The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  * * *

  We were hidden in the sawbush, watching the soldiers in the clearing. Human soldiers. The air was hot and wet and the insects kept trying to get past the chem I wore to keep them off. They didn’t bite but they buzzed. I didn’t much like jungle work.

  The four guards weren’t armored but they all had Stein 2mm carbines with drums. The drums each held five hundred rounds of ultra-velocity explosive caseless and the weapons had a high cycle rate, quick enough so that a casual wave on full auto would chop a man in half as fast as you could blink. Our softsuits wouldn’t even slow them down.

  I pulled four shocktox arrows from my clip and arranged them on the warm ground next to me in a fast-fan pattern. Even if the wounds weren’t fatal, the shocktox would slap a man senseless in half a second and keep him that way long enough so that if I wanted him dead, I could stroll up and finish him. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “No,” Razor said. “They’re mine.”

  I put my stacked-graphite recurve bow down. “All right. It’s your show.”

  That was true enough. I was last-over-the-fence, the newest member of the hex, so fresh I still had a real name. You had to earn your hexnom, and I hadn’t been in it long enough. This was my first mission. I was replacing a woman called Fish. All I knew about her was that she’d “gotten careless” with a trio of aliens.

  “Stay here, Peel,” he said. “I’ll wave you up when I’m done.”

  I nodded.

  Razor pulled his tanto from the delrin sheath where it snugged the cro-patch on his left hip. He rose from his crouch. The rosette softsuit’s refractors started to alter, but slowly as always. With his shock of short black hair and thick eyebrows, he looked like some ancient Japanese demon. He kissed the knife the way a man kisses a lover. The weapon’s blade was a mottled gray, from the hand-folding and hammering and tempering used to forge the steel into something that would hold a sharp edge and yet remain flexible. The knife was twenty centimeters long, thick across the spine, the point angled up from the angle-ground edge and sharp all the way to the tip. It was a Damascus pattern, and the technology of it was more than two thousand years old. The handle was tightly wound black silkwire. Razor had made the knife himself.

  The four guards were alert and well armed, and had a clear field of fire for twenty meters around them. To try to take them with nothing more than a knife in daylight ought to be suicide.

  Razor started toward the four. His trick was that he could see the future. That’s what he said, though the brainboys couldn’t find it. Only a few seconds, he said, maybe ten, tops. If he could or not, who could say? He believed it, and that was his edge. I had never seen him work, but I had heard the stories. He never carried any weapon other than his knife; he was the deadliest of the deadly and he liked killing. He had once taken out a pair of fully armed Gerin warriors and their four drones by himself. That said something.

  The word “mute” can cut different ways. It can mean silent. It can also be short for “mutant.” Either way, most regular JTs start looking for a place to spit after they say it. Mutes are six-person teams, technically named Detached Advanced Hexes. They work under two imperatives: FEUB and IMKI—”Fuck ‘Em Up Bad,” and “If It Moves, Kill It.” No, not “they.” We. I was one of them now. Me and my bow. We’re supposed to be able to walk on water, to fly, to vanish into thin air, and our purpose is to scare the shit out of the enemy. Mutes eat regular jump troopers for breakfast, have marines for dessert, and use shippies to pick their teeth. Our teeth.

  The first guard went down from a thrust to the heart. The second caught the tanto through the left eye.

  The third guard, a woman, swung her weapon around but never got a chance to trigger it before she died from a powerful stab under the chin.

  The fourth guard was so stunned that he just stood there like an animal waiting for slaughter. He didn’t even try to move as Razor cut his throat.

  It took maybe nine seconds from the time Razor stood until the last man fell. I’ve seen some of the very best martial artists move, and none of them could touch Razor for sheer speed. He was a freak.

  Yes, Razor enjoyed it. He grinned at me and waved with the bloody knife. According to Glass, Razor had special lubes he used to wipe the weapon each time he used it. He supposedly went through a lot of those cloths—alien blood was bad on untreated steel.

