Nineteen years, three toes and one right little finger later, as he readied to leave the Veteran’s Hospital, the nurse had very surreptitiously presented him with a footlocker the night before his discharge. They had shared a lot of nights, lately, and he’d had no suspicion this would be different. But the contents of the footlocker had sent him mentally reeling.
“Don’t you like it?”
The Flexalinks winked at him, an obscene pearl from the bottom of the trunk.
“This … this is my suit.”
“I know that.” She had hung onto his elbow, not noticing the tremble that ran through his body.
“They were all supposed to have been destroyed.”
She had smiled up at him. “I know. But this one’s yours. You survived, and I thought … well, I don’t know. I thought you’d like to have your suit, so I hid it.”
Jack couldn’t force himself to look away. In any other time, from any other war, a Dominion Knight would have given his soul to keep his suit.
But not this time. Not this war.
He stared in horror. He remembered the cold fear it had given him in his dreams to be wearing the suit again. And wondered if the Milots did create berserkers, and if so, how? And wondered if the nurse had ever realized what she’d done when she’d saved the suit, hidden it, and then given it to him.
A bird trilled outside the compound, reminding him of his new life. He swung the storage door shut. When he could open it and look the battle armor in the face again, emotionlessly, he would know he was well.
Until then, he planned to find the man that had made a coward out of him, and kill the son of a bitch.
Chapter 2
The rehab tech looked down at his clipboard for the twentieth time during the interview, not to review what the screen was telling him, but to hide his face, so that the man sitting across from him couldn’t read his expression. The tech was scared. He’d been scared for the past seven months, when the hospital had discharged this man into his general care at the rehab center. The man was a Knight—an idealist who’d been trained to fight the “Pure” war, and believed in it, had even taken vows accordingly and lived, exercised, breathed by those vows. And the man had been betrayed on Milos, like thousands of his brothers—and was a tracking time bomb because of it. Who did his superiors think he was, a goddamn saint, that he could rehab a Knight? Thank god, the patient no longer had access to a battle suit, and that the Knights had been disbanded years ago. Today’s armored infantrymen were just so much cannon fodder, and the tech could deal with that. The computer screen blinked at him, reminding the tech that he was supposed to be working on his client’s discharge.
“I don’t care where you reassign me, just make it somewhere I can be alone. I want to be alone.” Storm stared at the wall and watched it form into a comforting hologram. He glared at it until the picture grew hesitant, and then returned to wall.
The rehab tech said blandly, “There aren’t too many people as alone as you are.” He typed something into his keyboard. “All right. I’ll recommend several occupations that go along with your background survey—but I’ll tell you this, Storm—you don’t want to be alone. And when you realize that, you’ll have accomplished what I’ve been trying to do these past seven months.” He stood up, staring at the stark expression of the sandy-haired man. A forty-one-year-old mind inside a lean, twenty-two-year-old body—both of them harboring the lust for revenge and the killer instinct of millennia-old homo sapiens.
Jack barely heard the tech leave. His thoughts, waking dreams, boiled over him. Storm stretched out his right hand, tensed it so that the muscles ridged over the back of his hand, muscles that led to the smallest digit and ended abruptly in a scar-smoothed absence instead of the little finger. He rubbed the edge of his hand. That was the finger that had saved his life … and plunged him into living hell.
He’d had it explained to him, oh, maybe a hundred times. By the doctor, the nurses, the rehab tech, the computer monitor, and it still made no more sense than it had upon hearing it the first time.
He was the sole survivor of the Sand Wars. Oh, there were bound to be a few others—deserters mostly, hidden here and there in the underground strata. But his cold ship was one of only three to have made it off Milos, and the only one to make it past the Thrakian blockade, although that was undoubtedly when it sustained the damage which threw it off course and eventually caused massive system failures. It had drifted then, powerless and off course, lost in the outer lanes for seventeen years. And, inside, only his bay was functioning on auxiliary power … all of the others had gone dark, their occupants as dead as the ship in which they lay.
