Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  "Toss that other one over, too," I said to Tom, indicating the one whose throat I'd cut. He lay in the middle of the road, at the center of an expanding pool of blood. "They'll come looking for these guys in a few hours. We need to be gone."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I woke in the pitch black, only distant shards of light from several chambers away making it possible for me to see even in IR, and knew I’d slept for ten hours. We’d stumbled into the caves after walking for nearly twenty-four straight hours and most of the party had laid down against any convenient surface and fallen asleep right there. Pete had barely made it out of the middle of the storage chamber floor, and I’d only moved him because there was a party hauling in the cargo crates by hand where the mules had dumped them at the cave entrance, and I didn’t want him getting stepped on.

  I’d asked some random woman for a good, dark place to sleep undisturbed and she’d assigned a feral-looking ten-year-old to guide me back through a far-too-narrow side tunnel and into a chamber only a few meters on a side. There was nothing in it but a stack of old, ragged clothes I think they were using for patching, and I repurposed a handful as a pillow, and an armful more as a mattress, trusting my borrowed jacket for warmth. I’d been asleep the moment my head hit the rags and I probably could have stayed down for twice as long if I hadn’t become aware that Rachel was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside me.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said and for a moment I felt my blood run cold at the thought that the Tahni had discovered the caves, had followed our group back from the crash site; but that didn’t fit her tone.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, coming up on an elbow, looking her in the eye as best I could in the darkness. I couldn’t make out her expression.

  “I'm cold," she said simply, but there was a catch in her voice, a rawness. "I'm cold and no matter how many of them I kill, I can't get warm."

  She didn't elaborate, but she didn't need to; I understood completely. "Come here."

  I reached out and wrapped my arms around her. She wasn't wearing a jacket, so I slipped mine open and pulled it around both of us. She was cold, and shivering, and sobbing. She buried her face in my shoulder and I held her tight. She smelled of dried sweat and dust and I didn't care. She was Rachel and I was holding her again. I don't know how long I held her before she stopped sobbing, stopped shivering, but I know that sometime after that she kissed me.

  I kissed her back and the years fell away; we were kids again and we'd found a dark, quiet hiding place to be together. Rags made a bed for us, our clothes fell discarded into a corner and we huddled naked and dirty under a borrowed jacket, coupling with the desperation of people who lived in the valley of the shadow of death. But we weren't cold anymore.

  It was hours later when I saw the light approaching down the narrow passageway, bobbing up and down as the one who held it squeezed sideways. Rachel was asleep, her head resting on my chest, and I gently nudged her awake.

  "Cal?" Pete's voice called, indecently loud. I wondered what hours people kept in the caves?

  "I'm in here," I told him, grabbing at our clothes and handing Rachel's to her as she blinked awake. She pulled me into a kiss before she started dressing and I reveled in the warmth and softness of her for just one more moment.

  "Oh." Pete had flashed us with the lantern he was holding before he quickly pulled it back and turned around. "Sorry."

  Rachel laughed as she pulled on her shirt.

  "It's okay, Pete," I assured him. "What's up?"

  "Isaac wants to talk to you," he told me. In the light from his lantern I could see that he looked fairly clean and I reminded myself to ask him where I could get a shower hereabouts. "Right away." He shrugged. "Well, an hour ago it was right away; it took me a while to find you."

  I sealed up my Reflex armor at the neck fastenings and stood up, offering Rachel a hand.

  "At least he let me get some sleep," I said with a shrug, helping her up. She was skinnier than I remembered, felt lighter to me, though maybe that was the augments.

  We followed Pete through passageways I hadn't seen before, some of them obviously artificially enlarged at some point in the past to allow public access to different sections of the cave system. Some were fitted with chemical light strips and bathed in a pale, sickly green or blue; while others lurked in total darkness until the glow of Pete's hand-held lantern dispelled it for a few moments as we passed. He led us for over a kilometer through the twisting passage, and as we went deeper, I began to notice arrows and numbers hand-written at eye level on the cave walls in colored chalk. Someone had gotten lost before and they'd had to start marking the way better.

  The passages had started out nearly crowded with people, nodding to Pete and Rachel and sometimes to me as they went about their daily chores, some carrying totes full of food or fuel or clothes. But they thinned out the further we went; after we reached the markings on the walls, there was only the occasional passer-by, always armed and looking like a soldier despite the lack of a uniform.

  Then the walls started to glisten with moisture and I began to hear the unmistakable sound of running water, growing louder as we walked. Finally, we ducked through a short tunnel, its ceiling just a bit too low to stand up straight, and emerged onto a wooden platform that extended out over an underground river. Lights glowed from the near wall and twinkled fitfully in the eddies of the flow as it ambled through the cave on its way to wherever it went to die. Isaac sat on the platform's guardrail, staring out at the greenish tinted water like it held the answers to all our problems.

  "I found him, Isaac," Pete said, a bit too enthusiastically. "Sorry we took so long..."

  "You can go, Peter," Isaac told him, not looking up.

  "All right," he said, sounding disappointed as he turned and headed back.

  Isaac waited a few seconds to make sure our little brother was gone before he turned to me. He raised an eyebrow at Rachel, who had my hand gripped in hers.

