by Mel Odom
“Terrans didn’t attack the fort last night and nearly kill two of my soldiers. So maybe we need to figure out who the monsters are.”
She ignored him. “Where is Jahup?”
“In the med center.”
Concern wiped away her rebellion and fear gleamed in her eyes. Her voice tightened. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He fractured a couple of ribs when he crashed the RDC after some biopirates tried to kill us. The doc is looking after him. In a few hours, he’ll be fine.” Sage was scheduled for a med visit as well, as soon as he finished the interview. The shoulder separation he’d suffered from the fall he’d taken from the RDC and the impacts from the gunshots were painful now that the stimpack had worn off.
“What happened?”
“I guess both of us want to know that.” Sage reached into the meal box with one of the sporks and picked up a chunk of vegetable he didn’t recognize. Like the meat, the vegetable was well seasoned. He popped it into his mouth and ignored Noojin glaring at him.
Her stomach rumbled and she looked embarrassed, just like a girl again, not a hunter or a young woman.
Sage finished swallowing and took a sip of the corok juice, finding it cool and sweet. “You saw who attacked the fort. I need to know who it was.”
“What would you do to them if you could find them?”
“I don’t know yet. Let the Makaum people know they can’t do that kind of thing again. Turn them over to Quass Leghef for punishment. The Army doesn’t care what happens to those people, they just want to send a message that something like this morning won’t be allowed to happen again.”
“Would you kill them?”
“Only if I have to.”
Noojin reached out for a piece of meat and began to eat. She paused her chewing long enough to say, “The Quass won’t be patient forever.”
“After the attack on the fort, Quass Leghef has to make a statement to your people, and to mine too. She made a treaty with the Terran Army that we would be welcome here. That her people would accept soldiers being here. Last night, some of her people broke that treaty, and Quass Leghef and her peers are responsible for that.”
“Some of the Quass members no longer want you here.”
“Yeah, I know that. After this morning, there are a lot of soldiers who don’t want to be here either.” Sage had already heard some of the grumbling that was taking place.
The soldiers at Fort York, for the most part, were green and not used to getting shot at. Only the teams that Terracina and Sage had taken into the jungle had been tested under fire, and the attrition rate during the ambush that had killed Terracina had given pause to a lot of soldiers.
“I’ve been told the general is talking to military intelligence about the wisdom of keeping Fort York open for business since we apparently don’t have the support of the people the way we did in the beginning. Military command is trying to decide how badly they want to help you people maintain your freedom. The Phrenorian War is spreading, getting bigger, and some of it is headed this way. This planet’s resources make it a prime target for exploitation. The Phrenorians won’t say please and thank you when they get here.”
“Trying to scare me isn’t going to work. You’re just as bad as the Phrenorians. You weren’t killing Phrenorians out in the jungle, you were killing Terrans and other offworlders. And it wasn’t a Phrenorian who captured me and tried to—” Noojin dropped her eyes and wouldn’t meet his gaze. Her hands shook just for a second, but she quickly regained control over herself.
Sage kept his voice flat because they were going to deal with the truth. “No, it wasn’t a Phrenorian. You’re right about that, but it was the Army who got you out of that.”
“It was you that nearly got us killed. Jahup had the band out there looking for drug labs as much as we were looking to take meat. He wanted you to notice him. He misplaces his trust in you.” Noojin took a ragged breath. Part of the reaction was going without food for so long, but part of it was the residual trauma. “You were there to kill Velesko Kos. You only happened to find me while doing that.”
“Jahup found me and told me they’d taken you. We came looking for you. Saving you became part of the mission. Jahup made certain of that. He saved you. We helped. We wouldn’t have gotten into that drug lab if it hadn’t been for him.”
She looked away from him and made herself eat.
Sage let silence hang in the room for a time while she ate. She was back in that underground lab, a prisoner again, a victim. He knew he had to let her come back from that on her own, and he trusted that she would. She was tough.
Besides the meat and vegetables, the meal box contained flat bread that was chewy and had a nutty taste. Sage took a piece and continued eating and watched as Noojin calmed herself.
“I want to tell you a story,” Sage said.
She rolled her eyes at him, and Sage had to wonder if that was something she’d picked up from offworlder women or if the eye roll was a trait of all females.
Sage sipped the juice and wished he had coffee. He also wished he didn’t have to dig inside himself so much to convince her, because he didn’t like talking about his past, but he knew he had to be honest too.
“I grew up in a village not much different than yours. It was called Sombra de la Montàna, which means, more or less, ‘Shadow of the Mountain.’ It was called that because it was located in a mountainous area of Colombia, not far from Bogóta. It was a rough, inhospitable piece of country, but it was where my mother and several generations of her family had lived working crops and herding goats.”
Noojin narrowed her eyes at him in disbelief, no doubt thinking he was lying to her.
