by Lyn Gala
When Tyce didn’t say more, John’s eyebrows went up.
“It’s a promise that my soul will return to Ribelo in my next lifetime. It reassures Ama and the others that I will act with Ribelo’s best interests at heart because I’ve committed to coming back to the planet.”
“I thought all good little Ribelians wanted to improve the whole universe.”
Tyce shrugged. “Theoretically they do, but good people like Ama also run around telling everyone how their enlightenment is flawed because they want Ribelo free and thriving. And then you have people like Tuch who don’t even pretend to want enlightenment; they want to be left alone to make a living.”
“Tuch?”
“Head engineer. He’s still down with the shuttles.”
John was silent for a time, his gaze focused on Tyce’s arm and the part of his mark that was visible below his sleeve. “Did they make you get that to prove your loyalty?”
“It’s not that simple.” If John knew the whole truth, he would go down the hall and punch Ama in the face. “I had to earn the mark. I had to prove that I understood Ribelian beliefs, and I had to react in ways that showed I was on the path of enlightenment.” And he had to do it while under terrible pain, but Tyce didn’t plan to share that.
John’s expression twisted. “So they consider that mark proof that you’re morally superior?” he demanded incredulously.
Tyce knew exactly what John was thinking about—all those damn suicide bombers. “On the path to enlightenment and willing to commit murder are not mutually exclusive.”
“They should be.”
“Yep, and feel free to argue that point with Ama, only maybe don’t mention the mark.” Tyce traced the edge of his computer with one finger. If John started that argument, the fireworks would be enough to drive the Imshee away. She might criticize other Ribelians in private, but if a Command officer questioned her religion, she would not take prisoners. And that might be literal.
John caught Tyce’s hand in his. “I wouldn’t put you in that position.” He let go and fled before Tyce could engage his brain to respond.
Chapter Twenty-Six
YOSS DROPPED A PRE-made meal package in front of him. “Ama’s looking for a fight.”
Tyce pushed his computer to one side. “Why?”
“Something about a lack of enlightenment.” He pulled a reinforced crate over to the desk and sat.
Tyce could only imagine what she thought about John’s crew. Now that Tyce was getting reports back from the quick-strike teams, he questioned their enlightenment himself. Either that or they had reached such a profound level that they no longer cared about mundane issues like life and death. That could explain their lack of self-preservation. “Don’t let her kill anyone.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Yoss said as he opened Tyce’s meal and stole a protein chip. “To protect you.”
Tyce slapped Yoss’s hand away from the food. “I... what?”
“You. Ama. Lack of enlightenment,” Yoss said with far too much amusement.
“Yeah, I got that. I’m wondering why. I haven’t done anything lately.”
Yoss shrugged. “She said you’re supposed to be working with your Command buddy, not hiding.”
“I’m reviewing reports.” Tyce let some of his aggravation show. However, Yoss had never been impressed by Tyce’s moods. He grinned wider. Tyce shook his head because there wasn’t anything else he could do. “You’re impossible.”
“Get my report?” Yoss stole another chip, and Tyce pulled the package closer before Yoss ate the whole meal.
“Yes, and you’re an idiot.” Reading about Yoss’s antics gave Tyce heartburn.
“You rode the thing.” Yoss shrugged. Maybe he expected some sort of praise for being insane. Either that or he had missed his chance to die in the war and now he wanted someone to send him to his late wife. That was possible. Ribelians. Psychiatrists could make a fortune if they could figure out how to cure that brand of crazy.
“First, that worked because the Imshee was too surprised to react. Second, I only did it as a last ditch effort to avoid death.”
“I didn’t die.” Yoss gave him a smug smile.
“You could have.” While the Command soldier paired with Yoss had used the most neutral language in the history of report writing, Tyce could still read between the lines. Yoss had only escaped because there was an elevator shaft nearby. He’d thrown himself down it, and the deflated balloon at the bottom had enough air to break the fall. It had been a stupid move, and Yoss was not normally stupid.
