The Eve of War

by Christopher Hopper

  She felt the cylinder in her hand. He’d given it to her. He’d told her to… what? She couldn’t remember. Something important.

  Awen suddenly felt sad. Her mission had failed—after six years of training, her first representation for the Luma had ended in ruins. Maybe her father had been right after all when he’d said, “Stop chasing the stars, Awen.”

  So, this is what the void feels like, she concluded, pushing the tears from her eyes with her palms. Maybe… maybe this had been a mistake. Her thoughts moved back to Elonia, to the comfort of her house and her own bed. She wanted to slide into the dust and take a nap. Just a little sleep; that was all. Then she’d be able to run some more.

  “SPLICK!” Magnus shouted. Awen looked up and saw him turn to face three Jujari stalking down the alley on all fours.

  • • •

  Magnus watched as the three warriors stood up on their hind legs and drew their swords. The good news was that there weren’t four. The bad news was that he highly doubted he’d be able to beat three at once without his primary weapon—he didn’t want his MAR30’s report attracting any more contact. He lowered its output, deployed the spring-loaded bayonet below the muzzle, and pulled his serrated combat blade from behind his chest plate.

  “Awen,” Magnus yelled, “I want you to run.”

  “What?”

  “RUN!”

  The Jujari charged. The narrow alley kept them grouped together, which Magnus used to his advantage. He fired three low-energy rounds, each bolt slamming a target in the chest. The charge wasn’t enough to kill them, but it went a long way in disorienting the targets and giving him enough time to strike first.

  He ran forward and jabbed the first confused Jujari under the chin with his bayonet. The blade plunged through the jaw’s soft flesh and into the roof of the mouth. The warrior gave out a muffled howl, the air from his lungs forcing spurts of blood between clenched teeth. The Jujari batted at the weapon, snapping off the blade, and sent Magnus to the ground with his MAR30 still in hand.

  The second Jujari blinked at the first, his hackles rising at the sight of his brother’s spilt blood. He looked at Magnus and raised his sword, sidestepping the first warrior. Magnus rolled away from the blade’s sweep and then used his knife to cut at the warrior’s rear tendon above the hock. He heard a faint snap as the sinew gave way, and the Jujari toppled over, cackling.

  Magnus didn’t have time to terminate either of the first two assailants as the third bounded over them and dove at him. The Marine brought his MAR30 up and swung it like a club, the butt meeting the Jujari on the side of the head. The action, however, did little to faze the warrior. He snapped at Magnus, jaws clamping down on his shoulder like a vise. Pressed into the dirt, Magnus felt teeth pierce his armor and slide into his flesh. He yelled and thrust his knife between the creature’s ribs.

  The other two Jujari joined in, despite their injuries, and fought to grab ahold of Magnus. He was going to have to use his rifle, but he knew the sound would mean summoning more warriors than he could handle. Frankly, he was surprised that more hadn’t found them already. A claw scratched at his thigh and punctured one of his reclamation bladders. Another mouth full of teeth snapped at his boot, paws threatening to shred his armor from his leg.

  At that moment, each assailant’s head snapped back with a small burst of blood, and before Magnus realized what had happened, the fight was over. He crab walked out from under the carcasses and scrambled to his feet, MAR30 and duradex knife still in hand. He spun around to see Awen, bound and unconscious, held between two men clad in a patchwork of armor. A third and fourth man stood closer to Magnus and leveled blasters at him.

  “Don’t do it,” one man said to him from under an old Repub helmet that was missing the visor.

  Magnus only needed to raise his MAR30’s muzzle half a meter to draw a bead on him. But based on the assailant’s posture, he suspected he wouldn’t win the standoff. Still, he concluded, he had to try. They had Awen, after all. And Midnight Hunters never went down without a fight. Never.

  Here goes nothing.

  Chapter 8

  Piper held her mother’s and father’s hands as they were escorted to the front of a security checkpoint. She felt people watching from the long lines, casting menacing looks at her. But I’ve done nothing to hurt them, she thought. Still, their hard faces made her feel embarrassed. Even the air felt angry at her, filled with murmuring.

