Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  At the side of the first house, she paused while the rest of the platoon went on. “God,” Rita prayed under her breath. “If it’s all right with you, please don’t let there be bodies.”

  She had thought that her training as a pathologist would have inured her, but the sheer number of the dead at Balaguer had given her the first-year resident shakes. They weren’t lying on neat, steel tables, those dead boys.

  They were scattered, pieces of them scattered on the ground, like grisly post-Mardi Gras confetti.

  After medevacking the injured soldier out, Rita and Lieutenant Dix and the rest of the platoon found fourteen men the light had sucked dry.

  Six of the fourteen were Americans. Four of those now wore Arab uniforms.

  After that grim chore and the long march, Rita was so exhausted, she trembled. When Dix popped her head around the corner of the house, Rita raised her M-16 and almost shot her.

  ‘They all skedaddled,” Dix said, smiling at the muzzle of the gun and Rita’s startled face. “Come on.”

  Rita shouldered her gear and limped down the cobble-stoned street.

  It looked as though someone had turned Pons upside down and shaken all the people out. Rita felt the prickle of ghost stares in the abandoned windows, thought she heard the tread of the missing as they walked to the village fountain. The platoon entered the village quietly, as if afraid to disturb the dead.

  Dix motioned a squad to fall out. The men scurried, their gear jingling. When they were gone, Rita studied the shuttered greengrocer’s, the boarded-up tailor’s. Pons contained a sad, goose-bump sort of hush.

  In a few minutes the squad returned.

  “Just like forward OPs told us, lieutenant,” Hoover said.

  “All cleaned up. All quiet.”

  “Let’s take a load off, guys,” Dix sighed.

  BETWEEN ALFARRAS AND BALAGUER

  Gordon was keeping to the high country, thrashing his CRAV around in the juniper, not really thinking about where he was going. He was trying to remember his dream.

  The pilot had seemed happy to see him, and had said something weird: that Gordon’s face didn’t change.

  Of course it didn’t change. Gordon had been looking in the mirror for years hoping his chin would grow chiseled, like the pilot’s.

  It still hadn’t. When he shaved, Gordon saw the same dweeb in the mirror he saw in high school.

  Gordon hadn’t liked the pilot much, hadn’t liked the guy’s looks. Athletic and cocksure, like all the high-school jocks who beat up on Gordon.

  Except that the pilot’s self-confidence was frayed about the edges. His gray eyes were glazed with fear.

  “I gave them classified information,” the pilot had told Gordon. “I’ll be court-martialed.”

  Yeah, sure, Gordon remembered thinking. Right there in the dream he’d started analyzing himself. During the screening of Freud Meets Gordon II, he concluded that the dream was about power.

  The jock couldn’t control his alien; and Gordon could.

  He glanced around. The blue light was tagging along, bobbing over the black-green masses of juniper.

  Too late, as usual, Gordon felt ashamed. He should have talked to the guy. What was his name? Justin Searles? When Gordon hadn’t replied, the pilot got a look on his face as though they were choosing up sides for baseball and Gordon wouldn’t be on his team.

  At the top of a rise, Gordon paused and looked southeast. Near the horizon he could see the whitewashed rubble of what had been Balaguer. There had been a whopper of a battle there, a real double-decker with cheese, at least that’s what the colonel told him. Curious, he blinked to bring up his telescopic vision.

  Okay. So if there had been a battle—he wondered, surprise curdling in his belly—then what were all those tanks and trucks and artillery tractors doing under that camouflage netting?

  He stopped in a clump of juniper, keeping the Arab army in his sights and waiting for instructions. When he felt the hand clutch his arm, Gordon closed his eyes, powered down the CRAV, and pried off his goggles.

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  “Change of plans,” Colonel Pelham said the moment Gordon was free of the headgear.

  Gordon sat, goggles laced in his gloved fingers, and waited for Pelham to go on.

