by M. R. Forbes
"Which I have every intention of doing," Donovan said, his thoughts drifting to his mother. Had the Dread discovered her and the children? Was anyone from their base still alive? "We can't let them take him."
"No."
"What about the female clones?" Donovan asked, putting his eyes back on them. They were nearly identical to Ehri, created from the same base DNA. "Are they a threat?"
"They can't be permitted to escape."
"Is there anything else you can tell me that might be helpful?"
"The armored soldiers. Aim for the helmets. Severing the connection to their oxygen supply will kill them. Be careful not to hit the tanks. At this distance, you'll wind up killing the pilot."
Donovan remembered the explosion that had followed when they had killed the bek'hai Hunter, Orik. "Affirmative. I'll take the one on the right. Can you hit the one on the left?"
Ehri raised her rifle. She had confided that she had trained with Orik for a number of years. She knew how to fight, better than he probably ever would. "Of course."
"On my signal. I expect Diaz will open up as soon as she sees the plasma."
"Affirmative."
Donovan lifted the Dread plasma weapon, sighting along it to the armored soldier, getting a bead on the helmet. He focused on his breathing, making sure to keep himself centered and steady while he took aim. He couldn't afford to miss. Not this time.
He was about to take the shot when a flash to his left broke his concentration.
A scream pierced the night.
FOUR
"Matteo," Donovan said, lowering the rifle and breaking back toward where they had left him.
His motion drew the attention of the Dread soldier, and a moment later a heavy plasma bolt hit a tree right in front of him, sending hot splinters into the alien cloth he was wearing. The second skin absorbed the attack, deflecting it without harm, and he continued to run.
A second bolt came a little closer, flashing past his chest, nearly cutting him down. He dropped to his stomach, sensing the light and heat of the third shot crossing over him.
The shooting stopped.
He got back up, running toward the trees. He could see the light of rifle fire to his right, back at the clearing. It had to be Diaz and Ehri covering him.
A face appeared to his left. A clone soldier, nearly on top of him. He didn't hesitate, swinging the Dread rifle like a club, smashing it across the soldier's jaw. The clone collapsed into a heap, replaced with a second a moment later. It tried to tackle him, but he fell to his knees, turning the rifle and shooting, catching the clone in the chest. He rolled away before the body fell on top of him.
"Matteo," he shouted. The enemy already knew he was here; it didn't matter if they heard him.
"Donovan," his friend replied.
"Where are you?"
"Help!"
Donovan followed the sound, rushing through the trees. He had managed to break away from the attack, to escape the Dread's attention.
He caught sight of Matteo a moment later. The tech's back was against a tree; the rifle cradled in his arms. His expression was fearful and tense. A dead clone was on the ground in front of him. Three more were approaching his position.
Where had this group come from?
Donovan dropped below a stump, resting his weapon on it and taking aim. He didn't have time to worry about accuracy. He started firing, sending bolts of plasma across the distance and into the enemy line.
One fell. Then another.
Something came at him from his left, cracking through tree branches and landing right beside him. A bek'hai warrior. It kicked the rifle away from him, giving him just enough time to stumble back and fall onto his ass.
"Shit," Donovan said, eyes frantically searching for a way out. The soldier said something to him in the alien language as it approached, rifle pointed at him. Why didn't it shoot?
"Surrender," the soldier said, switching to English.
Information. That was why it didn't just kill him. The rest of the Dread didn't know everything that had happened on top of the mountain, but they wanted to.
"Go to hell," Donovan said. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but he wasn't going to tell them anything.
The soldier came at him, faster than Donovan could believe. It grabbed him by his throat, lifting him easily and shoving him against a tree. "Druk'shur. How did you defeat Orik?"
"He had help," Ehri said, appearing from the brush.
She fired, the bolt tearing through the Dread soldier's helmet and head and passing out the other side. Donovan felt the pressure on his throat release, and then he slid down the trunk as the soldier collapsed.
