“There is more to what happened out there in the woods than this,” he said, moving over to share the rock with her. She did not look at him. “You and Johan?” he asked. “It always seemed as if he was special to you.”
“Yes. Once, between missions,” she replied. “It meant more to him than to me. I didn’t understand what he wanted of me. I don’t even now. I didn’t want it to go further. It was a bad idea, in a moment of weakness.”
“We all have them,” he said.
“I am afraid it killed him,” she said, eyes downcast. “When this voyage came up, he threw away everything he had gained. I fear that I’m the reason he joined up. Perhaps he hoped to restart things between us. Asking me for things I do not understand and cannot give. So you’re right, it is both things.”
Fenaday shook his head. “I don’t think he’s unhappy with his choice.”
She looked back uncomprehending. “He’s dead.”
He could find nothing to say to that.
“I want to go back to what you and I were,” she said. “You won’t see last night’s side of me again. I want you to count on me as you did before.”
He nodded. “I never really stopped. I guess my feelings were just hurt.” Abruptly he leaned forward, taking her hand. She looked away, but held tight to his hand.
“One thing I’ve learned is that there are roads to places that no roads lead back from. Everything is different now,” he said. Emotion welled up in him. He felt unbalanced, like a man reaching for a handhold and missing it.
“Has this Pard tried to kill you since you joined Sidhe?” he asked, switching back to firmer ground.
She shrugged. “Twice on Bandish, once on Morokat. I think he was behind our troubles there. I handled it.”
“Then he knows where you are and will try again.”
“He doesn’t pursue me full time,” she replied. “It would be beneath his dignity. But yes, he’ll try again.”
“If we get out of this alive, we’ll deal with him,” Fenaday said, “together.”
“Make no rash promises,” she warned. “Pard is the head of Denshi and deadly. I bested him once by sheer surprise and barely escaped alive.”
“It’s been said and cannot be unsaid. Besides, I’m pretty formidable myself, you know,” he said with an ironic smile.
She shook her head, looking him in the eye. “You would look like a child next to Pard.”
“The bigger they are, they harder they fall?” he added hopefully.
“Well,” she said, with barest of smiles, “maybe we will get lucky.”
Fenaday and Shasti walked back to the camp, side by side, talking quietly. Duna and Telisan watched them return and exchanged their version of smiles of relief.
“I think our chances for survival just went up,” Telisan said.
Chapter Fifteen
Sidhe slid closer in orbit to Enshar, recovering her Wildcats. The fighters’ running lights glinted as they lined up for entry into her hangar bays. With recovery complete, the frigate altered orbit with a quick burn of engines. Fenaday’s security protocol allowed the starship’s engines to be used to change orbit, but the mutineers’ best efforts had failed to find a way to use them to break out. She moved to an orbit sufficiently close for a parachute drop on Barjan Field.
A brilliant yellow escape capsule popped from the frigate’s side. Inside it sat a Mark Nine one-kiloton warhead, the largest the Confed Navy permitted a private warship. The capsule fell through the atmosphere until its onboard computer finished analyzing wind, height and trajectory. A parachute deployed much later than would have been the case with live cargo. The warhead, well secured and incapable of going off by accident, slowly sank through the quiet of Enshar’s night. At a thousand meters, it disturbed a flock of migrating unbars. The giant bird-like creatures squawked and dodged the capsule. The deadly load landed between the wrecks of two in-system freighters on Barjan Field. Emergency and rescue lights began their automatic plea for help. They pulsed brightly at intervals. On the half-hour, a siren sounded for a few minutes. Wildlife fled the area in alarm.
*****
“Barjan,” announced Duna, pointing at the horizon with a small furred hand, “a city with a longer history than some species, far larger even than your Tokyo or Peking.” He drew his otter-like body up in evident pride.
