Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  Medical emergency to my quarters, I transmitted with my neurolink. I couldn’t have said it aloud: my jaw was shattered, held together by the byomer coating and nothing else. My skull was fractured and I knew I had a concussion and probably a serious brain bleed. I knew all that at some level because my headcomp was telling me, but I couldn’t comprehend it. I couldn’t think much at all and it was a miracle I could move. I crawled across the room on hands and knees, unable to pull myself upright, until I found her.

  Her eyes were wide open, her beautiful face broken and frozen in fear. Her head was against the wall, her neck at an impossible right angle to her body as she rested partially in the concave in the wall where she’d impacted. Her skull was caved in on the left temple, and I could see the clear cerebrospinal fluid leaking from her nose along with the blood that coated her face. She gasped a final breath and died as I stared at her helplessly.

  Get a fucking medical crew in here! I screamed somewhere inside my head, and I didn’t even know if was transmitting it.

  They had to save her, they could still save her, they had to fucking save her!

  A roar filled my head and darkness closed in on the edges of my vision. I fought against it, but my headcomp had dosed me with too many painkillers and I couldn’t stay conscious. The last thing I remember seeing was Jenna’s face, still frozen in fear and shock and the realization that she was going to die. The last thing I remember thinking was that I hoped I would die too.

  ***

  I blinked at the harsh light shining into my eyes and felt an intense disappointment that I was waking up at all. I was in a monitor bed in a medical bay and I knew without asking that I’d been under for over forty hours. Every injury had healed, even the brain bleed; they had to have put me into an automed, otherwise I would have woken up before now.

  Deke was standing next to the bed and I could feel his hand on my arm through the silky fabric of the disposable hospital clothes I was wearing.

  “Steady, Cal,” he said, his face as bleak and as close to hopeless as I’d ever seen it. “We’re here.”

  As my vision swam into focus, I could see Holly standing next to him, tears dried on her cheeks and fresh ones flowing now. She leaned down and hugged me tightly, sobbing against my chest.

  “I’m so sorry, Cal,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Oh, my God, I am so sorry…”

  I held her, let her cry and try to comfort me, but I couldn’t cry and I wouldn’t be comforted. I felt cold deep inside me, a vacuum with no sun to heat it.

  “There were three of the things,” Deke was saying. His words seemed to slide off my brain without taking purchase, but he kept talking. “They got onto a cargo freighter coming through the gate from Earth, but we don’t know how they got into the system. We also don’t know how the hell they knew we were here in the first place.”

  That sparked an ember somewhere in my head and I looked up at him. “Pretty fucking obvious,” I said, my voice as dull and unemotional as my soul. “Admiral Krieger and his military think-tank are the only ones who knew about us outside the program. Like the Bulldog said, people talk.”

  I didn’t even feel angry at Krieger; to feel angry I would have had to feel anything at all. I registered through the numb haze that we were alone in the recovery bay. There were no doctors or technicians around, and I wondered if Deke and Holly had chased them off before I woke up.

  “Besides you,” Deke went on, “they hit Kel’s quarters and Brian’s. Kel was hurt pretty bad, but Cowboy was coming back from the commissary when he heard Kel’s transmission. He’s the one who hit the alarm, and he brought Security with him to Kel’s room and they took the thing out before it could kill him.” Deke let out a breath and shook his head, leaning heavily against the bed. “Kel’s still in the automed and they’re going to have to grow him a new heart.”

  “I was with Brian,” Holly told me, wiping at her face as she sat up. “And he keeps a gun in the room. Between the two of us we managed to kill it.”

  The door to the recovery bay slid aside and Colonel Murdock stepped in, his face grey and strained. Even his uniform was less than perfect; it looked as if he’d slept in it.

