Blue rained across his sight.
It was surreal, but cerulean clouds rained fat blue globules that pooled into an azure sea, which sloshed across the lower half of his sight. The waters quickly rose to completely fill his vision.
What the fuck?
Then he remembered hearing a long time ago about expensive medicines that confirmed with the patient they’d received the correct treatment and dosage. The cap he’d pulled off the tube was the same color blue as his vision. So was the writing on its side.
“Probably to distract you from the pain,” he said, laughing, giddy with relief or, possibly, the drugs.
But it had worked. The pain in his ribs was gone. And it was more than a painkiller. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t as classy as the medical nanites of the Orion Era, but his injuries should be repairing, the natural healing mechanisms of his body boosted to a massively accelerated rate. Which probably explained why his chest felt so hot, he expected to see steam curl up from it.
If only he could see through the blue.
“Over here!” called a voice not far away. “He’s by that tree.”
They’d come back for him. He wasn’t alone.
“Istrielle?” he cried. “Is that you?”
He tried to peer through the blue filling his eyes but got nothing. It was his hearing that told him two people were standing over him.
Damn! He must seem pitiful, looking up at them blindly. Did his eyes look solid blue from the outside?
Hubert gave a warning hiss as the blue drained a little from his sight.
He could discern the vague outline of two people which was enough for him to orient his head in the right direction. “Who are you?” he asked the nearest.
The figure made no reply.
That wasn’t good.
Darant gasped. Blinked. And finally saw.
They were humans, or close enough, and they were carrying blasters. Beneath glossy light combat armor, they were clad head to toe in loose black overalls like hazmat suits. The impression was emphasized by rubber boots and shiny gauntlets that ran as far as their elbows. Visored helmets with circular breathing filters over the mouth completely enclosed their heads and covered their necks.
Wide, red, cross belts fell across their chests in an ‘X’ pattern that was mirrored by red ‘X’s stitched into the knee armor. The only other color came from a circular sensor band in lurid pus-green that was mounted over the visor.
They looked like villains from a low-budget horror-holo. And he supposed that’s exactly what the Re-Education Enforcement Division was.
“Easy, rebel,” said the REED he’d mistaken for Istrielle. “We’ll take good care of you. Docs will patch you up so you live long enough to understand the horror of your crimes and confess. You will pour out your sorry heart begging for atonement, and you will mean every single word.”
“You’ll get your chance to atone too,” said the other REED, a human man. “They’ll reconfigure your body so it’s pressure sealed for vacuum and then sell you to the asteroid mining consortium. Soon, you’ll forget what it was like to eat or breathe like worthwhile citizens who deserve those rights. Each day you deliver your work quota, they’ll swap three cylinders out of your new body. One for air. One for nutrition. One for waste. Miss your target or fail to beg for atonement, and you don’t get your swaps that day. Better hope you survive till the next one. Radiation’ll kill you within a year anyway.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a fluffy six-legged goat stand tall—all of his twelve inches—and narrow his eyes at the two REEDs.
Darant waved Hubert away. “Get out of here! Scram!”
“Pathetic rebel scum,” sneered the woman. “Do you really think we’ll fall for the ‘look behind you’ trick?”
Hubert growled and jumped at the man, flicking out a wicked curved claw from each middle hoof. He landed on his target, behind the man’s knee.
The goat’s mid-limbs crossed in front of his little chest, and the REED went down.
Orion’s balls! The little fella had sliced through the man’s hamstrings.
“Heavens above, Ceritel,” snapped the woman, looking at her comrade. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Goat trouble,” Darant explained as he drew his PHC-9 pistol and shot her five times, each time seeking weak points in her armor.
Turned out there weren’t any because it was weak all over. The armor was just for show, and the slugs of his 9 had carved cavernous wound channels right through her.
“You want some too?” he challenged the other REED who was face down in the dirt. Hubert stood on top of his helmet like a hunter over a trophy kill.
The curly white fur around the goat’s mouth was stained red and dripping with gore.
Pistol out and ready, Darant inspected the REED’s wounds. Hubert had tunneled under the man’s helmet and bitten out his throat.
The animal hopped off his vanquished foe and nuzzled against Darant’s shins.
Crouching down, Darant fussed at the wool behind the goat’s ears, marveling at its softness.
“Good boy, Hubert. So, you’re cute and deadly, eh? Just how I like my women.”
Istrielle…
Darant swapped a fresh mag into his pistol, grabbed his pack, and relieved the REEDs of a blaster and a couple of charge packs.
Hubert was eager to retrace their steps back to the camp. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for his human to follow, but Darant checked his purloined rifle first. The model looked like a local design, but its operation appeared generic.
He risked a test shot, sending a screaming bolt sizzling into the leaves between the dead REEDs.
Not bad. The rifle registered 23 standard power shots remaining.
The goat huffed at him.
“Somehow, coffee with your milk is never going to be quite the same again. OK, goat, let’s move out.”
He followed Hubert through the dense forest for twenty yards before he found Istrielle.
She was face down and unmoving, blown clear of a blackened crater that he guessed was from the same explosion that had thrown him against the tree.
