by Watts, Peter
Mother made soothing sounds from the other side of the table but he wouldn’t be calmed. “It’s those aliens out there! They’ve taken all the jobs a decent man can do, and then they get us in this war. If I didn’t have the lot of you to support, I could do something about it. But I’ve got six mouths to feed, and on what? You want portions as big as your brother’s? If you did some real work you’d fill out and I’d say you needed a man’s portion.”
Crispin cleaned his plate, as they all did.
That night he lay on his thin mattress while hunger clawed at his stomach. Problems swam in his mind. He wanted to be grown up, to do the work his father mentioned.
Eventually, he made the decision his father wanted. He’d join the Federated Army. Reyle wasn’t even part of the Federation, but he could run away and join so he could fight the enemy and break the blockade. Maybe they needed someone who could sketch. Maybe he’d learn not to be so discontented. There would be food, and he’d get exercise to fill out, like his Dad said.
~
Crispin sat up in sweaty sheets. He’d been having fever dreams about home again, although he hadn’t talked to his family more than once a year in the last five years.
He rubbed his face, stubble rasping, and remembered how he’d joined up the day after his decision. He’d said goodbye to his brothers, mother, and his father. The baby had been too little to really say goodbye. His father had been proud, blown up in the chest, and had slapped Crispin on his thin back. It stung, but made the tears he’d been fighting go away so Crispin was glad for the ache. He hadn’t hugged his mother, deciding he was too mature for that. She’d cried into the baby’s hair.
Crispin sat forward on the metal bed to flex an arm, feeling the tight sinews clench. Three square meals a day and hours of training had hardened him until he barely recognized himself in the mirror. He was still lanky, but firm like tightly strung piano wire. His fine brown hair had been cut short, so it never fell in his eyes. He had some new scars, too.
His hands, calloused and blunt now, pulled back the dressing that adhered to his side. A smooth red ribbon was all that was left of the laser shot that had taken him out. He’d been in full combat armor, slow but forceful, ransacking a moon base when the beam sliced through armor into his side. He’d still gotten to the command center, blasted through with his squad, and turned off the life support. With the hole in his suit he’d figured he’d go fast, but the durapatch they’d slapped over the wound must have held long enough to get back to the troop carrier and to the orbiting battle ship. All-in-all, not a bad time. He thought of how he’d share the exploit with the others. Maybe Crissy in Blue Squad would like to look at his scar.
A wolfish grin still flitted around his gray eyes as a medical technician entered followed by someone unfamiliar, but Crispin needed only to see the rank indicators lined in a row up his sleeve to jump to his feet.
“Sit down, no need for that in the clinic,” the man said gruffly. Crispin settled back into a sitting position since he’d been ordered to, but his back stayed straight. He gazed forward.
“Recovering nicely, I see. No surprise there. You’re always up for more action, eh? I’ve read your record, and you’ve been a trooper.” He didn’t take breaths between sentences or seem to expect any response from Crispin. “Thought you’d be interested in volunteering for something special.
“This medic can explain it all to you. Don’t ask me for the technical details. Knew all I needed to when they explained it could make a super-soldier. The best ever. That’s got your attention, eh?”
Crispin glanced over at the technician, a pale figure who fiddled with a digital tablet. Maybe he was checking Crispin’s status, or perhaps he was just nervous. Crispin turned his steely eyes back as the man spoke again, “Complicated process involved: speeds up your metabolism, your recuperative powers, ups the strength and reflexes. Better night vision, naturally, and I’m told there are camouflage properties to the skin, although I’d like to see that for myself.”
The technician’s enthusiastic pride apparently compelled him to interrupt. “Oh yes sir! We’ve developed a process where your own melanin can darken or lighten the skin. No fancy colors, right, not a man-sized chameleon . . . Sorry, sir.”
“Right then, it also lets you forage better so you don’t need as many supplies. Accidental find, actually, all part of some natural infection we’ve been able to engineer further. Science relies on fortuitous accidents quite a bit, eh?”
The technician remained wisely silent under this criticism.
The pause invited comment. Crispin barely let his eyes flicker to the other man. “Sir, it sounds like a ground troop force?”
“That’s right,” the other said warmly. “We’ll hit their bases and drive the enemy out of their own homes. It will be a new force, elite and swift moving. You’ll be more aggressive, too. We’ll give you the mental training to be the soldier we need. You’ll love it—the thrill of battle. We need good men. You’d like that, eh?”
Crispin wondered why the man insisted on telling him what he’d like.
“You’re from an independent colony, aren’t you? Re—,”
“Reyle,” Crispin supplied. “Yes, I still have family there.”
“Outer world. They should accept Federation protection. Wouldn’t want to let the enemy get to them. Imagine the kiddies back home. You’d be doing everyone a favor.”
Crispin thought of his mother and father, and his siblings still struggling to survive on the meager existence they could eke out. He sent them funds sometimes. He’d sent a shipment of vegetable starts and seeds to his father, also, but with blockades there wasn’t any way to tell if they’d gotten through. He hadn’t talked to them in over a year.
