For Promise Yet Unbroken

by Tygati

  It would be two weeks before the rescue ship would arrive, given how much space it had to cover. There was time for healing, time for planning, and time for Jeremey to get to know his soldier a little better before Harry had to leave.

  At the request of Colonel Brocius, all patrol riders went out with a Galactic Federation soldier riding double. They kept watch for any sign of Vek who might have escaped and for whatever the Vek had come to the planet for in the first place. It was the latter that most frustrated Colonel Brocius, as they still had no idea why the Vek would come so far out into unclaimed territory, to a planet which apparently required full evo suits and had only a small human colony on it. It wasn't a strategic target in any sense of the word. There was nothing to be gained from conquering Noman, so why come at all?

  What did the Vek know about Noman that the humans did not?

  "The war has been at a bit of a stalemate for decades," Harry confided to Jeremey. "There are a lot of skirmishes, some flashy explosions, but nobody's really managed to gain the upper hand. The Galactic Federation is constantly looking for something that will give them an edge over the Vek and they're terrified that the Vek will find it first."

  They were out in the hills east of Fair Valley, following one of the small creeks that wound through the twisting valleys. Although they were not on an official patrol, Jack had made it clear that anyone willing to spend their free time keeping an extra set of eyes out had his permission to do so. Since Harry had shown an interest in Jeremey's stories of Noman, and seeing was always better than hearing, they'd gone out to explore every time Jeremey was off duty.

  Officially Harry was still on medical leave, but Colonel Brocius was a practical man. Harry wouldn't be putting unnecessary strain on his leg if he was astride a dragon, nor would he be driving Doctor Holliday up the wall with his boredom in being confined to a sick room, and he was just as vested as Sheriff Sullivan in making sure they weren't ambushed by Vek.

  "Is that why Colonel Brocius asks so many questions about Noman?" Jeremey wondered, steering Promise away from a sharp gully. "He thinks we might have some special weapon he can use?"

  "That's the idea," Harry agreed. "I mean, the Vek were clearly looking for something dangerous when they came here. Colonel Brocius wants to find it first."

  Jeremey snorted. "Everything on Noman is dangerous."

  Harry made a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. "You have a point there. I'm very glad we haven't met up with any of those rachya you talk about." He shuddered theatrically.

  Jeremey shook his head. "Won't see any rachya until fall. They're still in hibernation. It's caraca we need to keep an eye out for. They're sneaky and like to ambush you when you're not paying attention."

  Harry made a face. "I think you just proved your point. Everything on this planet is dangerous."

  "Not the fleep," Jeremey pointed out. "They're really friendly. Well, unless something stampedes them, then they can trample you."

  "See?" Harry said, grinning. "Everything."

  Jeremey shoved him, gently so as not to knock him off Promise's back, and Harry took advantage by grabbing Jeremey's arm and pulling. Off-balance already, Jeremey fell forward into Harry's chest, scraping his cheek along the rough material of Harry's uniform jacket. Harry's free arm snaked around his waist, trapping him in place while also keeping him from tumbling from Promise's back.

  Harry's breath was warm against Jeremey's cheek. "Well," he murmured, "look what I caught."

  Jeremey's cheeks heated, the pounding of his heart sending blood rushing through his body. He was acutely aware of Harry; his scent, his warmth, his closeness. Harry affected him in a way he'd never experienced before.

  A shiver of anticipation ran through him as Harry leaned closer, the awkward angle making it difficult to steal a proper kiss. Jeremey shifted, trying to position himself to give Harry better access, when something caught his eye.

  "What's that?"

  He sat up, Harry's arm sliding from his waist as he did so, and righted his hat where it was attempting to slide off his head. In the distance, between two hills, was a smudge of color that wasn't right.

  "There, do you see?" Jeremey pointed.

  Harry sat up straighter, squinting in the proper direction. "What am I looking at?"

  "Promise—" Jeremey nudged the dragon in the proper direction and they set off at a loping pace.

