossing that endless, featureless desert in which they had lost themselves.
Casper shuddered in the vast cornfield traveling through space. Yes, there were fates worse than death.
The endless desert one’s mind can wander in.
Mindless servitude.
Loss of self.
Better death than any of those. And not for the first time since he’d decided to go forward with the infantry to maintain communication, he reminded himself that he would not allow himself to be captured again. That if there was at least one shot left in his sidearm… he would choose that.
As an ensign aboard the Challenger, chasing the Obsidia out into the big dark empty, hoping to rescue the “Lost Children” who’d abandoned Earth in its hour of need, he had not chosen that when everything went to hell in a handbasket. He’d opted to try and live. To survive for just a little bit longer.
And so he’d spent fifteen years as a mindless slave aboard the Obsidia. Wandering a simulated desert inside his head, punctuated by nightmares of the real world in real time at the cruel pleasure of the Pantheon.
Gifted or cursed with long—a very long—life.
Reina Benedetti set them free from that slavery.
You could put “free” in quotation marks, he thought as he tried to stop staring at the cities on the plain above his head. Instead of being free, they had merely awoken to what their bodies were doing. They’d still had to fight, quietly, silently, resisting the programming and insanity of the cubes, to regain the ability to control their own bodies. And even then they’d had to go through the motions of continuing to do all the horrible things they were required by the Pantheon to d
o, lest their self-awareness be discovered.
Because the Pantheon couldn’t know that their slaves had woken up. Not yet. Not then. So they went through the motions. Played the game. Waited as Reina woke an army up one by one. And in time, when their numbers were sufficient, they revolted. They slew the Pantheon. Regained the ship. And those who survived fled in the old Challenger. One last flight. One last jump. Leaping away as the entire Obsidia went up like a bright supernova.
There had been only three survivors. Two of them owed Reina everything.
So of course they’d come to rescue her. Of course they wouldn’t fight their way back to the Lex until they knew if she was still alive, or dead.
They owed her that much. They owed her at least that. Because they owed her so much more.
Before their capture, their slavery, Rex had been the platoon leader in the Challenger’s security detail. He was a member of the new UN naval force’s own army, formed out of what was left of the North American and European militaries. But as a slave aboard the Obsidia, Rex had become a gladiator. Fighting other slaves. Fighting chimeras the Pantheon either made or abducted from the worlds they passed along the way. All for amusement. Their amusement.
Because death was an amusement to the deathless.
Casper, on the other hand, had been turned into the personal slave of a high lady. Some evil witch who’d once been an entertainer back on Earth. A pop star twenty years gone to seed before Casper was born. Part of the elite, chosen because she’d won the genetic lottery of being beautiful, and therefore connected, and now, thanks to the discoveries of the Pantheon, she was eternally young. Once again.
And she was insane.
Hurting people for pleasure was her taste.
All those lost and horrible times came rushing into Casper’s mind unbidden as he lay there in the dirt of the dead cornfield. And so he changed the conversation, as he’d done so many times before.
“One of the men who died back there…” he began, knowing Rex was listening in the deep stillness. It would have been inconceivable for Rex to be derelict in his duty to others. “He said, tell them I didn’t forget nothin’.”
Silence.
Then Rex asked, “What was his name?”
Casper told him.
Rex seemed satisfied with that. Which was so like him. Never to understand that the rest of humanity had further questions. Wanted answers to those questions. Why else had they gone out into the stars?
Rex was the opposite of everyone in that he never seemed to need answers to the big questions. There were no mysteries to Rex. To him, life was nothing more than surviving this day to the next. And he was the best at surviving.
Bar. None.
Casper, on the other hand… had nothing but questions. Nothing but curiosity. He was a great reader. A student of history. A man always asking: Why? Why couldn’t things be better? Why this way and not that? Why don’t we go where we haven’t been?
And… why did some things have to happen?
That was what had driven him out into the stars.
That was what urged him forward day after day.
The desire to know. That was the quest.
And when will enough be enough? he’d asked himself many times before. When will all be known?
When?
“What did that mean?” asked Casper in the barest of whispers. “‘I didn’t forget nothin’.’”
A breeze, probably urged on by a climate control system, passed through the dead corn, causing the husks to whisper as they brushed against one another in the darkness.
“What?” Rex replied. As though he had not been a part of the previous exchange.
“What did, ‘Tell them I didn’t forget’ mean?”
Rex sighed. Just barely.
The wind passed on through the corn and was gone, and once more the night was still.
“It’s from Rogers’ Orders. In the Martian Light Infantry we promise each other never to forget our orders, and to remember the fallen who died doing their job. It’s the last honor we pay each other. To say we didn’t forget our orders.”
“Who was Roger?”
“Rogers. Don’t know. Never cared.”