Sage took his PAD from his thigh pocket and laid it on the table. He tapped the screen and the holo program popped up an image of a small village. Dusty roads wound through thatched huts clinging to the side of a long hill. Vegetation was sparse and the trees were twisted things that looked spindly and weak. Goats and chickens walked freely around the yards. The people dressed in simple white cotton clothing. The children were barely dressed at all, and their skin was dark from the sun, like Sage’s own skin. With the blue sky overhead, the scene looked calm and restful, not at all like the hardscrabble life Sage had experienced there.
Despite her attitude, Noojin stared at the image and watched the people and animals walking around the village. Everyone had jobs. Goats had to be tended, gardens had to be worked, and laundry had to be done in the stream that flowed nearby.
Most of the vids released in the marketplace through offworlder vendors offered immersive experiences for tourist spots. People who used the vid equipment could walk on sandy beaches, play games of chance in elegant casinos, surf white waves near Hawaii and the pink waters of the Bay of Uskosh on Rodapol and the frigid, ten meter waves of the Enthormwar Sea on Belseris. Or they could ride horses or fly on delusks on Rydis or swim with skelale on Claseras.
The simsense vids allowed users to go to pleasure spots. No one wanted to go to places like Sombra de la Montàna.
“My father was assigned to a scout unit during Mexico’s war with Colombia. The United States had joined Mexico against the terrorists that were launching attacks on the both of those countries from Colombia. Sombra de la Montána was a lot like Makaum in the early days. Not involved in the war, but it affected my mother’s people.
“The Army established a FOB, a forward operating base, near Sombra de la Montána because the terrain lent itself to guerilla action. My father’s unit performed surgical strikes against the Colombian leaders, going into the city, hitting targets, then fading into the jungle.”
“So he was a soldier? Like you?” Noojin asked, interested in spite of herself.
“Yeah. He was special ops, a guerilla, trained to work behind enemy lines.” Sage advanced the vid and showed some of the battle scenes f
rom that war. Burning vehicles occupied streets filled with victims’ corpses. “My father’s unit was up against some really bad odds, but they held it together.”
“Your mother and father met there?”
“They did. Some of the men in Sombra de la Montána traded goods with people in Bogóta. They would bring back information about the Colombian soldiers. One of those men was my mother’s brother. My father ate in her father’s house and listened to the reports from her brother. According to my father, he fell hard for my mother. He wasn’t a soft guy. He didn’t believe in love at first sight, and he was a soldier with a mission. But he always said there was something about my mother that he just couldn’t pull back from.” As Sage looked at the vid images, he could remember sitting with his father on their back porch, talking about his mother after she had died. Both of them had been emotionally distraught.
“He married her.”
Sage nodded. “I was born there the following year, and the war went on for eleven years before the Colombian army overran Sombra de la Montána. My mother refused to leave even though my father begged her to take us out of the village. Later, when the Colombians invaded, my father and his unit evacuated as many of the people as they could. They got my mother and me out, some of the other villagers, but not many of them. My grandparents and uncles and aunts and most of my cousins were killed when the Colombians rolled into the village.”
“You think that because you tell me this story, I’m going to tell you what I know?” Noojin stared at him, clearly unimpressed.
“No. That story was just to let you know we have more in common than you might suspect. And it was to set up the story I’m going to tell you now.” Sage delved back more deeply into the memories, and this one he didn’t like telling at all. In his whole life, he’d only told it to a handful of people.
“Sad stories aren’t going to break me. If I want those, all I have to do is walk through my sprawl.”
Sage ignored her, but he had to clamp down on a small spark of anger before it got out of control. “Before the Colombians destroyed Sombra de la Montána, I had a friend who lived there. His name was Danilo Arango. When I was eleven, he was fifteen. We hunted and fished together. Danilo had a girlfriend named Soraya, who was his age.”
The room’s environmental controls kicked on with a slight thump. Noojin sat on the other side of the table and feigned disinterest, but Sage knew she was listening.
“Danilo loved Soraya,” Sage went on. “I used to get mad at him and give him grief over it. He ignored me because he was happy being with her.” He pushed the emotion away and concentrated on putting words together. “He was spending more time with her than he was me. Then one morning, Soraya was found dead outside of the village. Someone had raped her and killed her. No one had seen anything. No one knew how such a terrible thing could happen.”
“Did anyone find out what happened to her?” Interest lighted Noojin’s eyes.
“I went to Danilo and talked to him. He told me that two men from another village caught him and Soraya the night before. They stabbed him and thought they’d killed him, but he saw everything they did to Soraya. Later, when he got strength back, he stumbled back to the village.”
“Didn’t he tell anyone what happened?”
“Me. He told only me.”
“His parents didn’t notice that he was wounded?”
“Danilo was an orphan. With the war going on, there were lots of orphans in the village.”
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
Sage shook his head. “Danilo asked me not to.” In his mind, he could see his friend at the back of the hut where they’d bandaged him up. “He swore me to secrecy. I was a kid, and I took things like that seriously. I guess I still do.”
“Why didn’t your friend want anyone to know? Was he ashamed?”