  As a child and as a rider, Jeremey had spent a lot of time outdoors. He loved being out in the world, loved the way it seemed to go on forever without end. Even when it was trying its level best to kill him, Jeremey loved his home. But since it did try to kill him on a semi-regular basis, he also paid very close attention to it. He knew Noman better than many people did. Better than he knew himself.

  He knew that spot was wrong. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but he knew it was wrong.

  Promise's smooth pace covered the intervening ground quickly, slowing down as the hills and gullies became sharper and required more cautious footwork. He rounded the edge of the hill they'd been aiming for and stopped, nearly flattening himself to the ground.

  Jeremey hissed out a quiet breath between his teeth and slid out of Promise's saddle. He placed a warning hand on Harry's knee, silently telling him to stay put, then slid his blaster out of its holster and edged forward to come up alongside Promise's head. The dragon held perfectly still, gaze fixed intently upon what had been revealed below.

  It was a ship. Flat grey with abrupt angles, it looked very out of place in the warm reds and tans of the surrounding hillsides. It was not overly large and, unlike the last two ships Jeremey had seen, this one was intact.

  As he watched, a hole slid open in the side of the ship and two figures stepped out. They looked strange, yet at the same time familiar. One of them gestured to something still inside, and a moment later a third figure emerged.

  Jeremey bit his lip. Evo suits—that was what Colonel Brocius had called them. To protect the wearer from a dangerous environment. Since Noman wasn't dangerous to humans, at least not in that manner, these had to be Vek.

  There was a second Vek ship on Noman.

  Below, the three suited Vek gestured at one another before they began walking in a roughly southwesterly direction, spreading out as they went. Jeremey waited until they were out of sight before scooting back to where Harry was waiting.

  "It's a Vek ship," he whispered. "Three of them came out, wearing those evo suits same as the ones we killed."

  Harry pursed his lips. "Why send two ships to the same planet?"

  "They must really want whatever it is that they're looking for." Jeremey rolled an idea around in his head. "Maybe there's something in their ship that would tell us what they're after."

  Harry frowned. "It's too dangerous."

  Jeremey snorted. "More dangerous than letting them find whatever it is that they're after?" He ran a hand gently down Promise's flank. "This is my home. It's not perfect, not even close, but it is my home, and I'm gonna protect it. From Vek, and rachya, and whatever else thinks it wants to kill me."

  Harry grimaced, then sighed and carefully slid down out of Promise's saddle. "Fine, but I'm coming with you. You don't even know how to read the Vek language."

  Jeremey grinned, then turned and made his way back up to Promise's head. "Stay here," he ordered, placing a warning hand on Promise's head when the dragon made a sound in protest. "I mean it. You can't fit inside that door and there's nowhere for you to hide down there. You stay put and keep an eye out in case those three Vek come back."

  After a few more grumbling noises and an annoyed whistle, Promise subsided. Jeremey gestured to Harry, and the two of them began cautiously picking their way down the hillside and over to the ship, mindful of Harry's injured leg. The hatch was still open when they got there and first Harry, then Jeremey, slipped inside.

  The inside of the Vek ship was unlike anything Jeremey had ever seen. Nothing about it had been designed by a human mind and it made him feel
vaguely queasy just looking at it. The angles were wrong. The coloring was wrong. The layout was wrong. Everything seemed too sharp and harsh. Jeremey knew he would never feel comfortable in such a place. He wondered what the Vek thought of human buildings, if they felt as wrong to the Vek as Vek architecture felt to him.

  Harry pointed down one looping corridor and they struck out, keeping an ear open for anything that might mean they were about to be discovered. They passed several rooms that didn't have anything interesting in them before stumbling across one that looked even stranger than the rest of the ship. Fluid-filled panels filled an entire wall, each with something floating in them. There were tables at differing levels with equipment sitting on them whose purpose Jeremey couldn't even begin to guess at. Several different displays hung from the ceiling, each displaying something different.

  One showed Noman's stellar system, with a bright yellow group of lettering across the planet itself. Another was filled with words he couldn't read, while a third displayed side-by-side diagrams of a Vek and a human with notations surrounding them. One in the corner reminded him of things he'd seen in Doc Holliday's office, but it was the last one that captured Jeremey's attention. It had several different images of a Vek, all labeled, all slightly different from one another.

