My grip on my weapon has my fingers aching, but I cannot relax them in fear of the movement. I need to void. I know it is only the fear and I force the feeling away. Only the urge to void goes. The fear remains.
There is no more communication on the voice link. With patience that threatens to tear my neck muscles, I turn my head so very slowly to my left, my eyes straining to see around the left frame of my visor. It takes forever, but once more I can see where Ki had been concealed. Instead of Ki, however, there is Pina. It is crawling very rapidly toward the rocks. Anta must have already passed. Adoveyna follows Pina without a pause. Will they take down the humans before the humans become impatient waiting for me to make my move? It is said that some humans pray to gods. I feel the lack.
My view of Adoveyna is just as it crawls behind some rubble. I slowly turn my head to face the bunker but I stop as I see something above and far behind where I lost sight of Skis Adoveyna. The small hill is little more than a support for shattered stumps and the remains of a few smashed dwellings, a thin smoky mist rendering everything in shades of gray. Earlier in the day the rise had been roasted and pulverized. Still, there was something that shouldn’t be. A fifth human? More? Had I seen a piece of wire or cloth waving in the slight breeze? A stray beam of light reflected from―
“Anta,” I whisper into the voice link. “Anta, to your far left, up on that hill, I saw movement.”
“Where?” it asks, but before I can answer, the kow-kow sounds of a human rifle shatters the silence. The sounds are soon joined by Pina screaming into the link and the humans in the rocks opening up with the energy knife, the broad swath of its blade coming right toward me. Someone screams, “Kill them!”
Quickly I roll until a large block of cut stone is between me and the knife, still giving the humans on the hill a view of me. Two of Anta’s remaining knives fire at the rocks beneath the bluff while the third fires irregularly at the hill. I turn, place my back against the stone block, aim my own blade toward the hill, and press the trigger. I feel the tremendous energy pulses as they warm my hands. When I am certain the humans are at least down, I jump up and turn to run toward the bunker. A deafening explosion erupts in front of me, blinding me for a moment, filling my lungs with choking dust and gasses.
Before I open my eyes or check to see if I have all of my limbs, I realize that the fourth human in the rocks has a missile launcher. My eyes open and the sky above is gray with dust and smoke, cut with the green glowing blades of energy knives and the white streaks of pulse weapons. As the deadly silence ends, returning my hearing to me, the feeling comes back to my body. The first of it is a skull-cracking pain in my head, a stinging tingle all across my skin. I cautiously lift my hands to feel my head, grateful to find that it is still covered by my helmet. I sit up, then kneel as I pick up my weapon. It is still charged and operative.
Without thinking, I climb to my feet and spring forward, the breath coming hard in my lungs as I braid my way among the broken stones and twisted metal. A loud kang sound from a piece of metal near my head catches me by surprise and I recoil from it, roll to my left, and come up aiming my blade at the bunker. There are two, no five flashes from the dark opening. The ground around me erupts with geysers of stone dust as shattered bits of metal buzz around me. An energy flash from behind comes close enough to sear the flesh on my left shoulder. There is at least one more human with a knife. I throw myself into a slight depression, whirl about, and fire my knife at the hill once more. Twice, three times, and I see my blade catch an energy pack. There is a blinding blue light, then nothing but a steaming hole in the ground.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone left firing from the rocks or the hill and I roll to my right, jump up, and wash the bunker opening with my knife. After I release the trigger, I squat behind some wreckage and check the hill as I touch the knife’s charge indicator. Still nothing on the hill and my weapon is at forty-nine percent. I glance a little more to the right, and look at the rocks. They are black where before they were reddish tan. I see no movement. “Anta?” I call into my voice link. There is nothing but static.
“Anta? Ki? Pina? Adoveyna?” I get to my feet and try again.
“Tsien Siay, report!”
They cannot all be dead. We have been at this far too long, endured too many things. If the human demons that spawned this hell have any sense of justice, all of the Twelve cannot be dead.
