by Various
“Advance!” The cry is hoarse.
Another fleet of kite-soldiers catches the wind, rising straight up, battering akma as they rise. The akma are upon them faster this time, more viciously. Two akma attack a kite with such ferocity that the soldier tumbles out of his straps, spinning slowly head over heels as he falls, straw spilling from his belly—I stop as I realize that it is a facsimile, not a soldier, complete with shiny foil on the tips of his weapon. A kite-soldier hurls a barbed net over the two attacking akma, and they tumble over each other as they plummet towards the hard ground.
“Advance!” Another cry rings out, and a formation of smaller kites takes wing: these are smaller, flat and diamond-shaped, with no tail and no passenger. They are double-layered like the soldier-kites: green on the skyward surface, blue on the bottom, so as to appear invisible to the akma. I recognize these kites—I may have built some of them myself, scalding my fingers with hot glue in the workshop. They are fighter kites, towing strings encrusted with glue and crushed glass. A single red kite rises at the far end of the hillock and the fleet of fighter kites speeds towards it, dipping in the wind. Akma run afoul of the strings, shrieking as the glass cuts through feathers and flesh, flapping uncontrollably towards ground.
Something batters into the back of my head, sending my helmet flying. Sharp talons rake across my neck and hair, leaving burning trails and throwing me to the ground. I yell and roll to face my attacker, but the akma has launched itself back into the air, its beak extended skyward. Now it turns and prepares to swoop at me again.
The akma’s eyes are what catch my attention. They are dull red, like the coals under umma’s pot. They remain trained on me as the akma rises up, up, up; its expression too intelligent for an animal but too cold-blooded, too evil for a man. Black feathers trail off its wingspan, spinning in the air like the first snowflakes of winter.
My stomach twists, but my mind is calm as stone. I scramble towards a clay water jug and press myself against it, lifting the shield to cover my upper body.
Thunk. Scrape. The akma hurls itself against my shield and recoils to the air. Its impact is surprisingly light, but a beak like a hooked dagger strikes the frame, leaving a round, coin-shaped dent in the bamboo.
My hands are shaking uncontrollably. I have never been so close to an akma. I’d always imagined them as dirty creatures, wild and slavering. From the safety of home, they look like nothing more than large birds. But they are something different in reality. The akma smell stale, like the unwatered dirt at the bottom of a gardening pot. Like the lantern oil in an old, ripped lantern. The akma smell of heavy, forgotten things. They seethe of it.
The akma have come to kill us for as long as anyone can remember. They flow through the shifting cracks in the sky, descending from heaven to fall upon us like a merciless army. They hate us, though we do not know why. It may be to test us. It may be to punish us. It may be that they come for no reason at all, and we were simply born in the wrong place.
The akma circles around for another dive.
• • •
“Let’s make a deal,” I say to Ji-won.
He stops his routine and leans on his mokpa. “About what?”
I throw another bamboo crossbar into the stack of ruined crossbars in the corner.
“Help me with these crossbars. Umma’s pile is running low, and every one I make splits in just the wrong place.”
“Hyung, I need to train.”
“I’ll help you with your training,” I say.
Ji-won looks at me, his eyes like two circles of soft glass. His features are undefined in the lamplight. There is an eager look about him when I say this, like when he was a baby and always wanted me to play with him.
Ji-won works deftly with the knife, splitting each stalk carefully along its seam. He holds the knife differently from me, gentler, so that it won’t ruin the crossbar even if it slips. His hands are thin, delicate. Perfect for kite-making. When he faces me in the courtyard, wielding his mokpa, they don’t grip the haft tight enough. He doesn’t have the power in his wrist to split a melon without rolling it.
When I bring umma her dinner later she is in pain. She breathes hard, coughs, breathes again. I hold the medicinal tea to her lips and let her drink.
“Ji—Ji-won.” She backpedals on her hands, steadies herself on the cushions. “I’m so proud of you, Ji-won. A good son and a beautiful soldier. Like appa.”
