Deathstalker Honor d-4

by Simon R. Green

  "Don't forget the nooses," said Sister Marion.

  "I was getting to the nooses!"

  "A dangling noose inside the doorway of a darkened room can take out even the most experienced warrior."

  "I was going to tell them that!"

  "Of course you were, dear. You carry on. Don't mind me."

  "Thank you."

  "And if the noose doesn't kill them immediately, yank on their ankles till their necks break."

  "Marion! Do you want to give this lecture?"

  "Of course not, dear. You do it so well."

  This had the sound of a conversation that could go on for some time, so Owen left them to it. He moved on through the compound, seeing what there was to see, listening to scraps of conversation that mostly evolved around everyday things. It was as though the colonists wanted to savor their few happy memories while they still could, before everything was lost in the fighting. No one seemed particularly optimistic about the final outcome.

  Owen found Colonel William Hand and Otto sitting together on a bench outside their hut, polishing their swords and quietly singing an old marine marching song. The Colonel still wore his old uniform, ragged and tattered but still scrupulously clean. His chest bore an impressive display of medal ribbons, carefully maintained. He didn't bother with the usual cloak and hood. He had leprosy and didn't care who knew it. His gray skin was dotted with dark patches of dead matter, and half his nose was eaten away. He might have been handsome once. It was hard to tell. He looked to be in his late fifties, a large and muscular man running now to fat. His long, dark hair was greasy and stringy, held back out of his face with a plain leather headband.

  His companion Otto was a hunchbacked dwarf, barely four feet tall. His overlarge head was touched with decay here and there, and most of his hair had fallen out. He too wore a marine uniform, but it was filthy dirty and he looked like he hadn't bathed in weeks. For a hunchbacked dwarf with leprosy, he seemed cheerful enough.

  The Colonel looked up at Owen and fixed him with a cold, flat gaze. "You must be new, boy, or you wouldn't be hanging around us. Even lepers have their pariahs. Got time to sit and talk for a while?"

  "Of course," said Owen. He sat down on the bench next to the Colonel. "May I ask what makes you a pariah here?"

  The Colonel snorted. "Because I don't think the sun shines out of Saint Bea's ass. I don't have any time for her peace and love nonsense. I'm a killer, boy. Bloody good at it too. Joined the marines as soon as I was able and never looked back. Never wanted anything else."

  "You seem to have had an impressive career, Colonel," said Owen, indicating the medal ribbons.

  "Bet your ass, boy. I fought in every campaign of note for the past thirty years. Killed men and aliens on a hundred worlds, first to advance and last to retreat, and loved every minute of it. No regrets, no bad dreams, no stirrings of conscience in the wee hours. Mother Bea never could understand that, and for a Saint she's remarkably unforgiving to anyone who won't toe the party line. She wants me to make confession, say I'm sorry and make my peace with God. Well, I'm not sorry, and I won't say I was, and when I finally get to stand before God, I'll look him right in the eye and say, You made me a killer. I just did what you made me to do. Now, where's the next enemy?"

  He laughed shortly, rooting around in the ruined half of his nose with a fingertip. "I was one of the best, but they still sent me here the moment I was diagnosed. I'm not bitter. Not really. But it came hard at the time, to give up my career for this shit-hole. Ironic, really. All the battles I fought, all the odds I beat, and in the end it wasn't a sword or an energy blast that got me, just a stupid mindless disease, killing me by inches. Not at all how I expected to die."

  "You never expected to die," said Otto. "You thought you were so special you'd live forever."

  "Maybe," said the Colonel. He looked at Owen. "Don't suppose you brought any cigars with you? No, of course not. Just as well, filthy habit anyway. But it's one of the few things I do miss… I missed the rebellion, you know. Biggest bloody war in the history of the Empire, and I never got to fight in it. Shame. I would have liked to test myself against the Deathstalker and his crew. They would have been worthy adversaries. Still, Empress or Parliament, it makes no difference in the end. Neither one is going to let us off this planet."