  He reached up and ran his fingers along what he could only assume was the title. "Harry? What does this say?"

  Harry looked over, frowning slightly. "Stages of death, I think. It's an odd word for death."

  Jeremey looked at the images again, something about them tickling his memory, like he'd seen them before, only… different. Human.

  Jeremey drew in a sharp breath. "The arrival sickness."

  "The what?" Harry asked, looking a bit confused.

  "When the first settlers arrived on Noman, they got sick," Jeremey explained. "Really sick. Only a third of the original settlers survived. This—" He pointed to the series of pictures, "looks a lot like what they show in school about what happened to the people who got the arrival sickness. Only these pictures show Vek instead of humans. I think… I think the Vek are trying to use the sickness as a weapon."

  Harry was silent, staring up at the display screen. After a long moment, he let out a quiet sigh. "Well, fuck."

  Jeremey grabbed his arm and tugged. "C'mon, we need to get back and tell Jack and the colonel what we found."

  Harry sighed again. "I really wish it hadn't been you," he said.

  Something struck Jeremey hard in the back of the head and his world went black.

  *~*~*

  When Jeremey awoke, head still throbbing, he found himself being stared at by four Vek—and Harry. The Vek had removed their evo suits, giving Jeremey his first real look at an unobscured Vek.

  Colonel Brocius had described the Vek as "big, ugly lizards." He wasn't wrong, but he wasn't exactly right either. To Jeremey, the Vek looked as though someone had crossed dragons with rachya and it hadn't quite turned out right. They were similar to rachya in size, towering over most men, but with horns and scattered scales more in keeping with those of dragons. They had wide, thick tails and squashed faces with protruding mouths.

  They did not look friendly.

  Worse than the Vek, though, was Harry. He didn't look any different, leaning against a table to keep his weight off his bad leg. He looked exactly as he had always looked, only Harry was unrestrained while thick straps held Jeremey's arms and legs down. He'd been speaking with one of the Vek but stopped and looked over when Jeremey stirred.

  "Sorry about this," Harry said apologetically, spreading his hands wide. "It's nothing personal. You have an immunity to the virus and the Vek are going to need that if they're going to unleash the virus on the Galactic Federation."

  Jeremey shook his head slowly, still trying to wrap his mind around what his eyes and ears were telling him. "Harry, you… Why?"

  Harry shrugged. "You wouldn't understand. You haven't spent your entire life fighting a war that someone else started. A war that goes on and on, never ending. I'm tired of it. Tired of the fighting. This way… it will all be over."

  "But…" Jeremey's own voice sounded strange in his ears. "But you'll die too."

  Harry shook his head. "Nah, they're going to immunize me, once they finish extracting it from you. Good thing, too. We didn't know when we came here that it affected humans too. They thought they'd have to reverse-engineer it to do that. This way is much simpler. It'll all be over that much sooner."

  "I don't…" understand, Jeremey wanted to say. The words wouldn't come out. He'd also spent his entire life fighting against a planet that wanted him and all his people dead. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but they never stopped fighting to survive. They never gave up.

  This… he just couldn't understand.

  "Of course you don't," Harry said. There was so much bitterness in his voice, Jeremey didn't know how he could have missed it before. "Your people still see each other as people, not numbers. You haven't been fighting a war so long that when an entire world gets destroyed in the crossfire, you actually care. You don't just go 'oops' and carry on."

  His mouth tightened and he looked away for several moments. When he looked back again, it had eased.

  "I really am sorry that you had to die, though," Harry said, pushing away from the table and coming over to where Jeremey was bound. "You were the best thing about this dustball planet. But then you had to go and find the ship, figure it out. You have way too much curiosity for your own good, Jeremey."

  Harry leaned down, his lips pressing softly to Jeremey's. When he drew back, he was smiling ruefully. "I'd say it was going to get you into trouble one day, but… it already has."

