by John Barnes
Enemy Number Nine, the rearmost green wedge, crossed the faint, blue line on the map overlay that indicated the outermost accurate range of Gweshira’s slug rifle. For a long breath nothing happened, and then Enemy Number Nine must have exposed himself, for a single shot cracked from her rifle. The green wedge with the black 9 on it stopped moving on the faintly glowing map; he had taken cover or been hit.
Jak spared that no thought. The side of Enemy Number Five’s head was just emerging beside a big rock, and Jak fired at it less than a heartbeat after Gweshira’s shot. The figure fell forward into the open and lay still. Jak tracked with his rifle, looking for another target.
To his right, a laser drew a white line between Sib and Enemy Number Three; there was a flurry of activity around that green wedge and Jak saw the indicator for a grenade launch flicker next to the green wedge with the black 3. Then the wedge turned white—shortwave IR had come from it—Sib had scored a hit with the laser, and a puff of superheated steam had emerged from the body.
But then the grenade landed. Sib’s position, the cluster of rocks ahead and to Jak’s right, lit in a blue-white glow, an instantaneous five-meter dome the color and brightness of a welding arc.
When Jak’s goggles had cleared, two seconds later, dust billowed up from that point, the center of the cloud glowing dull red from the furious heat within. Gravel and small rocks spattered down around Jak.
The thunder of that explosion fell to tolerable levels and Jak’s headphones let it in. Momentarily Sib’s laser pistol swung its white cutting beam crazily about the sky, like a wobbling column of light lashing out from the dust cloud. The charge ran out, and now there was only the black plume against the gray-pink sky.
“Truce.” The voice crackled in Jak’s ears. “We have three men down and need to retrieve them. Invoking Harmless Zone war protocols.”
“Truce accepted,” Jak said, cuing it through his purse to his whole team. “We have a man down ourselves.”
As he ran to where the grenade had gone off—to where Uncle Sib had been—his heart in his throat and unable to breathe, a far distant corner of his mind was grateful that Dujuv was not the sort to say “I told you so.”
Clarbo had actually gotten there slightly ahead of him—he wondered for an instant if the fool had broken cover before getting the truce notice. The grenade had been one of the standard military issue used all over the solar system, just a blob of hot-jet fuel blasted into a little flask of liquid oxygen by a pinhead-sized bit of explosive, so that they mixed at high temperature and energy release was complete. The base of the dust plume was already cooling and the last gravel was pattering down from above. In the clearing space between the rocks, Jak could see the crumpled, burned body, flames still flickering from parts of it.
The flash of high-temperature gas expands so rapidly that it flows in a nearly straight line out from the grenade; the parts of Sib that had been pointed toward the grenade had been burned deeply, through clothes and skin and into the internal organs, at the same time that the shadowed parts had barely been touched. One elegant eyebrow still arched over one unseeing, dead eye, but the other side of Sib’s head was charred and mostly gone.
Pikia raced past him, holding a fire extinguisher she must have grabbed from one of the wrecked hovercars, and sprayed foam on the evil green dancing flames that sprang along the rib cage and washed the separated arm; when she stopped, a moment later, most of the corpse was mercifully swathed in thick gray-brown goo.
Jak continued to stare, his eyes fixing on where Sib’s unburned left hand stuck from under the foam, at the thick raised veins that ran under the soft skin, between the hard bulges of the bones; a hand that worked hard and well for a long time, Jak thought, that’s how they get to be so developed and yet so coarse—
Another blur shot by Jak, and Gweshira was kneeling beside the body, on the ground, pressing that hand to her face the way a child holds a crumbling, aged teddy bear, and it seemed to Jak that he really only began to be able to hear again when she opened her mouth and wailed, a long, gasping shriek that ended in gut-punching sobs.
“Who’s in command here?” a voice said. Jak turned to see the tear-streaked face of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old wearing the field uniform of the Greenworld Royal Palace Guards, the preposterous drum-major-in-a-gay-porn-movie, too-tight and too-gaudy, good-only-for-dancing-and-posing outfit that Jak himself had worn during his time in Shyf’s service.
