Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  “Head hurts . . .”

  Slowly Hanna became aware of movement around them. Kwoort had gotten his breath back and he struggled to his feet, calling for Warrior Woke. The Warrior came up to him; she held the satchel Kwoort had carried everywhere. Kakrekt had backed away a little from the four of them. There was a weapon in her hand, but she was not aiming it.

  “Shuttle,” Gabriel said. It was still hard for him to speak.

  Hanna looked up into the low clouds, but no shape darkened them. “It’s not here,” she said.

  “Tell them. Get back.”

  “Holy One,” she said. “Kakrekt Commander. You should move away from this area. An aircraft will be here momentarily to remove us.”

  Kwoort snarled, “If I had known that I would have brought an army. I would have brought missiles.”

  Hanna opened her mouth to start the We mean you no harm speech. Closed it. She was tired of saying it and it wouldn’t do any good.

  Kwoort started toward them, stumbling. Kakrekt moved forward swiftly and tripped him, and he fell again. There was a constriction in Hanna’s throat and she recognized it as pity. It was the last thing she had ever expected to feel for Kwoort.

  Kakrekt was plainly in charge. Hanna said softly, “What are you going to do now?”

  Kakrekt’s mouth moved. It might have been the beginning of a smile, but it was gone at once. She turned, lifting the weapon, and it hissed. What? Hanna thought, because nothing happened for a second, and then Woke went down all at once and without a sound. There was no blood, no charring, nothing.

  Colloidal disruptor, Hanna thought, but the thought was automatic. No more complex thought occurred. She was not capable of complex thought.

  Gabriel said to Kakrekt, his voice faint but calm, “Why did you do that? What did this Warrior do to you?”

  “She did nothing. She was only present. Now there will be no living witness to carry the facts back to Wektt.”

  “Witness to what? Do you mean to kill us too?”

  “Not you,” Kakrekt said. Her eyes—all four open wide—turned to Kwoort. “I could not do this openly. But if there is no witness, I do not have to wait any longer. When I am asked why the Holy Man did not come back, I can say anything.”

  Kwoort got up. His eyes were all open too, as if he meant to remember this episode well—as if he thought he would live to remember it. The smile Kakrekt had not produced pushed out from his face, and his ears lifted and waved. Laughter.

  “You see incongruity, old Soldier?” said Kakrekt.

  “Old Warrior, how much do you forget?”

  “I forget nothing,” said Kakrekt.

  “Never? You do not say ‘Why did you attack that point?’ and hear ‘It was your order’? You do not make notes to yourself of this and that because you find, more and more often, that if you do not write things down, you might forget?”

  “Nothing of the kind has happened,” said Kakrekt.

  “I do not believe you,” Kwoort said. “I think you lie. I am sure that you do. But perhaps you have not yet come to the next passage—you have not begun to forget that you forget. Do you think you are different? Do you think you will not one day desire the final madness—one day when you know you have forgotten nearly everything and worse, the day when you want only to forget what you still know—do you think you will not want to cease to survive? Wanting to know the past will only hasten that day because you will see—”

  He took a step toward Kakrekt and she shifted the weapon. He began to talk again, his voice getting louder and louder. “You will see that it is no use, nothing is any use! Soldiers will breed and breed and if we do not encourage death they will find the Great Weapon again in the end and all will die! It nearly happened in my lifetime, I saw the summer when it happened, I saw the end of it—I am sure you did too, I am sure you lived then! Do you not know it will be your duty, it has been my duty, to send Soldiers to their deaths in multitudes to prevent it happening again!” He screamed now: “We all come to this point! All the Holy Men! We forget, we see we must force others to forget, we must tell them God demands that they forget, because breeding allows no change, it is how we are made, and it is too bitter to live with this knowledge—that we leave nothing lasting after us, only the same death over and over! I have not forgotten quickly enough! Kill me! I order you, my last order! Kill me!”