He ran to her side. “Istrielle?”
She didn’t reply.
Carefully he rolled her over.
Strands of green hair escaped her stupid knitted hat, framing unseeing eyes.
He forced himself to draw his gaze down her body and take in the destruction of her chest. A slimy mess of blood and intestines spilled out onto the forest floor.
“Not you too,” he moaned.
He took off her hat because she’d told him she wanted to live free of the masks and coverings that had suffocated her.
After stroking her hair into the way she’d worn it that night at Krunacao, he closed her eyes.
He was about to move off, but hesitated. Instead, he safed the REED’s blaster and threw it into the underbrush. He grabbed Istrielle’s rifle and reached into the dead woman’s thigh pouches to retrieve a couple of charge packs.
It was stupid sentimentality. But he wanted to have something of hers.
“Darant! Over here.”
He followed the sound of Lily’s voice and saw her waving him over from thirty yards away. Behind her, deeper into the trees, he saw the outline of a Viking in the shadows.
After a last, lingering look at Istrielle, he jogged over to his friends.
* * * * *
Chapter 22: Lily Hjon
“Never get attached,” Lily murmured. “Never care.”
“What’s that?” asked Vetch.
She ignored him, unable to contemplate anything beyond Darant’s haunted face. Her heart wept for his loss, but she had a part to play, and she wouldn’t allow herself to weep openly.
She understood, though.
Everyone she’d loved had been separated from her. Usually by death.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Darant,” Vetch told him. “You have two minutes to get your shit together, but then we’re going back for Enthre
e and Fitz. We can’t leave until we’ve at least looked for them.”
Lily was surprised to feel Vetch stretch a comforting arm over her shoulders. Normally, any fool trying that would have gotten it snapped at the shoulder, but now? She didn’t even flinch.
“You too, Lil’,” said Vetch in a gruff voice that was the closest he got to soothing. “I won’t lose faith in you just because you allow your eyes to leak a little.”
They hunkered there in silence, but they never managed the two minutes.
Fate came a-calling.
* * * * *
Chapter 23: Vetch Arunsen
Vetch flicked the selector to high-power fire and watched the rifle’s charge count above the butt stock drain from 21 to 4. There was a price to be paid for unleashing bolts of maximum destructive power, but he had no choice.
The whining gravitics of the two GAC-19 hover fliers grew louder. They were almost upon him.
Buried beneath a pile of half-rotten leaves, with just his barrel and sights poking out, he waited for the assault vehicles to come into view, trying to ignore the war hammer pressing painfully into his side. GAC-19s were ground assault craft and, as such, had thick belly armor. Ideally, he’d have shooters in the trees to fire down upon the upper vents of the rear engines where the armor was weakest.
But he’d have to settle for a few high-power shots into the side of the cockpit and pray for good luck.
Vetch steadied his breathing and tracked the red ‘X’ painted on the rounded nose of the lead flier as it came into view.
Hopefully, Lily and Darant had pulled themselves together sufficiently to be doing the same, but for the moment, Vetch’s universe had shrunk to him, the scope, and the sleek black form of the flier. As he was panning up to the cockpit, he suddenly panicked. The pilot needed to die first, but did the pilot sit in front of the gunner, or was it the other way around?
He couldn’t remember. But when he sighted the cockpit, his jaw was too busy dropping into his beard for him to care.
The sight picture slammed two surprises into him nearly simultaneously. First, there was only one occupant of the cockpit. Second, that pilot was Enthree.
The third surprise came a half-second later and barely registered. The cockpit was flooded with human blood.
“Hold your fire,” he whispered, “but keep under cover until we know who’s following.”
Enthree piloted the GAC-19 to a gap in the trees a short distance away, then settled it down to land. Damn! She was out of sight, and a mechanical hiss indicated she’d retracted the cockpit canopy.
“Wait,” warned Vetch as the second flier came into view. “Douse me in batter and fry me in oil. It’s Fitz.”
Lily ran out, waving a hand cheerfully. Vetch lay buried for a moment, frowning at Lily’s reaction. Fitz presented himself as charming and resourceful, but Vetch still hadn’t made up his mind about the man underneath.
* * *
Five people.
Four seats.
The dilemma was solved by Enthree balancing on the rear fuselage of one of the fliers as they headed southeast through the forest, retracing the route they’d taken from Krunacao. The Muryani’s prodigious sense of balance was a well-established fact.
The next decision was a much tougher one. What should they do next?
“We can’t go back to RevRec,” said Lily. “But where can we go?”
“Don’t be so hasty,” Fitz retorted. “Slinh’s people took a body blow they couldn’t handle. They lost their belief in what they were doing. And while abandoning us was a cruel betrayal that I’ll make sure Slinh comes to regret, it wasn’t a premeditated one. We return to Krunacao.”
“Those RevRec bastards don’t deserve our help,” said Vetch.
“I agree,” said Fitz. “We’re not going back for their sake, but for mine. I want to know who’s really behind this. And besides, I’ve just been on the blower to Sergeant Sybutu. His team’s going to meet us at Krunacao. Soon, we’ll be one big happy Chimera Company family again.”
