Man-Eater

by Griffin Barber

  “What size thing do we search for?”

  “A very small chest. Might have a crank on it.” This much, at least, he’d accepted from the SpinDog briefer: while the Kulsians had some machinery that was far more advanced than what he was used to, they were not likely to give any high-end technology to the indig collaborators this far from centers of power. The rig was supposed to look something like a transistor radio, with a hand crank similar to those on AM/FM survival sets from Chalmers’ own era.

  Ked rummaged around in the alcove while Chalmers searched the main chamber and Jackson watched the entrance.

  It didn’t take more than two minutes to search. The villagers were maybe one step up from nomads themselves, and even the hetman’s possessions offered very little in the way of hiding places.

  “Nothing?”

  Ked shook his head. “Nothing.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4 – Outmaneuvered

  SPINDOG ROHAB: MISSION DAY 041

  “Nothing,” Chalmers said automatically, feeling as if he’d been caught with one hand in the cookie jar. “Nothing useful,” he amended, slowly returning his hands to the oddly-designed SpinDog keyboard.

  Jackson snorted. “Man, you have a shit startle response.” The sergeant looked better than he had before they’d gone into the virtual reality language training. Time, it seemed, even virtual time spent slogging through the odd complexities of devolved Ktoran grammar and syntax, healed many things. “In fact,” Jackson continued after a dramatic pause, “you may have the worst startle response of anyone I’ve ever worked with. Totally useless.”

  “Might be, Jacks, might be.” Chalmers rubbed his chin and the five o’clock shadow there. “But it’s only a result of my need to protect my pretty face.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, man,” Jackson said, casting a meaningful look at Chalmers’ display.

  “I was looking at the history files,” Chalmers said carefully. They’d been cooling their heels since the SEAL’s mission had launched, spending a lot of time in a seemingly-endless string of briefings and planning sessions. Despite all the meetings, Murphy was being cagey about when, exactly, their deployment would happen. Tonight had been their first time off in a while, and Chalmers had decided to turn over a new leaf and started researching their allies. What he’d found hadn’t satisfied him, not at all. He’d looked for more juicy material, something equivalent to a gossip rag or tell-all book, but the SpinDogs either didn’t have such things or were keeping the Lost Soldiers locked out of the public information stream.

  “Not much there,” Jackson said. “Makes you think they got shit to hide.”

  Chalmers nodded at the computer screen. “Maybe we can hack it, you know, like War Games? You get much time on computers as a kid?” he asked, hoping against hope the younger man would have some hidden skill at computers he hadn’t known about.

  “’Course, man!” Jackson chuckled. “Growing up on the South Side in the early eighties got us kids all sorts of time on them mainframes. In fact, I was gonna go straight to work for IBM right up until I signed my first contract with the Bulls.”

  Chalmers was laughing well before Jackson finished his sarcastic rant. He held his hands up in surrender. “All right, all right! I’m an asshole.”

  “No, you just showing your vanilla,” Jackson said, smiling.

  “All right, I deserved that…” He gestured at the terminal as well. “But you’ve been reading up, right?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “The files they gave us; they’re pretty scant on who hates who.”

  Jackson shrugged narrow shoulders. “Well, kinda understandable.”

  Chalmers looked a question at him.

  “They’re making a mistake like the one mistake you just made. Only on a lot bigger scale.”

  “Not sure I follow,” Chalmers said.

  “The SpinDogs all seem to think their way is the way, so why bother learning what others think or do?”

  Chalmers shook his head slightly. “Yeah, but these guys are supposed to be all, ‘survival of the fittest’ and warrior culture. Seems like holding back basic information would create issues of survival for anyone who was that blind, and those acting on that blindness.”

  “Crackers gonna be crackers.” Jackson delivered the words with a southern drawl that he seemed to think should underline his meaning.

  Underlining or no, Chalmers missed what he meant. “What?” he asked.