  And Kakrekt, her hand now shaking, lifted the weapon and it hissed once more.

  • • •

  If only he had died at once, Hanna thought later, over and over.

  He seemed to stretch, arms flung high, reaching interminably toward cloud, and he swayed, bending now forward and now back as if his bones had dissolved to liquid, head lolling, feet rooted in the mud, but all his eyes were open and looked everywhere. She felt Gabriel’s hand behind her head, urging her face to his chest, an instinctive gesture of one used to protecting children, but she resisted, even though she had seen enough horrors, as if she owed it to Kwoort to bear witness to the end of a millennium of life. So she saw Kwoort take two last staggering steps, convulsing, arms still flailing; then she did turn to Gabriel and close her eyes, but she heard the monumental crash, surely louder than a single Soldier’s fall should sound. She heard someone moaning. She did not understand until later that she had heard herself.

  Crushed in Gabriel’s embrace she did not hear, either, the faint sound that made him tense and shift, looking upward; but she finally opened her eyes and looked up too, following Gabriel’s attention, and saw the shadow that broke through the clouds: Endeavor’s shuttle at last.

  She heard Gabriel say to Kakrekt, “I would put that away if I were you”—he nodded toward the weapon, and Kakrekt made it vanish.

  And now they will not have to go away, Kakrekt thought.

  Hanna whispered, “Oh, my God”—she had heard the thought.

  The shuttle eased onto the plateau and wordlessly they began to climb upward again, holding tight to each other. They did not say anything to Kakrekt. She had not moved and did not speak either. They had made little progress when two figures appeared above them. “Keep going. Board the shuttle,” one said; they were machines, many-armed servos, and they started down the steep incline, surefooted, and passed them without stopping or speaking again.

  “What—?” said Gabriel, starting to turn around and almost falling; Hanna saw blankly that he had picked up Kwoort’s satchel without her noticing, and the weight, however slight, affected what was left of his balance.

  “I don’t care. Come on,” Hanna said. Another difficult step, and another: she had never been so glad for the Polity’s rescue. “Come on!” she said. But Gabriel stayed where he was and she felt—felt, yes!—his uncertainty on the steep slope, and finally she turned around too and saw the servos’ purpose. They went to the bodies of Kwoort and Woke Warrior and picked them up and started back after Hanna and Gabriel.

  Kakrekt still had not moved. Telepathy had shut down again and Hanna could feel nothing of her thought. If Kakrekt was anxious or apprehensive there was no sign of it.

  Something touched her arm and said, “Do you need to be carried?”

  It was another servo. Gabriel said, “No, but let us hold on to you. Go slowly.”

  From just below them Kakrekt finally called out: “Come back in a summer or two and see what I have done.” And she was not finished; there was another shout. “Nakeekt lied!”

  Hanna stopped at this, and the servo obediently stopped too. She turned, but still she did not speak.

  “Yes,” Kakrekt said, more quietly, but every word carried through the cold air and pierced Hanna’s heart. “I get more information than you know. More than Nakeekt knows. Those leaves, prepared as she said—the distillate is a pleasant beverage. Nothing more. Was it difficult for you, deciding what to do? There was no need. It would have made no difference. It was your fellow-Soldier who
made the difference, here and now, when he put the Holy One alone and unarmed into my hands. The Holy One never gave you what you want, but I will.”

  Kakrekt lifted a hand, the one that had not held the weapon, and Hanna saw the communicator.

  “You will return. I will be waiting,” Kakrekt said.

  Chapter XX

  THE SHUTTLE WAS CONSIDERABLY larger than the pod, but it seemed crowded with servos sent to dig or fight. Hanna—falling into a seat, steadying Gabriel (or being steadied by him) as he fell into another—saw one human being, Corcoran, in the pilot’s seat, and shrank from the horror on his face as he looked at them. Possibly the servos looked more human than they did. It did not stop him from accelerating upward so fast that the layers of cloud blurred. Now he’s hurrying, she thought. She must have projected it uncontrollably and unknowingly because he said, “Got what I came for, no reason to wait around. They blew up two transports, didn’t they?”