"Thanks," he said, looking back to where he had last seen Matteo. He wasn't behind the tree. "Where's Matteo?"
"I didn't see him," Ehri said.
"What about the pilot?"
"Diaz is with him."
"The enemy soldiers?"
"Dead."
"Your clones, too?"
"I told you, they couldn't be permitted to leave."
He watched her face for signs of remorse. There wasn't any. Death didn't have the same meaning to the bek'hai as it did to humans. Not when they reproduced like toys in a factory, instead of unique living, breathing, feeling creatures with hearts and souls. Ehri was starting to see the truth of that perspective, but she wasn't there yet.
He found his rifle on the ground, picking it up before heading over to the spot where Matteo had been standing. He was half-afraid to find his friend's corpse among the dead clones, half-relieved when he saw it wasn't. Where had he gone?
"Matteo," he said as loudly as he dared. "Matteo."
There was no reply.
"Did any of them escape?" he asked.
"I didn't see any fleeing, but their numbers are hard to judge in the cover and the darkness."
"Did they take him?"
"It is possible."
Donovan cursed, leaning against the tree. If the Dread had ordered Matteo to surrender, it was likely that he had. Matteo was smart, creative, resourceful. He wasn't a soldier.
"What am I going to tell Diaz?" he said. He felt responsible for losing him, and he knew she was going to blame him, too. Even if she didn't admit it. Even if she would never say it. He had been so close. He should have protected him.
"It isn't your fault," Ehri said. "He may still be out here."
A soft rumble in the sky caused Donovan to look up. A Dread fighter streaked overhead, momentarily blotting out the stars.
"We don't have time to look for him," Donovan said. "They're going to send more soldiers."
"Mechs," Ehri said. "I can hear them in the distance. We don't want to be near here when they arrive."
Donovan wasn't going to run away from his responsibility. He led Ehri back to the downed fighter, where Diaz was positioned over the pilot, keeping an eye out for more of the enemy.
"Diaz, we have to move," he said, approaching them. He glanced down at the pilot. He was small and thin, with a delicate frame and a kind face. "Can he be carried?" he asked, looking over at Ehri.
"Do we have a choice?" she replied.
"Where's Matteo?" Diaz said.
He kneeled down next to her. "I'm sorry," he said.
She kept her expression flat. "Dead?" There was no emotion in the question.
"I didn't find his body. They may have taken him. I was close. I should have-"
"Shut up, D. We're not going there. We're all doing our best." She blinked away a tear that found its way to the corner of her eye.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I told you to shut up," she replied. "We need to get this guy out of here, or we lost him for nothing."
Donovan nodded and then lifted the pilot over his shoulder. The man was unconscious, but he groaned slightly as he was moved. The Dread fighter passed over a second time. It would be sensing their heat, communicating their position. They had done well so far, but they were nowhere close to being safe.
How the hell were they going to get out of this alive?
FIVE
Tea'va dur Orin'ek stood in the antechamber to the court of the Domo'dahm. His mottled face was wearing what he intended as a scowl but was distorted by the overall structure of his flesh and bone into something closer to a smile. It was an unfortunate side effect of the cloning process that had made him, and of the in-between state of the bek'hai and human genetic splicing. He was ugly as both a pur'dahm and a human, trapped in a phase of change that had left him alienated from the other dahm, while at the same time revered by the scientists that had created him.
Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and to them, he was the future.
The Domo'dahm's antechamber was a dark place, lit only by a thin line of luminescent moss that had been compounded and packed into narrow channels along the surface of the lek'shah; the material that was used in nearly all of the bek'hai construction. Super strong, impervious to nearly everything, it was the only reason they had survived for as long as they did. From what Tea'va had learned, when their homeworld had started to die, it was the lek'shah that had saved them.
That was all history. Ancient history. For hundreds of cycles they suffered under the weight of their failures, each rotation of time leading them closer to the final destiny.