I’m Ji-sung, I want to say. But I don’t have the heart to correct her.
She is mumbling, repeating herself. “You make me and appa proud, Ji-won.”
I show Ji-won how to wrestle against someone bigger and heavier. He helps me with long, straight cuts across bolts of silk. I select strong strips of wood for his shield. He helps me carry the completed kites, distributing them around town where they are needed: whimsical dragons and butterflies for the children; small flat diamonds for the soldiers; oversized low-flyers for the woodsmen; kites bearing oil-soaked rags for the surface watchmen.
In the evenings we sit and talk and play baduk. Ji-won plays music, blowing into a hollowed-out gourd. Sometimes the neighbors come to watch us, little Mi-yun with her eyes like curious creatures, old Chin with his cart of discarded things. The world is silent then, except for the scratching of tunneling insects and the muted echo that swishes continuously through the city like a kind of blood. The echo of a thousand conversations, of laughter and scolding and coughing, reflecting through the lamplit tunnels like a heartbeat.
Ji-won looks happy, as if all he has ever wanted was my company.
He doesn’t know that I have begun to craft my own shield.
• • •
The akma screams down again, aiming for my head. I keep myself behind my shield, but this time when I feel the thunk I swing the weighted rope around my shield, embracing the akma. I feel weight when I tug: the rope has caught. I kick my shield into it as hard as I can and roll, coming out on top.
One wing tangled in the rope, the akma screeches and flaps, nearly dragging itself into the air. I thrust my hand out to pin it by the neck and bring out my knife. It feels just like slitting the throat of a chicken, tough at first but soft and rubbery on the inside.
Another akma circles above. I run for the cover of the rice field, wading ankle-deep into the muddy silt. I must find Ji-won.
“Oi!” Someone yells and there is a screech and thunk and a flash of someone above me, a tussle. A soldier wrestles with an akma nearby, flattening the rice stalks. On my left three soldiers corner an akma against a granary, their mokpa extended.
“Oi! You! What are you doing out here? Get back! Get back inside!”
A soldier, a captain, perhaps, is gesturing towards the nearest tunnel, telling me to go, to run. I suddenly realize how I must look—helmetless, covered in mud, wearing my shabby self-made armor and brandishing a little knife and shield. There is blood on my hands and head.
But I am not going back.
I turn towards the soldier in the rice stalks. Another akma is harrying him from above, beating the air around his head with its wings. I run at it, running so fast that my heart hurts, and swing my shield like a club. The thin edge hits, sending it sprawling and flapping to the ground. I throw myself on it, but this one is not quite dazed and claws back with its talons, ripping through my unprotected sleeves, tearing through skin.
The soldier beside me finishes this one, ending it with a swift jab to the throat.
I stand, bloodied, dizzy.
“Hyung!” comes a voice from behind me. It’s Ji-won’s voice. “Hyung!”
“Ji-won!”
He runs up, graceful even in his mail armor, his mokpa by his side. “Get out of here,” he says. And suddenly he’s not my little brother anymore, and he’s using the voice he uses to intercede when umma and I are snapping at each other—sweet but firm.
And I am stunned—in my mind’s eye umma turns away with a huff, because I’m not acting how she wants me to, because she is only putti
ng up with me for Ji-won’s sake. Because without Ji-won I have nothing anchoring me to this family.
And someone grabs my shoulders and pushes me towards the tunnel, and I’m so surprised that I don’t fight back until the mokpa part for my entrance and I’m thrust back behind the soldier-wall.
And outside, the akma screech. And Ji-won is out there.
• • •
Something breaks within me. I scream, throwing myself at the soldiers that block my way. A shield batters me in the side of the head; an elbow catches me in the stomach. A sandaled foot comes down hard on my hand, sending my knife spinning. My fingers explode with heat and pain, and all I can think is—I won’t be able to make kites for a while.
But I could never make kites without Ji-won. He is the gray stone stele that holds me and umma and appa together, and I am a red ribbon pulled by the wind.
