by Jay Allan
“This is what you look like scared,” he observed. “But why?”
She looked away and then up into his face again, seeing only concern and curiosity. “I’m sorry. I… I got hurt, not so long ago. It’s made me jumpy, I guess.”
“Boyfriend trouble in the military? Is that allowed?”
She shook her head. “Not that. Not a boyfriend. I mean really hurt. On the base.”
The soft smile faded from his lips. “On the base?”
She nodded.
He took a step closer, slowly as if worried that she might run away. He brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “You have nothing to fear from me,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded and reached up to cover his hand with her own but then pulled away to open the door behind her. Perhaps there was time for this later, when she could allow herself to find out what his touch just now had meant. When she could admit to herself how much she needed it. She ground her teeth and shoved aside an overwhelming desire to hide in his embrace and, if even for just a little while, forget that she ever set foot on this planet. No time for any of this now.
“Let’s walk slow so we don’t look like we’ve got something to hide on the scanners,” she said. “If we move fairly at random we could get close to the hospital without being noticed.” She paused to consider. “Actually, let’s not be seen by anyone. Ours or theirs. If they did send Union patrols they’ll think we’re rebels, too.”
They made their way back to the edge of the slum and the meandering route they took was as much the result of a lack of compass as it was to appear to be a rebel patrol. Things finally began to look familiar to Djari who’d spent far more time in these quarters than she had. But the Rhuwacs no longer loitered in the alley and no one else was moving nearby, according to her scanner. The hospital showed only a handful of life signs.
“No!” Djari exclaimed and she had to grasp his arm with both hands to keep him from rushing back into the building.
“Stop,” she hissed. “We don’t know who’s in there.”
He scowled at her but after a moment relaxed enough for her to let him go. She pulled him into the shelter of a courtyard wall and studied the dim glow of the scanner. This model only showed life signs but no specifics about species or state of health. At least they were alive. “Not moving. Could be our patients. Or people hiding.” She pointed at the screen. “Is that the back area where we left Reko?”
“I think so. That’s the hallway there, I think, given the exit.”
She nodded. “Let’s use the back door again. Just move very quietly. We’re not helping anybody by walking in on rebels.”
They stole around the side of the improvised clinic and pried the door into the washroom. The floor was slippery with things she refused to examine more closely. No sound came from the main hall and power to the building seemed to have been cut. Feeling their way in the dark with an eye on the scanner, they crept forward to the nearest person.
It was, indeed, someone hiding. A Centauri woman, wrapped in a sheet from her bed, cowered in a corner.
“Shh,” Nova whispered and touched her gently as she crouched beside her. “Are you hurt?”
The woman raised her tear-streaked face and looked from Nova to Djari, taking a moment to recognize them. “They shot them,” she said. “All of them.”
“Who?” Djari said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know! They just came in here and started yelling and shooting. I ran and hid. They were shouting about the Union but no soldiers came. They just left.” She stared blindly into the dark. “They just left.”
“Stay here,” Nova said. “Stay quiet.”
Djari moved ahead of her around the corner and to the front entrance. They found another survivor, this one a Bellac worker, and then one of the locals that had supplied them with food these past few days. Nova pressed her hands over her face to stifle her cry when she saw a tall Centauri sprawled face down near the door.
“Gods, Reko,” she moaned, although her scanner had already told them that none of the bodies strewn through the hall were alive. “Please, not this.” She dropped to her knees beside him and heaved him onto his back. “Oh, damn!” She squeezed her eyes shut and dug her hands into his borrowed tunic as if to tear it.
“Come on!” Djari gripped her arm to pull her up. “We have to get out of here.”
She shook him off. “I can’t leave him here, in the dirt.” The half-closed eyes in the dusty face seemed to accuse her of something. Why had she left him here, unable to defend himself? Now who would teach her to curse in Centauri? “I can’t…”
“We have to. Let’s go!”
“Djari,” they heard a whisper. Coria came out of the shadows, uninjured but her eyes were wide with fear. “You’re alive! Thank the Gods!” Djari held her tightly, his voice a soothing murmur, until she had collected herself. She seemed less excited to see Nova near him.
The three of them shifted Reko onto a pallet and covered him with a blanket. The next priority was to collect the survivors and leave the hospital, more to escape the gruesome carnage than with any hope of finding a better hiding place. The alley outside was silent although they stopped and listened anxiously when some shouts reached them from afar. Another escapee huddled in a doorway of a looted and burned home and they convinced him to join them.
Coria led them to a small stable, smelling cleanly of hay and wood, where Nova arranged them along a rickety stairway to hide their true number on the sensors. She took stock. None of them were too injured to move on their own. The shell-shocked Centauri woman would have to be minded carefully. One of the Bellacs was little more than a child. The others just looked stunned and exhausted.
“What happened?” Nova asked Coria. She glanced guiltily at Djari. “Did they notice we left?”
“Then it’s our blood on your hands, Human,” Coria snapped.
“They did not,” the Bellac medic said. “There is some sort of mutiny going on. Some of the rebels are trading captives to save their hides. Taking them out in the dark to bargain with. Thank the Gods they took the young ones out, first. Arter’s people came and shot whoever’s left, just to make a point. They shot their own, too!”
