He still thought Pia was with me here. I smiled dreamily. She was going to be safe.
Water streamed from his cammies. Cautious and taut, he was the consummate predator aware of every small changing nuance of his environment. The GP must have been playing the same scene for Pia. Her voice inside my head grew thin and strident as Blade advanced on me.
Oh, God, Kadar San! Can’t you hear me? Wake up. He’s coming. Kadar San, he’s coming!
He is coming? Who is coming?
Don’t you remember, Kadar San. Blade. He’s coming.
Oh. Blade. The ugly Human? The mean Human? Does he have fleas?
I thought that funny and sat there chuckling to myself.
Blade halted at the unexpected sound. A scowl transformed his face into something hideous, an old Frankenstein monster face irradiated by a sky charged with electricity. Suspicious, he pressed forward slowly, ready to fire at the first movement.
He is part Human, the GP babbled desperately to Pia.
Inch by war inch, Blade neared where I sat happily waiting for him to finish me off. In another few steps he would have me in sight.
I still didn’t care.
He is part Human, the GP declared.
What was that supposed to mean? I felt a jolt as recognition swept through Pia’s mind. Suddenly, the tone of her thought-voice changed from pleading and tears to chiding and harsh.
Sergeant Kadar San, get your cowardly ass off the ground. Are you willing to sit there like your Zentadon ancestors and play victim? Think about the taa camps. None of you had the gonads to do anything about it till the Humans made a revolution. You’re part Human. Kadar San, damn you, act like it!”
Go away! I retorted.
That’s right, she shot back. Get mad. Do something about it instead of sitting there like a knot on a log or a wart on a frog …
Old, old Earth expression?
One more step. Blade craned his neck to look around the boulder.
Kadar San, he’s going to shoot your fraidy-cat elf ass. Desperation and horror returned to her voice.
The sense of well-being was leaving. I didn’t want it to leave.
Pick up the gun, Kadar San!
I hated the rain in my face. I never wanted to see rain again. I reached for the Punch Gun as though awaking from a dream. I picked it up.
Blade’s mask of a face appeared. I looked up directly into the muzzle of his Punch Gun.
Shoot him, Kadar San!
Blade laughed, but it was not him; it came, deep and hellish, from the rotted soul of the Presence.
I attempted to roll away and get a shot at the same time, knowing even as I thought it that it was too late. The sniper had the drop on me. My one consolation was knowing Pia had made it.
“You’re wasted, elf,” Blade snarled.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R
FIFTY EIGHT
The trigger squeeze never came. A savage part of the clouds fell on Blade. The lizard snatched him off the ground and tossed him high into the air, like a baby fanger toying with its live prey.
Blade was too mean to give up without a fight. Even as he was being flung from one animal to the jaws of the next, he got off a shot that exploded the first creature.
The second reptile, one of the big kings, caught him in the air and snapped off Blade’s leg. A hideous scream of pain and terror. The sniper fell helpless at the animal’s feet.
The lizards were coming for me next!
I shot the king into all his component parts. Seeing the leader disintegrated took the fight out of the remaining two. They barked and leapt back into the woods from which they had emerged in ambush. I heard them crashing through the forest in retreat.
There followed an eerie quiet. Even the storm slackened. I labored to my feet, swaying a little, not fully recovered from lintatai and all the other hardships of past days. I kept my eyes on Blade as I slowly approached. He blinked up at me.
“My leg …?” he murmured.
I retrieved his Punch from where it had fallen alongside and shoved it into my belt. I relieved him of the Gauss and slung it over my own shoulder. I stood over him and aimed my weapon at his head. My hand did not waver this time.
Blade stopped blinking and glared at me. “Fu-uck,” he growled. “You haven’t the balls.”
“You forget,” I said. “I am half-Human.”
I felt absolutely nothing. No taa, no emotion. I was empty. Killing was not so difficult if you were Human.
No.
It was the GP.
Killing is not always murder, but murder is always murder. You cannot destroy evil by the use of evil. You take part of the evil with you.
I cannot take him with me to the pod. There is not time. I haven’t the strength.