With my chin I switch the sensor in my helmet to read thermal input. Looking at my visor I see a bright orange place on the hill where I laid on my blade causing the human’s energy pack to go up. There is another bright orange place among the rocks where the second knife was. When it went up, the four humans went with it. Below the rocks there is a dimming orange dot, the cooling body of a dead human. In the rubble field below, where my comrades were hiding, there are another four orange dots, dimming, as the heat leaves their bodies. Before feelings crush me, I remind myself that the lack of an exploded energy pack sign means that in all probability, their knives still work. I must disable them before I leave.
I am alone.
For a moment I am confused about what to do. Should I rage and throw myself into the monster’s mouth to avenge my dead comrades? Do I cower in terror, hoping that no one will notice me? Do I surrender and trust to the good intentions of the Amadeen Front? Do I simply abandon this place, go backto Lurack and say, “Mission accomplished, Ovjetah. Everything is dead.”
—I hear a sound from the bunker and I whirl around, my knife at the ready. The heat sensor shows two beings dead in the ragged opening. Farther inside are at least six older dead and deep inside are two hot live ones, very close together. I realize I am standing in full view of the bunker, and I squat down, amazed that I am alive.
Perhaps the two humans who are alive are wounded. For some reason they didn’t take me out when they could. I want to call Anta’s name again, see the bodies of my comrades with my own eyes. I rebel at relying on a mere instrument to tell me my comrades are dead. But what would be the purpose? Then, what was ever the purpose of any of it? How can a being tremble in fear of losing its life one moment and care not a dot the next?
I stand in full view of the bunker, my weapon held at my side, and walk toward the opening, hardly curious at the form my death will take. At the opening I step over the lip of the hole torn in the wall and walk in. I pause inside and look around.
It is still. After six days of battle, there is something obscene about so much silence. It allows too many things to be felt. They stand before me in a row: fear, sadness, outrage, emptiness, and hate. Indifference and a terrible tiredness. How I long to rest my head upon my parent’s lap and beg Yazi Avo to quiet the buzzing in my brain.
I take a breath; exhale. Another. It is not the moment before; that moment when I had living friends and living enemies. It is not the moment to come, when whatever it is that I must do has already been done. It is this moment. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember something comforting—something perhaps even useful—from The Talman.
How little of the book I know. My parent tried to teach me, but it was killed by the Front long before I completed my first year. I keep the golden cube of my parent’s Talman suspended from a chain around my neck, but I rarely read it. After all, it was the masters of the Talman Kovah who proved that this war cannot end. No adulthood rites, no presentation before the family archives, not for Yazi Ro. Not for any of us condemned to Amadeen. Our talma was to be sealed for eternity into hell.
Two humans are dead on the dusty cement floor at my feet. The older of the two caught the slice of my energy knife through the upper right quadrant of his head. The younger one is almost a child the way humans reckon such things. She was cut in two through the chest.
Bodies.
Nothing.
Two more corpses upon a mountain of dead.
There is a golden pendant on a golden chain around the neck of the young one. I expect it to be a cross, that sign of the human prince of peace. I se
e, instead, the cube of a Talman taken from some dead or captured Drac.
My rage paints everything in reds and blinding whites. Instinctively I touch the trigger on my knife and watch as her head rolls free from her torso. I take the chain from the stump of her neck and look at the cube. It carries a line sign, but I do not know it.
I look around inside the concrete and steel structure. Nothing but the mounts remain of the crew-served weapons that had been bolted to the floor. There are scraps of cloth hanging over the weapon ports. Human curtains. They are made from the tan, white, and red camouflage cloth the humans use. There are chairs very similar to Drac chairs, and a table very similar to the one I ate from before my parent, my siblings, and my home were destroyed so very long ago. The inside is blackened and chipped from weapons firing.
I am numb from fatigue and from the pains in my head. I wonder how many human homes and lives I have destroyed. Some things are beyond counting.