  “Caleb,” he said, his voice hoarse and scratchy, “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about Jenna.” He blinked and had to lean against one of the monitor beds for a moment. “She was a good officer and a better person.” He swallowed hard and I realized suddenly that he must have actually liked her. He’d had to have done a pretty in-depth check on her before he’d cleared her to know about us in the first place. “I did want you to know that the medical team did the best they could for her, but by the time Security had cleared the area, the brain damage was too extensive.”

  “I knew she was dead the minute the thing hit her.” The words sounded as if they were coming from someone else, someone standing behind me. They were cold and harsh and not at all what I wanted to say to him.

  He looked as if the words shook him, as if I shook him. He pushed away from the bed and stood up straight to face me.

  “We know what the things are,” he went on, voice steadier. “They’re cyborgs.”

  “I thought the Tahni didn’t believe in cybernetics,” Deke protested.

  “Their holy writ says that no Tahni born of a female may alter himself or herself from the form the Emperor has designated for them,” Murdock told him. “But they’ve found a way around that. The things they used to attack us were never born. All the biological material used in them, including the brain tissue, was grown in a lab. They don’t arm robots, and they don’t use cybernetics and they don’t genetically alter themselves…but they can make their own cyborgs by growing the living parts; and since they’re alive, they aren’t technically a robot either, so they can arm them.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Deke hissed, disbelief in his voice. “How many of these fucking things do they have?”

  “Can’t be too many,” Murdock replied with a shrug. “Our research staff estimates that it probably takes them months to manufacture one, then months more to educate and train them. If they could mass-produce them, I’m sure they would.”

  “They’ve been using them as bodyguards,” I said, sitting up in bed to face him. “The one we ran into at the temple on their colony was guarding a high-ranking Imperial minister. They probably guard the Emperor and his close family and advisors.”

  “Until they decided it might be worth it to send a few after us,” Holly realized. Her face and voice hardened with fury. “Until their damn spies figured out where we were.”

  “We have to move our operation,” Murdock told us. “We chose Hermes for secrecy, but if it’s not a secret from the enemy, then it doesn’t matter who else knows. I’ve been in contact with Admiral Sato; he’s authorized us to ship everything to Inferno immediately.”

  I felt myself nodding at that. This place was Jenna to me; I couldn’t see it ever being anything else. She was gone and I never wanted to come back here again.

  “Has anyone notified her family?” I asked.

  There was a pause, an awkward silence. They didn’t need to ask who I meant.

  “A message was sent to their Orbital,” Murdock told me, his voice sounding uncomfortable with what he was having to say. “They were told there was a training accident.”

  “I should have been the one to tell them…” I began, a flare of anger finally finding its way through depths of apathy.

  “You’re dead, Cal,” Murdock reminded me. “You all are. You can’t meet them, you can’t talk to them, they can’t know you’re still alive.”

  I felt a leaden resistance to his declarations; but the fact was, Jenna wasn’t that close to her family. She probably hadn’t even told them about me. I knew I didn’t want to be the one to tell her mother that I got her little girl killed.

  "What difference does that make now?" I muttered without much energy behind the protest. "You just said our enemies know about us, so what does it matter who else does?"


  “So, what do we do now?” Deke asked Murdock. He was trying to sound tough and challenging, but it came across more as desperate and scared. “The Tahni know about us, and even if we move, they know the targets we strike.”

  “We can’t give up just because it gets harder,” Holly insisted, but she wouldn't look up at him, as if she didn't believe it herself. “We have to keep doing our job.”

  “Maybe our job description needs to change,” I said, hearing the bitterness in my voice and wondering why I couldn't feel it inside me as well, wondering why I didn't feel angry at Colonel Murdock and Admiral Krieger, wondering why I didn't feel anything at all. “We need to get away from the religious targets and the morale targets and just work on degrading their ability to fight. Stop pissing them off and start scaring them again."

  Murdock regarded me silently, and I could have sworn there was a hint of guilt in his eyes, like he knew what I was saying was true because he'd been thinking it as well. I laid back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling but seeing Jenna's face, seeing the horror in her expression. I rubbed my eyes as if I could rub it away, clean it out of my memory.