We have prevailed, counseled the GP. But I can only influence.
After a moment, I dropped the Punch and let it hang from my hand at the end of my arm. I looked down upon Blade and he glared back with his baleful, unrepentant caves.
“I knew you didn’t have the balls,” he said. “Now, patch me up before I bleed to death.”
Blood oozed out the stub of his right leg. The lizard’s teeth had cauterized the main artery. Nonetheless, untreated, he would still bleed to death before the coming of light after the approaching shorter night. He remained a threat to me, and to the galaxy, every minute he remained alive.
I knelt at his side and applied a tourniquet fashioned from a piece of his own dirty uniform. That would see him through for awhile longer. I gave an ear flick as I stood up again. Blade seemed to suddenly realize my intentions.
“You aren’t going to leave me here alone!” he exclaimed.
“No,” I agreed.
He still looked dubious.
“I’m going to leave this with you.”
I placed my Punch Gun on the ground about ten meters away. I kept his, and I kept the Gauss. I might need them. The Presence seemed uncharacteristically chastened during all this.
“By the time you reach the weapon,” I said conversationally, “I will be out of range and well on my way to catching the pod with Sergeant Gunduli. The Punch Gun has one energy bullet remaining. Sergeant Shiva said I was not to leave a live trooper behind. I would suggest you use the bullet before the lizards regain their courage and return.”
AFTERWORD
The Dark Planet appeared on the view screen of the orbiting Stealth, its boils of lightning burbling on its crust. A destroyer sent from the dreadnought Tsutsumi flickered into sight on the screen and launched a wave of small-yield kinetic energy strikes against the Blob coordinates supplied by Sergeant Gunduli. She shuddered, reached, and took my hand. Ground-based missiles and beams from the Tslek decoy camp on Aldenia blazed to intercept, providing a spectacularly brief fireworks show that was, as Pia put it, mostly sound and fury without substance. After all, there was no real power in the Blob camp. Only a single soldier with a bunch of holograms and a few weapons to put on a show and make the Republic think it was an advance base.
The destroyer’s systems tracked in on the fake base and hammered it into mushroom clouds. Meanwhile, I knew, the main Galaxia fleet was elsewhere preparing for a great war. DRT-213 — what was left of it, two of us — had reported back in time to prevent significant forces being lured off the line to Aldenia. The fate of the Galaxia Republic, as Pia put it, might have been decided by a Zentadon.
I smiled thinly. “Half-Human, half Zentadon,” I said.
Extraction of the Stealth from the Dark Planet’s gravity began. The ship accelerated out of its orbit and whipped back around Aldenia’s two moons and onto a trajectory for redocking with the Tsutsumi. As soon as the ship slipped from gravity’s pull and the G-forces bled off, I prepared to eject the lindal from the garbage port.
“There’ll be an investigation,” Pia pointed out. “The loss of the team does not have a good explanation without the box to confirm it.”
“I choose not to give Humans or any other race or species the ability to a
rtificially control one another,” I said with a determined ear flick. “Pandora’s box will vanish forever into a black hole, like a grain of sand on the desert. Higher-higher will just have to believe us that the soldiers of DRT-213, including Sergeant Blade Kilmer, died bravely battling our way back to the pod.”
The lindal propelled free of the craft. Pia and I stood together before the view screen and watched it tumble away until it became less than another speck of sand on the vast beach that was space. It would induce no more evil. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought I heard the Presence shriek with disappointment.
“We may have seen the last of it,” Pia said, “but we have not seen the last of evil.”
I looked at her. She smiled, suddenly shy.
“I do not think I have the Human part of me accomplished yet,” I said.
Oh? What on Earth could you mean?
I am speaking particularly of the kiss.
“We have two whole Galaxia days before we redock with the Tsutsumi,” Pia pointed out demurely. “Practice makes perfect.”
An old, old Earth expression?
Hush! How can you kiss with your mind going like that?
I was thinking that if you had a tail …
THE END
What if you were told you have a power you don’t know about? What if you were told that you have to use it to save the universe from a major bad-die? What if no one will tell you how you are supposed to do this?
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