Thieves of Light

by Michael Hudson

  "If you'll excuse me, my gentle companions, a certain young lady in the employ of Hop Zoid's modest establishment awaits my return," Pike had called to them, standing up backward as the taxi rolled away.

  "Thanks, Uncle Pike," Parcival had called back, waving.

  Pike saluted. "The pleasure if not the profit was all mine. Bhodi Li, sleep well."

  There was no chance to say any more, not with the taxi disappearing into the gloom and the shuttle waiting.

  Twelve hours later, Bhodi's imagination had turned that innocent parting into an ominous warning. Part of Bhodi was hoping that the young lady's charms had been sufficient to detain Pike on Rejia. But expecting otherwise, Bhodi had come prepared in fighting clothes and full armor, his helmet tucked under his arm.

  Voices down the corridor told Bhodi that he would soon have company, and he did not want to be found standing outside a closed door like an idiot. Swallowing his apprehension, Bhodi touched the plate and ducked through the opening that appeared.

  A moment later laser light splashed across his right shoulder just below the cop, slicing through the strap that held the armor piece in place. He reacted without thinking, without even feeling astonishment. Dropping his helmet,

  Bhodi dove away to the left, and the cop came off as he shoulder-rolled to a crouched position.

  He looked up to find Pike standing a half dozen paces away, looking at him down the sight-tube of a long-barreled phaser pistol.

  "What-" Bhodi began.

  Then he saw the muscles of the Fop's hand flex slightly, and Bhodi instinctively threw up his left arm to protect his face. A moment later the forearm guard fell to the floor, and Bhodi felt a blast of heat through the material of his suit.

  Before the heat could become acutely painful, Bhodi sprang up with a spinning move and dashed for the door. He managed three steps before he felt the left cuisse loosen. It slid down his leg and his long strides kicked it against the wall.

  He was almost to the door by then. But as he reached for the touchplate, a stabbing beam of laser light from Pike's phaser began to circle it like an electron orbiting a nucleus. To open the door, Bhodi would have to reach into the beam with no more protection than the thin fabric of his gauntlet.

  Instead, Bhodi drew back his hand and turned to stare at Pike questioningly. As he did, Pike flicked the energy beam sideways, slicing the straps holding the holster cuisse in place, and Bhodi's last piece of armor dropped to the floor. The floor of the gallery was littered with equipment, like a battlefield after a slaughter.

  "You have a bet down on me failing or something?" Bhodi demanded, finding his voice.

  "Couldn't find anyone to take it," Pike said, tipping the barrel of his pistol ceilingward. "So I decided to go the other way and cover all the short bets. I got very good odds."

  "Then why the target practice?"

  Pike made the weapon disappear into his belly pocket. "I thought we'd get this business of a rematch out of the way right up front. Just in case you had the same notion about proving something to me that you did with Tivia."

  Outrage and anger bubbled to the top of Bhodi's emotional kettle, released by the knowledge that the moment of danger had passed. "She at least took me on even," he snapped. "You might notice I don't have a pistol."

  But even as he protested, Bhodi knew that his words were foolish. The pinpoint accuracy of Pike's phaser fire had made the point plainly: even armed, there was no way that he would have been on even terms with the Guardian.

  "But you had weapons," Pike said lightly. "Or what was all your work with Tivia about?"

  "Right," Bhodi said disdainfully. "I'm going to charge somebody who has a phaser pointed at me."

  "Sometimes your choice is charge them or die-if the distance to your opponent is less than the distance to cover."

  "That my first lesson?"

  "No," Pike said, surveying the litter on the floor. "Your first lesson is that armor is not invulnerable. Go see the armorer. He'll issue you replacement straps-and an Allison B-5 phaser sidearm. When you return we'll start on the rest of the curriculum."

  The Allison pistol was a hand-and-glove fit with the recess in the holster cuisse. A size-five glove and a size-six hand, that is. Drawing it was harder, it seemed to Bhodi, than it ought to have to be. There were two catches that had to be released to get the weapon free-one on the cuisse, and one on the pistol's grip.