  “Right this way, Senator.” An armed security liaison led Darin into a narrow black-glassed corridor.

  Piper looked between the panes of glass, wondering who watched from behind them. But she had nothing to hide. She stepped into the hall and walked with her chest out, Valerie two steps behind her. Piper wore her extra-puffy coat, a sweater, leggings, and oversized winter boots. Jammed inside her coat was Talisman, her stuffed corgachirp, and in her backpack were her holo-pad, an overnight kit her mother had prepared, and some snacks. “Everything else,” her parents had said, “is packed and will be waiting for us on Avolo Four.”

  Which means what? she wondered as she exited the hall. It means we’re moving.

  Her mind had been racing all morning, thinking of all the things a normal nine-year-old should be doing in this situation: hugging her friends, writing goodbye cards, having one more sleepover, saying thank you to teachers. But none of it was going to happen. The kids of other families who’d move away got to do those things—military families, defense contractors, star system representatives. But Piper had barely been given the time to brush her teeth before leaving for the spaceport!

  “Watch your step, sir,” the lead liaison said. “Watch your step, miss.” The uniformed man took her hand and helped her on board a hover skiff. Piper looked around. No one else in the terminal had one of these. Even the transport shuttle that had picked them up from their apartment had been fancy. That was because her daddy was important. And he was on an important mission. But what, exactly, she had no idea.

  People stepped back as the driver pulsed the klaxon button; Piper wanted to try pushing it, but she knew someone would yell at her. She reached for the button anyway. Her long press startled the driver. He glanced down and followed Piper’s hand to her face, and she smiled at him.

  “Piper!” Valerie yelled, pulling her back into her seat, but Piper caught the faintest hint of a smile on her mother’s face.

  The skiff turned from the main terminal and diverted into a smaller corridor. Piper looked behind them to see the tiers of the big blast doors contract like an iris. “Where are we going?”

  “A starship,” Valerie said through a tight smile, having fielded this question a hundred times already. “We’re heading to a starship.”

  “Is it a big one?”

  Valerie puffed her cheeks and looked at Darin, who just grinned. “You’ll see.”

  “Dad,” she said, drawing out the word. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “You’ll see!”

  The skiff passed by a series of long rectangular windows that looked out on a massive launchpad. It was the size of a small city. There, serviced by what must have been thousands of busy ant vehicles and even smaller ant people, sat at least ten, maybe twenty, dark-gray starships. Their slender shapes and sweeping blue accent lines terminated in V-tailed fins and big engine cones. Each ship seemed like it was on a hospital bed connected to pipes and metal arms and bundles of string.

  “Is it one of those, Daddy?”

  “You’ll see!” Darin said, laughing.

  By the time the skiff stopped, Piper had pulled Talisman from her coat and was showing him everything she saw, especially the big ships. The liaisons escorted the family into a private waiting room with a large window that looked down on a single vessel. Piper ran to the window and read the name printed in white letters near the ship’s cockpit windows. “Destiny’s Carriage,” she said softly. Her mind went to one of the many old stories she loved, back when speeders had wheels and were pulled by animals. “Is that ours
, Daddy?”

  “That’s the one we’re taking, yes, sweetheart,” Darin replied. Piper felt him stroke the top of her head. His hands were big and warm.

  “It’s smaller than the others,” she said.

  “And faster,” he added.

  “But why smaller?”

  “Because we’ll be the only ones on it.”

  “The only ones?”

  “That’s right.” Darin squatted beside her, looking out the window. “Just you, your mom, me, and the flight crew.”

  Piper wrinkled her brow. “But what about all those other people we saw?”

  “They’ll get on their own ships.”

  “Any of them going to where we’re going?”

  “Not that I know of, Pinky,” he said, using her favorite color as a pet name. “They’ll still find their way to wherever it is they’re going.” But for some reason, Piper didn’t think her dad was convinced of that.