Something strange about the scene makes me pause. The chipping took place after the fire. The blackening is from burning, probably ignited by an energy knife. The chipping is caused by bullets. The Twelve had no rifles. The rifle fire had to have come from inside. Anta had said the humans might be fighting among themselves. Perhaps that is why so many of them were not in the bunker when we attacked.
I take another deep breath, and as I do so I vaguely remember the sensor. I look at it again and the orange dots are now larger, the walls of the bunker reflecting warm from the sun and the energy weapons. Two of the humans are still alive, and the only thing to be served on Amadeen is death.
Against the back of the firing gallery is a room. In it are six of the human beds, raised on legs, and draped with cloths. Three of the beds have bodies tossed across them. Three more bodies are crumpled on the floor near them. The ones on the beds carry knife wounds, the slashes and dismemberment unmistakable. The ones on the floor carry bullet wounds.
Another room to the left off the gallery is for food preparation. Nothing alive in there. The ones alive are hiding beneath the bed on the far right.
I place my weapon between my knees and hold it while I remove my helmet. The room smells foul, the human blood sickeningly sweet. Cement dust is in the air causing light filtering through cracks in the bunker to make dustbeams. The place is filled with greenflies, already feasting upon the pools of red human blood. Strange how the insects have an equal affinity for yellow Drac blood.
The Talman says that only form changes, nothing ever dies. It looks like a lot of death to me.
I look at the bed beneath which the two humans are hiding. There is a rifle on the tattered sheets, the stock shattered. The readout on my sensor shows one of the humans to be too small to be an adult. Of course, there are also very small humans called dwarfs and midgets who are just as deadly. Still, one of them might be a child.
Prisoners? By the bloody book, why burden myself with prisoners? It is so much less complicated if they simply die. Would they take me prisoner, or would they render me into muck and thank their bloody gods?
Perhaps they will, instead, kill me. It is time to ride the monster.
I hook my helmet onto my weapons belt. Holding my knife in my right hand, I place my left beneath the end of the bed. “Now is when you must kill me,” I whisper.
I flip the bed over and bring my knife up to bear. All I can see is a single form. A human female from what I can see of her back. She is curled into a lump. She is not armed. “Get up,” I order in English. “Get up and face me.”
She doesn’t comply. Instead she shakes her head back and forth, a human sign of resistance. “Get up,” I repeat.
I reach down to grab her shoulder, my knife pointing at her head. Just before I touch her, I hear a baby cry.
So easy to have a soft heart.
So easy to say, here is a parent and child. Take pity, Ro. What has a mere baby done to you? Have mercy.
How many Dracs have had their wombs ripped open, their barely formed children dangled by their umbilicals before the still-living eyes of their parents? How many humans have smashed the heads of how many Drac children upon rocks and exchanged money bets upon how far the blood splashes?
With all of my strength I grab her shoulder and throw her onto her back, her baby still clutched in her arms. I lift my knife to cut them both in two, then I see the baby. It is a Drac baby only a few days old.
The woman’s eyes stare at my face. Tears make her eyes glitter in the half dark. She knows she is about to die. She knows the baby is about to die. “Please,” she whimpers. “Please.”
What about the dead, I want to ask her. What about all of the dead? And how did you acquire a Drac infant, woman? Whose womb did you slit? Filthy, hairy, foul-smelling thing, what right do you have to ask pity from me?
I say none of it. I gesture toward the infant with my knife and say something very stupid. “It is not human.”
She shakes her head. “No,” she answers. “It’s mine.”
Mine.
It’s mine.
I lower myself until I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, my knife across my knees. A howl begins from inside me, from deep beneath the core of my soul. It expands until it fills every crack and crevice of my being. When the pressure is more than mere will can contain, it explodes from my mouth. A bellow, a scream, a cry.
I cry for them, the human female and the abandoned Drac infant. I cry for the Twelve, for my parent and siblings. I cry for Planet Amadeen, and for one of its many weary soldiers, Yazi Ro.