“I’d like it, sir. I’d make a fine super-soldier. I’ll be the best man you’ve got.”
“Yes, I expect so. Sign here.” The officer made a gesture and someone entered the room. He grabbed Crispin in a blurred instant and a burning sensation pierced his neck and shoulder. He cried out and fell limp.
“He’s infected,” someone said. “We’ll see if it takes.”
~
Crispin made the change. It took time, weeks or months he was never quite sure. They pushed his body to its natural limits and then beyond. He woke up in a hospital bed aboard ship, like last time, but could feel the difference in himself.
The overhead light stung Crispin’s eyes, so he broke it. The spaceship’s red emergency lights took over, dim and indirect. A look in the mirror showed how much he’d changed. He stared into his jet black eyes, and as he concentrated his face skin darkened. Stepping close to the mirror, he tore off his hospital gown, leaving only his boxers. As he focused, darkness filled in the sharp muscles of his torso, like oils swirling to the surface from deep within him.
He cocked his head, listening. With newly acute hearing, he detected hushed footfalls in the hallway.
The technician jumped when he entered the room and found Crispin’s black eyes watching him from the hospital bed. Crispin’s muscles quivered, eager to move again. He’d barely thought about returning to his narrow bunk before he’d been there. Strength and power made him clench the muscles in his bare arms, studying their bulge and flex.
The technician inched around the room. He checked the light and saw it wasn’t just off, but broken. A shiver ran through the thin, weak shoulder bones protruding against the white material of his lab coat.
He turned to Crispin with a faltering smile. “We thought you’d still be asleep.”
Crispin looked back without smiling.
“Do you feel different?”
“Yes.” The sound of his voice contained nuances he hadn’t heard before. He modulated it. “I’m feeling quite good. Powerful.” He rose to his feet with the final word.
The technician blinked, as if his eyes hadn’t quite tracked the swift movement. Sweat glimmered on his forehead in the dim light. “Well, that’s really good. There’s training for you and your
new squad. You’ll get used to all your new abilities.” The man’s sweat smelled tart in the tiny sealed room. They were somewhere in the base of the ship, Crispin felt, and he could almost sense other figures in the rooms beside and above him. The warmth off the technician drew him a step closer. The tiny man looked so weak to Crispin, so pathetic and unable to take care of himself that Crispin felt bad for him. Was this how he’d looked to his father?
Crispin licked dry lips. “I’m a little thirsty.”
“Oh, god!” The technician dodged for the door.
Crispin stopped him without conscious thought. He held the man by his lab coat, puzzled. “Why are you running?”
The technician whined pitifully.
The door opened and two armored Security with stun batons entered. They must have been monitoring the room.
Still puzzled, but not afraid, Crispin didn’t try to hurt them, but when they moved against him he felt satisfaction as he tossed the technician aside to meet their challenge. A moment later the two guards lay with their helmets smashed.
The technician gave up whimpering on the floor to dash out the open door into the hallway. Crispin checked the bodies of the prone men. The first one was quite dead. The second one wasn’t, but bled from a wound on his temple where he’d hit the floor. A vivid pool of red sent crisp tangy notes into the air. Crispin put a finger into the liquid and brought it to his lips. He was very thirsty.
When he left the room, the second man was also dead.
Crispin took one step out the door into the hall and found the military officer there again, flanked by two other men. They weren’t Security, Crispin knew, because they didn’t have the helmets and batons, but his hackles rose at the sight of them and he swallowed a growl.
The officer lifted a gray eyebrow. “He won’t understand if I tell him to stop, but he’ll understand if you stop him,” he said to the two strangers.
Crispin met their charges with a vicious glee. The first man pounded Crispin’s shoulders with heavy blows, forcing him to bend forward like a charging bull ready to gore his opponent. The second man caught his arms, trapping him. He lunged with bared teeth, wanting to bite, but they were as swift as he was. The first man caught his chin, lifting Crispin. Hands trapped and neck twisted as if ready to break, Crispin stared into the man’s gleaming black eyes. The soldier malevolently glared back.
His captors were like him, super-soldiers.
“We’ll take it from here,” the one holding him said in a smooth timbered voice. He wiped Crispin’s mouth and met the midnight stare. “He’s one of us now.”
~
There was war. In fact, there was nothing but war now. Crispin paused in the laughing flicker of a burning building and raised his head to sniff the air. It smelled good, better than the air on the ship but all planets had air that smelled better. This night smelled particularly good. He found what he was looking for, the trace scent of hiding figures, and sprang across the open square to the next building where they must be concealed. His leap scared them into the open, a screaming mess of noise and hysteria that he quickly silenced. The crackle of the buildings and the sounds of his mates killing in the distance were all he heard here. It was another night with an especially simple mission. They were here to burn and pillage. They would cause terror to the enemy, the special terror that his kind could bring. And news would spread.
He let his skin darken and faded into the night shadows around him. Something in the distance pulled him past the breaking windows and hopeless cries. He ran. It seemed the fights were endless, finally coming close together with only forgettable troop movements in between. The chill wind of the dark planets and the hot flesh of the enemy filled him.
