“I don’t think peegs are a problem for thees religion, Manning,” replied Sandoval as he hefted his pack and slung his rifle.
“Pigs, cows, chickens . . . all these religious types are wacko. The government offers them heaven . . . whatever heaven they choose, but they’re too stupid to take it,” complained Manning, “which is why, ladies, we have to sleep on the friggin’ ground and haul our sorry asses up a friggin’ mountain.”
“Manning, my friend,” said Digger as he put a friendly arm around his small, wiry squad-mate. “Perhaps they do not know that heaven awaits them. It is our job to bring them the truth, to orient them to the possibilities, to let them choose, to give them an opportunity to convert. Not missionaries, but on a mission for their good and ours.”
Most of the squad winced visibly at Digger’s sarcastic recitation of text from their Conversion Forces training manual.
“I don’t haul this equipment around for nothing, you know,” noted Wires quietly. He had finished disassembling the conversion scanner with one hand as he had eaten his breakfast with the other.
“. . . And, if they reject our generous offer of eternal life, then we’ll just hafta’ blow their asses to kingdom come,” retorted Manning, patting his automatic rifle like a faithful dog.
“In which case, I get to do my job,” finished Digger as they headed out, trying to keep pace with the ever-aggressive A. K.
Derek held his tongue during the exchange and wondered for the thousandth time what a misguided sense of duty and a slick recruiting vid had gotten him into. Back in his real life, before the Conversion Forces, he had been told he was a good-looking guy: average height, brown hair, with an athletic build from playing sports and a broad, white smile. And, back then, he had a bright future ahead of him in one of the new worlds, just like everyone else.
Now look at him. Dirty, banged up, and bruised, with greasy, unkempt hair that looked almost black, three day’s worth of stubble, and a hobbled, bent-over gait that reminded him of his grandfather. And he couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled.
Worse yet, he couldn’t imagine the next time he would smile.
He had a violent, miserable, and dangerous job. And the future, at least the immediate future, didn’t look all that promising. In fact, it looked like hell.
* * * * *
He hated firefights with religious zealots. The gangs and the loners could be vicious opponents, too, but at least those mals mostly fought in a straightforward, military way. They would battle to protect turf or supplies or to cover while their wounded were evacuated to safety. Occasionally, they would simply run away in retreat. Sometimes, the gangs and the loners would even peaceably surrender.
But the zealots never surrendered. They feared conversion more than anyone else, more than anything else. They not only fought for their lives, they fought for their eternal souls.
Chapter 2
The injured mal made pretty good distance for a guy who had bled so much, but, then, he hadn’t stopped for the night as they had. Adrenaline had obviously kept him going. Or fervor. It didn’t really matter which.
A. K. had Manning take up the trail when it got more difficult to follow. The grass and alpine shrubs gave way to rocks and occasional patches of clean, white snow as the mal headed up toward a low mountain pass. Pancek suggested that the group would make better time if it just hiked up to the saddle of the pass, the obvious destination of anyone headed this way, but A. K. insisted that Manning actually track their quarry—whether because he was truly concerned about the remote possibility of the mal doubling back and slipping away or because it just felt more like a hunt that way, Derek didn’t know and didn’t care. He ached from the climb, even at their slow pace, and his lungs burned from sucking in the cold, dry, and all too sparse air as they gained altitude.
Manning sniffed and poked and focused his beady eyes in an effort to discern a trail, then scampered from rock to rock to repeat the effort like the little ferret he resembled. He clearly delighted in showing off in front of A. K. and A. K. let him do it. Their Neanderthal leader stood watching in a relaxed slouch, mashing an unlit cigar with his teeth and smiling a disgustingly yellow smile whenever Manning picked up the trail again.
At the top of the pass, the squad stopped. A. K. scanned the area with his digital ocular scope while Manning searched for further signs of the blood-trail. Each seemed to be taking considerable time.