“You’re the one that disappointed Ama,” Yoss said. He clearly considered that the larger sin. “So, any new feelings from the ship?”
Tyce chewed on a carb chip from the meal package before answering. “Just a general feeling of creeping anxiety, and that’s all me.”
“Are you sure?” Yoss leaned back and propped a boot on the edge of the desk.
“About the other shoe dropping? Yeah, I’m sure.”
Yoss snorted. “You never feel anxious going into action. You worry about the kids and do dumb shit to protect them, but you get too focused on the mission to think about your safety or mine.” Yoss hesitated before adding, “It’s one of your best qualities.”
Tyce shook his head. “Why is Ama upset about me reading reports?”
“She said John is love broke.” Yoss wiggled his eyebrows and then threw in a truly obscene tongue gesture. “I’ve gotta admit, I can’t come up with another reason for him to throw a fit about you switching sides.”
“Because we were best friends,” Tyce said. Not all deeply felt relationships were sexual. Then again, when Ama talked about love sick, she probably didn’t mean to imply sex. The crude gestures were all Yoss.
“I would never shit on my own life for a friend, and it seems like most of those Command soldiers had heard stories about how John had questionable loyalty and was only around so the Commander could pick his brain about your motives and tactics.”
If Yoss kept poking Tyce’s guilt, Tyce would end up in therapy. He’d never asked John to damage his own life that way. “His choice,” Tyce said sharply. For most Ribelians, that would have ended the argument. People had every right to choose, even when the choice appeared wildly illogical.
Yoss ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “Sure,” he said. When Tyce looked, he added another kind of tongue gesture.
“You are impossible.”
“Yep,” Yoss agreed cheerfully. “So, how bad is this anxiety of yours?”
“How bad is your anxiety?” Tyce countered.
Yoss shrugged. “I figure most of us will die, maybe all of us, but if it can’t be avoided, no need to worry about it.” That was such a Yoss thing to say that Tyce shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. It didn’t matter how long he lived with Ribelians, there would always be a layer of pessimistic nihilism that he could not emotionally comprehend.
“You thought we would die trying to board the ship, and here we are.”
“Does that mean you’ve come up with a stupid plan?”
“Stupid implies they don’t work. They usually do.”
That made Yoss hesitate. He frowned and leaned forward. “That’s what’s stupid. You don’t act like any Command officer I’ve ever gone up against, and every plan seems like it shouldn’t work, but then...” he shrugged. “So, have you come up with a plan yet?”
Tyce poked his computer angrily. “No. It would help if we had a ship so we could launch an attack or a distraction, or even make a run for it, but I don’t know enough about these Imshee to figure out how to beat them in ship-side fighting.” At best they were annoying the aliens, and Tyce had a small hope that annoyed Imshee might decide to go somewhere else, but they seemed to want the ship. While Tyce was distracted with his work, Yoss tried to steal a carb chip, the only part of the ready meal that was edible. Tyce slapped his hand away, but Yoss got a devilish expression and tried again. Tyce defended his meal with
one arm and tried to slap Yoss with the other.
The bark of Command guns interrupted their fight. Yoss looked at Tyce for a fraction of a second, and then took off at a dead run. Tyce grabbed his weapon off the desk and ran after him. He silently cursed the incompetence of the Command soldiers. No one had called in a single warning or reported the direction of the attack. Or if they had, they’d used a private channel, leaving the Dragon crew out.
In the hallway, Soldiers spilled out of rooms on either side and milled in confusion. Weapons’ fire came from the left, and Yoss shouldered people aside as he waded through the crowd, his weapon held up. Tyce followed in the gap left by his wake. Some of the soldiers hadn’t even grabbed their weapons, but more experienced crew, including those from the Dragon, were guiding those back into rooms. They were so incredibly screwed.