Fenaday and the others crowded the flight deck. As the shuttles came in from the ocean, they could see the city in its ruined majesty, stretching out in all directions back from the coastline. From the air, it looked like a froth of bubbles of different sizes and shapes, burying the low mountains of the coastline. They could see domes of white and a variety of metallic colors shining in the sun. Shaftways lined with windows and balconies allowed light to plunge into the depths. Some of the domed exteriors showed rents and signs of explosions. Several new-style towers visible in the distance looked ragged, uneven, as if they had attracted some form of explosive weapons fire.
“The mansions and the more desirable properties are down those shafts,” Duna said. “Barjan’s upper regions were reserved for commerce, sanitation, industry, the poor and those young non-traditionalists influenced by other cultures.”
The shuttles approached the immense Barjan Spacefield, a proper complement to the huge city. Fenaday could not tell where the city began and the space/airport ended. They’d flown over the seaport side on the way in, passing over dozens of half-submerged wrecks, long broken free of their moorings. At the quays sat more vessels, including a huge submarine transport lying on its side.
“Are there undersea cities?” Fenaday asked Duna.
“Several major ones and a number of other installations,” answered Duna absently staring at the horizon-filling city.
Fenaday imagined being hunted by Shellycoats through the streets of a city beneath the sea. The thought filled him with a deep horror, as did the sight of the half-sunken ships. Fenaday feared little in space or in the air, but for some reason, the sight of a sunken vessel always made him uneasy.
“Radio direction indicates we are nearly on top of the capsule,” called Bernard. They all pressed against the windows, searching for it. Fenaday saw the bright yellow capsule first, pointing it out to Fury. The shuttles sank to the concrete of the field. This time Fenaday didn’t tax the engines by running them for a possible escape. The damaged shuttles couldn’t take the strain, and in truth, they had nowhere else to go.
The Dakotas’ still functional ramps dropped. In a well-rehearsed drill, the remaining robots, led by the three HCRs, came out, forming a perimeter. The ground troops followed warily, taking cover around the shuttles or behind the robots. In a deliberate display of nonchalance, Fenaday and the command staff sauntered out of the shuttles and into the open.
Sweat popped out on his forehead as Fenaday stepped into the enervating heat of the spaceport apron. He unsealed his shirt, glad he had left his leather A-2 jacket in the shuttle. Shasti walked beside him. She’d torn the sleeves out of her shirt. Her well-muscled arms cradled a bipod-mounted tri-auto, the same heavier caliber the HCRs used. He admired the way the shirt stretched over her chest, then mentally kicked himself for being distracted from the task of surviving the day. He wondered if she had noticed.
Telisan had noticed and he smiled to himself. The Denlenn was an essentialist, having seen so much cut short in the war. He lived for the moment. A pity, he thought, not for the first time, that there are no Denlenn females along. He found human females attractive enough, but there were compatibility problems in physiology and psychology. He sighed. Two particular faces occupied his mind, a female and demi-female of his species. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
The spacers stood in a circle, surveying the evidence of their unknown enemy’s work on the field. Some ships were scorched and flayed open as if by a tremendous heat, perhaps the whips of lightning from Duna’s ancient stories. Carbon scoring defaced the hulls and the concrete apron. Glassy trails lay melted in the permacrete. In the
far distance the remains of a large vessel rested where it careened into the ground on that fateful day. Her shattered inner structure resembled an enormous ribcage.
Telisan followed Fenaday’s gaze. “At least it was quick on her.”
The permacrete apron stretched before them, littered with smashed helicopters, aircars and lesser modes of transport, as if they’d been struck down in a single instant. The characteristic debris piles typical of a Shellycoat attack were curiously absent.
Fenaday raised field glasses to the city beyond. Several fires burned in the distance, trailing plumes of smoke into the bright blue sky. He didn’t know if these were natural or the result of some power short or failed machinery. Batteries, solar power and self-repairing machinery had kept Barjan full of mechanical movement since the Enshari perished, but it was a dance of the dead. Out in that foreboding city, robot domestics tended rooms filled with bones of their masters or perhaps, cleaned them away as mere refuse. Repair robots without central direction attempted to keep the city lights working. Gradually, each hit a problem only solvable by the living and failed. Still as seen from orbit, many machines continued to move in the city’s bowels.