  "If we're not winning the war, Colonel," my voice was almost a whisper as the energy seemed to drain out of me, "then what the hell are we doing here?"

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Now:

  “What the hell am I doing here?” I mumbled.

  I stared down at my drink, wishing I was somewhere else. The bar was the smallest, quietest place I could find in Hesperides, but it was still too big and too loud and too crowded. I would rather have stayed on Inferno, stayed at the base in Tartarus and waited for Deke to come out of the tank. But Dr. Rajiv had made her recommendation to Colonel Murdock, and with the touch of a stylus to a screen, I was on two weeks' mandatory leave on Eden.

  I'd asked Holly to come with me, but she'd thought I'd be better off making an effort to talk to new people, open up a little. By which she meant, in her polite and sensitive way, that I'd gotten hung up on her once before because I was too much of a backwoods hick to be able to separate a physical relationship from a romantic relationship and she wasn't going to take the chance that it would happen again. Especially since she and Brian were on the outs.

  So, I was alone on a whole fucking planet full of strangers. Thanks a bunch, Dr. Rajiv...that should make me feel so much better. At least Eden was prettier than Inferno, with better weather on average. Maybe I'd go camping. I spent enough time outside in every imaginable climate that camping didn't usually appeal to me as a recreational activity, but at least I'd be away from all the anonymous faces. If I had to be alone, I'd rather be by myself.

  I chuckled at that, earning a strange look from a half-drunk guy three seats down the bar. He was in civilian clothes like everyone else in the bar, but he had a military haircut and the look of a Marine. I shook my head, raised my glass to him and took a drink. The tequila burned hot in my throat, smoothed somewhat by fruits from three different planets.

  I set it down again, determined to enjoy the taste instead of just slamming it; drinks were expensive in Hesperides, even with a military discount. It was only an hour or so after dusk here, fairly early, and I started thinking about going somewhere else and ordering some food. Then someone sat down on the stool right next to me. I felt a flare of irritation; there were like a half dozen free seats at the bar. I took another drink then glanced over at the guy.

  Jason Chen sat peering intently at me, his face slightly older, his hair much shorter, but his eyes as darkly cynical as they'd always been. I felt time freeze and I was certain I was just mentally transposing Jason's face over some random stranger's.

  "Hey Cal," he said quietly. "How've you been?"

  ***

  "So," I asked finally, "how'd you find me?"

  Jason checked around carefully before he answered. The Captain Luis Sobha Memorial Gardens were well outside the city limits of Hesperides, their well tended groves running in concentric rectangles around the four-meter-tall granite statue of the man at the center. I could see the head from here, from the edge of the park; it glowed in the soft illumination of the spotlights that surrounded it. He'd been a round-faced man with a broad chest and something of a gut, but he'd been the first human to set foot on Eden back when shit like that meant something.

  I'd tried to talk to Jase back in the bar, but he'd quickly shushed me and told me to meet him at the Memorial instead. I'd walked and it had taken nearly an hour to get there even though the bar had been near the edge of the city, but he'd been there waiting for me.

  "I'm with Intelligence," he answered the question, looking as if he'd relaxed slightly. "My office runs tactical and strategic scenarios for Admiral Krieger's office."

  "Demeter," I realized, wanting to spit the word out.

  "Yeah, Demeter," he confirmed with a shrug. "Once I knew you were still alive and what you were doing, it wasn't that hard to get a line on you and your unit when you were transferred to Inferno. I saw your transport orders to come to Eden for R&R, and I took some accrued leave myself to come meet you here."

  "So why all the cloak and dagger bullshit?" I wanted to know. “Why drag me all the way out here?” I waved around at the carefully-shaped topiaries that were our only company. “I mean, it’s great to see you again, but…”

  “The Tahni have occupied Canaan,” he told me, and the bottom dropped out of my gut.