Digger dropped his pack and paced nervously below the near edge of the ridge, squinting up at A. K. “You know, you make a wonderful friggin’ target silhouetted against the sky at the top of the pass,” he finally called out, disgusted at the lack of combat sense or, perhaps, the unmitigated macho gall of A. K., who continued his ocular scan.
Pancek held up a finger to test the wind. “Even with a Kalashnikov, a decent sniper could easily take him out from more than five hundred meters,” he observed, but not loudly enough for A. K. to hear.
Sandoval, Wires, and Derek sat unceremoniously on the ground to rest, each one leaning against the nearest convenient rock slab or boulder. Sandoval began to idly inspect the gray and black patterns of his rock slab and the contours of the green and pink lichens splotched over its rough granite surface, then stopped, as if suddenly fearful that such a pastime would make him look inattentive to the tactical situation, at best, and sensitive and girlish, at worst. Derek was too tired and starved for oxygen to care, either about the pleasing variegation of the rock face or Sandoval’s homophobia. Sure, they were only at about 11,000 feet or so, but he was tired, dehydrated, and not fully acclimated to the altitude.
Finally, ferret-boy conferred with A. K., and the two rambled down-slope to talk to the rest of the squad.
“Our quarry dressed his wound. Manning thinks someone met him here.”
“You see,” interjected Manning proudly, “the blood-trail stops, but the lichens have been disturbed on the rocks, both along the ridge to the south and downhill to the west. Given the distance between strides . . .”
“Yeah, why don’t you go calculate that again, sport?” ordered their squad leader dismissively, then waited while Manning retreated back up the hilltop to repeat his routine.
“Look, Derek, Manning’s gonna take you and Wires and Sandoval and follow the injured guy down-slope.” He paused as they nodded their assent, then added, “You girls might be able to move fast enough to catch someone half-dead who hasn’t slept, at least if he keeps heading downhill.”
He motioned with his head for Pancek and Digger to follow him. “The rest of us will follow his contact along the ridge and take care of that problem.”
Wires frowned as he stood and gathered his equipment. “Shouldn’t I stay here so I can move to whichever party needs the conversion equipment quickly?”
A. K. looked at Wires, a hard, stern look of disgust usually reserved for stupid children or dogs that passed gas while he was eating. He motioned toward Digger. “I have who I’ll need when we catch the bastard.” He turned and walked quickly away, Pancek and Digger quickly falling in line behind him.
As soon as they moved out, Manning abandoned his pretense of repeating his tracking observations and gathered his troops. “Lock and load, ladies,” he ordered curtly, enjoying his authority. “Remember, no birth control. It’s against their religion.” He giggled in his nasal, ferret-like way at the joke, even though they had all heard it a million times.
Derek sighed and switched out the rubber ammunition yet again.
* * * * *
Maria moved quickly along the ridge to the south.
She followed it as it angled up toward the peak of a snow-capped mountain until she reached the snowline, then veered off to the west. She jogged steadily, skirting just below the ice and sharp-edged rocks to make her way around the peak, toward the ridgeline and valleys beyond. Her taut body was lithe and strong and conditioned to the thin mountain air. She moved quickly without breathing hard, her dark, shoulder-length hair bouncing as she darted arou
nd granite slabs and mounds of loose scree.
Her plain gray jumpsuit provided some camouflage on the mountain slopes and covered her too-pale skin from the burning ultraviolet rays of the sun as it peeked at her over the top of the mountain. The standard-issue garment also protected her from the cold of her alpine journey, as well as the cool darkness of Sanctuary. The turned up collar of the jumpsuit did not quite cover a thin, light scar running down and forward from her right ear just below the angular line of her jaw. She ran her right thumb lightly along the scar as she considered the situation during a brief pause in her scrambling flight.
She hated that she had left Joshua behind to fend for himself. He was surely too weak to escape the advancing ConFoe squad for long. He had lost too much blood. He was exhausted and dehydrated. He had barely made it to the top of the pass where she had waited on lookout.