  • • •

  The bridge of the Black Labyrinth was spacious, spartan, and dimly lit. Officers sat at their terminals and performed systems checks, incoming data dumps, and resource-allocation movement. The hum of the ship’s drive core became like a security blanket for the crew: were it ever to go silent, they would know the end was near. Barely audible above it were the incessant finger taps and hushed whispers of techs and the subtle whoosh of air venting.

  The room looked out upon the remainder of the ship, an impossibly wide and imposing Goliath-class super dreadnought. The admiral stood alone at the observation window, hands pressed against the floor-to-ceiling glass. The crew noted that he hadn’t moved in almost thirty minutes; some even took bets on whether he was sleeping. It wasn’t until the executive officer summoned him that the lone figure twitched.

  “Admiral Kane, I think we have something,” the XO said.

  “Actionable?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe so. It’s video captured from the negotiation meeting.”

  The figure at the window lowered his arms and turned. His bald head was dimpled with scar tissue, and he had one pale pink eye, the other a shade of brown so deep it appeared black. He wore an officer’s dress uniform, black from neck to toe but devoid of rank and insignias. Aside from his pale eye, the man’s only other outstanding feature was a gold ring, capped with a red stone, on his right pinky.

  “Let’s have it,” he said, stopping in the middle of the bridge.

  “Sir,” acknowledged the XO.

  A holo-projection hovered in front of the admiral, displaying a camera feed from inside the mwadim’s pack tent. The view moved subtly from right to left, positioned about ten meters above and to the rear of the room. A woman approached the mwadim, then a Jujari alpha moved to intercept a portly Republic official, presumably the ambassador. Right then, bright light oversaturated the camera, returning a second later to the developing aftermath of an explosion. The admiral’s eyes darted around the image. He raised his hands and started to manipulate the recorded view, shifting it to see better. A second explosion lit the room.

  “Sir, if you’ll look—”

  “I see it,” the admiral interrupted, using his hands to zoom all the way to the dais. Amongst several other bodies, the mwadim lay at the back of the alcove along with a woman. The admiral rotated his hand, and the camera spun in to look down on the pair of bodies, the giant hyena dwarfing the woman at least five to one. He noticed an exchange between them, their hands meeting in the chaos.

  “I want to know who she is and where she is,” the admiral said. “Nothing else matters.”

  “But, sir, what about the fleet?”

  The admiral froze the image and centered on the woman’s face. “The fleet,” he spat, “will do what the fleet has been ordered to do. She is all that matters now. Find her.”

  Chapter 9

  When Awen came to, her eyelids felt like they weighed a hundred kilos each. Her sheer force of will finally got them to open wide enough for her to see blurry shapes moving in the distance. She felt like a thick blanket had been stuffed inside her head, slowing her ability to remember… to remember what?

  She blinked. The shapes turned into lines, and the lines turned into bars, and the bars turned into trees. Where am I? She tried to raise her head, but the attempt brought on a wave of vertigo. What’s happening to me?

  She tried reaching out to the world around her, feeling with her hands, stretching with her legs. But her limbs weren’t responding to her instructions. So she leaned toward the Unity of all things, willing her soul to move beyond the bounds of her… of my what? She was having trouble seeing herself—or seeing anything. It was as if her entire existence was wrapped in a shroud… like the fabric walls of Oosafar.

  Oosafar. The mwadim!

  Awen’s heartbeat quickened. There’d been an explosion. Then falling. She pictured running through alleyways and dodging heads. No, not heads, she thought, laughing to herself. Containers. There was more running, and then… the Jujari found us. No. She tried to shake her head. That’s not right. Jujari attacked us; someone else found us. They had weapons and candy and then…

  And then what? But she felt too giddy to keep trying to sort things out, as if all of those jumbled-up memories were funny and she could start laughing at any moment. Maybe she was laughing already.

  Her body felt light as if she were floating on a cloud. Clouds, she thought. Clouds made her happy, and happiness made her want to fall back asleep.