  "No one cares about us," said Otto. "They're ashamed of us. We have no place in their bright new shining Empire." He sniffed wetly and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "I was gengineered like this, in case you were wondering, by my parents. They ran a traveling circus, and since hunchbacked dwarves don't tend to occur naturally anymore, they made one of their own. I was one of the stars of the show. Audiences loved to come and pity me from a safe distance. But no one ever asked me what I wanted. What my dreams were. So the minute I hit sixteen, I went straight to the nearest recruiting office and signed on. I was supposed to be a mascot, but I quickly demonstrated such a natural aptitude for killing people that I got upgraded to full service inside a year. Never looked back."

  "We fought side by side in a hundred battles," said the Colonel. "Nasty little man. Very good with a gutting knife. And when I came here, he came with me. He didn't have leprosy then. A good friend, but dumb as shit."

  "True," said Otto. "Very true."

  "Thank God for the Hadenmen. They gave us purpose again. At least now I have a real enemy to vent my spleen on. And a chance to die a warrior's death instead of rotting away, day after day. And best of all, after months of open disapproval for my past wicked ways, Saint Bea had to come to me to help train her people how to fight. Must have stuck in her craw something fierce, but she did it. Came and asked us right in front of everybody."

  "Looked like she was chewing a wasp while she said it, mind," said Otto.

  "What do you think of our chances against the Hadenmen?" said Owen.

  Colonel Hand grinned nastily. "Don't you worry, boy. Hadenmen will die just as readily as anyone else, if you stick your knife in the right place and twist it. Besides, if a shitty disease and a rotten planet like this couldn't beat us, a bunch of walking appliances with attitude isn't going to do it."

  Owen nodded, made his goodbyes, got up, and moved on. He thought he'd enjoyed about as much of the Colonel and Otto's company as he could stand. But for all the old soldier's venom, Owen couldn't help thinking that maybe he had a point. Lepers were the dark, unspoken secret of the Empire—the forbidden subject that was never openly discussed. No cure, no hope, so just dump the poor bastards out of sight where the rest of us don't have to look at them. Owen had known about Lachrymae Christi vaguely, but it had never occurred to him to do anything about it. Leprosy was something that happened to other people. But now, having had his face rubbed in it, he vowed to do something about it. Something. Assuming he and they survived.

  He rounded a corner and saw Moon, sitting alone, his shoulders shaking as tears ran jerkily down his face. There was no one near him, no obvious cause for his sorrow. In fact, those few lepers near him seemed to be trying their best to ignore him. Owen hurried over to the crying augmented man, and then stood awkwardly over him, not sure what to do.

  "Moon? Tobias? What is it? Has someone said something, done something?… Dammit, if anyone's been having a go at you, I'll rip his lights out!"

  The Hadenman stopped crying abruptly and looked up. "Oh, hello, Owen," he said quite calmly. "There's nothing wrong. No one has upset me. I was just trying out the emotion, to see what it felt like. Please, sit and talk with me."

  Owen frowned, shrugged, and sat down next to his friend. Moon wiped his face with a cloth, quite unself-consciously. Owen looked at him. "So… nothing's wrong? You're all right?"

  "I don't know. I confess I've become very confused of late. This is my second life, Owen, and many things are still new to me. Memories of my first life are always returning, but jumbled, distorted, like the actions of someone else seen dimly on a holoscreen. I can remember doing things, but not why I did them, or how I felt while do
ing them. I spent most of my first life living among humans, developing human traits, but most of that is lost to me now. I have emotions, I… feel things, but they are strange, puzzling things, because I have no frame of reference to put them in. I'm like a blind man seeing colors for the first time. So I laugh and cry, savoring their unfamiliar flavors, trying to discover what separates them, and how they relate to the world I live in. I see the lepers here, living and fighting and dying so bravely, and I think tears are appropriate, but it is hard to be sure. It's very hard to be human, Owen. I don't know how you manage it so effortlessly."

  "You'll get the hang of it," said Owen. "You just need to practice. That's how everyone learns. And yes, tears are appropriate here. If I had any left, I'd shed them. But I've seen so many people die, fought in so many desperate last-ditch battles, it's hard for me to find room for such emotions. I have to be strong, unmoved, because everyone else needs me to be strong for them. I'd love to have the luxury of being weak again, Moon. To have someone else be strong, be the hero, so I could lean on them. It's hard work being a living legend."

