by B. V. Larson
“You stealthing again? What’s up?”
“Shhh,” she hissed in my ear, closer than ever.
I felt two small hands on my shoulders. I wanted to hunch up, but I tried not to move.
“Listen,” she said, “I came to tell you this isn’t working. The news streams—it’s not convincing.”
“What’s not convincing?” I asked.
“Hey,” the veteran with the stims said, turning his head to frown down at me. “Shut up down there. You can say your prayers later—for all the good it will do.”
The other Germanica troops laughed and shifted comfortably. Things must have looked pretty good to them. The battle was clearly going their way. At the far end of the crater, I could still hear steady gunfire, but it wasn’t the raging storm of a half-hour ago.
“You can’t end it like this,” Gytha said. “All of Blood World is watching you right now.”
My eyes drifted up to check on the camera drones. It did seem like there were more of them up there than I’d seen previously.
“They’re all wondering why you’re on your knees in this pit. It looks like you’ve surrendered. The populace is confused—they will riot in the streets soon.”
“They really don’t like confusion then, huh?” I whispered.
“No. They like a hero. They’ve chosen you. They don’t understand why you’re being humiliated while your army marches to victory.”
“I get it…”
A boot struck the back of my head. Knocked forward, I grunted.
“No one said you could talk, Varus!” the veteran told me.
Then he made a mistake. He spit on me.
Now, a man like me can take a lot of abuse. I’ve been tortured, murdered, beaten and strangled plenty of times. Throw in a few poisonings and even having my guts eaten out of my belly while I watched—I’d seen it all.
But spitting on a man? That’s just an insult without a cause.
“Throw that stealth suit over me,” I told Gytha. “Over both of us.”
“No.”
“Why not, girl?” I whispered. “It’s roomy enough, those Vulbites were big.”
She was silent for a second. “It’s too intimate. Such close contact—it isn’t done.”
Wham! A fist slammed into my ear. My helmet was off, and it hurt pretty good.
“I said: Shut! Up!” the veteran roared.
A scattered round of laughter went up from the group.
Becoming almost as annoyed with Gytha as I was with the Germanica troops, I reached for her in the dark. She was invisible, but in order to talk to me she was very close.
A quick up-down motion was all it took. I grabbed that bag-like stealth-suit she had over her head and pulled it over myself as well. She made a small gasping sound.
Seen from the inside, the stealth-suit wasn’t completely transparent, but it wasn’t opaque, either. It was kind of like being inside a loose weave garment that reminded me of a gunny sack.
“What the fuck?” a voice said a few seconds later.
“Where’d he go?”
Lights played around us on the dirt, but I sat still. It was weird to see the light shine right through our bodies and strike the ground underneath us. It was as if we were transparent, but I knew the suit was bending and refracting light around us.
My hand reached up and clamped itself on Gytha’s mouth. I sensed she might be thinking about screaming.
“He must have slipped away!” said one of the Germanic guards.
“Shit-shit-shit!” the veteran hissed out between clenched teeth. “Find him, or it’s your ass!”
Footsteps crashed around in the dark. They were looking all over—but they weren’t searching the trench. Why should they? They’d all shined lights into that particular spot and seen it was empty.
“VARUS!” a man shouted, but I didn’t even move.
Inside the stealth suit, I could see Gytha’s shadowy face clearly enough. Her eyes were wide with shock.
I eased my hand away from her mouth.
“You have dishonored me,” she whispered. “I should kill you.”
“Uh… can you do that later, maybe?” I asked. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“Let go of me. You’re violating my person.”
“I’m up against you because we’re both inside a one-meter bag!”
“No wonder these men hate you so much.”
Sighing, I considered knocking her out and leaving her in the trench. The trouble was, these Germanica friggers weren’t totally dumb. They’d find her, and they’d know she had something to do with my escape.
If they didn’t recognize her, they might even kill her. Life was cheap to a legionnaire, but Gytha had never been scanned for revival as far as I knew. She didn’t even have a tapper to record her mental engrams. She might be permed.
Not sure what else to do, I stood up, lifting her with me. I carried her like a kid.
I was lucky she wasn’t carrying any weapons. The look on her face told me I’d have been dead otherwise.
Heading toward the crater wall, I ran with her in my arms. She squirmed, but she didn’t try to gouge out my eyes or anything. For that, I was grateful.
Once we were out of the Germanica camp, I crouched down and waited.
“You want me to release you here?” I asked. “I can let you run up and out of the crater, but I need your stealth suit to fix things.”
She stared at me with an odd expression on her face.
“You are very forceful. I thought you would demand intimacy.”
“Uh…” I said, thinking that over for a second. Finally, I got it. “Oh, no, no, no. I wasn’t going to do that.”
“You behave like a littermate put out to stud,” she said. “I’m no brood-mother.”
“Right… of course not.”
There was a lull in the conversation while I reviewed my tapper. My inbox was full of nasty messages. Among them were automated battle-updates from Legion Varus. They were down to ten percent effectives.