“Maybe he was ashamed, but mostly he wanted revenge on those two men that hurt Soraya. He was afraid no one would believe him. I don’t know if anyone would have, and if they would have done anything about the murder of one girl. Times were very confusing then. That was only weeks before the Colombians attacked the village, so Soraya’s death was a small thing compared to all the other fear people had.” Sage pushed images of Danilo from his mind, but it was hard. He still remembered the wound in his friend’s chest and the pain in his eyes. It was an old story and the hurt was almost thirty years gone, but it lingered. “After Danilo healed up, he disappeared. Three days after that, some of our hunters found Danilo dead, his throat cut, out in the jungle. He was dressed up in battle paint and carried a warrior’s weapons. A bow, machete, and an old laser rifle that didn’t hold a charge for long. Nobody but me knew why he was dressed that way.”
“Did you tell anyone then?”
Sage nodded. “I had to. I couldn’t keep that to myself. To my way of thinking, I’d let Danilo get himself killed. So his death was partly my fault. By the time I told my father, the Colombians were almost upon us. We had to get ready to leave.”
“What about the men that killed Danilo and Soraya?”
“They got away. Nobody ever knew who they were. Danilo never told me their names. He might not even have known. He went after them and they killed him. Or someone did.”
A flicker of anger ignited in Noojin’s eyes. “You think to frighten me with that story? To make me think about being the only person who can name those men that attacked the fort? To consider that they might want to kill me?”
“Or maybe Telilu?”
Noojin drew back at that, and Sage knew he’d made her look beyond herself.
“You’re sure you can take care of yourself,” Sage said. “But can that little girl protect herself?”
“She doesn’t know who they were.”
“Maybe those people don’t know that. Then she’ll be even more vulnerable because she’ll never see them coming.”
That had never occurred to Noojin. Horror twisted into her face as she considered that.
Sage went on softly. “There’s a young soldier in the hospital ward right now who has to undergo skin grafts and other surgery for simply doing his job. He’s not much older than you and Jahup, and he’s going through a lot of pain, and he’s got physical therapy ahead of him before he’s himself again. He’s only been on Makaum a short time. He arrived when I did. He hasn’t made any enemies.”
“I tried to warn him.”
“I know, and that’s why you’re going to give me the names now. Because you want to protect people.”
She shook her head.
“And because if you don’t tell me,” Sage said, “Jahup is going to want to know who almost killed you, and who almost killed his little sister. He’s not going to leave this alone.”
“I won’t tell him.” Desperation gleamed in her eyes.
Sage kept his voice soft and insistent. “Jahup’s going to keep asking, and keep asking, until one day you do tell him who those men were. And when you do, what do you think Jahup is going to do? Sit back quietly and let those men get away with it? Even if you don’t tell him, he’s going to start asking around, and he may get close enough to the people behind the attack to get himself hurt because he doesn’t know who they are either. Because you didn’t tell him.”
Noojin wrapped her arms more tightly around herself, and from the slow panic easing into her features, Sage knew he’d gotten to her.
“Jahup won’t let them get away with it,” Sage said. “Once he knows those names, and he’ll get them eventually, he’ll go after those men. And he’ll probably get himself killed because he’s not going to be ready for them.” He let the silence between them grow heavier. “You don’t want him doing this alone, and don’t think the two of you are good enough to do this on your own.”
When Noojin looked at Sage again, tears sparkled in her eyes. “I don’t want Jahup hurt.”
“
I know. Neither do I. That’s why I’m here. Those guys nearly killed you, and they nearly killed his little sister. Jahup won’t let that go. You know that.”
Noojin wiped her tears on her sleeve. “I didn’t see all of the men.”
“That’s fine. Give me the names of those that you know and I’ll take it from there.”
FIFTEEN
Security Building
Fort York
1739 Hours Zulu Time
Noojin couldn’t believe how weak she’d been. Crying in front of the Terran sergeant was embarrassing. She didn’t cry in front of anyone. She wasn’t some empty-headed female who couldn’t control her emotions. She was a hunter. A good hunter. She wasn’t this emotional person who couldn’t control herself.
True to his word, Sage had freed her from the interview room, but she also believed that he knew she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t be with Jahup, though that was what she wanted most of all, because Jahup would ask the questions the sergeant said he would ask.
And she didn’t want to go home to the small house she shared with three friends. They were merely acquaintances, people to live with, not family. Her family, like Jahup’s mother and father, were dead. She was like the orphan in Sage’s story.
She walked to one of the small commissaries set up throughout the fort, drawn by the smell of coffee. Makaum didn’t have coffee, though some of the offworlders were now experimenting with planting some seeds. The Quass and the trade council had seen a market for coffee beans. Many of the Makaum people had developed a taste for it.
The commissary was about half full of soldiers. Men and women in hardsuits sat at tables and talked quietly among themselves. Most of them stopped talking when Noojin entered, and she realized coming there was a mistake. She just didn’t have anywhere else to go.
They knew who she was. Her skin and her hair and her clothes immediately set her apart from them. None of them trusted her.