  “Look at their history—at least what we’ve been told of it. They were bound to think of themselves as the best and brightest thing going, and their arrogant asses won’t let them admit that losing their own civil war—or whatever—was their own damn fault. So, they get kicked out of the house and come here, finding all these backward people, a lot of who’ve descended into some kind of worse-than-Thunderdome shit. They all set to claim themselves the new masters, but then the Kulsians appear, who haven’t descended quite so far, and they got big guns, too, and better numbers. But our friends were lucky enough to be in space, so they hide out, bide their time, all the while thinking their truth is the only truth that matters. When really, what’s goin’ on is one cracker sees the other cracker got a bigger whip and knows, deep in his bones, that he wants to hold that whip, but can’t.”

  “You lost me again, Jackson,” Chalmers said.

  Jackson sighed, thought about it a moment, then said, “These SpinDogs have had nothing smack them in the face to tell them how wrong their outlook is.”

  “But they were kicked off their home world or whatever.”

  Jackson nodded emphatically. “Sure were. But to their minds, they got beat by people who were better than they were at being the ideal of their culture. They come here, see the people that lost some of the motherland’s stink, all descended into barbarism, and the folks that didn’t sink as low still in charge, still adhering to the Old Ways. Nothing has ever told these crackers their system is whacked. They don’t even think to question that. The only lesson they’ve learned is the wrong one: that they weren’t good enough at working that system, which only served to confirm, in their eyes, the values of the very same system, man.”

  Chalmers blinked. He’d always known Jackson was smarter than he, but he’d rarely been shown just how much smarter. If the man had been given a better education, Chalmers had no doubt Jackson would have been some kind of staff officer or civilian bigwig.

  Guilt followed the thought. Guilt that, had Jackson not fallen in with the wrong crowd, so many things might have been different. Especially since, in this case, the wrong crowd was one Horace Chalmers, Warrant Officer, US Army.

  “Yeah,” Jackson mused, staring at the bulkhead, “Murphy seems to think things are going to be fine once we put our hosts in charge of the planet. Maybe it’s just my blood talking, but I’m thinking we just putting our crackers in charge, nothing more.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  Another pensive shrug. “Not really. I figure the government used to do the same shit all the time, right? So long as we know what our crackers want, we can be looking out, I guess…No, thing I worry about is this: do we really know our crackers, or are they gonna be stabbing each other—and us—in the back to get the best bits of the pig?”

  Chalmers leaned back, suddenly wishing they hadn’t had this conversation in what passed for public. Not that there were any sureties of privacy elsewhere, but if Jackson was right, Chalmers was certain all of the competing interests would act to make sure their agenda was served. And that could interfere with the mission. Almost certainly would, in fact.

  He didn’t think he was being paranoid, but just because you couldn’t see threats didn’t mean they weren’t there. That’s why he’d been diligently searching through the records they’d been given. Wanting to name his fear made Chalmers a far better student than he’d been before.

  Come to think of it, the emphasis all the non-Terran humans—SpinDogs, R’Bak, and Kulsians alike—placed on clan loy
alty was a lot like Mogadishu, what with its powerful warlords and would-be kings.

  No, this could end up being the Mog all over again, no matter who they wound up backing in the end.

  * * *

  CLARTHU: MISSION DAY 052

  In the end, searching several additional houses didn’t produce the radio; Chalmers stalked out of the third, still empty-handed. Time constraints had been such that, after the hetman’s home, they had to split up to cover more ground, but even working one to a structure, Ked, Jackson, and he were not going to get much accomplished. Even if they’d had a Gestapo-like disregard for the personal property of their allies, tossing a place was no substitute for a careful, thorough search.

  They needed time they simply were not going to have, not if the noises rising from the dueling ground were the bad sign they seemed to be. The ritualized, chant-like shouts had become more frenzied since the three had split up. Any long fight was a hard fight, Chalmers knew.