  “It looks like the trucks are all positioned with their grilles northeast. Unless the ANA has got a lot cleverer than they were yesterday, that’s the direction they’re headed.”

  Northeast, Gordon thought, Most of the Allies were southwest. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the Arabs were doing. Four or five tank battalions and a shitload of artillery. Overkill for the small force of British and Canadians near Berga.

  Goddamn, the Arabs were invading France.

  “Tell you what to do, sergeant,” Pelham was saying. “You hurry on up the Segre River to Pons. Reconnoiter for me up there. Find yourself a good hiding place and wait for the Arabs to move though. I want a recording of this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep out of sight,” Pelham warned him fretfully. “And get me some good film I can show the French.”

  “Yes, sir. You bet, sir.”

  It was going to be Gordon Battles the Forces of Darkness allover again.

  THE SEGRE RIVER, SPAIN

  The Pyrenees are made up of little folds, all U-shaped valleys from Ice Age glaciation, and narrow, fjord-type gorges. After shooing Rover away, Gordon made his way down the gentle U-shaped banks of the Segre. Miles later he was trapped in a steep-sided fjord.

  The sides of the river were mossy limestone, and it wasn’t until he arrived at the picturesque bridge outside Pons that he found handholds where he could scoot-and-clamber up the ravine. On the bank he looked around, saw nothing but a curious sheep watching, and beaded east into Pons.

  At the edge of town stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, wilted flowers at her feet. Farther on down the cobble-stoned road, a fountain splashed clear water into a granite basin.

  The place was deserted, the fountain the only happening thing in town.

  Pons was quaint, the sort of village that small, exclusive American shopping malls like to imitate. Near the center of the village Gordon found the hiding place he was looking for.

  The sagging structure had been a stable once. Between the weathered boards were splintered gaps through which he could watch the Arabs pass. If the ANA were doing any sightseeing, they’d look at the fountain, at the neat stoops of the whitewashed houses, not the crumbling barn.

  Making his way to the rear, he opened the slatted door and rolled inside. The place was exactly as he thought it would be: haystrewn the interior dim except for slanting bars of sun. In the darkness of the rafters, frightened pigeons were flying.

  One thing in the barn, though, didn’t fit the bucolic picture. Directly in front of Gordon squatted an American captain, a grenade launcher on her M-16.

  Which was pointed right at him.

  The captain was fortyish, but good-looking. Gordon noticed that, too. She was tall, on the thin side, a coffee-and-cream woman with a tight helmet of curls. She had huge bedroom eyes, although Gordon wasn’t certain how large they might look in other, less startling circumstances.

  Praying that the captain wouldn’t fire off a grenade, Gordon put his arms up.

  WITH LIEUTENANT DIX’S PLATOON, PONS, SPAIN

  “Put it away, captain!” Dix shouted from a dark corner.

  Rita was nonplussed. Put the gun down? But some toy tank had just rolled into the barn. The thing had robot arms, and it was lifting them over its head in an I-give-up gesture.

  “We’ve seen these things before,” Dix told her. “It’s American.”

  Slowly Rita let her gun drop. The small tank’s arms fell with twin clinks, and curled aro
und braces on the cannonless turret.

  “Where’s the guy?” Rita asked.

  “What guy?”

  “The guy in the tank.”

  “There’s no guy there, sugar,” Dix laughed. “It’s just a robot remote. The operator’s back in Portugal somewhere. Hi, honey,” she said and waved at the robot.

  With a slight whine of its servomotors, the robot lifted an arm and waved back. Rita found herself smiling—smiling as if Balaguer had never happened.

  Pushing herself up out of the straw, she walked over to it. The robot had taken a beating, she saw. There were scratches along the turret, and the back end was a mess. As she approached, the turret swiveled toward her and the robot held out a hand.

  After a hesitation, she put her own hand into the steel claw. Lightly, considerately, the claw closed. The arm lifted a little and lowered again.

  Then Rita caught a glimpse of something blue, something cold, between the slats of the barn. She turned, but the blue was gone.