  He stepped back, glancing over his shoulder at one of the waiting Vek and making an odd gesture that Jeremey didn't understand. "All yours." It was clearly what the Vek had been waiting for, and two of them moved forward with purpose.

  Jeremey felt the first gripping of panic, watching the Vek looming over him. He shot a desperate look at Harry, struggling within his bonds, but Harry, once a soldier, now naught more than a traitor, did nothing.

  Nothing but watch.

  Harry's lips parted. "Goodbye, Jeremey—"

  There was a hiss of air as the door slid open. The Vek and Harry all turned to look, Harry's brow furrowing, then one of the Vek screamed and chaos broke loose.

  It was hard for Jeremey to keep track of what was going on through the mass panic that gripped the room. There was screaming and shouting, the fear in it unmistakable even though the words themselves were alien to him. The Vek were running every which way, arming themselves with whatever came most readily to hand, but to no avail. Whatever had come through the door was fast enough that Jeremey caught only brief glimpses of it as it cut down the Vek one by one.

  It saved Harry, wide-eyed and backed into a corner, for last. He held a smooth grey rod in front of himself for defense, his blaster nowhere to be found.

  "You are a disgrace to your people, human," the being hissed, its movement steady and deliberate as opposed to the chaos from only moments ago. "May your gods have pity on you, for I will not."

  It struck then, almost a blur as it sank its claws into Harry's shoulder. The rod fell from his nerveless fingers as he screamed, the sound mercifully cut short as his killer snapped his neck.

  Dropping Harry's lifeless body to the floor, the being turned toward Jeremey.

  If the Vek had reminded Jeremey of dragons crossed with rachya, this creature looked more like a blend of dragon and human. Lithe and graceful, the lines of its body bore a strong resemblance to that of a tall man, but with enough slight differences that it was impossible to mistake for human. It had dark, blue-tinted skin with a fine dusting of sapphire scales all across its body and a face that was a little too long, the area around the mouth protruding a bit too far to give the illusion of humanity. It also had a dragon's elegant wings and tail, proportioned for a much smaller body than Jeremey was accustomed to.

  "Um�
�" Jeremey started.

  "I do not know if it is you who seeks out trouble, or trouble which seeks out you," the dragon-man declared, undoing Jeremey's bindings one at a time. "Perhaps it does not matter, as the result is the same."

  The dragon-man's words were strangely accented, the emphasis not quite in the right places. It could be that the unusual construction of his face caused the uneven speech, or more likely it was simply that it was not his native language.

  "Um, thank you? For helping me," Jeremey offered, rubbing his wrists as they were freed.

  "It is my duty to keep you safe," the dragon-man declared, invading Jeremey's space and pressing against him in several places. "I chose you. I will protect you. It is my promise to you."

  "Your promise?" Jeremey whispered, unable to look away, caught up in a sea of sapphire as his world abruptly seemed to tilt around him. It couldn't be, and yet the evidence was staring him right in the face.

  "My Promise?" he breathed.

  The dragon-man grinned and nuzzled Jeremey's cheek, then stepped back to pick something up—Jeremey's hat—and set it back down on Jeremey's head. Just like he always did.

  Jeremey fought the urge to laugh, sensing that if he did then he'd never stop. "Well," he said weakly, "at least there's no slobber on it this time."

  Promise grinned again and helped him down off the table and out of the blood-splattered room. Jeremey carefully avoided looking at Harry, his mind still in turmoil over that betrayal. Try as hard as he might, there was nothing he could think of, no subtle indicators that Harry had been anything other than the cheerful, friendly face he'd presented himself as.

  Jeremey stopped short in the corridor as one thought led to another, terrible thought. "What if there are more?"

  The look Promise gave him was quizzical, and Jeremey realized that there was no way for the dragon to have been following his unvoiced thoughts.

  "Like… like Harry." Jeremey swallowed. "People who are… not…"

  "Honorable?" Promise supplied.

  Jeremey nodded. "Yeah. What if there are others who are working with the Vek? How do we… know whom to trust?"