  “Chalmers!” Ked said, emerging from the large building across from the hetman’s home.

  The crowd noise changed again, became a series of rousing cheers as Chalmers jogged over.

  “Is this it?” Ked asked. He held what looked like a metal-framed bread-box with a dynamo crank protruding from one end.

  Chalmers smiled at the younger man. “Sure is! Where was it?”

  “Inside. Village grain store. Buried about arm-length.”

  Chalmers cursed. Right where it would make it impossible to single someone out as the owner, so long as you didn’t leave fingerprints. For perhaps the third time since wakening in these strange circumstances, Chalmers lamented the fact he had no evidence kit with him.

  Another cheer rose from the dueling ground. Chalmers glanced at Ked, wondering how the man could be so cool while his sister was fighting for her life a few hundred yards away.

  “Jackson, come on, man,” Chalmers called as loudly as he darted into the doorway of the home belonging to the hetman’s son.

  “I’m coming, Chalmers,” Jackson grunted. “Hold your shit.”

  “Ked found the radio, man.”

  “Right,” Jackson said, walking backward out of the building. Chalmers could hear him dragging something.

  “What the shit, Jacks?” Chalmers asked as he saw the trunk his partner was dragging. Except, on second glance, it wasn’t a trunk at all. Covered in whinnie-hide, the thing looked like a treasure chest out of one of his old D&D books, five feet long by three feet high.

  “Check this shit out,” Jackson said, flipping the lid up.

  Chalmers whistled. “That ain’t right.” And it wasn’t.

  Nestled within the chest was a shipping crate full of what looked like anti-tank missiles. Five of them and the single-tube device that, judging from a button-studded box which extruded from one part, had to be the launcher.

  “Shit, man, those had to come from—”

  Another cheer, this one louder than those previous, erupted from the grounds. It was cut short by a collective gasp that left a silence as troubling as anything that had come before.

  “Thinking we should put it back, no?” Chalmers said, wondering what the villagers would make of them looting a dead man’s possessions.

  “I don’t think so. I figure we give the hetman a look at what his son was up to,” Jackson said, patting the lid.

  “And if they bought them?” Chalmers asked, looking hopefully at Ked.

  The warrior scratched at his sparse beard thoughtfully but ultimately shook his head. “Nothing the villagers have in trade is worth so much as these.”

  “And then there is the why. These are not so useful against men, but against machines,” Jackson mused.

  “But the J’Stull don’t come out to these parts—”

  “Not according to our friend Stabilo, anyway,” Chalmers said.

  The crowd noise had receded to a lower, steady volume.

  Ked sighed, the set of his shoulders easing.

  “What is it, Ked?”

  “My sister is victorious,” he said, pushing the radio into Chalmers’ hands.

  Chalmers blinked. “How do you know?”

  “They do not cheer for her as they would for their hetman. I go to see if she needs healing. I will return.”

  “Wait! Should we put this back?” Chalmers asked, gesturing toward the chest.

  A shrug. “I do not know. The hetman may be dead. We will find out in a few moments. His son is already dead, and so beyond caring if caught with it.”

  Chalmers stared after Kedlak. “Jacks,” he mumbled, “we are standing in broad-daylight holding two pieces of evidence that prove some local is a traitor.”

  “Yeah,” the sergeant agreed sourly, “which means we the only ones holding the bag that someone’s ready to kill over.”

  Chalmers spat. The mission just kept getting better and better.

  * * *

  SPINDOG ROHAB: MISSION DAY 048

  “Man, this mission just keeps getting better and better,” Jackson said, replacing the headset on the terminal.

  “What’s that?” Chalmers asked, mopping a sweaty brow with one end of his towel. The .75-gee maintained in the quarters of most SpinDog habs wasn’t enough to maintain real muscle tone, not on its own, so the afternoon workout he had just returned from had quickly become a habit. His body had likely been in the best shape it had been since AIT on his awakening, and it was easier to start from that high level of fitness than it had been at any time since his youth. He needed something to be easier, too. This changing his life for the better the second time around wasn’t exactly easy, so he figured making a habit of healthy practices was better than trying to play catch up later.