“The amount of mechanical and electrical movement in Barjan,” Duna said, “makes me doubt that the EMP effect was used near the city.”
“Let’s hope so,” Fenaday replied. “It will be hard enough to get a ship operational without having to replace the computer system as well.”
Fenaday turned his eyes away from Barjan’s ruins and walked over to the nearest crashed vehicle. The others trailed him. Shasti gestured to Brian Connery and Daniel Rigg, who spread their squads out further to cover them.
They examined the wreck of a small helicopter. The black and orange machine lay badly crumpled, though there had been little fire. Human and Enshari bones rested intermingled in the cabin; the remains were in poor shape from animals and heat.
“Christ,” Mmok said, “can you imagine what this slaughterhouse smelled like for the first few weeks?”
“No,” said Fenaday quietly, “I thank God I can’t.”
“The bodies are all gone to bone or less by now,” said Shasti, as if to reassure him. Fenaday smiled to himself. She knew he was somewhat squeamish, at least by her standards.
Over twenty spacecraft lay in this section of the port. They ignored four more, smashed onto their sides by the attack or perhaps, merely toppled by storms. These were clearly shattered and beyond hope. Of the others, about half were military, or of a commercial type for rough, semi-prepared fields. The rest sat on the field, in vertical take-off cradles like the ones on Mars. Several of the nearest ships were burnt out hulks. One more looked as if it had been in the advanced stages of a refit never to be completed. A few promising prospects existed: a small in-system sloop and a huge liquid-hauler—both looked undamaged. Fenaday made a mental note of their positions.
“All right,” Fenaday said, “enough sightseeing. Let’s get that nuke and find the Terran Embassy.”
Mmok pointed to an area between two badly damaged in-system freighters. “Signal came from there,” he said laconically. Mmok stripped out of his shirt and tossed it to Cobalt. His one cyborg arm gleamed as the sun bounced off metal and polymer, contrasting with his pale white face and other natural arm.
They walked into the shadow of the freighters, grateful for the shade, and spotted the capsule immediately. Mmok unsealed the hatch, cutting off the lights and siren before it could blare again. The warhead and the detonation kit were bundled in with additional supplies.
“Dinnertime,” Mmok called out as he passed fresh charges to Cobalt and the other HCRs, which in turn loaded them and other supplies on the three utility robots. The larger unarmed versions of the crab robot handled the equipment easily.
“There’s a groundcar park over near the port buildings,” Rigg said. He’d pulled out his field glasses and scanned toward the control tower area. More cautious than some of the others, he’d only unsnapped the body armor over his chest, and sweat stained his green uniform shirt.
“Let’s check it out,” Fenaday said.
As the landing force moved, the gray crab robots skittered over the permacrete, keeping an unvarying distance from Mmok. Cobalt and Vermilion also paced them, though closer. Verdigris returned to the shuttles with the utility robots and the warhead under the watchful eyes in Pooka’s top turret.
“Wouldn’t it have been faster if we landed near the embassy?” Duna asked. On his shorter legs he had some trouble keeping the pace. He was also struggling with a silvery tube that he’d brought from the shuttle.
“We passed over the embassy on the way into the spacefield,” Fenaday said. “The helipad is blocked by a crash. I want to scout the site from the ground before trying to move into the legation. Automatic defenses might still be operating, and we need to clear landing areas of debris before bringing in the shuttles.”
“Ah,” Duna said. He popped a seam on the silvery tube, and it unfolded into a silvery parasol that Duna raised over his head.
As the spacers slogged over the burning apron, fitful breezes from the ocean provided them some relief. Fenaday was glad for the brim of his hat and the sun goggles he wore. Rask walked next to Fenaday. His blood red eyes were hidden behind goggles, otherwise, the heat didn’t seem to bother the blue-skinned, goblin-like alien. A breeze lifted Shasti’s long mane of hair, and the sun created flashing blue highlights in it. It also raised bright, metallic highlights on Mmok’s ceramic metal skull in a far less charming effect.