  Her heart climbed her throat. Unless her imagination was running away with her, the alien had come back. It had followed them from Balaguer. It would corner them. It would suck the blood out of their bodies.

  “What’s wrong?” Dix asked.

  The doors banged open. A globe of blue light sailed into the barn.

  Rita dived for cover. Startled pigeons exploded into a dry-feathered maelstrom. Around her she could hear the rattle of weapons coming to bear. Then she whirled, M-16 in band, and saw that the robot was moving between the crouched soldiers and the light. Its metal arms gestured forcefully. Go to the corner, the robot seemed to be saying to it.

  Like a well-trained dog, the light obeyed. Hunched against the opposite wall, heart beating triple time, Rita waited, staring suspiciously.

  WITH THE CRAV AT PONS, SPAIN

  Don’t shoot! Gordon wanted to scream.

  Every gun in the six-person squad was pointed at Rover.

  Desperate, he rolled toward the captain. She shied back, but the little lieutenant didn’t. Instead she watched, her blue eyes wide.

  He cleared a space in the straw with one swipe of his arm.

  DON’T SHOOT, he wrote in the sand.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice taut. “Okay, just keep it away from us, understand?”

  He smoothed out the dirt and scribbled, GOT IT.

  Gordon glanced back. Rover was in the corner pretending to be Good Dog. He was practically doing an imitation of Roll Over and Play Dead.

  “You all friends with that thing, or what?” the lieutenant asked.

  Gordon turned to her. CLASSIFIED, he wrote.

  The lieutenant and her squad stared at the word. They looked at it a long time.

  Gordon wouldn’t have minded telling them more, but knew Pellham and Toshio were watching on the monitor. Rover was more than Classified, higher than Top Secret. He was Eyes-Only. Say more, and Gordon, like Justin Searles, would be the victim of a gang bang by a court-martial board.

  He smoothed the sand again. GET OUT OF PONS BFFORE SUNDOWN, he wrote.

  There. That was cryptic enough. Not anything Pelham could take exception to. Looking at his own sentence, Gordon thought it sounded a bit too much like a B-Western. He could add THIS TOWN’S NOT BIG ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US, but since he was wearing the best poker face of all, the squad might not understand the humor.

  “In Balaguer we seen fourteen people that light sucked the blood out of,” the little lieutenant said, resting her suspicious gaze on Rover.

  NOT THIS LIGHT, Gordon wrote back. IT WAS WITH ME ALL THE TIME.

  Rover had an alibi for the deaths at Balaguer all right, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a killer. He had nailed three people in an Arab tank and one member of the LDV platoon. God only knew how he spent his time while Gordon slept.

  I’LL KEEP IT AWAY FROM YOU, he wrote with more confidence than he felt.

  “Make damned sure you do.” The peach-faced lieutenant with the blue eyes checked her watch. “Listen. We got a couple of hours yet until dusk. My men had the stuffing worked out of ’em. You mind if we hole up here and grab some down time?”

  Gordon knew little about flesh-and-blood women. His fantasies centered either around the posters of blondes in chain-mail panties he purchased at comic-book conventions or the fainthearted heroines of old horror movies. What little sex life Gordon had had contained a confusing mixture of his awe of women’s fragility and his fear of their strength.

  The lieutenant with the wiry forearms didn’t seem as though she was about to suffer an attack of the vapors; but she didn’t resemble a Valkyrie with a ray gun, either. He liked her sunburned snub nose, her candid blue eyes. DIX, the name patch on her fatigues read. Gordon thought that if he could get over his shyness, he’d look her up sometime.

  Hi, he’d say. Remember me? And maybe Dix would overlook his weak chin, his complete and total dweebiness. Maybe one day she’d look at him and see not the disappointing man but the CRAV’s chiseled, powerful form.

  As though she’d read his mind, the lieutenant smiled up into his optics, a flirtatious twinkle in her eye. “I’ve always wanted to meet one of you all. And the way you shook the captain’s hand, like she was Steuben crystal or something. Hey. You a boy robot or a girl robot?”