Jak didn’t dak, didn’t even speck, the question. Then he felt a hand tighten on his shoulder—when had Dujuv arrived? How long had his toktru tove’s hand been resting there?
“This is him but things are pretty bad right now,” Dujuv said. “I guess I’m the second.”
“I’m the third myself,” the young man said. “Brimiyan Presgano. I hate to ask but … well, most of our ‘force’ wasn’t trained people like you have and a lot of them are just sitting down and crying—and they won’t listen to me, they know I was only an officer because I was the captain’s cousin—”
A sinking feeling hit Jak even as he felt Dujuv’s hand tighten on his shoulder, but it seemed to help clear Jak’s head—leaving him horribly conscious and functional in the middle of this grim little battlefield, with the sun just coming up and everyone standing around as if at the scene of an air crash. “Kawib Presgano was your captain, wasn’t he?” Jak asked.
“He was … he’s dead now, over there …” Brimiyan seemed about to break down.
Kawib Presgano and Sibroillo Jinnaka had killed each other. Kawib lay flat on his back, and two young men holding each other’s hands wept beside him. Brimiyan whispered, “I know you were in the Royal Palace Guards so you know what it is and what it’s all about. Well, I never knew Xabo, but people always said he and Kawib were like mom and dad to all of us, and we needed somebody. You know why—”
“We do,” Dujuv said, “so you don’t have to speak of it unless you want to.”
“He wasn’t really the same after he lost Seubla, and then after he lost Xabo they said he was just drifting through the motions.” Brimiyan’s eyes were filling with tears and he was wiping them furiously from his eyes with his sleeve. “But just the same, after Xabo was killed and Vifu took over, Kawib and Vifu still took care of us and made sure we were adjusting and kept our spirits up and they were always there to help—”
Jak had a sick feeling, realizing that there was about a fifty percent chance that he had shot Vifu, whom he knew. But then Sib and Kawib were dead too … it was all too much. He put an arm around Brimiyan, and the man—released now to be a miserable boy—clutched Jak and sobbed.
Jak looked at Dujuv, making a slight what can I do? face at his toktru tove, but Dujuv was not looking at him; the panth was staring at Kawib’s head. Jak followed his friend’s gaze.
Kawib had apparently popped his head out just after firing his grenade in Sib’s direction, and Sib in turn had caught him with the classic most-effective laser shot, across the face through the eyes, leaving Kawib with a black carbon mask with two deep black holes in it, and a strange swelling in the head where his brain had exploded into steam.
“Nakasen’s balls,” Dujuv muttered to Jak. “Oh, Nakasen’s bleeding balls. Just like Seubla.”
Seubla had been Kawib’s only demmy, ever. He had loved her deeply, and the two had been devoted, but because their bloodlines were a threat to the Karrinynya, Princess Shyf had kept them in a frustrating together-and-apart relationship, with Kawib in the RPG and Seubla a lady in waiting, always seeing each other but never able to be alone or to court each other. Though Shyf had liked Seubla and trusted her as a friend (as much as any princess could do any such thing), eventually Seubla’s ancestry, tracing back to more than one possible pretender to the Karrinynya throne, had led Shyf to decide to end the problem forever. Jak and Dujuv had been there at the party when Seubla had been assassinated; Dujuv had killed the assassin with his bare hands, scant seconds too late.
Seubla too had died with a laser cut across the eyes�
��the way Hive Intel taught you to make it. The professional way, whether “assisting a friendly monarch” or “preserving the consistency of the Wager.”
Nakasen had taught nothing of the afterlife, holding that it was unknowable and irrelevant to right action in the present besides. But seven hundred years had not yet eradicated the idea from human consciousness; “Wherever he is, I hope he’s with her,” Jak murmured, and Dujuv whispered back, “Toktru, old tove.”
Shadow arrived then, and knelt beside the body. He drew his family dagger from the short leather skirt that the Rubahy wore into battle; it was used for just three purposes. The first as a last-ditch weapon—Rubahy honor required it was always to be the last one drawn, and to draw it in a fight effectively made a binding vow to kill or die; hence their expression about “fighting till daggers are drawn.” The second was in order to kill an oath-sworn enemy, to administer the coup de grace to an enemy of great prestige and power whose killing would win honor for the whole family.