“Do you find me unattractive?” Gytha asked.
She was sitting next to me, and we were hip-to-hip under that stealth-suit. It was kind of like being wrapped up inside a blanket together.
The truth was, she was a lovely girl, but my mind was on other things.
“Listen,” I said, “I’ll take you on a date sometime if this all works out. But right now I’ve got to leave you here.”
I ditched her then, lifting the stealth suit off her and standing in it. She stood uncertainly.
There were snipers everywhere, and I was sure most of them were looking the other way— -- toward the front lines—but you never knew.
I grabbed her shoulders, turned her around so she aimed uphill, and gave her a slap on the butt to get her moving. It was what my dad might have done to a horse that didn’t know which end was up.
Gytha looked alarmed, but my prompting worked. She began trotting up the hill.
Moving down into the camp again, I took one glance back.
I thought I could see her at the top of the crater. She was part of the crowd now. I hoped she wouldn’t catch a stray round. I’d heard a number of Blood Worlders watching the battle from the lip of the crater had died that way.
Then I forgot about Gytha and moved through the Germanica trenches. They were almost all empty, except for their dead. The fighting was all on the other side of the crater.
There wasn’t much time left, so I got a move on.
-57-
By the time I managed to sneak my way back to Armel’s bunker, they were in victory celebration mode.
The camera drones were buzzing overhead, too. There had to be thirty of them up there, humming away and streaming the scene from every angle.
“Germanica has won!” Armel shouted, throwing his hands high.
I could tell he was very aware of the cameras, and he was hamming it up for them. Centurion Leeza and a crowd of other officers had gathered around.
Most of th
em looked weary. Many were wounded. At least Varus had given them hell.
A booming crack of gunfire rang out in the distance at that moment, making everyone look up to the edge of the crater.
Up there, two squads of littermates stood in perfect order. Two squads of nine, walking three by three, began marching down the wall of the crater.
“Ah,” Armel said, “they come to honor me at last.”
We all watched the procession, transfixed. But for me it wasn’t the towering giants in their armor that attracted my eye. It was the smaller figure between them. If I wasn’t mistaken, Gytha walked in the center. She was alone and clearly in charge.
Inside my stealth suit I frowned. I sure hoped she wasn’t harboring any ill-feelings.
The heavy troopers stood nearly three meters tall. Even at that height, they weren’t lanky or thin of build in any way. They were hulking brutes wearing polished heavy armor that reflected our lights with dazzling beams.
Each of the giant figures carried a massive high-tech rifle that fired a large, accelerated round. I knew from experience those guns could put down a legionnaire or stop an air car with a single shot.
In addition to their rifles, they carried thick blades. These were slightly curved and had a bright leading edge. Wielded with the unnatural power of the heavy trooper, they could chop off limbs. They weren’t utilized with any kind of finesse, but rather treated like meat-cleavers in close combat.
The procession approached us, and Armel ordered his troops to stand back.
“Make way! Make way!” he shouted—his delight was obvious on his face.
The Germanica pukes backed up, scowling. There was no love lost between basic humans and Blood Worlders. We’d been mortal enemies up until now.
Armel, however, was beaming.
“This is a fine day! Look! The sun rises in the east!”
It was true. The skies were turning orange as the fierce star we called Epsilon Leporis spun slowly into view, coming over the edge of the crater like the eye of an elder god.
The night was over, and short though it may have been in hours, it had been long and hard-fought for the thousands who’d died in this bloody pit. All told, I estimated that less than two cohorts worth of Germanica’s troops had lived to see the dawn—and Varus had been wiped out.
The survivors gathered to watch the ceremony. They came up out of their trenches, smeared in filth. They lined the hills and even the crater walls themselves.
At the top of the crater’s rim, a great throng grew. Thousands stood silently, watching us.
Armel loved it all. He walked in a tight circle, unable to contain his glee. His heels kicked up with every step, such was his level of excitement.
Standing off to one side, I had to crush myself against the outside walls of his bunker in order to avoid being bumped into. The stealth suit still hid me from view, but it wouldn’t stop anyone from noticing they were touching a ghost.
“This is a fantastic moment for Legion Germanica!” Armel announced. “We’ve won an entire planet for Mother Earth! Let it be known for all time that we have gifted this prize to humanity, that we have reunited our species, brother and sister. All those who were once pitted against one another in war are now allies!”
It was a pretty speech, I had to give him that. It even sounded like he meant it.
Glancing up, I saw the camera drones shift a little. They were focused on Gytha now. She walked forward in a ceremonial fashion. She was wearing a white garment. It looked kind of like a white sheet clasped at the shoulder by a golden sunburst.
Stopping to stand in front of Armel, she stared around at them all, regal in her manner.
Damn was she a fine-looking woman. She had an exotic look to her, an ethereal beauty that usually only existed in holo-vids and re-touched ads back home.
“Blood has been owed,” she said in a loud, clear voice. “Blood has been paid. This contest is over.”