Typical, thought Casper. And that thought made him happy. The galaxy got weirder by the day, and Rex never changed. It was good that there was at least one constant thing on which all compasses and timepieces could be set. Rex was a lodestone, a true north. An atomic clock that never ran late despite the forces that sought to shake everything apart. Without him… Casper imagined all would be madness.
“Where do the orders come from?”
This seemed to stall Rex. His silence indicated he didn’t totally understand the intent of the question.
“How do you know them?” Casper clarified.
“Rangers. Back on Earth. They make you memorize the orders. They’re good. They make sense. You can apply them to a lot of situations. That and a five-paragraph op order, and you can lead just about anything into a fight.”
This had already been one of the longest conversations Casper had ever had with the man. It almost qualified as Rex baring his soul. Almost.
Except what happened next was downright stunning. In the dark, Rex began to recite and comment on the orders.
“Let’s see… there’s Don’t forget nothing. That’s the first. Then there’s the second order: Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute’s warning. That’s all good, though I have no idea what a musket is. But being ready to move at a moment’s notice… that’s crucial. Three is, When you are on the march, act the way you would if you were sneaking up on a deer. See the enemy first. I knew that one before I was in the army. We ate deer when we could back before the Exodus. My father taught me that. Tell the truth about what you see and what you do. There is an army depending on you for correct information. You can lie all you please when you tell other folks about the Rangers, but don’t never lie to a Ranger or officer. Goes without saying, of course. Five is, Don’t never take a chance you don’t have to.”
Rex chuckled in the darkness at that one.
“Combat is nothing but chances. Especially if you want to seize the momentum and maintain it. So that one was always ridiculous. To me.
“Six was…” He thought for a moment. “When we’re on patrol, march single file, far enough apart so no one shot can go through two men. Which I have seen happen. Seven… If you hit swamps, or soft terrain, spread out in a line, so it’s hard to track you. Then there’s, When you march, keep moving until dark, so as to give the enemy the least possible chance to shoot at you. That one seemed old because most modern fighting takes place at night anyway. Especially asymmetrical warfare operations. And When you camp, half the party stays awake while the other half sleeps. But these guys are on their last legs, so…” He let that last word slip off into the dark and the cornfields.
“Keep prisoners separate until interrogations. That’s ten. And eleven, Don’t take the same route twice. Take a different route to avoid being ambushed. Twelve, No matter whether we travel in big parties or little ones, each party has to keep a scout twenty yards ahead, twenty yards on each flank, and twenty yards in the rear, so the main body can’t be surprised and wiped out. Makes sense. Thirteen: Always have a rally point. Didn’t set one tonight. There’s no place to fall back to. And fourteen is, Don’t sit down to eat without posting sentries. Naturally. Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack. French used to be our enemies just like they were when they went full-Islam before World War III. I always thought that was crazy. Showed that Rogers was one smart soldier. And that things never change.”
Silence.
Casper wondered if Rex would go on. He didn’t dare speak; he didn’t want to break whatever spell had overcome his friend.
&nbs
p; “Don’t cross a river at a regular ford,” Rex said. “The funny thing is that back in Ranger school, this sergeant had to explain to me what a ford was. Basically don’t use bridges or places where cattle cross. It’s usually mined. If somebody’s trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.”
Rex paused. Was he thinking about that one? Did he anticipate it was applicable to what needed to happen when they took up their march in a few hours? As though some ancient bit of wisdom might just get them all out of this jam alive.
Casper sensed his friend was testing that rule, seeing if it still held true on a battlefield stranger than what old Rogers could ever have imagined when that rule was first put forth.
“Eighteen, Don’t stand up when the enemy’s coming against you. Kneel down, lie down, hide behind a tree. Or, cover first, then fire. I’ve found that to be good, when you can apply it. But sometimes in CQB it’s better just to put as many bullets between you and the enemy as possible in the shortest amount of time. And nineteen was, Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet. I prefer these machetes we started using back on Mars at Saffron City. Wouldn’t trade it for nothing. Axe is a bad weapon. You get one chance with it. That’s all. So you better do all the damage you can do in that one swing. With a machete you can just keep chopping and slicing.”
Casper lay there in stunned silence. He wondered if Rex, too, felt that they were at the end of themselves. If maybe his old friend knew as well as he did that they weren’t getting out of this one alive. And maybe the old memories, the important things, maybe they were coming around for one last visit before it was closing time for the both of them.
“If I ever form any fighting force,” said Rex in the silence, as though reading Casper’s thoughts and promising him there would be a future in which they played a part, “they’ll memorize all those orders. They’ll be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent who try to make the galaxy a better place. Most people just want to burn it all down. My men will be that line between those who are trying to go on, and those who want to watch it burn to nothing. They won’t forget nothin’… and we won’t forget them.”