And the third purpose was this one: Shadow on the Frost knelt, raised the knife in both hands above his face, and brought it down to form a gash on his left shoulder, where the mourning scars for friends were traditionally administered. Blue-green blood flowed out and stained the white feathers; Shadow leaned forward and let a little drip onto Kawib’s lip, where it lay like a sapphire on a ruby in the now-bright early morning sunlight.
He stood and said, “Dujuv, my oath-friend, you and I together are strong enough to move the bodies. Perhaps we should get them together, and then consider calling for help? We are not within the limits of Freehold but I think they would come out as a compassionate mission.”
Dujuv nodded. “It seems like—”
“Attention parties from Greenworld and the Hive.” The voice was loud, and it came through all their purses at once, as an override. “You are ordered not to fight and not to move from your present location. We will be arriving in less than one minute. Be careful to avoid all weapons discharges as our automated systems will home on the source and fire.”
“Send a reply,” Jak told his purse.
“Can’t identify the source.”
“Then broadcast, general hailing. And copy to all our team.”
“Ready.”
“Complying. All Hive forces, lock down.”
Brimiyan lifted his purse to his face, and gave the same order to the Greenworld forces. Both sides were in the open, scattered, hopelessly intermingled with an enemy, and already stood down; whoever the new players in the game might be, they were the ones who had the drop.
“It’s Paxhaven,” Gweshira said, coming up beside Jak, her face still drenched, looking down at the ground and clearly keeping her voice level and even only by considerable force of will. “They’re finally here.”
“Finally?” Jak asked. “Should we have been expecting them?” As far as he knew, Paxhaven was usually inconsiderable, a quaint little island on the other side of the pole, a few thousand kilometers away.
“Oh, yes,” she said, nodding, and then her breath caught. “So stupid,” she added. “I almost said, ‘Sib will be so disappointed …’ ”
CHAPTER 12
A Reasonable Assessment of My Performance Is Total Failure
The Paxhaven forces arrived: four big statisaucers, donut-shaped aircraft lifted by counterrotating, electrostatically driven central rotors. They were silent, graceful, and elegant, but did not move quickly; Jak would eventually realize that this nicely summarized why Paxhavians preferred them.
At the time he was mostly awed by the silence of the approach and the swift grace of the descent. The troops that emerged did not act like peacekeepers or like commandos, but walked out of the ship as if walking was the only thing on their minds. Jak wasn’t sure whether they were in uniform or just dressed alike; they wore what everyone in Paxhaven wore, something that looked rather like an ancient-style martial arts gi, with press-fastenings to close the lapels and soft, brightly colored undershirts beneath the uwagi. There were no badges of rank visible but clearly some were giving, and some were following, orders.
The woman in the center of the group said a few things in a pleasant, conversational tone, the people around her turned and said things to the people around them, and they all walked off in several directions, to perform their various duties. It all seemed very civilized and very calm.
She approached Jak and said, “Jak Jinnaka, my name is Petol Porizeux. I am here from Paxhaven because we know that your two forces were fighting over the lifelog of Paj Nakasen. We hold mandates from the League of Polities that we could reasonably construe to mean that we have title to that object. Unlike anyone who has touched it so far, we intend to submit a case to the League of Polities and to abide by their decision. I should add that we also are well aware that the only other polity that might sustain a claim on the lifelog is yours, the Hive. Will you allow us to take possession of the lifelog?”
“With all my heart,” Jak said. “You can’t imagine how sick of the stupid thing I am.”
She smiled slightly. “Given that Nakasen’s lifelog is the most sacred relic now existing in the human part of the solar system—and the quite likely source of a great era of religious revelation that may run for centuries hence—and that you are referring to it as ‘the stupid thing,’ I believe I have imagined how sick of it you must be. I am sorry it has been such a burden. No doubt when you picked it up, your reasons seemed good, and now they seem very foolish.”