And then they had found this Earth. A planet rich in resources, including an intelligent life form that had not only overcome its failures, but that held the key to saving them as well. It had taken the prior Domo'dahm little time to decided that the planet would be theirs and that these so-called humans would be both savior and slave.
So it had been for fifty of the planet's cycles. They had first conquered the humans and then begun to use them, harvesting the strong to assist in their splicing experiments, using the middling as labor while they replenished their strength, and breaking down the weak for sustenance. Of course, some of them had evaded their grasp. They were intelligent life forms after all, able to think and reason and learn. It didn't matter if some escaped. It didn't matter if they tried to resettle their planet, to learn to live alongside their masters. And the bek'hai were the masters. They both knew it.
Most of them, anyway.
A hatch slid open. A female lor'hai in the traditional white robes of the sur'Domo'dahm, the servants of the Domo'dahm, stepped through it to meet him. Unlike many of the clones within the capital, she wasn't a copy of the un'hai. She was one of the Mothers, a larger-framed model that was being produced for their higher levels of fertility and genetic compatibility. The idea of the clone type was lost on Tea'va. Some of the dahm, like Tuhrik, had been adamant that the key to their survival was to re-learn to reproduce in the fashion of the humans, a method they had abandoned long ago. He could still remember Tuhrik's impassioned plea for Tea'va to open his mind to the idea. He was one of the few pur'dahm who had fully functional genitals, and who had the potential to impregnate a Mother.
The idea of it disgusted him, and as a pur'dahm he couldn't be forced. Turhik had gone so far as to attempt to lure him to first experiment with his si'dahm, Ehri, a clone of the un'hai. Rorn'el had always been infatuated with the human who had sourced Ehri's genetics, and some of the other pur'dahm had found the si'dahm particularly intriguing. He wasn't one of them. The bek'hai had abandoned sexual reproduction for a reason.
"Domo'dahm Rorn'el is prepared for you," the Mother said, smiling widely at him. Her face was soft and gentle. He saw nothing appealing in it.
Tea'va followed behind her, into the court. It was a large, open room, though the lek'shah here was molded thickly to protect their leader, hanging from the ceiling in wide spines and covering the floor in intricately carved plates. There were a few other pur'dahm already present, those that had positioned themselves into the top ranks of their pecking order. One of them would be the next Domo'dahm within thirty cycles.
Tea'va knew he should have been standing there with them, instead of approaching them under these circumstances. He had played the game differently than the others, his more successful splicing leaving him with no choice but to prove that he was, in fact, superior to them. The scientists wanted to believe that he was because it would validate all that they had done since they had found this planet. Subjugating another intelligent race had never been a desire.
It had been a necessity.
The assembled pur'dahm stood beneath the warm glow of bright lamps that mimicked the sunlight outside and cast shadows across the space, shadows that hid the Domo'dahm from clear view. It was a tradition that had continued after the death of Kan'ek, the Domo'dahm who had brought them to Earth. The original bek'hai form was against their laws to be gazed upon. It had been decreed that the human design was their future and that looking upon their past would predispose them to reject it.
Tea'va understood why Kan'ek had made it so. He had never seen what a true bek'hai looked like, and he still rejected being more human. He knew he wasn't alone in that. Though Rorn'el had been taken with a human slave, he had little love for the rest of the lesser species. It was the reason he had decided he would no longer tolerate their presence on the planet. They had what they needed from them, and their consistent uprisings were a wasteful distraction. There was no logical reason to risk that they might ever find a way to overcome the lek'shah.
Tea'va lowered his head at the thought, staring at the floor plates as he approached the gathered pur'dahm. They had been etched with a written and pictorial history of the bek'hai, from the early days before they had invented an alphabet, to their first forays into space, to their arrival here on Earth. Parts of the design had been scorched over; the images that had once depicted the original bek'hai body.