The doctors had no explanation for it. Somehow, he had roused when the power had gone off—roused enough to jam his right hand against the interior of the bay, pushing the panel that would activate the emergency auxiliary power. The action could have sprung the “coffin” lid and freed him, but instead it jarred the auxiliary power button and he was plunged back into cryogenic sleep. The coincidence had saved his life … and lost him his right little finger and three toes to frostbite, a small enough price to pay, his doctors had told him.
If he had been freed, they doubted he could have lived for very long aboard the systems-dead ship.
He was heir to the ignominious title of sole survivor of the most disastrous defeat of Dominion Forces since their formation. Jack smiled grimly at this, aware that he was no doubt being monitored from the other side of the wall, beyond the holograph. He wondered what they thought about him—his tense smiles at nothing at all. His inability to sleep a night through without waking, panic-stricken, six or seven times. His determination to stay solo, alone, a survivor.
The Thrakians, he’d been told, had stopped conquering almost as suddenly as they’d started, leaving behind a crescent-shaped path of destruction—once verdant planets turned into seas of sand by war and alien terraforming.
No, not sand. Jack stretched his hands in front of him on the table, aware even as he thought, that the rehab tech was reporting to a superior, and decisions were being made that would determine the course of the rest of his life—or so they thought. Once he was free…
Not sand. It looked like sand. Moved through the gloved hands of his battle armor like sand. Flowed. Grit floated on the air when flung. Hot. Dry. Dusty. But not sand, exactly. They knew now that it was filled with microcosms. Tiny organisms that stayed dormant until the Thrakians planted their young, and then went to work.
The Thrakian League had decimated eight solar systems in order to create nests for their grubs. Warm, sand-filled nests. And why they stopped there, no one knew. It certainly wasn’t because the Dominion Forces had defeated them at Milos. Nor had they been defeated at the Stand of Dorman’s Colony, Storm’s home planet.
No, the Thrakians simply stopped because they’d wanted to, and for the last fifteen years, there had been uneasy treaty between the League and the Dominion. Uneasy because none of the Dominion scientists could predict when, or if, the swarming would occur again—or how to stop it if it did.
It was already too late for Storm and for Storm’s family, long dead, though freshly mourned.
Breaking off his thoughts. Jack looked up at the wall. “Hurry up,” he said. “I want to get on with this.”
On with what? With saving the universe from the Thrakian menace? He laughed humorlessly at himself and leaned back into the form-fitting chair. It made minor adjustments to his lanky form. He did not sit in a chair so much as he conquered it.
The conference room door sprung aside to admit the rehab tech. He threw a motley looking gray jumpsuit onto the table, where it slid until it halted in front of Storm. He picked it up with his nine fingers and spread it out to read the insignia.
“A Ranger.”
“That’s right. You’ve got your wish, Storm. You’ve been assigned to Claron, one of the Outward Bound planets. Not too much going on there … mining and the supportive trade for that. You’ll be gathering
a data base on the planet itself.”
“I’m not a xenobiologist.”
“No, but you had some background training in it, before you volunteered.” The rehab tech gave a thin smile, matching the sparseness of his brown hair. “The government can’t afford a specialist for every backwater planet. But if you want to be alone, that’s the place to go. I’ve ordered a packet of background tapes for you.”
“How soon can I leave?” Storm lowered the suit, curling it toward his chest, a subconscious protective gesture that the rehab tech noted.
“Day after tomorrow.”
For the first time in weeks, the veteran smiled, and the happiness reached his washed-out blue eyes.
And in the Claron morning, the echo of that smile touched his eyes again. He threw his pack over the skimmer and lashed it on, listening to the redtails courting in the sky over the compound. Their raucous chatter could only lure another redtail, and that was the way it should be. They swooped overhead toward the forest beyond and disappeared, with a chorus of wild, hysterical giggles.