  "I told him I wanted to talk to you alone."

  "Where he goes, I go," Rachel said flatly, challenging him with her stance and her tone.

  "So, it's like that again, huh?" Isaac laughed softly, levering himself down off the guardrail and stepping up to us. "You're here all of two days, little brother, and you're already stirring things up."

  Isaac looked old. Not physically, not really---though I could see the lines that stress had etched into the corners of his eyes and mouth---but emotionally, spiritually. He seemed older than Dad had ever been. Even his baiting was tired, almost rote.

  "What's up, Isaac?" I asked him, not taking that bait. "What do you want?"

  "You got your way," he told me, shaking his head. "The Council voted to let you lead our forces to take over the Planetary Defense Station."

  Rachel squeezed my hand, smiling like I'd won an election. I tried to smile back but I had half hoped they wouldn't do it. Now all their lives were on me.

  "So," Isaac went on, spreading his hands. "You're in charge of my people. What do you want us to do?"

  He was resentful, but I thought he was resigned, too, which was as close as I was going to get to cooperative. At least he was sober. I thought about his wife and chided myself for that thought. I hadn't been very put-together myself right after Jenna, had I?

  "We need to start training for this mission," I said, trying to sound sure of myself. "We don't have much time and we have to get your militia familiarized with the weapons I brought in before we even think about rehearsing the raid. How many effectives do you have?"

  He shot me a confused look and I reminded myself where I was and who I was talking to.

  "How many troops can you put in the field?" I amended. "Adults and preferably younger than fifty." Not that older people couldn't hack it physically; even on a backwater like Canaan, we had anti-aging treatments. But I'd been taught---absorbed via my headcomp, if you wanted to be accurate---that once people hit a certain age, they bec
ame more hesitant to risk their lives in battle.

  I saw Isaac calculating in his head for a moment before he answered. "We have nearly a thousand people here in the caves right now," he said. "Plus probably twice that scattered around in hunting camps, fishing villages and some of the smaller farms the Tahni didn't bother attacking. We keep in contact with them via messenger; we don't trust radios and 'links are definitely compromised since the enemy controls the satellites. If we rule out anyone under sixteen, pregnant women and everyone over fifty, I can probably bring together a thousand men and women, given a little time to get them together."

  He stroked his beard thoughtfully. "Of course, even with the weapons you brought in, we only have enough guns to arm eight hundred."

  "Have you tried raiding their armory?" I asked him.

  "Once," he said, wincing. "We hit their base in Harristown about a month and a half ago, back during the Day. We were trying to free a bunch of people from their work camps, and we did. We lost at least two dozen people trying to storm their armory though." He stopped almost in mid-sentence, as though he was suddenly aware what he was about to say.

  "That's when they started the reprisals," I said. It wasn't a question, but he nodded slowly.

  "They've killed thousands of us," he rasped, blinking angrily to stop the tears coming. "They killed..."

  "I'm sorry, Isaac." I put a hand on his arm. He stared at it like it was the tentacle of some alien sea creature. "I won't say I understand, because no one could. But I lost someone I loved not quite a year ago, and it's still..." I trailed off, not sure how to put it.

  He didn't try to hug me, but he nodded in acknowledgement, which, again, was probably the best I could hope for. I let my hand slip away.

  "We haven't hit them since," he went on after he'd composed himself. "And if we do this and it doesn't work, Caleb..."

  "I know," I said, feeling fear twisting my gut. We wouldn't just be killing ourselves, we'd be ensuring that the Tahni killed a whole lot of innocent people as well. "But it's either risk it all on doing something or give ourselves up to the mercy of an enemy that doesn't have any."

  Isaac let out a breath, then met my gaze again, his blue eyes as clear as I’d seen them since I returned. "You're right. So, what do we do?"

  "Find me a place to gather our forces for training," I told him. "Somewhere we can fire at least the Gauss rifles without being detected. And while you're doing that, I need a squad, people you trust, people who can keep their heads under stress."

  "For what?" He wanted to know.

  "I need to go into Harristown."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The New Society of Friends on Canaan has a concept of Hell that was different from the classic one I’d read about in religious history class. We thought of Hell as separation from God, an eternal loneliness out in the darkness that was much worse than any metaphorical lake of fire or demonic torture.

  Looking down at the streets of Harristown, I wondered if we’d had it wrong. I’d visited the City many times when I was younger, always wide-eyed at the size of the buildings and at the constant flow of people and vehicles. Now it was a prison, surrounded by wire fences and security sensor pods, its streets and buildings naked under the harsh glare of floodlights on every corner, and patrolled by squads of Tahni troops.

  Open-sided trucks hauled human prisoners in and out of the gates periodically, taking them to the farms closer to the city, the ones the Tahni had taken over to provide food for themselves and their newly enslaved workers. Other human workers pushed handcarts through the streets, loaded down with building materials or totes of processed food; they were unguarded but there was nowhere to go and no place to hide. Their faces were drawn and exhausted, their clothes stained and ragged, and they all shared a look of hunger and hopelessness that would have been at home in any classical painting of Dante's version of Hell.