“The rest are trying to get back into the hills,” Coria said. “The ones who aren’t turncoats.”
Nova tapped her lips with a forefinger, considering this. “Air Command is going to be all over those hills. Snipers are just going to pick them off. Surrendering is probably much healthier right now.” She looked to Coria. “Do you know where and to whom they’re delivering the hostages?”
The woman shook her head. “Guessing along the east side where it’s more open.”
“Going to be light soon,” Nova said to Djari. “We need to get out of here. No guarantee that we’ll be found by the right sort of rebel.”
“No, I suppose not. What do you have in mind?”
She looked up at the people on the stairs. “We’re going to play Shri-Lan. I’ll be your prisoner, and so will they.” Nova pointed at the Centauri and a Bellac with a long gash across his cheek and a bandage around his head. “The rest of you look well enough to be rebels. We have a few guns.” She turned away from them and pulled the data sleeve she had taken from the dead rebel from her pocket.
“Calling home?” Djari said and looked over her shoulder.
“Sort of.” Nova frowned when the unsophisticated device balked at her manipulations. She managed to recode the access scan and then briefly touched the device to her neural implant.
Djari raised an eyebrow. “You can interface with that?”
“Not exactly, but I can create a recognizable signal. They’ll know it’s me.”
“How?”
She shook her head. “You’d have to hold a gun to my head to find that out.”
He frowned. “You don’t trust me?”
She looked up, startled. “Of course I do. It’s just not the sort of thing we talk about.”
“No need.” She touched his hand and felt his fingers close around hers like the briefest of hugs. She turned back to the others. “Coria, you and… what’s your name? Selvan? You two go back to the hospital and grab some clothes that look like something rebels would wear.” She met the woman’s eyes. “I’m sure you can figure that part out.”
Coria looked as if some retort burned to be flung at Nova but then said nothing. She tugged on the medic’s arm and they slipped back into the street.
* * *
There were nine of them now, making their way slowly along the outside of the old city wall toward the north end where Union patrols were sure to pick them up. The sun had risen not long ago, but a hot, dry wind already flapped their loose clothing and frayed their nerves.
Nova turned to walk backwards for a moment, counting heads, before returning her eyes to the uneven terrain around them. She now showed her Air Command uniform and her hands were loosely tied behind her to appear as a hostage. It made walking on the uneven ground awkward and tiring.
A young man with a crutch hobbled beside her, slowing them all down, but he was a great story teller and managed to keep them distracted with his commentary. The Centauri woman had stopped talking long ago and continued moving only because Coria had tied a scarf around her wrist. Djari and the medic walked in the back, armed with the guns. The others surrounding them tried their best to look armed and menacing, a difficult feat for any of them as they stumbled along in the heat, not having eaten since the day before and with only a small bag of gritty water to sustain them. They stopped often to rest in what shade they found and each time they started out again it seemed more difficult to put one foot in front of the other.
They had met a small group of retreating rebels earlier. Their questionable disguise had worked or perhaps the rebels were too intent on fleeing into the hills to bother with challenging them. Feeling a little more confident, they continued their journey without having seen anyone else. The arid ground now sported considerably more scrub and the occasional tree, blocking the view from town and offering a little more shade.
She turned again, briefly, to look back at Djari. He looked up as if she had called to him and his tired face lit up with a smile. She remembered their brief moment together those few hours ago and the thought of another one like it, as his smile seemed to promise, gave her hope and renewed strength.
Nova glanced at Ulos, the young Centauri beside her. “Didn’t anybody notice that he wasn’t from around there?” she asked, referring to his latest, somewhat convoluted tale. Her head ached and she had trouble following the plot but it kept her from thinking about other things.
“That’s the fun part. The difference between his markings and his lover’s people are some loops across the left chest. So he used her paints to change his markings.”
“He must have been truly in love,” Nova said. Few things were as prized by Caspians as the intricate patterns on their short hide, a system that proclaimed their birthplace as precisely as a regional accent. Some females colored their hair to better display the patterns but males spurned the practice as effeminate. Neither men nor women would readily change the markings with which they were born. “So did they get found out?”
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “He painted himself in front of a mirror.”
Nova laughed.
They found an ancient wash-out and moved into the shade provided by the striated rock face of the gully. The ground sloped gently toward the north. “Let’s hope it doesn’t start raining,” Ulos said. “A man could drown in here.”
“Do not mention water.”
He shrugged. “Would be salty, anyway.”
“Someone coming,” Coria said. She was holding the scanner. Interference was again reducing its range to just a short distance around them. “Four of them, that way.”
Only a few moments later an armed rebel group traveling in the opposite direction came into view, like many of them hurrying to escape into the hills. Their guns were loosely pointed in their direction but they seemed to have no clear intent.
Nova’s ragged column came to a halt when their way was blocked by the newcomers.
“Where would you be going?” A Centauri in a desert robe walked toward them. He stopped in front of Nova who kept her eyes on the ground and tried to look like a captive. It didn’t take much pretension. “And where did you get the soldier?”