  I had left the arrows out, just in case. I reclipped them save for one, and moved out from the cover of the jungle into the clearing. It was early morning but already hot. If nobody found the bodies, they’d be bloating by dark. And when they did find them, it would have to be frightening. Four dead soldiers, one cut each, in the middle of a clearing, not a shot fired. How?

  It’s war, I thought, looking at the three dead men and the dead woman. They weren’t real people, they were just broken dolls, oozing red machine oil, no before and, now, no after. Besides, it could just as easily be me lying there. They’d have shot me without a second thought if I’d strolled into their ken. It’s war. People get killed.

  They should have thought about that before they turned traitor.

  I had something to prove. I suspected everybody in the hex did, but Razor did like it too much.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get to our TBR coordinates. We’re late and Tilt will have our balls.”

  Tilt, our hexleader, was a man who never smiled. He was small, thin, almost innocuous to look at, hair cropped close, pale green eyes. Everybody in the hex was terrified of him, even Razor; I hadn’t figured out why yet, but he scared me, too. I felt it on a level way below conscious thought, a racial memory from the time when we lived in caves and something prowled out there in the dark and stirred the hairs on our necks. Something too horrible to face with spear or fire, especially in the dark. That was Tilt’s trick, his edge.

  We moved through the bush carefully. This sector was supposed to be clear, except for the guard post Razor had just eliminated, but you never could be sure of what MI told you. We both wore confounders, but as electronic scramblers, the devices make good paperweights. A properly tuned confounder might fool a particularly stupid simadam running a heatscope or a motion sensor one time in five; not odds a trooper in the field cared for much when they ran in the enemy’s favor. Confounder technology had a way to go.

  We got to our assigned coordinates with an hour to spare; we were the first to arrive. The rest of the hex showed during the next half hour.

  First were Tilt, the HxL, and Glass. Glass was Arnie Average, nothing special about him, the kind of face you can forget a second after turning away. But turn back and you’d have trouble finding him again. According the stories I’d heard in the JTs, Glass could hide in bright sunlight in the middle of an open field without any camo gear, and he could make the best ninja who ever lived look conspicuous. He was the one who had taken me under his wing and talked to me about the others. He’d rather be killing octopods, he said, but you went where they sent you and did what they paid you to do.

  The final two members of our hex were Lout and Asp.

  Lout walked into the clearing as if he owned the planet, and Asp suddenly appeared behind us. She might give Glass a good run for invisible, but that was not her main trick. Asp could throw a poison pencil fifty meters and hit a man-sized target ninety times out of a hundred at that range. She carried a 6mm flechette pistol, a silenced chatterbox, as backup, but nobody in the hex had ever seen her use it. So I’d been told.

  My recurve bow has a pull of thirty-five kilos, no compound pulleys, an honest draw. I was trained to use it with either hand and alternate frequently enough so that I work both sides more or less equally. Years of work with the bow have given me a fair amount of muscle in the arms and shoulders, and across the upper back. I’m not a weakling.

  Compared to Lout, I might as well be a skeleton. The man has obviously moved some serious weights more
than a little distance, and if somebody wanted to bet that he could pick himself up with one hand, I wouldn’t take the bet. One story said he’d wrestled a Gerin warrior hand to hand and had broken the thing’s back. The aliens are strong.

  Lout bore an 8mm Rand caseless rifle. The entire barrel is essentially a silencer. Low-velocity, subsonic. He also carried a drop-forged one-piece hatchet made of black anodized 660-Diamond-grade duralum.

  Tilt’s main weapon was an Immelhof 6mm spring darter.

  Glass wore a pair of 10mm DW subsonic rocket pistols.

  Mutes aren’t issued weapons. The QM gives us each a softsuit, a TBR, distill-can, medkit, 8/gen NV goggles, and a confounder. That’s it. If we want to eat, we can draw Q-rats or find local produce. We furnish our own hardware for fighting, and there are only two criteria: the weapons must be deadly and they can’t make much noise.