  "They sure don't make it easy to get this out fast," he complained to Pike.

  "And why should they? The quick draw of your Western epics is foolish theatrics. Any warrior who doesn't have his weapon at the ready before he needs it is a fool who deserves to die young."

  "You can't live with a gun in your hand."

  Pike's expression darkened. "You can when the alternative is dying with it in your holster. Bhodi Li, your first job is to let go of what you think you know. You know nothing. If you continue to think otherwise, I'm going to lose a thousand units on you and you're going to find yourself back on Earth wondering why you feel lightheaded."

  "What's the point? I'll never shoot like you."

  "That's not the role planned for you. Look at me, Bhodi. I'm fast for my size, and reasonably agile. But do you think that I can run down a fleeing Arrian, or charge a battle nest? I'm specialized for sniping and fire support."

  "Is that what they want from me? Charging nests of monsters? Is that how you got the vacancy in the platoon to begin with? No, thank you. You can send me back now."

  Pike crossed his arms over his barrel chest. "What is the reason for your ambivalence, Bhodi Li? What has happened to the confident warrior I saw on the recordings Li-hon showed the platoon? What has happened to your boldness? What has happened to your great spirit?"

  "That was a game!" Bhodi fairly shouted. "Don't you get it? Jesus, you could have killed me with that business this morning, and this is only the training! I ought to be going to Friday night football games and feeling up Denise at the school mixers. And Parcival-"

  "What of Parcival?"

  "Do you know he only really acts like a kid when you're around? It's like you're his father, letting him be his own age-"

  "I know," Pike said, nodding. "I'm very happy to give him that. Do you know, when he first came to us he never laughed. He was always serious-always earnest."

  "So he ought to be driving his teachers crazy and looking forward to puberty. What right do you have to take a kid like that and throw him in the middle of a war?"

  "Are you going to tell me that he would have been better loved and cared for on Earth? Do you know anything of his story?"

  Bhodi hesitated. "Yeah, a little."

  "Then you know he's where he wants to be."

  "He's too young to make that choice."

  "You're wrong to judge him by his years," Pike said. "He understands the choice. Yes, he may die young. On his next mission, perhaps-none of us ever know when we go out whether we're coming back. But who are you to say that he shouldn't be allowed to make that choice?"

  "Besides, you don't really care about Parcival," Pike pressed. "You're just using him to avoid talking about something else."

  "I do, too, care. What d'you mean?"

  "It's very simple and very obvious. You talk about protecting Parcival so you don't have to admit you're afraid."

  "Hell, yes, I'm afraid," Bhodi snapped. "I'd be an idiot not to be."

  "But are you afraid of failing, or succeeding?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Bhodi sulked.

  "No? I think perhaps you'd like to avoid having to face the third refusal. That way you can avoid facing the question of what you're made of, and go back to Earth and recapture the fantasy."

  "The fantasy?"

  "You had an image in your mind of what you were. We've taken that from you. You are not the best fighter here, not even the best of the challengers. Can you admit that, or is it too much honesty?"

  His chest tight, Bhodi drew a breath before answering. "All right.
There are a few that are better."

  "To be specific, you currently rank forty-seventh out of fifty-two on the instructors' chart."

  "I've only been here ten days!"

  "And you've shown us anger, arrogance, impatience and ambivalence about your challenge."

  "I worked hard on Ja-Nin."

  "By your standards, perhaps so. Compared to other students, not so. And it is progress, not effort, which counts here."

  "So what are you telling me? Go home? Quit before I'm fired?"

  Pike settled on the floor and, with a sweep of his hand, invited Bhodi to do the same. "I'm telling you to examine yourself and decide what it is you want. Only when you know your goal will you have a chance of reaching it."

  "That sounds real simple," Bhodi said, sitting back on his heels. "But it's not that easy."

  "Then let me try to help. Why did you come here? Why did you make the first refusal?"

  Bhodi hesitated.

  "Honest answers, now."