  I'd seen it before, I told myself, shifting the binoculars away from their faces. I'd seen it on other colonies, seen worse than this. I wasn't very convincing; this was my home and it was worse.

  "They started using us for labor once they had control of the farms," Rachel told me, speaking in a low tone right next to my ear. "They don't feed them enough, so they won't have enough energy to try to escape."

  We were huddled together under the cover of a camouflage blanket that hid our thermal signature and I still felt incredibly exposed on the hillside overlooking the city. We were less than a kilometer from the road gate leading out to the farms, and it had taken the two of us two hours to crawl into position. The rest of the squad, six of Isaac’s best, including Tom McCrey, were concealed in a more covered position on the other side of the hill.

  “You can’t see the camps from here,” she said grimly. “I was there when we hit them a couple months ago, though. I wish we could have gotten more people out.”

  “The truck will be coming back with the off-shift workers from the farms in an hour,” I told her, trying to shut out the images her words had put in my head and concentrate on business. “I need to get moving.”

  “I’ll be waiting at the rally point,” she said, kissing me lightly on the ear.

  “If I’m not there by the No Later Than time,” I told her firmly, “get out and find a hole to crawl into until you think it’s safe to head back to the caves.” I touched her hand, squeezed it. “I mean it. If the shit goes down, I can get out better on my own.”

  It took her a moment to answer, but she finally said, “Okay. I promise.”

  I let her hand go, praying she’d keep her word. I’d have enough to worry about down there.

  I pulled my hood on, then slowly eeled out from under the blanket, crawling out on my forearms and the inside of my legs at what felt like a glacial pace yet was still fast enough that I worried I'd be spotted. The sky had clouded over again, the thick darkness of another storm building, but the Tahni security floodlights made me feel like I was walking in broad daylight. It took me over forty-five minutes to make it to the dirt road at the bottom of the hill and take cover under the overhang of a rock outcropping left over from when they'd carved the road through the valley. Resting my back against the cold rock, I pulled up my hood and sucked in a breath, finally feeling like I could inhale again.

  The truck was early. I heard it not five minutes after I reached the rocks, saw it coming down the valley road not long after, its electric motor glowing like a beacon on thermal imaging. It was, like so much of the equipment they were using, one of ours. It had belonged to the shipping depot in one of the surrounding townships, maybe New Jerusalem, and had been repurposed from hauling cargo to hauling workers. It was an older model, and I could hear the plaintive whine from the motor where bearings needed replacing, could hear the creaking from the suspension. It was all-wheel drive, with a ground clearance of about a meter and a brush-guard grill that ran the length of the undercarriage. I knew because I'd worked on trucks like that with my dad, doing the service portion of our tithe.

  I took a deep breath and then ducked out from behind the rock, lying down flat on the muddy ground and rolling out into the middle of the road, in the center between the deep tire-ruts. I laid flat, not even breathing, trying not to shiver despite the bitterly damp cold of the sodden road. I figured the chameleon camouflage in my Reflex armor should blend in pretty well with the dark mud, and I had sunk down far enough that I didn't think they'd notice me, but my gut was churning with the idea that the Tahni driver would swerve at the last second and run me over. It probably wouldn't kill me, but it would really hurt.

  The electric hum and the grumble of tires digging into sloppy mud grew louder until it seemed like it was right on top of me, but I knew exactly how much time I had left; my headcomp had calculated it down to the millisecond. My hands were in motion before I even saw the front bumper pass over me, and I caught the edge of the brush guard as if I'd rehearsed the maneuver a thousand times. I was jerked forward with all the momentum of a two-ton vehicle going forty k
ilometers an hour, but the Reflex armor hardened in exactly the right way and my fingers and wrists and shoulders only felt a slight, abrupt pressure. I braced my feet against the inside lips of the frame and pulled myself up as far as I could.

  Bits of mud spattered against my legs and the small backpack I wore, kicked up by the fat, polymer tires, but I ignored the distraction and followed the simulation my headcomp was running for me of the truck's progress. Another hundred meters to the fence, and it seemed to take forever to reach it as the truck slowed down, waiting for the gate to open. I held my breath again, hoping they stuck with the pattern I'd seen when we were observing them from the hill, hoping none of the guards suddenly got conscientious. The truck skidded to a stop, pausing for only a few seconds while the gate slid aside on simple rollers, skittering and rattling across the gravel.

  Then the vehicle moved again and I hissed out a sigh, feeling my teeth unclench. The truck rumbled onto the paved roads inside the city, mud flaking off of the tires and the glare of the lights leaking through to the undercarriage, making me irrationally feel exposed. I saw the legs of the Tahni soldiers patrolling the fence line and I knew they had heavy weapons turrets set up there in guard towers every hundred and fifty meters apart. Maybe KE turrets or maybe even electron beamers, like they’d used to kill my Dad when he’d come in peace.

  I wanted to feel rage at that, wanted to feel fury and hatred and wrath; instead, I felt a deep sadness, a hollow in my heart. I couldn’t bring myself to hate them anymore. I’d still kill them, but my hatred had burned out like a star gone supernova. All that was left was the expanding cloud of gas and radiation with nothing left at its core.