  The teasing look both shocked and scared him a little.

  Keeping his optics lifted so that the monitor wouldn’t snoop on his reply, he wrote without looking: BOY.

  “Well, ain’t that interesting,” she said.

  AT BALAGUER, SPAIN

  A Palestinian NCO bent down and whispered in Wasef’s ear, “Another one.”

  The colonel nodded and clambered up from the shade of an olive tree, whose branches had been tattered by small arms fire. Holding a handkerchief tight to his nose and mouth, he followed the noncom up the hill.

  Three thousand Arabs lay sprawled along the grassy crest, rotting in the sun. In Balaguer itself were almost two thousand Allied corpses, British and American both.

  So where were the burial details? Wasef had never known the Allies to leave their dead so long. Before reaching Balaguer, he’d sent a Hind D out in a reconnaissance flight, but so far everything was quiet, terrifyingly quiet, as if the enemy intended to let their dead rot to bone.

  Single file, Wasef and the sergeant made start-stop progress though the field of corpses like children playing Simon Says.

  “Here, sir,” the NCO said, pointing to a body.

  Wasef looked down. The soldier was the wrong color, the wrong shape. The others were blue-gray, their gas-distended bellies straining at uniform buttons, their faces swollen like those grotesque American Cabbage Patch dolls.

  This soldier might have been alive but for the pale cream hue of his skin, and for the bloodless hole in his forehead.

  “This is the tenth one we have found,” the sergeant said in a hushed voice. “All of them Arabs. Not one American or Englishman.”

  Wasef nodded as though he understood, but he did not understand at all. It was obvious that the blue lights were at war with the ANA. These ten Arab bodies spoke louder than a formal declaration.

  He lifted his head and looked back at Balaguer, seeing the burned American M-113, its red cross still legible on one side. The red cross had not stayed the ANA missile, just as the red crescent often did not stay the killing hand of the Allies. Nothing was safe.

  Looking at the bloodless corpse, Wasef felt cold terror spill down his back.

  “The men are afraid,” the sergeant told him. Wasef saw pleading in the-man’s face.

  “They think Captain Rashid talks to the lights,” the NCO went on. “They think he brings this terror down on their heads.”

  “Ignorance,” Wasef grunted.

  “Yes, sir.” The noncom shrugged helples
sly. His face looked pinched and wan. “But in battle, bullets sometimes stray from the mark.” The man’s voice lowered. He glanced around in embarrassment. “And for the colonel’s safety, sir, I would suggest he keep away from the captain.”

  PONS, SPAIN

  Rita hunkered, her back against the barn wall so she could keep an eye on the blue light and also watch Dix and the robot.

  The pair were nestled as close as two peanuts in a shell, and just as happily. The robot had cleared part of the dirt floor, and the two were carrying on an animated conversation, Dix speaking low and the robot responding in writing.

  Rita was just close enough to read the words. R&R?

  Dix glanced around at her squad. Most were asleep. A few were sitting up, snacking, and cleaning their weapons. They were pointedly not looking in the lieutenant’s direction. When Dix glanced Rita’s way, Rita tactfully turned toward the blue light.

  Odd, Rita thought, how still it was. How deceptively peaceful, as cool and blue as dusk. As she watched, she heard a tapping sound start up in the back of her brain, a sound to drowse to.

  Quickly she looked away and saw Dix smiling up at the robot. “Three weeks,” the lieutenant whispered.

  LISBON? the robot wrote in reply.

  “Probably. Why? You all interested?”

  Rita watched the metal finger make a slow arc in the dirt, then another arc. The heart-shape completed, the robot drew an arrow through it.

  Rita felt a titter of mirth in her throat and hurriedly lowered her gaze to the straw. It was somehow hilarious, macabre, and sweet at the same time, seeing the two talking together, the large metal object and the tiny pink-faced girl.