  Sighing, Bhodi stared up at the ceiling. Then he shook his head. "Jesus, I watched the shuttle blow up on TV at school and I figured that was it for space. And all of a sudden I'm looking down at old planet Earth and there's someone asking me if I want to see more. What else could I say?"

  "And now-why do you stay? Now that you know the price of extending your sight-seeing tour."

  Bhodi frowned. "I–I don't know."

  "Do you want to go home?"

  "No. Except sometimes I think, what if something happens to me and there's no one to go back and rescue my family from what they went through when I disappeared."

  "If you die, their loss becomes real and their grief valid," said Pike. "Would you take that from them, too?"

  Bhodi shook his head. "I guess I didn't think of that."

  "Next question. Do you want to become a Guardian?"

  "Yes-and no," Bhodi said after a moment's consideration. "Yes, because it would mean something. No, because I don't want to die."

  Pike nodded understandingly. "Bhodi-this uncertainty is something that comes on nearly every challenger recruited from a world with no knowledge of the war. Your uncertainty is even stronger because you don't quite believe you can achieve what you reach for, and so are afraid to try."

  There was an edge of defensiveness in Bhodi's voice. "What would you think if you'd been beaten as many ways as I have?"

  "As I said before, we deprived you of the image you had of yourself. But Bhodi, understand that the reason you're here is that we have an image in our mind of what you can be."

  "What do you mean?"

  Pike leaned forward and rested his palms on the floor. "I'll tell you something you're not meant to know, Bhodi Li. There is nothing-nothing! — that you're being asked to do that you're not capable of doing. The tests you underwent when you arrived assured us of that."

  "So?"

  "So the question isn't whether you can, but whether you will. Commit yourself, give yourself to this fully, and I'll turn you into a warrior Li-hon and Tivia and even Lord B. will welcome into the platoon. Then you can face the question of staying or going home honestly."

  Bhodi's expression was dubious. "You can do that for me?"

  "Yes," Pike said gravely. "If you trust me." Bhodi stared, then began to snicker. "That's funny." Pike's expression softened, then he, too. started to laugh.

  "It is, isn't it?"

  "All right, Ferthewillihan Pike," Bhodi said, standing and thumbing the releases to bring his Allison into his hand. "Let's do it."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first hours were devoted to making Bhodi familiar with his new weapon. Unlike the weapon he had been provided for the audition, the Allison was no clone of the standard Photon pistol. Physically, it had a longer, slimmer barrel (the correct term was focus tube, Bhodi learned), a rakish sighting ridge along the top (which seemed a poor substitute for a LED sighting light), and more weight in the grip.

  Most importantly, it had a faster response. With the Photon pistol, Bhodi had learned to space his shots a second and a half apart, since the arena's scoring system could deal with nothing faster. That conditioning had to be unlearned. As Pike had demonstrated to him that morning, with the Allison it was possible to get off several effective shots in a single second.

  Another part of Bhodi's reeducation was the concept of the effective shot. With the Photon pistol, a hit was a hit was a hit. With the Allison, what Pike called "holding" a target was as important as hitting it. Once the output setting was at maximum, longer holding times were the only way to get more energy on target. And it was concentrated energy, not good targeting, that did the damage.

  "If all you manage is to light up your opponent, you might as well not have fired," Pike said. "All you've done is give away your position, like being the first to turn on your flashlight in a dark room."

  Bhodi asked about more powerful weapons and was told that the Allison was the most powerful "free" sidearm available to the Guardians. Free in this context meant that it was dependent on its internal source of energy.

  But there were heavier weapons in the arsenal, heavier both physically and in the sense of having greater energy resources, and Pike did not neglect them. In fact, Pike made a point of acquainting Bhodi with every personal energy weapon available to the Guardians. There were twenty-six such standard arms, from a two-shot derringer too small to contain a microgenerator and which used expendable piezocapsules instead, to a shoulder-mounted bazooka-like pulse phaser that would have been at home as the main armament on a fighter ship.