Reaching the vehicle-park, they bypassed the smaller Enshari vehicles, heading for others of Terran design. Several of the largest vehicles bore Confederate Military markings. Rask greeted these like old friends. “Well, well,” he crowed, waving his ape-like arms, “good old reliable M-2 multi-fuel armored transports.”
“You think they’re usable?” Rigg asked dubiously.
“Hell, Sarge, the damn things run off of any liquid you can get into the converter. Engines will be gunked up, but we aren’t buying them. Gimme about twenty minutes with some help, and I’ll have at least one of them running.”
Rigg looked at Fenaday. “What do you say, sir?”
“How many of the mules do we have left?” Fenaday asked.
“Just three. They can only take four people each or the equivalent in equipment. We could put everybody in the scout force into two of these. They also have armored sides.”
“You’ve got your twenty minutes,” Fenaday said.
“I’ll give you a hand,” Mmok added. “I’m pretty good with engines, being half one myself.” The rare evidence of humor drew a few grins.
The spacers settled into whatever shade was available. Telisan radioed Fury, relaying the reason for the hold-up. In the shade, it was cool enough to make sweat-soaked shirts suddenly cold. Shasti sat next to Fenaday. Despite all the improvements of genetics, Shasti shared something in common with most women. Her body temperature ran on the cool side. Fenaday, who radiated heat cheerfully, provided a comfortable place to put her back against. He smiled at the liberty, taking it as a sign that things were healing between them.
Shasti looked at Duna sitting near them, studying the city.
“Belwin, how are you doing?” she asked—in a rare display of concern.
The Enshari looked back at her with his large dark eyes. “I am all right, Shasti, though I cannot help thinking of all that is lost and can never be made good. I keep my mind focused on the task to be done here.”
“Revenge is a powerful motivation,” she said.
“Revenge, my child,” Duna said gently, “is a luxury, and an expensive one. I am only interested in re-establishing a home for my people. Life is more important than revenge. Nothing brings back the dead. Nothing makes them rest any easier. I would forego revenge for a home.”
Fenaday tensed a little, expecting Shasti to take offense at being called a child. No rebuke came from the Olympian, who only replied, “Interesting thoughts, t
hough foreign to me. On my world, people live by the blood feud, and revenge is an everyday occurrence. I was raised in a guild of assassins.”
“How terrible,” Duna said. “It sounds as if much that is precious is wasted on such a world.”
Fenaday listened to the discussion with bemusement. Shasti was not by nature chatty or empathetic. Somehow the Enshari had made a connection with her. Fenaday felt grateful for it. She needed more friends.
Rask and his crew were better than their word, getting two of the large M-2’s running in the twenty minutes. “If my old motor sergeant saw the abuse I put the engines through in startup,” a gleeful Rask said, “he’d die of apoplexy. The engines need a tear down and clean out, but there’s no time for it now.”
Rigg and Shasti’s best troops boarded the multi-fuels, leaving the remainder under Fury’s command at the shuttles. Fenaday and his command staff rode the second vehicle. Rigg and his ASATs took the point, flanked by the HCRs operating as a skirmish line. Crab robots, lacking the HCRs’ foot speed or heat endurance, latched onto the vehicles. Mmok’s air scout circled overhead. It transmitted the best views of the way ahead to Mmok so they didn’t waste time on blocked streets.
Multi-fuels proved a good pick for the trip. They could go around—or in some cases up and over—the debris. The big machines headed up the on-ramp of the airport freeway, slowly wending their way through the wreckage of the last Enshari rush hour.
“Could all this have been done by Shellycoats?” Shasti wondered.
“I doubt it,” Fenaday said, grabbing onto a side rail as the multi-fuel shoved a wreck out of its way. He avoided looking into the wreck but couldn’t miss the flash of white bone within.
“Why?” Telisan asked, looking at the cars dotting the roads all around them.
Was Once a Hero Page 19