• • •
When I’m allowed back outside, there are akma bodies everywhere. They make black feathery piles all over the farms and the roads and all over the hillside, down to the bamboo forest and the mulberry grove.
Soldiers are dealing with their fallen first. They carry them by their armpits, cursing softly as they drag them across to the center of town. It smells like iron, and there is a taste in my mouth like blood or tears. Rice fields lie half-trampled. Black feathers float gently on the breeze or lie crushed in the mud. Blood mingles with the dirt, flowing in wide rivulets from akma and human, oozing together in places.
I’m running back to the rice field where I last saw Ji-won, checking each soldier, alive or dead, for Ji-won’s thin arms and posture.
I hear the sharp intakes of breath as uncles and aunties find their dead, their hands clapped to their eyes as they find second-borns that have served their duty.
And I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn, and it’s Ji-won.
He’s smiling. “Hyung,” he says.
My eyes fill with tears. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t go back without you,” I say.
“Why would you have to?” And he smiles that smile.
He helps cut long strips of cloth for the scrapes on my chest and upper arms. I help him carry the dead, hooking my arms under each corpse. They feel so stiff and heavy, as if they have turned partially to stone.
• • •
We burn our dead at sunset.
Kites fill the air, black and red. Black like the steles in the cemetery outside town, where we will store the ashes tomorrow, quietly and reverently. Red like our anger, directed at the sky.
Ji-won is beside me, following the kites around the sky with his eyes. The kites trail tiny hollowed-out gourds, humming a dirge for the fallen. The buzz fills the air like a thousand night-insects, crowding the mind, numbing the body.
Ji-won grasps the haft of his mokpa, standing straight. His wrist is strong now, his arm steady. I remember the hundreds of hours spent training with him, the thousands of hay-bales torn to shreds.
And I think: maybe he learned something from me after all. Maybe the gift I could give him, the only thing I could teach, was worthwhile.
“Hyung,” says Ji-won, his face half hidden in the shadows cast by the funeral pyre.
I turn and see uncertainty written on his smoke-stained face, the face of a boy who has had his first brush with death. The first of many.
“Yes?”
His eyes flit downward before coming to rest on mine, a motion that I know better than anything. “Tomorrow, will you still practice my spear forms with me?”
I exhale. “Yes, of course. Of course I will.”
We watch as the flames lick higher, scorching our faces and the edges of the star-filled sky.
And I think: maybe Ji-won isn’t the only stone stele holding the ribbon of our family to the ground. Maybe in my own way, just by keeping him on the right path and teaching him little things that a hyung should, I keep frail little Ji-won anchored as well. We are both the stone, I think. We are both the ribbon.
We’re brothers, after all. And we fly against heaven.
Stephen Sottong became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Planetary Scouts” in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton.
Visit his website at www.stephensottong.com.
* * *
Novelette: “Planetary Scouts” ••••
Flash: “Friends” ••••
PLANETARY SCOUTS
by Stephen Sottong
First published in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton
• • • •
1
IWAS ABOUT to order another beer when a rumbling in the floor announced the arrival of the passenger liner. I thought about letting my new partner find me in the bar but decided against it. New recruits are impressionable. No use scaring off another one.
Picking my left leg carefully off the bar rail, I placed the offending appendage on the floor. My knee had locked again. Hobbling would make me late. I forced the scarred fingers of my left hand into a fist and smacked the back of my knee. It gave with a jolt of pain. I was barely able to grab the edge of the bar to break my fall. Levering myself up, I flashed my credit chit at the pay station and made my way unsteadily to the door.
Some parents and their Scout son were standing at the door of the bar making “oo-ah” noises at the painting on the bar’s domed ceiling. The owners had hired a starving off-world artist to immortalize the Planetary Scouts. The artist was talented, but he never talked to any of us. To start with, there’s the motto: Discover and Explore. That’s our motto all right, but we don’t do discovery any more. The boredom of hop to a planet, take a few readings, and repeat endlessly, had driven humans nuts, so discovery is now left to robot ships. The only reason they use us for exploration is they’ve never come up with a computer that’s as adaptable as a human; although there are more than a few Scouts who wish they would, and pronto.