He raced through the streets on silent feet. Quick now, never weighted down by heavy battle armor since he could strike before an enemy could fire, could dodge whatever they launched at him. He’d been injured, surely all soldiers were injured, but he barely bled and there were ways to replace it. His light-sensitive eyes avoided the flare of more flames and he skirted the empty buildings. They’d probably had the sense to set up a barricade somewhere by now. Predictably, they’d think they could hold out. Crispin bit his lip and let instinct take him. It pulled him along feverishly, filling him until he found more people, a whole cluster of them, huddled in a lone building outside the proper edges of the small town. He entered easily and the small ones were the first to go. The victory of it filled him with power. He had been through it all, but the thrill didn’t wear off. He finished almost instantly with one combatant, soft and unable to hurt him, and turned to find only one left standing.
A flicker of puzzlement shivered down his spine. This was different. Why was the prey speaking instead of running or fighting? Crispin opened his awareness to the man’s words. They weren’t in standard but he recognized the dialect. What dialect was it, Reylan? He rose from his crouch, a surge of recognition piercing him. The man had said his name.
“Crispin, my God, Crispin.”
He looked around himself. It was a wooden house, his wooden house. He stared at the broken bodies of his siblings. And there lay Mother. The Federated Army had changed wars, switched sides, and he’d never even realized. He was now fighting against his people. His family?
“Dad?” Crispin asked, bloodlust fading. He stared at the aged figure of the man in front of him. His father had always been thick, but now he was bent at the shoulders. His hair had gone gray and thinned. Had it been so long that his father had grown old? He hadn’t thought of his family since his change.
“Stay away from me! What you are now, it isn’t my son,” Dad yelled, fumbling in the bureau behind him.
“It’s me, Dad, I’m a soldier.”
“No boy of mine! No soldier! You’re not even a man.” Dad was crying, and furious, and his hands had found a weapon. The shotgun he’d kept for years. He pointed it and pulled the trigger.
Crispin stood over his father’s body in the first real conscious thought he’d had in many years. He stared around the room as if looking for answers. That must be Reese, fully-grown and still living here to look after them. The woman could be Reese’s wife, or maybe his baby sister. What had her name been?
He crossed to the faucet to wash his face and hands. On the wall above the sink was a faded piece of paper. His specialized eyes could see it clearly in the dark. It was the sketch of his mother and Anna. The baby had been named Anna.
He wondered with a sort of remote horror whether his mother had recognized him, there at the end.
The water chugged fitfully before starting in a thin stream. Crispin rinsed his mouth and spat into the sink. The sketch looked tiredly back at him.
He lit the house on fire, with their bodies and the sketch still inside. The wood ignited as if it had always been more suited to burning than living in. He moved away from the smoke and waited for feelings. They didn’t come easily. Finally, he had a thought he wanted to share with his father.
You’re right, Dad, he thought to himself, I’m not a man. A man would have stood there and let you shoot him for what he’d done.
But what I’ve become is something different.
Heather Roulo is a Pacific Northwest horror, fantasy, and science-fiction author. Her short stories have appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, podcasts, and magazines including Nature and Flagship. In 2009 her science-fiction podcast novel Fractured Horizon was a Parsec Award Finalist and she received the Wicked Women Writers award from HorrorAddicts.net. Heather is the co-founder of Podioracket.com, an indie author interview podcast. Find her on twitter @hroulo or at www.facebook.com/heroulo. Her website is www.heroulo.com.
I WAS THERE...
Tarl Hoch
I was there when the vampire council was shattered.
It was on a planet known as Gabriel 5; a dead world in a dead system. A planet of ash and ruins, it was once the capital of a race long dead before mankind even glanced at the stars. From the shattered bones of their empire, we created o
ur own when we fled Earth.
The humans had expanded so fast that the great clans, all five of them, fled to the stars on ships of black steel and fangs of flame. Our exodus brought those of us that remained out into the open, and as we had expected, the humans panicked. Hunts, lynching, even open warfare abounded. Generations of positive propaganda to try and spin a positive view of our kind, gone in a matter of months.
The clans found the dead systems, their stars red like overfed mosquitoes in the blackness of space. Territories were made, fought for, won and lost before we settled. We were lords again, with our own hierarchies. Trade was in slaves, some brought with us, others captured as mankind spread out among the stars. The humans suspected we were there, but had no proof.
Life was good, for a time.
But, like the humans we had once been, we fell to boredom. With boredom came bickering, feuding, wars. Politics became a vicious and bloody affair. Territories changed hands and among the chaos the humans found us. Their warships found our homes and slew entire colonies. It was among this that the council decided to meet on Gabriel 5. Artisans had created tombs, mausoleums, crypts among the alien architecture and rubble, an entire planet devoted to the artistic representation of death. The air was flaked with fat hunks of ash from where the ground cracked down to its very molten core. The fires consuming buried organic matter that the aliens left behind.
The entire place reeked of death.
I loved it.
Of course we were the first to arrive. We were the First of the five after all, most noble of the clans. Our heritage was pure; we could trace it back to the eldest among us.