  And just as uncontrollably Hanna saw that she and Gabriel had been secondary objects. Soldiers—specimens—had been the first. Metra had held the rescue back deliberately, allowing them to remain in danger, looking for one last advantage without putting the shuttle at risk, probably with spyeyes transmitting the last flurry of violence—

  And in that second’s flash from Corcoran—oh, telepathy was back, all right, back with a vengeance—she knew that Metra had not done it all on her own responsibility. She had done it with Commission approval. Starr’s approval.

  Metra’s voice came into the capsule, urgent.

  “Maximum speed, at once. Incoming data indicate Commander Kwoort is still alive.”

  Hanna froze. Next to her Gabriel whispered, “Thank God.”

  But Hanna thought: If only he had died at once.

  PART SIX

  OLD EARTH

  Chapter I

  SHE WAS SLAPPED INTO Endeavor’s sickbay so fast her head spun. She was injected with nutrients, someone cut off much of her hopeless hair, and she was admired as the only case of starvation the medics had seen outside textbooks; Gabriel, she was assured, was equally admired. All this she gathered in dozy fragments, finally surrendering to exhaustion and a sedative she did not want or (in her opinion) need. In another fragment she was walked carefully through Endeavor and transferred—somewhere—with measured haste, where the same things happened again, though she would not let these new medics shear off any more hair, the importance of retaining it swelling out of all proportion.

  When she was allowed to emerge naturally from the haze she found that she and Gabriel were on the Admiral Wu. They were prescribed gentle exercise and slow progress with real food, combined with short periods of debriefing and long ones of rest.

  There was time to assess the damage.

  • • •

  Hanna, as soon as she could leave sickbay, spent as much time as she could in a lounge reserved for important passengers. It was large (that was in its favor) and one wall looked out into space, giving the specious impression that there was an escape route at hand. She had not suspected how important that would be. She had not understood until now that during the long captivity in Wektt she had vigorously suppressed memories of other occasions, more brutal but much shorter, when she had been a captive. The Admiral Wu was moving fast; even given that a course, once painstakingly charted, could be retraced at enormous speed, it seemed to be proceeding too fast for comfort, and the staccato Jumps that made for rapidly shifting starscapes were disconcerting. All the same, Hanna would have slept in the lounge, if it had been allowed, just so that she would be reassured, when she opened her eyes, that she was no longer confined to the tiny room deep under Wektt.

  She suspected she had become claustrophobic. Time would take care of it, she thought. It didn’t seem important. She had, as she had said to Bella, gotten over worse.

  • • •

  Gabriel’s default for damage control was prayer.

  Should I not, Lord, feel penitent? It was my hand that disarmed Kwoort and left him helpless before his enemy, even though I pitied him, even though he was Your child as much as I. But all I find in my heart is sorrow, I find regret, but I do not find guilt. I live. A woman lives and goes home to her child. That must be enough.

  Still there is need for penance. Show me what You would have me do. Lord, I listen . . .

  Hanna touched him in one of these private intervals, but only once. He seemed to her remote in a way that eerily resembled trance. It was not detachment she sensed, though, but passionate engagement with . . . something.

  How brave he was, she thought, after what he had seen, to still believe.

  • • •

  The two of them had a secret. Don’t bring it up, she said in an urgent pulse of thought just before debriefing began, and the question in his mind meant, What if they ask, and she said, They won’t.

  Later he came to see her in the lounge, which she had already begun to think of as her personal property. Uncharacteristically, he was frowning. He sat down next to her, leaned close, and whispered, “Is anybody listening?”

  “Eavesdropping, you mean? Here? No,” she said in surprise. “Why?”

  “Nobody asked me about that. What you told me not to tell them about.”