  "Yes," said Moon. "I remember you being a hero. You risked your life to open the Tomb of the Hadenmen after I failed. After I deserted you, leaving you and the others to fight the Empire while I went off on my own, convinced it was my destiny to reawaken my people. I was wrong. I won't let you down again, Owen. I'll never desert you again."

  "Of course you won't," said Owen. "I never thought otherwise."

  "There are more new things in me, apart from my emotions," said Moon. "I recently attempted to run a diagnostic on my tech implants, the internal mechanisms that made me an augmented man. To my surprise, I found most of them to be missing. My body has absorbed them. But I am as strong and fast as I ever was, my senses as clear, my thoughts as sharp. It's as though I don't need the tech to be more than human anymore."

  "It's the Maze," said Owen, nodding. "When you passed through with the rest of us, it put its mark on you too."

  "I am neither man nor Hadenman anymore," said Moon, frowning. "I'm becoming something else. Something different. My eyes still glow and my voice still buzzes, but perhaps only because I expect them to. You're further down the road than me, Owen. What am I becoming?"

  "I don't know," said Owen. "Perhaps something we have no name or even concept for. Yet."

  "I feel something when I consider this, Owen. I think… I'm scared."

  "We all are. The unknown is always scary. But no doubt the caterpillar fears becoming a butterfly, even as its instincts compel it to construct its own cocoon. We have no control over what's happening to us, so… enjoy the ride. And remember you're among friends."

  "I have observed the lepers. If they can face their changes with such courage, so can I." He looked sideways at Owen. "I think… something new is developing in me. I can… sense things. Things not apparent to anyone else. It's not telepathy. More like empathy perhaps. Either way, believe me when I say we're not alone here. There's something else out in the jungle. Something hidden and very powerful."

  "The Hadenman army?"

  "No. I'd know my own people. This is alive, but it's like nothing else I've ever encountered. It thinks slow thoughts, but it's growing angry. And it knows where we are."

  "Does it have a name? An identity?"

  "Oh, yes," said Tobias Moon. "It's the Red Brain."

  Hazel d'Ark had joined up with her two alternate selves, trading gossip over their respective Owens, when a single leper woman approached them, limping tiredly into their path. The three women stopped abruptly rather than run her over, and the leper woman dropped to her knees before Hazel.

  "Forgive my impertinence, blessed one, but you are Hazel d'Ark, the liberator of Golgotha?"

  "Well, yes," said Hazel. "Though I didn't exactly do it alone. Was there something you wanted?"

  The leper pushed back her cowl, revealing a face half eaten away by rot. Patches of bare skull showed through the sparse remaining hair, and her teeth showed clearly where her left cheek should have been. Up close, the smell was appalling, though Hazel and the others tried hard not to show it. The leper woman produced one gray hand from under her cloak. It was skeletally thin, and only had two fingers on it. The leper woman held it out in supplication to Hazel.

  "You have been touched by God, lady. You have worked miracles. I have seen it on the holo. So work one more miracle, for me, I beg you. Heal me."

  Hazel fell back a step, shocked. "I… I can't. I don't know how."

  "You have healed your own terrible wounds. You are blessed by God. Only lay your hand on me, and I too shall be healed, I know it."

  Hazel looked to Bonnie and Midnight for help, but they were stunned too. Hazel looked back at the leper woman before her, and didn't have a damned clue what to say. So in the end she reached out a hand, her flesh crawling, and laid it firmly on the leper's bowed head. They both waited a few moments, but nothing happened. After a while the leper woman sighed, and got to her feet again.

  "Thank you for trying, lady. My faith was not strong enough. I won't trouble you again."

  She pulled her hood back over her ruined head, and limped slowly away. Hazel looked after her, and then back at her hand. She rubbed it hard against her side and then stopped, almost guiltily. She realized there were other lepers, watching her.

  "I would have helped her if I could."

  No one said anything, and after a while Hazel walked on. Bonnie and Midnight followed her, some distance behind.