  If it spikes an audiometer higher than aud 20 at two meters’ distance, it’s too loud for a mute to carry. That’s where the nickname ostensibly comes from. If you hear an explosion and the trooper next to you drops dead, you can deal with that. But if the soldier talking to you quietly keels over with a dart or pencil or arrow in him and you don’t see it, it can surprise the hell out of you. Maybe it’s contagious. I don’t know if the fucking rubbery aliens think that way, but men do. And the Gerin bleed and die like the rest of us, so maybe they get scared, too.

  The other gear is standard military-issue and useful only sometimes, although it made what the local rebobs were using look like dark-age antiques. Our softsuits are supposed to be proof against medium-to-high-velocity nonexplosive projectile weapons in the 5mm-lOmm range, but nobody with half a brain risks his life on that. The refract camo mostly works, but it is slow. The tightbeam radio is okay when the operators on both ends know what they are doing. The distill-can will give you potable water from any oxy atmosphere where the humidity is 10 percent or higher. The medkit runs a stupecomp that is pretty good on wounds and common infections, but it’s fragile. The spookeyes work best under a medium starfield or less, but point them at any suddenly bright light source and they will temporary blind the wearer. The confounder might be used to smash a bug in an emergency, or maybe you could throw it to distract an enemy. If I had to limit myself to one item, I’d take the distill-can. Drinkable H20 is worth a lot in the field. But even so, we were technical miracles on this planet and we knew it. Between that and our personal skills we might be excused for feeling a little arrogant. We ought to be able to go through the locals like a laser through smoke. Even as a newboy I was confident.

  Tilt said, “Okay, here’s the scope.” He squatted and pulled a one-time holoproj unit from his belt and lit the timer. He set the unit on the ground. The rest of us crouched down to watch. We had a real mission this time, not just normal FEUB stuff. A major piece of work.

  The air warbled at Tilt’s feet and a threedee colored itself into life over the projector. From where I was, the holgram looked like a four-building business complex. Two were multistory, the other two single-levels. The scale and compass built into the edge of the holo gave me an idea of the size and layout.

  “You can see the place is disguised,” Tilt said. “Not a speck of military visible anywhere. This is from a spy sat we have footprinting the area, and the resolution is good enough so you can read the numbers on the vehicles. You can bet there are troops stashed and some kind of defensive perimeter buried or camoed good enough to fool the sky eye.”

  None of us said anything. If this was what it was supposed to be, there’d have to be some safeguards; anything else would be foolish, and the enemy couldn’t all be fools.

  Tilt pointed at one of the smaller buildings. “This is what MI thinks is the Target’s sleeping quarters.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Lout said. “’MI’ and ‘thinks’ in the same sentence?”

  Glass laughed, and I added my own chuckle.

  Asp didn’t crack a smile. Neither did Razor. “Vacuum it, Lout,” Tilt said. “It’s our job to hit the

  Target and either bring him back or bury him.”

  “He’s some kind of holy man, isn’t he?” Asp said.

  “Does it matter?” Tilt said.

  “No, it doesn’t matter,” Razor put in.

  Asp and Razor glared at each other. They’d been lovers once, according to Glass. It hadn’t ended well.

  “Asp?”

  She looked at Tilt. “No. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yeah, he’s the head holy man. And he’s ours.”

  Tilt finished the briefing. He had allowed us time enough to memorize the layout before the clock flashed the holoproj. The thick plastic oozed as the acid inside did its work. Tilt kicked dirt and brush over the dead holoproj. By the time anybody found it, we’d have finished our mission or we’d be dead, and either way it wouldn’t matter—the unit would tell no tales.

  “It gets full dark at around twenty hours,” Tilt said.

  “We move then. It’s an hour-and-a-half walk. Flake out and get some rest. Rotate watch by twos-Glass and I will take it first, Lout and Asp next, Razor and newboy last.”

  Tilt and Glass moved out of the clearing. Razor stretched out, leaned back against a clump of brush, and fell asleep. Lout stripped his Rand and began cleaning and oiling it. Asp sat a couple of meters away from me and stared at the dirt between her knees.