Then, she did something none of us had been expecting. She reached up with her fine-boned fingers and touched the emblem at her shoulder.
Her garment dropped away, and she stood there as nude as the day she’d been born.
A murmur went up from the audience. We were no strangers to nudity—even if Gytha was an especially nice-looking specimen. But this whole thing… it seemed like some kind of ancient rite. A pagan festival from our distant past.
Just how different were the Blood Worlders from normal folks back home? If some of them decided to settle on Earth in the future, I wondered if they would bring such archaic practices to our world. I shuddered to think how they might fit in.
“Who shall claim this prize?” Gytha asked, looking at Armel.
We all froze for a second. I think there were about a thousand brains ticking like clocks, processing this new input. Was Gytha the prize—or part of it?
I guess it made sense in a way. She’d been the ruler of this world, so it was only fitting that she’d give herself to whoever the new master was going to be.
That kind of thinking had to be the squid influence. It seemed clear to me. Cephalopods only understood two possible social roles in their society: you were either a master or a slave—or possibly both relative to others higher or lower than you on the food chain. Still, I couldn’t imagine what a squid would want with a human woman, pretty or not.
I could hear audible gasps from the Germanica troops when Gytha made her offer—especially from the women. There were a lot of scowls, too. I’m sure they were as shocked as I was.
But not Armel. He was grinning like it was his wedding night.
He bowed deeply, and with a sweep of his hand, he caught Gytha’s fingers in his, bringing his lips to brush against her knuckles.
That’s when I made my move. I pushed forward, knocking people out of my way.
It’s easy and kind of fun to bull your way through a crowd when you’re invisible. Everyone should try it some time.
People growled when I jostled them aside. They turned angrily—but then a look of shock came over them when they realized there was no one there to yell at.
They staggered away as I advanced. I felt like a shark fin cutting through the waves.
“Stop!” I boomed.
Armel’s mouth had just opened after his lingering finger-kiss. Frowning, he straightened with Gytha’s bare hand still in his gauntlet.
Everyone turned to look in my direction.
Whipping off the stealth suit, I tossed it down and stood tall.
“No!” I said. “I claim the prize!”
“McGill?” Armel growled.
His face registered disbelief, but it quickly down-shifted into rage.
A dozen officers surged forward, seizing me from every direction, but Armel waved them back. Reluctantly, they released me and stepped away.
Gytha made no move to cover her nude body in any way. She seemed completely at ease standing buck-naked on the worldwide vid network.
“A challenge has been issued,” she said calmly. She looked at Armel. “How do you respond?”
Armel’s face had been squirming like a toad on a spike this whole time. His cheeks had turned an awful shade of purple.
He stared at me. His right eye twitched where I’d sent it smashing onto the floor earlier. I got the impression the nu-skin he’d sprayed on it was itching him something fierce.
“I will face the challenge!” he roared.
-58-
The situation had not gone the way I’d expected. In truth, I was kind of pissed off.
Armel knew the score. Earth needed to impress these people. We were just playing a game for them, putting on a show.
Wasn’t that how you impressed any culture when you met up with its members for the first time? We were supposed to politely participate in whatever tea ceremonies, feasts, feats of strength or intellectual contests they thought were important. We weren’t supposed to take this kind of pageantry personally.
But noooo…! Not old Armel. In my humble opin
ion, he was guilty of the worst sin of all: pride.
“You’re blowing it,” I said to him quietly.
His eyes flashed at me angrily. “I will not yield in front of billions. You have sown the seeds, McGill. Now, it is time for the harvest!”
I had no idea what he was going on about, and I didn’t much care. I looked at Gytha hopefully.
But Gytha, for her part, appeared to be more curious than alarmed by this turn of events. She watched the two of us with interest.
Was that a gleam in her eye? Did she like the idea of two men fighting over her? I got the impression that she did.
Dammit.
Seeing there wasn’t going to be any help coming from her to talk Armel out of this, I sighed.
“All right,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“You fight, of course,” Gytha said. “To the death. On this planet, only blood can settle a disagreement.”
The camera drones overhead looked thicker than ever. There must have been thirty of them buzzing around up there by now, maybe more.
They’d been racing in from all directions, flying to us from every corner of the crater. Apparently, no one wanted to count the dead or recap the action anymore—they wanted to see this new wrinkle we’d added to the show.
Armel was calm again. I watched as he puffed himself up. His nose lifted up into the air with growing confidence.
“As the challenged,” he said, “I will choose the manner in which honor is satisfied. A duel, McGill. You will meet me with crossed swords. No armor, no other weapons. Right here, right now.”
“A duel?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Yes. Do you yield in fear?” Armel asked.
“Hell no!”
“All right then. Centurion Leeza!”
With two rapid claps of his hands, he summoned Leeza. She walked up to us, eyeing Gytha’s naked body indignantly.
“Tribune?” she asked.
“Your unit failed me today,” Armel said to Leeza without even looking at her. “Now, you will help witness this event. Honor will be served.”
“Great,” she said.
“Get my swords. They are in my desk.”