Tyce spotted John near the engineering room. “What’s going on?”
John glanced back into the engineering room, but apparently no one in there had information. John shrugged and said, “I have no idea.”
“None of your guys called it in?”
“If our people didn’t report trouble to everyone, Ama would have their hides.”
Since John didn’t have information, Tyce hurried after Yoss. He flipped his radio on. “Ama, where are you?” There was no answer, but then Tyce hadn’t expected one. She never trusted radios, and that position had some merit since Command regularly deployed signal grabbers. If the Imshee were smart, they’d do the same.
As they got closer to the fight, the quality of soldier appeared to improve. These guys had weapons at the ready and they had the heavier ordnance. However, they clustered too close together to effectively counter an energy pulse weapon and several kept the breast clip on their gun. That would keep them from dropping it, but if they fell, it increased the likelihood of random fire taking out their own. These were not people who had ever fought ship to ship. The Dragon staff fared better. They were all positioned near doorways and several waved off other soldiers who wanted to stand too close.
Even young Ralie, who was prone to panic in high-stress situations was on one knee, his weapon pointed in the general direction of the fight. Tyce touched his shoulder on the way past.
An explosion blasted the air and made the floor vibrate. Someone had blown the perimeter.
Tyce broke into a run, shoving soldiers aside when they stood dumbfounded in the middle of the corridor. “Make a hole!” John yelled. Surprisingly, the undisciplined and scared soldiers immediately moved to the walls. If an Imshee came through, they were going to be cannon fodder, and Tyce was a horrible human being because he hoped that made it possible for more Dragon crew to survive.
They passed the engineering room, and several Command crew were in defensive position, along with Phemos and Barr from the Dragon. Half the damn bridge crew was up here, which made Tyce wonder who had stayed with the shuttles. Tuch liked to complain about how others led, but he was allergic to making leadership decisions on his own.
John stopped near a young woman who was holding an assault weapon down at her side. “Give me your weapon.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed and trembling. He reached out and gently took it from her before handing her his own, much smaller, weapon. “That handgun isn’t appropriate for a frontline assault. Head back to engineering and protect the engineers.”
“Yes, sir.” She fled.
“They gave you babies,” Tyce said softly, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. Children on the Dragon knew how to handle a weapon better than some of John’s soldiers.
John nodded wearily. “I know.”
Most of the soldiers in this part of the hall looked competent, at least, and several Dragon crew members held positions alongside John’s people. John pushed through slowly. They were getting close to the action now and the whine of alien weaponry and the competing sounds of Command and Ribelian weapons made an uneasy cacophony.
Tyce spotted Mond. “Who’s guarding our rear?”
“Ama took a group that way. She suspected this might be a distraction.” She might talk about him having superior tactics, but ninety-eight percent of the time, she was equally good.
John stepped forward, and a Command soldier put a hand out. “Sirs, it’s too dangerous.” He gave first John and then Tyce a sharp look.
“We need to see what’s going on,” Tyce said firmly. He couldn’t devise any reasonable strategy if he didn’t have information on the enemy.
The soldier didn’t budge, even when another round of gunfire echoed down the corridor. Someone needed backup, but the design of these damn curved corridors made it impossible to see who was winning. “I’ll see if anyone has a camera or we’ll get a camera up there. Head back to engineering.”
“I’ll be fine,” Tyce said. Command rules precluded a ranking officer from entering direct combat, but he wasn’t Command and he wasn’t the ranking officer. He went to push past the soldier.
The man stepped right into Tyce’s path. “Sir, you are absolutely not going any farther. I don’t have time to defend this position and argue with you, so I suggest you take yourself back to engineering. I will get you a camera view.”
Mond added, “I’m with McLeod. You need to go figure out how to kill these bastards, and you can’t do that with your brains splattered against the wall.
“Tyce,” John said quietly, “They’re right.” A new burst of gunfire cracked through the air, much closer this time. “Get us the camera view as soon as possible.” John pulled on Tyce’s arm.