  She heard her name being whispered by a chipmunk. Not a chipmunk, she corrected. A monkey face. A naked monkey face, or maybe a naked monkey butt. Like baboons have. So disgusting. And that made her laugh even more because the disembodied thing was talking to her.

  “Hi, naked monkey butt,” she replied. “What’s your name?”

  • • •

  Magnus swung from a metal beam with his hands bound above his head, his feet half a meter from a concrete floor. He blinked himself fully awake to see his helmet on the ground. While his armor had taken the brunt of being strung up, his body still ached. His shoulder was on fire, and he noticed bite marks in his armor, claw marks on his thigh, and more punctures on his foot. Dried blood caked the plating. His lips tingled… from being stunned. He suddenly remembered the alley and the four men. He looked up and searched the room to find Awen hanging two meters away on the same beam. She was mumbling something, her head drooped.

  “Awen!” Magnus said.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Awen, can you hear me?”

  Her head swayed a little, and then her eyes met his—sort of. She blinked a lot then said, “Hi, naked monkey butt.”

  “Uh, what?” Magnus replied, eyebrows raised.

  “You’re attractive for a monkey butt.”

  “Awen. Awen, listen, I think you’ve been drugged.”

  They must have known she was a Luma. They were suppressing her, and that meant the enemy was informed. Her last feat of magic, saving them from the falling concrete block, must have been draining, and that was what let the enemy get the drop on her. The upside was that she probably wasn’t in any pain. He knew she had to have plenty of injuries.

  “Okay, NMB,” Awen replied.

  “NMB?”

  “I’m making acronyms,” she said with a giggle. “You know, for your name. All you military guys love your acronyms.”

  Magnus couldn’t help but chuckle, despite the circumstances. She did have a point.

  “Listen, Awen. We need to get you out of here.” Magnus searched the rest of the room. They were in an unfurnished cell with a single barred gate, no windows. Sheet metal made up the walls, and the air smelled like grease. The only light came from work lights in what looked to be a big warehouse on the other side of the bars. There he saw his MAR30, his MZ25, his duradex knife, and his two remaining grenades sitting on a table.

  “I don’t understand, though,” Awen said with a slur.

  “Understand what?” Magnus worked at the chains around his wrists.

  “How
’s an NMB going to get us outta here, anyway? You’re just a butt.”

  Magnus rolled his eyes. “Remind me never to take you out drinking with the boys.”

  “You got it.”

  Just then, a male voice spoke in a whiny soprano from somewhere in the warehouse. “Look who’s awake.”

  “Yum-yum,” another voice said, this one low.

  “Somebody get the boss,” the first one said.

  Magnus saw silhouettes move in front of the work lights as a few figures approached the cell. They unlocked the door and swung it open on squeaky hinges.

  Four figures entered the room, each wearing leather, fabric, and mismatched armor plates from any number of star systems—just like the men from the alley. Only these weren’t warriors.

  “Careful, now,” the squeaky-voiced male said. “Don’t get too close to that one. He’s gonna be a fighter.” Magnus decided to call him Weasel, thinking that two could play Awen’s nonsensical game. “But this one here”—Weasel turned to Awen—“is going to fight in different ways.” He removed a knife and scraped the edge along his stubble.

  “Look!” Awen gasped in delight. “More butts!”

  “What’d she call us?” the low-voiced captor said, his armor unable to cover his bulbous midsection. Magnus pictured a talking turtle head poking out of a geometric shell. And I’ll name you Turtle. He chuckled to himself.

  “How should I know what she called us?” Weasel replied. “She’s piped up on drip, idiot.” He pointed the knife at Awen. “Now, let’s see if she wants to play.”

  “I really wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Magnus said.

  Weasel turned, noticeably uneasy with the way Magnus stared at him.

  “Or what?” Weasel said, stepping toward Magnus.

  That’s right, Magnus coaxed him, stay focused on me. Any movement away from Awen was all he wanted until he had time to formulate more effective goals.

  “Or I’m going to adjust the composition of your face forcefully. Most will think it’s an improvement.”