Storm fit into Claron. He fit better than even his rehab tech could have guessed, and in ways he never could have predicted. The mining syndicates that made up the boomtowns operated within an unwritten code of environmental protection … one that he felt comfortable with. They had a purity to their industry, a code, that perhaps only someone like himself could understand. The plains were filled with obsidite, worth crossing space to pull out, and worth doing it right.
The only trouble he’d had in all his months of work was with a local brewery, Samson’s Ale. Claron boomrats had a liking for the malt crops … a liking that put them on the list for extinction.
It wasn’t that Storm had a thing for boomrats. When he’d first located his compound at the fringe of the Ataract forests, he’d cursed at the skinny little rodents more than once. The thieving, fractious critters stole his supplies and ranged over their territory like packs of bandits, shoulder to shoulder, kits in the middle and scarred veterans to the outside, though they were scarcely big enough to give a predator a decent mouthful. They walked on their hind legs, to look bigger and more ferocious, Storm thought. And when they’d discovered Samson Breweries’ malt fields, they thought they’d walked into paradise. At first it hadn’t been necessary to kill them—the boomrats ate themselves to death, unused to the luxury of abundant food. Jack had walked through rows of chewed-off stalks, with bloated boomrats belly-up in the aisles.
That hadn’t taken them too long to figure out. Then the crop eating began in earnest and he’d had to go toe to toe with Samson to give the little critters the right to live. Luckily, the sonic fences he’d devised seemed to work all right.
Storm didn’t know what niche the boomrats occupied in the ecology of Claron yet, but he knew he’d find out. And he was pleased with himself for saving them for that niche until then.
The dawn fled completely. The mauve horizon of Claron’s southern sky hugged the forest and mountain ridge fiercely. He looked out toward the plains, to the mines, and saw the white funnels of their steamstacks. He felt like a little company. In a day or two, after this tour, he might go into Upside, and say hello. A little public relations, and private, would go good right about now.
He kicked the starter and swung on, the skimmer shuddering into life beneath him. Its shadow skimmed the dirt clod meadow and took off as he throttled it forward. He’d have to learn to spend more time on the Ataract … it was supposed to be the site of his permanent base, but he’d found excuses to keep the compound relatively mobile for several years. He didn’t like staring into the eye of Star Gate on the eastern edge, even though that was principally why he was on Claron—why they’d needed a Ranger.
He was little more than a Gatekeeper. Oh, the exobiology work he did was important, but only if colonists started moving in, next to the miners. But it was the Gate—unnatural hole in the fabric of the universes—it was minding the Gate that had put him there. And so Storm watched it. He watched it with the faint prickling of hair at the back of his neck, as he comprehended just what it was he dealt with, unlike most of the locals. No, Storm knew its powers all too well. Claron had been discovered at the other side of the hole when the Gate had been punched through, and it had taken the energy of a small nova to do it. Star Gates were few and far between, being too expensive and too dangerous to the patterns of the galaxies to use. This one had been a fortuitous accident … and would stay that way, as long as he was assigned as Ranger. The Dominion did not want it expanded.
Jack wanted it closed, but knew that wasn’t likely to happen either.
He sighed as he brought the skimmer in line with the golden eye. It was a short run from the compound. He measured it off, to be sure it was still anchored. The energy waves radiating from it rippled. He’d set up low level sonic posts to be sure nothing from Claron absentmindedly wandered into it—although the corner of Jack’s mouth twitched at the thought of a pack of boomrats wandering into the Gate. He’d like to see the fraction of a second long, wide-eyed expressions on their rodent faces when faced with deep space.
Measurements done, he swung the skimmer about, and turned on his recorder. The morning breeze of the Ataract swept his face, drying the nervous beads of perspiration on his forehead. It was a raw breeze, and spiced, smelling nothing like the planet he’d grown up on. Dorman’s Stand had been an agra-planet, with the smell of freshly loamed earth and tangy pesticides, and freshly harvested vegetables. He took a deep breath. He’d almost forgotten what Dorman’s Stand had smelled like … dampened by the years spent in the stink of his own sweat and lubricants of the battle armor.