  Special attention was given to the weapons of choice of the rest of the company. "You need to know what's at your side or your back," Pike said. "But beyond that, you never know when you might need to fight with a weapon pried from a dead friend's hand."

  Pike himself carried an Allison with a modified sight, plus two of the tiny derringers. He showed Bhodi how he could conceal the derringers in the palm of his large hands to give the appearance that he was unarmed when he really was quite well defended.

  Tivia's sidearm was a Bracke, slightly less powerful than the Allison but a more comfortable fit for her smaller hands. "Not that she likes to use it," Pike added as Bhodi turned a Bracke over in his hands. "If she can get away with it, she tries to go the whole mission without drawing it. Or if she has to draw it, to go without discharging it."

  "Seems like that could be dangerous, to herself and the platoon. Pride goeth, etcetera."

  "It's not pride. It's tradition, and tradition is Tivia's blind spot," Pike said. "The sergeant's had a few run-ins with her about it."

  The other three members of the platoon formed its heavy-weapons team. With his size and strength, Li-hon was a natural for the pulse phaser and its relatively small 140-pound backpack power unit. Lord Baethan literally was a weapon-a Celtan-designed three-beam phaser was built into his right hand, so that all he needed to do was raise it and think the command to fire. The triphaser drew on the same power source as did Lord B. himself, which meant that as long as he could fight, he could fire.

  True to form, Parcival had designed a unique weapon for himself-basically a modified Allison mounted on an articulated arm atop Parcival's hard-shell electronics-crammed backpack. Using an autotargeting system, the weapon could fire hands-off from any position in a 180-degree rainbow arc from over Parcival's right shoulder to over his left, at any azimuth from minus twenty degrees to plus fifty, and in any direction.

  Though the autotargeter was still a hair too slow and a bit too easily fooled for any of the others to adopt the weapon, it did free Parcival's hands to operate the jammer-scanner "black boxes" he wore on his right wrist and left forearm. Real-time intelligence and electronic dirty tricks were Parcival's most important battlefield contributions.

  "There's a lot to learn," Bhodi said dubiously as they wrapped up their armaments survey.

  Pike patted his shoulder. "Not more than you can learn."

  Pike was true to his word. In three short days,
he gave Bhodi what he needed most-he gave him his confidence back. And he did it by making war a game again.

  It started with target practice on a marvelous high-tech firing range. But to get to it, Bhodi and Pike had to transport down to the planet. Like all of the gunnery training facilities, it was located in Rejia's sterile outback, part of a cluster of low, sprawling buildings that reminded Bhodi of a GM automobile plant he had once seen during a family vacation.

  Bhodi's concept of a firing range was based on what he'd seen in police dramas-shooters lined up on one side, targets lined up on the other, like a bowling alley for guns. But the range was shaped more like a baseball field, only larger. The angle between the "foul lines" was 120 degrees instead of ninety, and the curved back wall was easily 250 meters away, too far for even a Mike Schmidt or a Kirk Gibson to hit one out.

  But there was only a single shooter's station, more or less where home plate would have been. In the first exercises, Bhodi stood on the shooter's station and potted a series of stationary red disks located at a distance of twenty-five meters, evenly spaced in an arc from left field to right. When he had proved himself at that distance, a new set of targets popped up from the floor at fifty meters, then a hundred, then two hundred.

  It was easy shooting. The Allison was lovely and cooperative, and Bhodi quickly learned to trust and admire it. There was never an errant shot or a misfire Bhodi could blame on the weapon. There were few enough Bhodi needed to blame on himself, for the sight was true and the weapon steady in his hand.

  But it did not stop there. In the following days, Pike systematically added complications that elevated the level of the challenge. Bhodi was presented with a mixture of targets at assorted ranges and instructed to shoot the closest ones first. He was offered targets that popped up momentarily from the floor or flashed diagonally across the range.

  In time, all variables were exploited. Exercises were conducted in the equivalent of full midday light, twilight dimness, and moonlit gloom. The targets themselves shrank, reduced in increments from the size of a human head to the size of a clenched fist.