“I’m not Command. I don’t have to follow stupid rules,” Tyce said, but he knew he’d already lost. John pulled on him again. He hated leaving his people, but his aim wasn’t so good that he was vital on the fighting line, and without information, he couldn’t give any advice. Even though he felt like a coward for doing it, he turned and ran for engineering. The sooner he got to a secured receiver and reviewed the video footage, the greater the likelihood of killing these bastards.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ONE OF THE SIX CAMERAS bobbled as the soldier wearing it stumbled. He fell backward, and the camera angle picked up a view of another soldier’s nostrils as she dragged the wounded man to safety. In seconds, she had grabbed the camera and snapped it into place on her vest before she rejoined the line. The Imshee they were firing at had barely even twitched. Tyce jotted a note on a slip of paper and pushed it toward John.
“How does the situation look?” Ama asked.
Tyce spared Ama a glance before turning back to the monitors. John answered her. “We’re barely holding, and we’ve lost too damn many people.”
“We killed two at our position,” Ama said. While true, both had required point-blank shots to those huge eyes, and both times the Imshee had taken their executioners out with them. The first Imshee struck Tyce as uncoordinated, and yet these new Imshee struck out with those sharp claws, even when they were dying.
Tyce couldn’t figure out why these Imshee were so much more aggressive. They lacked most of the mangy hair, and they were smaller. Tyce suspected the Imshee were now throwing immature fighters into the breach, a tactic that spoke of either desperation or an utter lack of paternal instinct. Maybe both.
“The main corridor killed one, but they can’t hold. They keep retreating.” They had been forced to leave their wounded and dead so that when the Imshee moved forward, their people were lost behind the enemy line. Tyce had seen Yoss fall and the Imshee walk over his body. He could only pray that Yoss was alive and the fight was keeping the Imshee too busy to check their kills.
“What are you doing?” Ama asked as she walked along the wall, touching a few slips of paper here and there. They were stuck to the wall in clusters, each with Tyce’s blocky handwriting.
“Helping Tyce with his research.”
Her laugh was dark and forced. “My ship never had to scavenge for paper before he joined us. Have you spotted any patterns yet?”
“Nothing useful.”
And that was the main reason Tyce was happy to let John deliver the news. Tyce was a giant coward who didn’t want to admit the truth: all his observations and all the deaths meant nothing. He had no revelations, no crazy plan, nothing to save them.
The video monitors weren’t showing anything new or unusual, so Tyce pushed away from the display. Despite having all the wounded, the engineers and the medical people crowded into the room along with the most immature of the fighters, the noise in the room never rose above a murmur. Tyce kept his own voice low enough that only John and Ama would hear him. “Yoss fell.”
Ama closed her eyes for a second, and then nodded slowly. “I will pray that his soul finds its rightful place in the universe.”
Rage washed through Tyce so strongly that he had to grip the edge of the table. He wanted to scream about the unfairness of it all. He wanted to demand she explain how her precious universal balance could allow such senseless death. He wanted her to make some promise that it would all work out. John rested a hand on Tyce’s shoulder. “These new Imshee don’t act like the first few we encountered.” His tone was almost apologetic, as if he regretted forcing Tyce to discount the loss of his friend.
Tyce got it. They had to focus on the task. He curled his fingers around John’s wrist and took several deep breaths. The whole time Ama had concern in her eyes.
“They’re smaller,” Tyce said, “so either they are immature, the equivalent of human teenagers, or they’re like Rownt where adults with less status are smaller. Either way, they seem to be throwing less experienced individuals at the line.”
“So they understand cannon fodder,” Ama said disapprovingly. Ribelians had many moral failings, but they did have an almost universal disgust toward the idea of putting inexperienced and often unwilling young people on the fighting line. “I have faith in you and your paper to solve this,” she said.