TWO
“Its name is Suritok Nan. Its parent told me just before it died. Fourth in its line, but its parent told me none of the line names. No one will be able to piece them together now.”
We sit outside the bunker on the rubble, the woman cleaning the face of the Drac child on her lap. I sit watching her, my mind far from a decision about her continued existence.
Her skin is smooth and the color of mud, the hair on her head short, black, and curled. She too has ear flaps and that bulb of a human nose, all of those fingers. The Drac child’s skin is the color of sunlight, its face smooth, hairless, and puffed with birth fat. I can see, though, that the woman only sees a child; that the child only sees a parent. It is something I cannot even imagine existing, but there it is. I look away. The woman and the child are not the only things that have been left undone. I must find the bodies of my comrades, take their Talmans, destroy their weapons.
“Nan’s parent,” continued the woman, “it didn’t even have time to tell me its own name before it died. The Talman it carried was gone.” She moves her shoulders and lets her gaze fall. “Stolen, probably,” she continues. “You can get over a hundred tags for a Talman and chain back on the Dorado.”
A hundred tags. Tags are script money issued by the Front. According to captured humans, a hundred tags is enough to buy a melon. So much for eleven thousand years of wisdom. I look at the Talman and chain I had taken from the girl I beheaded. They are still in my hand, a bit of human blood on it. Perhaps this was the one taken from Nan’s parent. Probably not. I look again at the woman’s face.
Why should a human be so concerned about the heritage of a Drac infant? Perhaps her show is for my benefit. She thinks I might let her go. Her and her Drac child. After all, I let her live. So far. Perhaps she will do whatever she thinks will induce my compassion. Humans lie, and sneak, and trick: all skills we have learned from them along with butchery, cruelty, and horror.
I notice the power switch on my knife is still energized. The weapon’s charge is down to fourteen percent. Stupid. Suddenly I am very tired. I want to find a safe, dark place, curl into a ball, wipe my memory, and sleep for a thousand years. I turn off the switch.
“What are you going to do with us?”
A decision seems to make itself. I stand, take a step, and stop next to the pair. Extending my hand, I hold out the Talman and chain to her.
“It probably belongs to another line, but the words are the same.” Tears
, another thing we have in common with the humans, blur my vision. “The line died with the soldier who carried this.”
She takes it, nods her thanks, and places the chain around the child’s neck. I do not ask her if she can read Drac.
I stay behind at the crossroads and watch the woman’s back as she walks toward the north stepping over the rubble and around the holes, the baby still in her arms. The sun is almost gone, the sky red as the desert dust. I face the west and wonder what I should do.
I should make my way back to the Sikov commander and report. They are all dead, Ghah Jov: Anta split from its crotch to its right shoulder by an energy knife; Ki, its pieces splattered across the ground where a rocket’s blast carried them; Pina riddled with bullets, the tracks in the sand showing how it dragged itself across the ground before it died; and Adoveyna stretched out on the ground without a mark on its body as though it were sleeping. When I lift Adoveyna I feel the blood on my fingers.
Ah, yes.
I must report the village of Riehm Vo liberated. I should report as well the woman whom I let return to her own people, in addition to the baby Drac I allowed her to take with her.
I can imagine Joy’s brow rising as it waits for the soldier before it to explain several counts of treason. Should I tell it the woman herself killed two humans who were determined to kill the Drac child? That was the firing Anta had heard when it scouted the position. Should I tell Joy that if I had, instead, brought her with me back to the Sikov, the woman would be executed and the baby thrown into a holding center for children with no lines to await training as future killers for the Mavedah? Joy could not see what was wrong with that. A few days ago I would not be able to see it either. But now I see Nan sleeping in love’s arms, a rest so complete all I can do is quench my envy by letting them stay together.
I cannot go back to the Sikov or the Mavedah. Let them believe all of us died. I turn and look at the woman in the distance. I believe she can protect the baby from her commanders in the Front, but she could not protect me. I would be killed, or forced to commit treason and then killed.
Enemy Papers Page 40