Maria had tended to Joshua’s wounds and given him her canteen, but it would not be enough. Fatigue and exposure nipped at his heels and the ConFoe squad was close behind. Joshua had attacked the ConFoes in an effort to protect Sanctuary. Now she knew he struggled merely to live long enough to draw their enemy away while she ran home to raise the alarm. She continued on.
Maria would not see Joshua again on this world, but she had been taught that she would in the next. Between deep breaths of cool, clear air, she muttered a prayer that Joshua would not be converted before he died.
* * * * *
A. K. loped along the ridge top, drawing ahead of the more methodically-paced movements of Pancek and Digger. He knew the tactics were all wrong—at least according to the asshole training sergeant back at boot. He could trip a booby-trap or be caught alone in an ambush or even simply fall off a cliff and break his ever-lovin’ neck. To hell with that. This, this was the thrill of the hunt—you didn’t have that if you were careful and proper and followed candy-ass procedures.
Besides, it was always more fun to catch them when you were alone. There were no witnesses that way.
He stopped shortly after he passed the snowline. Something was wrong. There were no tracks. He swore vehemently—a string of short, descriptive, and foul expletives punctuating his thudding steps as he backtracked looking for where his quarry had altered her course.
Yeah, he knew it was a she. The length of stride had suggested it, but the tiny boot-print in a muddy depression not far back had confirmed it. She couldn’t have turned off too long ago.
Rather than squat down and examine the scratches on the rock-face or disturbed lichens or gravel, he stopped and looked around the mountain to either side. After all, there were only two directions to go—east and west. East led back towards the direction of yesterday’s firefight, a possibility if the mals they met had been protecting something—a cabin or a campsite—and she was making her way back there.
But he doubted it. She had met the injured mal a fair distance from the firefight—a fair distance west of the firefight. A. K. stopped and turned southwest and craned his neck to the right. His black eyes narrowed, attempting to pierce through the hazy glare along the snowline as it curved around the peak and continued on. A slight movement of gray against gray caught his attention.
There. There she was.
He lifted his rifle, aimed casually, and fired off a short burst. There was no way he could hit her, not from this distance, not even if he’d taken his time and used a sniper-scope, but he might get lucky.
Besides, he just liked the idea of terrorizing the bitch.
* * * * *
Maria instinctively dove sharply to the right as she heard the report of the automatic weapon. She rolled as her shoulder hit the hard slope, then spread her arms and legs to slow her tumble before it became an uncontrolled fall down the jagged face of the mountainside.
Once her slide was stopped, she scrambled behind a nearby car-sized boulder, peering back to pinpoint her attacker. Bright red trickled from a gash in her forehead, tracing an irregular path down the pale whiteness of her cheek to the edge of her scar as she poked her head cautiously out from the up-slope side of the hunk of granite. A gust of wind blew her dark hair forward, fluttering the strands before her sharp blue eyes briefly, then failed, leaving the tresses to fall back into her face and mat against the jagged, red trickle on her cheek.
Her face flushed with embarrassment when she saw the brute, far back along the ridgeline, raising his rifle with one hand above his head and pumping it in the primitive celebration of all self-congratulatory killers, amateur or professional.
He was too far away still to be a threat, unless, of course, she broke a leg or flung herself off a cliff-side because of his macho display of aggression and firepower.
She felt stupid, but not too stupid. She could tell from the high-pitched crack of the burst that the ConFoe hadn’t been firing rubber projectiles.
Had they changed the regulations to make the Conversion Forces more lethal yet again? That information was yet another reason to make it back to Sanctuary alive. It might mandate an acceleration of the Plan.
Maria got her feet under her and scrambled away in a crouch, south and slightly downhill. The valley where Sanctuary lay hidden beneath the trees was not far now. A cool north breeze raced her down-slope.
* * * * *
The second faction of ConFoes moved as a group. It wasn’t that Manning was any less bloodthirsty than A. K., who the vicious ferret-boy sought to emulate in the ways of searching and destroying. The maniacal little chicken-shit was just too cowardly (he actually wore a Kevlar vest all the time) to truly go off on his own and too much of a show-off to not want the squad to see what he would do to this traitorous, blaspheming mal terrorist when they caught up to him.