  I was new to the hex and I didn’t know as much as I wanted to know, so I said to Asp, “Can I ask you something?”

  She was an attractive woman, dark hair cut in a military buzz and even features, but she wore a scar from the corner of her left eye to the edge of her jaw under the ear. Plastics could have smoothed that out easily, so she wanted it there for a reason. I couldn’t tell about the body under the softsuit, but if she had survived more than a couple of missions as a mute, her body would be fit and hard.

  She looked at me as a woman might look at a pet that had just pissed on a rare carpet. “I don’t know you,” she said. “Fish was my friend and she was good and one of the amphibians killed her. Show me something.”

  I knew what she wanted. If she was going to risk anything on me, a word or her life, she wanted to know if I had what it took to be in the hex. If I had an edge. MI had sent me, but that didn’t mean anything. Tilt had signed my orders and taken me in, but that was Tilt. This was personal. She knew she was one of the Chosen, but was I?

  I glanced up and saw a wrist-thick vine that wound around a tree trunk twenty meters away. “The vine, over there,” I said. “Two meters up.”

  I pulled an arrow from my clip and picked up my bow. It doesn’t matter if you are shooting formal daikyu or a short recurve field bow, the kyu technique is essentially the same. There are several basic movements to be observed: stance, breathing, notching the arrow, raising and drawing, lowering, extension, sighting, release, and zanshin pause. With the long bow this sequence can take some time. It can also be speeded up. I already knew where the target was, and I was going to shoot sitting down. I kept looking at Asp for the second it took to fastrun the moves and loose the arrow. I heard the arrow hit solidly, but I didn’t look. She watched me, then her gaze flicked away from mine for a second before it flicked back.

  “Ask your question,” she said.

  “Why are you here?” I meant why the mutes, not why here doing this pick-up scuzz work instead of fighting in the real war against the aliens.

  She knew what I meant. She looked away, at the vine.

  “Because it doesn’t matter. One enemy is as good as another; man, or Gerin. It’s technique that’s important.”

  I nodded. I could understand that. That was peak bushido, to do it right above all. “Okay. Thanks.”

  She looked back at me. “What about you?”

  “Because I want to see if kyudo can be kyujutsu.”

  “The theoretical into the practical,” she
said. It was not a question.

  “Yes.”

  Well. That was that. If you wound up in the mutes, it was because something was seriously wrong with the way your mind worked. Here was where they dumped the psych cases, the laughing sociopaths and those men and women who didn’t care if they lived or died. IMKI freaks and those with a thirst for blood. Mutes were jokingly rumored to eat their own dead, and regular JTs laughed when they said that, but I’d heard rumors of cannibalism that didn’t seem so funny. Roast octopod was supposed to be a delicacy in some hexes. But you also had to have more going for you than just being crazy to get into the mutes. You had to be good at something, something the military could use. You had to have an edge.

  I had spent twelve years learning all there was to know about my Art. I’d run out of teachers who were better at it. I didn’t have to look to know where my arrow had gone, I could skewer targets all day long, it was like a kind of magic. There wasn’t anything to psi, they said, like Razor’s claim of chronopathic ability. The brainboys couldn’t find it, they said it was all in his mind, but there was a lot they didn’t know. Whatever it was, it was my trick. I almost always hit what I aimed at. But that was do, the Way, and it was practice. The jutsu aspect needed to be tested. What I needed was to see if a two-thousand-year-old art could compete in a modern war; that was my flaw. It was crazy. But I had to know. I was the best there was and I needed the test. If you have a talent, you have to exercise it.

  I had done my first tour on DuQuesne, I had killed Gerin, but that had been with guns. That I knew I could do. Could I survive with nothing but my Art?

  The mutes was the place to find out.

  The military isn’t the most efficient machine ever designed, but it knows about some things. We might all be locked up back in civilization, but they had a use for us out here. Scare an enemy bad enough and he stops working the way he should. Teams of armed crazies could get real scary, especially if they had some kind of martial skill going for them, something you couldn’t explain, something akin to magic.