Storm brought the skimmer to idle and stalled there, in midair. He felt uneasy. The Ataract was relatively quiet this morning. No boomrats were out. Yet the sun was up. He rubbed the back of his neck. He felt vaguely on edge, the way he usually did before an assault drop—
Jack swung the skimmer about, and began to patch in his recorder to the compound computer. His hand trembled and he cursed as he fumbled over the keys missed by the amputated tenth finger. He looked up, caught a vision of the tree looming in front of him and leaned over, pulling the skimmer around it. But it brought the machine skewing to a halt, trembling in the air, and he caught himself panting.
He took a deep breath and got control of himself. The terminal vibrated under his fingertips, letting him know it had made the connection, and he dropped his gaze to read the board. Everything was fine. There was nothing in this section of the Outward Bounds that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Jack laughed at himself. He disconnected the linkage, and returned it to recording. The skimmer coughed once.
Below him, crudely dug out ground rippled in the air discharge from the skimmer. Jack descended and turned the transport off as he recognized the field he’d dug. Small, twisted green snoots of malt edged upward, and he grinned as he crouched down to examine it. He’d conned Samson Breweries out of a sackful of seed, and here was his reward, already pushing up to meet the sun. He tickled a shoot. He hadn’t entirely lost his green thumb, he guessed, though only the gods knew what would happen when the boomrats found this patch. He’d grown it for them, though.
A sharp pebble skimmed the air, slashing into his shoulder. Jack yelped with the sting and straightened up, looking around.
The horde of boomrats looked back, shoulder to shoulder, their beady, flint-colored eyes staring, the adults stretched to their utmost height on their skinny hind legs. One of them gripped a stone in his front paw.
“I’ll be damned,” Jack muttered. He took a step away from the malt patch, and watched as the thirty-strong pack of boomrats shifted warily with him. He pointed. “This is for you, guys—but if you chew it down to the nubs now, you won’t have anything left for the winter, or to go to seed for next year.”
Scarface, the leader, showed his fangs.
Jack backed up, toward the skimmer. He wasn’t worried about one or even two boomrats, but a pack could chew him up
a little. He held his hands up in the air even as he wondered if they’d thrown the stone at him. Tool implementation? He’d have to make a note as soon as he got out of here.
As he backed up, Scarface seemed to relax. His tawny body dropped to all fours and he ran at Storm, and stopped, chittering. His rodent muzzle worked, then he spit something out at the man’s booted feet. Then, warily, the boomrat backed up and rejoined his pack.
A shiny green stone, covered with spittle from the creature’s mouth pouches, shone up at Storm. He bent over and picked it up, and wiped it off. It was not anything of import, except it was something pretty and shiny. Jack dropped it into this pouch.
“I take it this is a thank you for the malt. You’re welcome—but—” Jack hesitated as he swung aboard the skimmer. “Don’t do anything rash like taking over the planet, okay? I could be in a lot of trouble for this.”
Muzzles and whiskers quivered uncomprehendingly as he kicked the skimmer back into operation and headed for the fringe of the Ataract.
He woke sweating. His pulse pounded in his ears like war drums, and he lay still in the darkness of the room, waiting for his hearing to go back to normal. He wiped the palms of his hands across his T-shirt. As usual, he couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming, just that he’d been suffocating—
Jack swung off the bed. He went to the faintly glowing panel of the computer terminal and activated it. Something was wrong. Not just his life or his psyche, which was always abnormal, but something was wrong with Claron. He feared it.
The screen fired to life under his fingers, but he heard the noise before the tracking came up, and he flinched, looking upward, seeing only the ceiling, but knowing what he heard outside. Blips and streaks across the tracking field confirmed it.
Claron was under siege.
Solar Kill Page 2