  “You see the latest mission brief?” Jackson asked, leaning back in his chair to avoid getting sweat dripped on him. The Coriolis effect made it hard to predict just where shit was gonna hit.

  “No. What happened?” Chalmers asked, his gut suddenly churning.

  “Murphy said we’re no longer going to be tasked with locating black market dealers and their suppliers, but uncovering spies in the local populace.”

  Nodding, Chalmers finished wiping down and, wadding the towel in one fist, chucked it into the reclaimer built into the wall of their quarters.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  Chalmers shrugged and skinned off his sweat-soaked shirt. “Nope. Murphy doesn’t know any better than us what we’re gonna see on the ground until…well, until we’re boots on the ground. I figure we could end up doing anything from carrying beans and bullets for the shooters to driving one of those goofy armored vehicles the local warlords tool around in. There’s just no way of knowing until we are down and doing it. Murphy’s Law screws with even the simplest plans, and this one has way too many ifs for comfortable planning.”

  “How are you so chill, man? No offense, but your ass wasn’t exactly known for coolness…”

  Chalmers smiled. “I figure I got a second chance at doing this right. Being…better, I guess? Life being life, that don’t mean the chance doesn’t have a heavy price tag attached, but I’d rather get it right, you know? For me.”

  Jackson smiled. “You got all wise and shit, Chalmers.”

  “I’m trying, Jacks. I’m trying.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5 – Cut Me a Slice

  CLARTHU: MISSION DAY 052

  “I’m trying to something from your point of view, but I just can’t seem to give a something begroag shit, Ked,” Kenla said, a toss of her head making several of the tiny bones in her dreadlocks click against one another. Kenla’s right arm was in a sling and there was a bandage around her midriff, but the bandage showed surprisingly little blood, especially since the trousers she wore still glistened with the stuff down to her knees. A third wrapping covered the place where her neck joined her shoulder.

  “You overcame and survived, did you not?” Ked asked, sounding defensive and, from the flushed reddening of his ears, knowing it.

  “
No thanks to your medicine! I had to be treated by the village healer, here,” she gestured with her unbound arm at one of the women walking behind her. The hetman was being carried into his home, and the healer’s progress was slowed by the bearers and their charge as they negotiated the entrance. “They showed honor, though, treating me before their own.”

  “Is he alive?” Chalmers asked.

  More clicking of bones followed as she shrugged. “He was when he fell at my feet, though just barely. I cut him many times, but he is tough as old leather,” Kenla opined.

  Deadlier than the male. The quote crossed his mind before Chalmers could remember where he’d heard it.

  “He will live,” the village healer said. “I have given him the patheos-pak, and his natural endurance will replenish his blood within a day or two.”

  “The what?” Chalmers asked, but the healer ducked into the entrance, and Ked and his sister had their heads together, speaking quietly.

  Amazingly, the rest of the villagers seemed uninterested in the chest Jackson had dragged from the dead man’s home. Chalmers had been watching. No one seemed to take any undue notice or care.

  He’d hid the radio in his pack, so there remained three possibilities: one, the collaborator responsible for the transmissions was smooth enough to avoid gawking; two, the collaborator who had the radio had not been responsible for the weapons as well; or three, the collaborator and man killed by Kenla were one and the same.

  “You see anything?” the warrant officer asked Jackson, in English.

  “No. You?”

  Chalmers shook his head. He considered a moment, then added, “We’ll have to watch tonight, then. I can’t see this going unreported to whoever provided those missiles.”

  Jackson nodded. When the siblings had finished their quiet conference, he repeated the plan in the local dialect. The more of it they heard and spoke, the more they realized it had a lot less Ktoran in it than what the SpinDogs spoke.