Then there’s those planets the artist has us exploring. All the planets look a whole lot like primitive Terra or one of its clones. The fauna looks cuddly—nothing with claws or fangs. Some day I’d like to explore a world like that. Hasn’t happened yet.
The space dock wasn’t far, so I walked. The night was typically warm and cloudless. In spite of the lights along the commercial strip, stars shone. One of the two moons was rising and the docking stations that ringed the planet formed a brilliant necklace. A street vendor was preparing a dish for a wobbly looking Scout that smelled of curry. As the knee warmed up my pain eased.
The railing by the dock’s reception area was filled with expectant Scouts waiting for visitors and new partners. Brushing the hair away from my artificial left eye, I zoomed in for a better view of the disembarking passengers. I had no idea what an A. Lester would look like. A short woman in her late twenties wearing a fresh Scout uniform came out first, long brown hair pulled back from a fine-featured face. Her body was full, lithe, muscular. She carried a large pack on her back.
“Oh yes,” I said under my breath, “if there is a good deity, this will be the one. I deserve her after that last mush-for-brains.” The young woman spotted a middle-aged female Scout holding a sign with a name on it, approached, and shook hands. So I reverted to being an atheist.
The remaining passengers were all civilians. The railing cleared. My knee ached.
A female flight attendant with short red hair left the hatch, the kind of woman—tall, poised, gorgeous—who managed to look great in the shapeless uniforms the spacelines pack their attendants into. She was laughing and talking to the person behind her.
A young man ducked out of the hatch. I zoomed in. The kid was nearly two meters tall, with short blond hair, strong features, and a body capable of towing a small excursion vehicle out of a swamp. He joked amiably with the flight attendant who didn’t take her eyes off him. The man carried both of their bags effortlessly in one hand. Hell, he even had a cleft chin. I turned my eyes to heaven. “There is
a God: it’s Loki.”
I made my way to the gate. “You must be my new partner.”
The young man dropped the bags and sprang to attention. “Scout Private Lester reporting for duty.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I turned to the flight attendant. “And you would be?”
“Marina.” She offered a flawlessly manicured hand.
I handed Marina her bag. “Thanks for keeping the kid safe.” I turned to Lester. “Come on, kid.”
Lester shrugged and waved goodbye to the crestfallen woman. He fell in beside me. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. Aidan Pastor is a legend in the Scouts.”
I flinched. “Right, kid.”
“We study your tactics in Planetary Scout Academy.”
“I better check on my royalties.”
“I can’t wait to take off on our first mission.”
I waved my credit chit at a ground car and it opened. We climbed in and the door swung shut. The seats were too small for Lester. “Scout enlisted quarters building 42,” I said. The car moved out.
I looked at the eager face and pulled up my left shirt sleeve. “You know what these are, kid?”
“Burns?”
I nodded. “My last partner played by Academy rules. That’s why I’ve got these. We’re going nowhere till I’m sure you’ve got my rules down to instinct. So what do you do when an unknown lifeform comes at you fast?”
“Attempt to determine if the lifeform is intelligent.”
“Wrong. Rule one: if the local fauna or flora starts chasing you, shoot it. My last partner wouldn’t shoot the natives because he thought they might be intelligent. They were intelligent—intelligent enough to have a catapult. The creatures he wouldn’t shoot hit us with a boulder as we tried to get the hell out. It damaged the ship—caught on fire, burned him to death and nearly killed me.”
“It was bad for you, but it saved the beings.”
I stuck a scarred index finger into his oversized chest. “Nope. When they hit the ship, there was a radiation leak. Killed everything for 50 kilometers. Wiped out all the intelligent life on the planet. Only thing that saved us was our suits. If he’d shot a couple of them, there’d still be intelligent life on that planet, he’d still be alive, and I wouldn’t be in constant pain. You don’t shoot, I’ll shoot you.”