  “What?” I blurted, taking a step back, not wanting to believe him. “When? Why haven’t I heard anything about it?”

  “Six months ago,” he said. He was pacing now, his long-legged stride eating up ground in one direction, then another, his face showing agitation. “It’s being kept classified, need-to-know. I only found out because I’ve been monitoring things there, trying to keep an eye on Mom and Dad.”

  “Shit,” I breathed, slumping down to sit on the soft ground, head falling into my hands. “Have…have you heard anything?”

  “Nothing’s getting out,” he gritted that out through clenched teeth. “We don’t have anyone on the ground. I know there're remote intelligence probes in the Goshen system but everything out of them is locked down behind security firewalls. It’s like the entire Operations Department has decided we don’t exist.”

  “We,” he’d said. I wanted to laugh at that, but there was nothing funny about it. A few years ago, he’d been so ready to leave Canaan and not look back, and now it was “we.”

  “It’s Demeter again,” I informed him, letting my hands fall to the ground helplessly. “They told us before we left that, if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be trying to liberate any other colonies. So, they’re burying it, hoping no one finds out until the war’s over.”

  “We have to do something, Cal,” he insisted. He crouched down in front of me, still towering over me. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and I realized I still hadn’t seen him in his uniform. None of this seemed real. “It’s our families.”

  I tried to think of Mom and Dad, tried to think of Isaac and Pete and Abigail and Leah, but for some reason the only one I could picture in my head was Rachel.

  “I’ll talk to Colonel Murdock,” I said. “After…” I trailed off, not ready to share everything yet. “After recent events, he might not be inclined to listen, but I’ll talk to him.”

  “And if he won’t do anything?” Jason sounded desperate and I didn’t blame him. I looked up and saw fear in those dark eyes, saw something of that little kid walking into a strange school on a strange world where everything weighed too much and there was nothing fun to do.

  “If not…” I trailed off. I remembered what I’d told Rachel that horrible night so long ago. Once upon a time, I’d told myself I was doing all this to keep Canaan safe.

  I stood up, shifting my shoulders in a manner I remembered doing when there was work to be done on the farm. “Get an anonymized ‘link,” I told him, “and send me the address. I’m going to need a way to get in touch with you.”

  ***
>
  “I thought I told you not to show your face back here until you’d finished your leave,” Colonel Murdock said, frowning at me deeply from behind his real wood desk. It wasn’t an affected expression either; I could tell after all these years. The lines beside his hang-dog eyes pulled downward with his mouth, that’s how you could tell the difference.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I replied, still standing in parade rest, keeping my eyes fixed on a point on the wall behind him, where a curved sword was mounted inside a glass case. I’d come here straight from the spaceport in Tartarus and I was still dressed in civvies, but the military courtesy seemed my best bet, nevertheless. “While I was in Hesperides, I heard a disturbing rumor and I needed very much to check with you whether or not it was true.”

  There was a slight change in his face, barely perceptible unless you’d been around him for a long time, a shifting of emotions he did his best to hide. “All right, out with it,” he prompted with gruffness that was affected this time. “And for God’s sake, at ease.”

  “Yes, sir,” I responded, relaxing some and letting my eyes meet his. “Sir, someone told me they’d heard that the Tahni had occupied Canaan.”

  There was an intake of breath slightly off-rhythm, but that was the only betrayal of his feelings.

  “Unfortunately, that isn’t just a rumor, Caleb,” he told me, pushing back from his desk and coming to his feet. He stepped around the solid oak slab that was the desktop and faced me from half a meter away, arms crossed over his chest. “The invasion occurred without much warning six months ago, not long after our failed attempt to free Demeter. It seems they felt comfortable in their ability to hold their acquisitions after that.” He raised his hands helplessly. “We’re not a hundred percent certain why they did it now, but the Goshen system contains key Transition Line hubs needed for them to surround the Solar System and cut it off from material support.”