"Domo'dahm," Tea'va said, reaching the front of the room. He fell to his knees, prostrating before his Master.
SIX
"Pur'dahm Te'ava," Domo'dahm Rorn'el said. His voice was light and scratchy. He spoke in English, though it was difficult for him to do so. "Rise."
Te'ava got back to his feet. He forced himself to make eye contact with each of the other pur'dahm. They glared at him with flat expressions. They knew what he had done. All of them knew what he had done. It wasn't all his fault. Tuhrik had a hand in this. A bigger hand than his? It was difficult to say. Difficult for him to judge. It was up to Rorn'el to determine that.
Of course, Tuhrik was dead, and his si'dahm was a traitor. Rorn'el should never have allowed Ehri to study the humans so closely. He had tried to do right by Kan'ek, to continue the work the prior Domo'dahm had started and bring them closer to full integration. The failure was as much his as it was Tea'va's.
Not that he would ever suggest as much. To do so would mean challenging Rorn'el's wisdom, which in turn would mean matching the Domo'dahm in a game of intellect. A game Tea'va knew he couldn't win. A loss that would mean his immediate death.
"Domo'dahm Rorn'el," Tea'va started. He would be aggressive, speak first and state his case before any of the assembled pur'dahm could take the opportunity to twist his words and use them against him. They all wanted to take Rorn'el's place, and discrediting one another was part of the game. "I believe the latest human activity has proven that my initial concerns were accurate. Allowing the external-"
"Silence," Rorn'el said softly.
Tea'va stopped speaking.
"Why do you suppose, after fifty years of absence, the human ship returned?" Rorn'el said.
"Domo'dahm?"
"Something made them bold, wouldn't you say, Gr'el?"
"Yes, Domo'dahm," the pur'dahm replied. "Perhaps it was related to one of our gi'shah pilots giving chase through the mesh?"
"A desperate attempt to destroy another of the human's small starcraft," a second pur'dahm, Orish'ek, said. "To what end, when we have already destroyed so many, and still they continue to come?"
"You didn't question my motives at the time," Tea'va said. "You believed it wise to try to destroy the one you call Heil'shur. The one who has always evaded us. You believed he could be dangerous."
"I told you the pilot's success was a minor concern," Rorn'el said. "If he could teach the others to defeat our defenses so regularly. A minor concern, Tea'va, because they still couldn't harm us."
"Tell us you weren't trying to prove your worth as a Hunter, Tea'va," Orish'ek said.
"Tell us that you weren't trying to prove that you are better than we are," Gr'el said. "Because you can breathe their air without assistance. Because you can mate with the Mothers."
"Why would I ever want to mate with the Mothers?" Tea'va spat. "You insult me."
"The scientists believe our future depends on it," Rorn'el said. "Whether you agree with the practice or not, the potential of your splicing cannot be ignored. You insult us with your pride."
"A Domo'dahm must be proud," Tea'va said. "To make the right decisions, a Domo'dahm must be strong in their beliefs. That is what the pur'dahm are taught. That is what all of us were taught."
"Being steadfast and being stubborn are two different things, Tea'va," Rorn'el said. "That is why you are here as a disgrace, instead of standing among us."
"I almost had him," Tea'va said. He regretted the outburst immediately. He couldn't win the game if he couldn't keep his emotions in check.
"Pride, again," Rorn'el said. "What has your pride gotten us? One ship escaped from Kan'ek. One ship capable of riding the slipstream. One ship capable of returning to this planet."
"It is only one ship," Tea'va said. "It cannot defeat the lek'shah."
"That is what even they believed before you fired so recklessly into the mesh," Gr'el said. "You showed them that the lek'shah is not invincible, that there is a way through it. That we are vulnerable."
"The smallest light of hope soon grows into a star," Rorn'el said. "Letting the humans remain was a risk I no longer wished to take. That is why we have expanded our patrols. That is why we seek to root them out."