Sandoval helped from time to time as the obviously still-hurting Derek struggled down the uneven slope, though Sandoval made no offer to assist the similarly slow-moving and encumbered Wires.
Wires didn’t notice, or at least didn’t respond to, the slight.
Derek didn’t care about the inequity at the moment. The drugs were wearing off and his numb tiredness had grown into a throbbing ache that was now turning into a staccato of painful jolts streaking out from his groin and back as his combat boots thudded hard down the tortuous terrain.
The slow pace didn’t matter. Their quarry had little hope of escape. Shortly after they had passed through the tree-line, the blood-trail had started up again. One of the ragged, twisty, stunted trees had apparently snagged the unlucky mal’s dressing and poked into the blood and pus of the bullet wound, causing it to flow freely yet again. Manning made a show of tracking from his point position, but Derek could have followed the trail himself, even through the haze and shooting lights of his increasing pain. Hell, Wires could have followed the trail and everybody knew Converters didn’t even get combat training.
* * * * *
Joshua was light-headed and it wasn’t from the altitude. He rested against the tree trunk of a dark, tall spruce, his labored breath coming in shuddering rasps. He had never really hoped to escape, but he had hoped to lead them further away, away from his beloved Sanctuary.
He had prayed for strength all through his trek from the creek-side firefight. A less faithful man would have thought that his prayers had gone unanswered. Joshua knew that it had only been his prayers that had gotten him this far.
He drank deeply from his canteen, then poured the rest of the contents over his head and face, the cold liquid splashing him to greater alertness. He would have no further use of the water. It was time to make his last stand. If he somehow killed all of the ConFoes, it would not matter that he had not led them further from his home.
He found a thicket of thorny bushes growing in a depression behind a stony outcropping amidst the thick, dark spruces. The thorns tore at his jumpsuit and skin as he crawled in, but did not slow him. Either his pale, bluish skin was losing feeling or the hot fire from his freely flowing wound drowned out all competing sensation in its ferocity. Neither was a good sign.
He posi
tioned his Kalashnikov in a V-shaped crack in the face of the outcropping, facing back along the way he had come. Then Joshua settled in to wait. He prayed that his pursuers would not be too slow in overtaking his position. He knew that he didn’t have too much time.
* * * * *
“Crap! I crawled faster than this when I was a baby!” Manning tapped his foot exaggeratedly as he stood looking back at the straggling members of his command. “I could swim upstream faster than you wusses can walk down a friggin’ hill!”
“Let me kick you in the balls a few times and see how fast you move,” said Derek, under his breath. Wires looked at Manning with a stare that implied something similar about seeing how fast the loathsome asshole would move schlepping around over a hundred pounds of bulky equipment, but he verbalized none of it. Sandoval just shrugged and kept moving.
Manning didn’t let his lack of motivational skills affect his self-perception of his leadership. “Oh, hell, ladies. Take a break. From the looks of this blood-trail, he’ll be dead when we find him anyway.” He turned and sat with his back to the squad, his rifle resting in his lap as his eyes scanned the forest, looking, hoping, for trouble.
Dead bodies weren’t any fun . . . well, not much fun anyway.
* * * * *
Joshua opened his eyes, jerking his head up from the grainy dirt where his chin and cheek had rested, his drool wetting it into a pasty spot of mud that clung to his face as he peered out from his hiding spot.
“Christ, they’re slow,” he muttered aloud before quickly becoming embarrassed by his language and mouthing a short prayer asking forgiveness.
If he’d known that they would be this slow, perhaps he could have gotten away or led them further away or set a booby-trap or two before taking up his covered position. Not now, though. Now his legs no longer responded when he tried to shift position. Bless it, he wanted to take some of them with him.
* * * * *
The next time Joshua awoke, he was laying on his back and warm, foul liquid was streaming into his face. The shadows were lengthening and he was no longer surrounded by thorny bushes.
Forced Conversion Page 2