  “That’s because I never reported anything about it. It never seemed to be the time for it, when everybody was talking about negotiations. So-called.”

  “But we’ve got to tell somebody.”

  “Well, of course we do. Oh. No, no,” she said. “Did you think I’d keep that to myself? No! But,” she said, “it’s too important for just anybody to hear about. I’m going to tell Starr. And I’m glad, I’ll be so glad, when it’s the Commission’s secret, not mine.”

  • • •

  Eight days after they left Battleground—Wu pushing protocols and moving from Jump to Jump at battle-ready speeds—they were on Earth. Hanna refused to do anything until she had seen Mickey, though much of their reunion was given over to an explanation that sometimes people cried not because they were unhappy, but because they were so filled with happiness that it could not be contained.

  After that she had to go and do something else. The path led, inevitably, to Starr Jameson. It always did.

  Chapter II

  “WE’LL HAVE TO SEND someone back,” he said. “Not you personally, I hope”—he wasn’t promising, Hanna noticed—“someone else. But there’s no hurry. We have enough to go on with for now.”

  They were in the quarters Jameson had reclaimed, the commissioner’s suite that was a kind of warren of its own, though this room, his most private office, opened out to water and sky and land. Hanna turned in her seat to look out at the river, merged flawlessly with interior space, just as she remembered. The water was blue today, like the gloriously clear sky above it. The last time she had been in this room with Jameson, not long before first contact with Zeig-Daru, they had hardly known each other, but on that occasion she had recognized the attraction between them for the first time. Now that she was physically in the same room as Jameson once more, she recognized something else. She might go away, but the attraction was not going to. In spite of her declaration of freedom, exasperatingly, she could not help wanting him. The bond between them might be attenuated, but it was not broken.

  She knew that for his part he was not shocked by how she looked, which was better but still bad. Nor was he repelled by her emaciation, as he had not been by her pregnancy. She felt his desire to take her in his arms, take her to his home just as he had when she returned, battered, from other missions. He wanted to give her all she needed to get well and more; he wanted to give her everything he thought she should want.

  This time she would not allow it, bond or no bond. And the first thing she said was a reminder of all the reasons why she would not.

  “That’s what the delay with the shuttle was about? To make sure you got what you wanted?”
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  “We needed a Soldier out in the open, alone and isolated from a population center. Kakrekt gave us two. She’ll gloss over their disappearance for her own purposes. Whether Kwoort will ever be conscious again is questionable, but he doesn’t have to be. The other can be dissected down to the cellular level and beyond. If we can’t get what we need from those two specimens there’s always Kakrekt. Willing to trade.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hanna said.

  He waved a hand with uncharacteristic vagueness. He seemed, Hanna thought, to be divided. He thought Battleground was sorted out, and now that he had Hanna in front of him again in the flesh (what was left of it), he would like to return to his peculiar brand of courtship. She was almost sorry that she had to tell him sorting out Battleground was about to become the least of his concerns.

  She said, “We could help Kakrekt to the knowledge she wants, but when she’s gone, who else will want it? And she won’t remember much longer that she wants us to help her change the world. She’d never do that anyway. No one will.”

  “A world is a hard thing to change, but it can be done. What makes you so certain this one can’t be?”

  “It will be in my final report,” Hanna said. “About what I saw in the breeding ground. The facilitators weren’t just taking nourishment. They were pumping in fluids at the same time. This is a guess, but I’ll bet you. When you dissect poor Woke I bet you’ll find something missing from her ova, or whatever she has, and the same from Kwoort’s sperm: great big chunks of Soldier DNA. That’s what the facilitators carry and that’s how they’ve evolved their power—they’re a delivery system for the rest of the DNA. Making more Soldiers is their only function. The Holy Men don’t know the mechanism, but they understand it can’t be fought. And the facilitators are mindless. They control Battleground. Kakrekt never will.”

  He might have questioned her further, but then she said—she had to take a deep breath first—“There’s something else.”