Jak’s eyes stung with tears; Petol Porizeux took a step toward him, put a hand gently on his shoulder, and looked into his eyes. He felt curiously calm, as if all the evil and tragedy of the last few hours were temporarily lifted off him. She said, so softly that probably only Jak heard, “We all carry such burdens; be grateful you have set one down.”
“How did you know my name?” Jak asked.
“It was in our files, along with many identifiers for you,” she said. “You have been of great interest to us, because of your uncle. We had just been contemplating what invitations to issue to him, and to Gweshira, when this tragedy struck. If you will let us, we can give him a loving and respectful burial. We think he might have liked to come back to Paxhaven.”
On the Hive, bodies were powdered into fine dust and then dropped into the central black hole, warming and nourishing the whole space colony; for reasons he could feel but not name, Jak knew Sib would have preferred Petol’s offer.
“Then we are decided,” she said. “We will take you and your party, the Greenworld RPGs, and the lifelog back to Paxhaven with us, and sort out everything there.” Again she leaned in to whisper something to him, as if they were members of the same zybot or shared a family history. “You’ll see. This is the best thing.” Then she took a step back from him, and without raising her voice, gave orders that were obeyed instantly by everyone. Only Clarbo, very briefly, tried to raise some objection, and at her glance, he fell silent and got into the statisaucer where he was supposed to go.
With four corpses in the holds, and thirteen passengers in the visitor seats, the statisaucers rose from the face of Mars, as silently as they had arrived, high into the bright morning sky. Jak glanced down for the last time at the black scorch between the rocks that marked the place of Uncle Sib’s death, and began to cry, harder and harder, holding on to Dujuv’s hand as if it were a life preserver. Below them, it was a beautiful, clear early summer day in the northern desert, broken by with the occasional brilliant blue river and lake surrounded rich green blotches of foliage, heat shimmering off the flat rocky places and the sun sometimes glancing at them from the little circular Bombardment-crater lakes, like a pupil recurring in a thousand eyes.
It was the first time Jak had flown in an aircraft in Mars, and he remembered how Uncle Sib had always wanted him to be aware of the scenery (and he never really had) wherever he went, and even as he wept, he tried to wipe his face so that he could see and remember. After a while, he fell into exhausted, often-waking sleep.
When Jak awoke, Gweshira was sitting next to him. “We need to talk a little, Jak. You’re going to learn things here—things that Sib and I weren’t sure you’d ever need to know, things that maybe we’d have been better off if you’d never had to learn them, but you’re going to learn them now and I suppose it would be better to have you prepared. Paxhaven is where Sibroillo studied to become the fighter and agent that he was, and it’s where Circle Four had much of its leadership for a while. Sibroillo and I both studied there, though I arrived about a decade after he left. And it’s also where Bex Riveroma had his training.”
Jak felt, as he always did, a cold surge in his liver at the mention of his mortal enemy.
“Paxhaven,” she went on, “though it isn’t mentioned much, because they like to keep this quiet, is the home of many important social innovations. It’s not an accident that many zybots have been headquartered there or had a presence there, even though it’s a little place with barely two million people scattered around the islands in the ring. And among their social innovations, they were the mother school of all the Disciplines training—it was to Paxhaven that all the great martial arts masters fled at the end of the Old Empire, and it was at Paxhaven that Paj Nakasen converted the Great Mother Dojo, en masse, to the Wager, and the Disciplines came out of the integration of the ancient arts with the Wager. Paxhaven was also where Maniples was first played … and many other things. So for the warrior-to-be, it was—and for that matter it is—the place to go to train.
“Sibroillo, you see, had very mixed feelings about how he himself had turned out … and he felt that for every more-or-less decent individual such as himself, the place had bred a dozen Bex Riveromas. True, the program under which they trained had been redone … but you were his last living blood kin, and he felt that the Jinnaka line would have a better chance at the fine destiny he thought it deserved, with you growing up as you did, fostered by him, than in the narrow, rigid world that would have been school at Paxhaven. I suppose someday, when you know Paxhaven well and you know the world well, you might form an opinion about how right, or not, his decision was.”