“Taking her back to them, what do you think?” Coria said.
The rebel shifted his eyes to her. “Arter broke off those useless talks. He said to scatter into the canyons. You’re heading into the wrong direction.”
“To hell with Arter. We’ll be scraped off the hills one by one as target practice. I’m getting out of here.”
“You might want to rethink that, Bellac,” he said. Nova groaned inwardly at their sad luck of having run into a rebel actually loyal to this lost cause. The man stabbed his gun into Nova’s midriff. “I think we’ll be taking her off your hands.”
Just then a row of armed Union soldiers rose up on the embankment above them, appearing out of absolutely nowhere. No one had noticed their silent approach, too worried about the rebels coming their way. Confused, all of them looked around to face a wall of muscle in battle gear.
“Away from her,” one of them ordered.
Nova gasped when she recognized Captain Beryl, not monitoring his squad, but himself behind the barrel of his gun.
The leader of the newcomers whipped around, gun ready, and was immediately met by a storm of laser fire. Others, too, fell to their aim and Nova saw Coria collapse and then Ulos also dropped before she managed to tear herself out of her shock. She pulled apart the loose knot that tied her hands and waved frantically.
“Stop! Cease fire!” she shouted, not daring to move into the crossfire. “Stop! Civilians!”
They did stop, but her companions lay dead or dying on the ground. She turned to find Djari still on his feet but with an arm scorched from wrist to elbow. Another burn had blistered the side of his handsome face. He stared at the bodies on the ground and stumbled back, shaking his head in disbelief. She took a few steps toward him but someone gripped her arm.
“Djari!” she cried, but the look he gave her felt like an accusation. He lurched away to flee into the scrubby hillside. When one of the soldiers aimed to fire after him, Nova pushed the gun aside to let the shot go wild. “That’s not a rebel!”
She turned and launched herself at Beryl, gaining speed over the short distance to hit his chest with outstretched arms. “You fucking bastard!” He stumbled back, utterly surprised by her attack, and fell over a rock beside the path. She landed on top of him and smashed her fists into his face, cursing, unaware of the tears that poured over her face, unable to stop even when blood gushed from his nose and lips. “You. Fucking. Bastard!” she yelled again and finally someone pulled her away, needing another soldier’s help to keep her from returning to cause more damage.
Nova struggled with the men, too enraged to give up her insane desire to seriously hurt the captain, a man more than twice her size. He struggled to his feet, wiping at his streaming face.
“Look what you did, you stupid bitch,” one of his men said. “What the hell was that about?”
Beryl explored a gash across his eyebrow and then looked at his blood-covered hands. “Let her go,” he said.
“Captain?”
“You fucking heard me.”
Nova nearly fell when the soldier released her with an angry shove. She breathed in sobbing gasps, her hands on her knees, furious and exhausted. “Those are civilians trying to get me out of this place. Why did you open fire? Look at this!”
“He raised his weapon,” Beryl said and then seemed to realize that he sounded defensive. “As far as we saw, they were rebels. Our orders are to retrieve you. Now get your ass in motion and back to base.”
“I’m done taking orders from you,” she said and paid no attentio
n to the looks of astonishment among his men. She knelt beside the unconscious Coria. “We’re taking her with us. And anyone else who’s still alive.” She glared at Beryl. “Do you get that?”
He grasped the back of her suit and hauled her to her feet. “You are pushing your luck,” he said. “We’re going to assume you’ve lost your fucking mind.” He turned to his men. “Grell. Silas. Double-time to the gate and bring an evac back here.”
* * *
The hours that followed passed like a feverish dream. Too weak to continue the trek to the base, she was made to sit in the shade while the soldiers stood guard. She did not recall talking to any of them or seeing Beryl after this. Someone eventually pulled up with a skimmer and the few survivors of this latest massacre were taken away.
The medics at the base received her, someone propped her up while she took a long shower and then she was tucked into a cot in the garrison’s well-equipped hospital compound. Coria was also there, asleep or unconscious, and an armed guard stood by the tent entrance. Nova was treated for dehydration and finally allowed to sleep before she remembered to ask why they had posted the guard.
The following day brought a bedside debrief. And another, conducted by someone else. She talked about Sergeant Reko and Arter and the conditions at the crude med station near the slums. She tried to recall the location of the anti-aircraft guns they had seen in the hills and that still hadn’t been found. She asked about Coria, who was no longer in the hospital tent, and was not given an answer. Then she was left alone again, feeling restless and ready to leave this place.
At the end of that day several officers entered the tent. She sat up and put her feet on the floor as did two of the more able patients that shared her space.
“At ease,” they were told as the general approached.
“Yessir,” Nova said, not at all at ease to be sitting here in a hospital gown while General Patrina Ausan stood before her. The Centauri, who once spoke at the flight academy on Magra while Nova was still a greenie, had been an inspiration for her since her image first appeared on the massive overhead screen of the lecture hall. Now she was leading Air Command’s primary base on the other side of Bellac Tau, making the new skyranch her responsibility. Nova had to remind herself to stop gawking at the woman.