* * * * *
Chapter 24: Enthree
“We could use a fresh pair of eyes and…” Fitz shrugged in a manner that Enthree had learned to describe as flippant. “And a fresh pair of antennae.”
Enthree regarded the human twenty feet below her on the forest floor, though she took her role of lookout very seriously and kept her antennae sweeping the area for unexpected visitors.
The man wasn’t even properly human. Those truly of that race often referred to him as a mutant, which was highly inaccurate. She decided to assign him the label of trans-human for now.
Vetch had ordered her to watch their six, by which he meant to use her superior senses of smell and vision to alert the remnant party to dangers approaching from the forest. And although she tried to perform her duty with diligence, she couldn’t help but redirect her antennae away from the trees and toward the trans-human, agitating them laterally as she sought hidden meaning behind his words.
She trusted Vetch and Darant because they were transparent to her. Meatbolt had been like that too, and Lily to a degree, although her friend with the fascinating tattoos harbored a wellspring of sadness that corroded her from within.
Fitz, on the other hand, cloaked his true self under a chameleon disguise of personas. He swapped them out to suit whatever task was at hand, much as he did the cartridges of his Fitz-Cannon, as he liked to call his intriguing hand weapon.
Enthree had seen humans attempt to hold multiple personas before, and she concluded that the species was ill-advised and ill-equipped to do so, because each persona left a residue that gummed up the individual’s psyche. Before long, so much psychological sediment built up that the underlying truth behind that person was obscured forever.
Such a person could not be trusted, and the ‘trans’ she placed in front of Fitz’s species name did nothing to alleviate her fears.
Enthree did not trust Fitz’s flippancy any more than the man behind it, but she couldn’t see an immediate reason to refuse his request.
“Of course,” Enthree answered, and she realized with a painful jolt along her spine that Lily had been standing behind Fitz all this time, and she hadn’t noticed. Her concerns about the trans-human were inducing a troubling reduction in her observational effectiveness.
She helped Lily up to take her post in the branches and then clambered down to the others at the tree line surveying the village of Krunacao. She took binoculars from poor Darant who radiated grief and anger like a nuclear furnace.
The vision enhancing device was designed for tiny, forward-facing, humanoid eyes, and it took several moments of uncomfortable adjustment until she was able to see through the eye pieces. Doing so was not nearly as uncomfortable as the sights that awaited her in the burning village.
Krunacao.
The memories of the time she’d spent here two nights before remained happy and informative, but the very joy of that night now laid a poisonous foundation for the charnel house scene laid out before her.
She trained the binocs on the temporary canteen where she’d consumed alcoholic beverages. It was one of the few buildings that was no longer burning, its fabric outer layer having been consumed by flames to leave a blackened frame under which charred humanoid corpses slumped against metal tables. She surmised they were lunchtime diners caught unaware by the attack.
Why hadn’t they fought back, she wondered? Almost all the adults in the village had been armed two nights ago.
“I want to know who did this,” Fitz said. “Who are we facing? Any clues?”
“I am still assessing,” Enthree replied, though she snagged for several seconds on Fitz’s use of the word ‘we.’ She was no longer sure who ‘we’ were, and she was even less convinced they remained the allies of the rebel group that had abandoned her at the walls of Ameliorate-10.
So far, there had been no sign of Slinh’s rebel army, which was presumably still headed here through the forest, traveling on foot. When they g
ot here, they would find almost every building in flames or already burned out. Three thousand inhabitants had called Krunacao home, and their bodies were everywhere, many of the adults still gripping personal weapons. Something about their positioning was wrong, though. There were no signs of an organized defense. Nor were there signs of them fleeing headlong into the trees, which were just a hundred yards from the edge of the buildings.
Enthree tried selectively filtering out the crackle and roar of the flames, listening for a clue that would answer the questions forming in her mind.
Hisses and pops from vaporizing fluids were everywhere. Enthree pulled her jacket tight over the hearing hairs of her throat and chest because she didn’t want to think about what was generating those sounds.
Instead, she relied on her eyesight to scan the tree line on the opposite side of the village. The humanoid binoculars used smart overlays to see through the smoke, but they were ineffective. Her vision was impaired by the tears dripping over her eyes, stimulated not by the smoke—which her outer nictitating membrane was perfectly capable of screening out with minimum loss of vision—but by thoughts of those joyful people so full of life that night and now…so very dead.
“Well?” Darant demanded from nearby. “What do we do now?”
“Give Enthree a few more moments,” Vetch told him.
In those moments, Enthree saw enough to confirm her working theory. “There are no signs of weapons being fired into the trees, which I would expect if villagers fled there. The position of the corpses neither matches everyday peaceful activity, nor determined resistance or flight. I conclude that this massacre has been staged to make it look like something it is not.”
“Thank you,” said Fitz. “I concur.”
Enthree handed Darant back his binoculars. “There is more. That smell invites further investigation.” An ‘S’ shape reflected up and down her spine as she contemplated the sickening odor of devastation.
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