  The Hadenmen attacked just after first light. The rain was coming down like it had a grudge, but the augmented men didn't even seem to notice. They came streaming into the clearing from all sides, forcing their way through the packed treeline by sheer brute force, wood splintering and cracking under their servomotor-driven strength. The guards in the watchtowers sounded the first alarm, and lepers went running to the walls to defend the Mission. Hundreds of Hadenmen came marching through the rain in silence, attacking without challenge or war cries. They strode endlessly out of the jungle, tall and perfect like living gods, graceful beyond hope, with the sun burning in their eyes and energy weapons in their hands.

  A fusillade of arrows rained down on them, mostly glancing off their internal armor. When the arrows did pierce flesh, the augmented men merely pulled them out and let them drop to the ground. They opened fire with their hand disrupters, punching holes in the wooden outer wall, concentrating their fire to create holes large enough to enter through. The wooden wall burned briefly here and there, but the driving rain soon put it out. And then the Hadenmen reached the outer wall, and the first few broke through into the compound beyond, and it was all hand-to-hand fighting after that.

  The lepers up on the catwalks kept up a steady rain of arrows on their enemy, and now and again an augmented man crashed to the ground and did not rise again, an arrow in his eye. Other defenders poured boiling oil on the Hadenmen climbing through the holes they'd made in the wall. Those few defenders with energy weapons picked their targets carefully, and cursed the long two minutes it took for their guns to recharge between shots. Inside the wall, defenders rushed to meet the intruders, and held them in place by sheer weight of numbers.

  Owen and Hazel fought side by side before the largest hole in the outer wall, and every Hadenman that came within reach of their weapons died. They swung their swords with far more than human strength, and the heavy steel blades sheared cleanly through internal armor and implanted steelmesh to pierce the more vulnerable organs beyond. And fast as the augmented men were, Owen and Hazel were faster. They stopped the invaders in their tracks, and step by step they pushed the Hadenmen back out into the clearing, kicking aside the bodies of the fallen to get at their inhuman foes.

  Bonnie Bedlam and Midnight Blue danced among the augmented men, laughing and singing as they killed. Bonnie threw herself into the thick of the combat, cutting everything within reach, ignoring the injuries she took herself. The wounds healed so quickly she barely felt the pain, and wouldn't
have cared if she had. She was death and destruction, and nothing could stand before her. Midnight teleported back and forth across the compound, blinking in and out of existence just long enough to strike down an enemy and be gone again. She seemed to be everywhere at once, and everywhere she was a Hadenman fell.

  The two Sisters of Glory came howling out of nowhere, swinging their swords too fast for the human eye to follow. They viciously cut the Hadenmen, darting in and out again, slashing at vulnerable joints and unprotected throats. Sister Marion strode stiff-leggedly into the thickest part of the fighting, lurching and swaying and somehow never where her enemy thought she would be. She brought her sword around in a long, sweeping arc, cutting right through a Hadenman's glowing eyes, and then finished off her blinded prey with a knife to the heavy veins at the top of the thigh. Blood splashed her uncanny witch's outfit, and looked perfectly at home there.

  Sister Kathleen swung her sword with both hands, cutting a path through the enemy through sheer determination. She ducked and darted, bobbed and weaved, elusive as mercury, leaving dead men in her wake.

  Colonel William Hand went to meet the Hadenmen with grim purpose and some satisfaction, glad at last to be doing what he was meant to do and did so well. He roared and chanted old battle cries as his sword rose and fell in simple butchery, and his heart was glad. The augmented men tried ganging up on him, but Otto was always there to watch his back, hacking the long legs of the Hadenmen and bringing them down so his knife could reach their throats and faces. He laughed and sniggered as he killed, reveling in the destruction of such perfection of form.

  And everywhere, inside the Mission and without, the lepers fought as best they could, with guns and swords and sharpened farm implements, anything that came to their gray and rotting hands. Anyone who could stand came out to fight, throwing themselves at the enemy with the calm desperation of those who knew they were dying anyway. And perhaps also because they were determined to preserve the few things in their life that still had value and meaning to them. The Mission, their homes, and the Saint who had come to give them hope when they thought they had lost it forever.