The com line crackled again. Jack frowned as he looked forward. Thin shreds of clouds stretched out over the worn hills. They seemed to carry the interference with them.
“Ah, commander, that’s going to be harder than it looks. We’re surrounded. Have been since this morning. Someone out there is really pissed at us.”
At his back, Lassaday whooped at the off-color language. Jack shook his head.
Kavin fought to keep the com line open, despite the interference and the drift of the signal. “We’ll take care of that. You just pack.”
“But… there are ruins here. Any kind of battle will annihilate them. You—we can’t be responsible for that.”
“We hear you,” Kavin said calmly. “Then we’ll just turn around and go home.”
“No! Wait a minute!”
The commander looked up at Jack. The laugh wrinkles moved about his eyes. He scratched a slender forefinger into his hairline.
“Ah… commander? We’ll do whatever you want us to.”
“Right. Then sit tight until you see us walking in to give you an escort.” Kavin keyed off. He sat back in the form-fitting chair and looked at the control panel. “Why do you suppose the Bythians picked now to get upset?”
Jack shrugged. “Probably the ruins. Colin’s used to poking around dead worlds, where nobody’s going to argue with him.”
“I wonder if they’re big enough to set into.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.” Kavin played the instrument panel and brought up the target screen. It came up, not only with the field camp located on it, but the ruins. He frowned. “Not big enough.”
“Better luck next time.”
“Right. Okay, captain. Tell the boys we’re going to kick ass.”
Jack opened up the bulkhead to the cargo hold and leaned down, saying, “Suit up.”
The half a dozen topside with them were already suited. They brought up Bogie and Kavin’s armor.
“Who’s driving?”
“I am,” and Kavin smiled grimly.
They lost six Knights at Black Piss River. Twenty-two died, but six were lost from all accounting. Jack never saw where they went or what happened. He and Kavin thought it possible the overwhelming numbers of Bythians might just have carried them off and dissembled them elsewhere. He hoped not. Abdul was one of them.
Kavin put the hovercraft down in a lush green meadow, but Jack was busy reading grids. He stood up, his armor moving with him, but feeling alien and stiff. Bogie had been silent when he’d put it on. “That’s not just a river system down there… it’s a salt marsh, and a toxic waste site that’s been reclaimed.”
“What?”
“That’s what accounts for the color of the sands in the riverbed. I don’t think we want to be wading around in it too long, though the carcinogen count doesn’t appear to be above normal.”
“Shit.” Kavin’s voice was muffled, then he sealed his armor seams. “I didn’t think barbarians had waste dumps.”
“These do.”
Lassaday offered Jack some stim-gum. His mouth was dry, but he waved it off. The grids showed enemy troops moving at an incredible rate.
“They’re out there,” he said, “like sand on a beach.”
“Don’t kill anybody,” Kavin responded and raised his voice so the platoon could hear it down in the hold, “unless you can’t help it.”
Jack put his helmet on and sealed it as the hover bumped to ground. Forty-eight Knights got to their feet as the sides of the hover opened. Jack leaped out.
Battle armor is not equipped with stuns. Scouts and recons are, occasionally, but battle armor’s purpose is to destroy the enemy, not put it to sleep. So Jack was the only one of the forty-eight to even have a stun option. He did not think to use it, for as he hit the ground running, the Bythians opened fire, and they seemed to give no thought to the vulnerability of ancient ruins.
He found himself involved in two battles. Bogie screamed in dire pain inside his head, and the noise reverberated throughout the bones of his skull and the fillings of his teeth, even as he reacted automatically and opened laser fire. Jack reeled as a shell exploded next to him, sending grass and dirt sky high and hitting him almost hard enough to topple the armor. But he gritted his teeth, kept on his feet, and shook off the wave of Bythian suicide infantry who clung to him.
But inside, oh, inside, Bogie screamed again. Jack felt bile at the back of his throat and his heart pounded so horribly he thought it would explode.
“Bogie! What is it?”
No answer. No answer but the chill lance of psychic terror that stabbed him again, bringing with it a clammy sweat that poured off his brow and threatened to blind his sight.
Jack swung his head violently, then swore as the suit responded with like violence, out of control, but it shook the Bythians off him and, at his back, other suits of armor trod over their broken bodies as they advanced toward the flimsy prefab building that housed the Walker investigators.
He fought because his reflexes had been finely honed to fight and because the hundreds of Bythians he faced gave him no choice. Inside, he cried… a keening wail. Or was it Bogie? The pain of it made his nose run. He kept his com lines open to receive but not to send. He wanted no one to hear what he was going through, and it was bad.
Lassaday had fallen and dislocated his shoulder. He kept up a steady stream of curse words, most of which even Jack had never heard before. But the sergeant kept working, and the first ten Knights drove a wedge through the Bythian ranks, opening up a path to the Walkers.
Kavin grunted, “They’re the bait—watch it boys. Once the Bythians find out they’re not going to pull us down, they’ll go for hostages.”
Out of the corner of his visor, Jack saw Rawlins’ dark armor jump the point of the wedge, power vaulting the last five meters to the field camp. Once there, he set his shoulders to the building and opened up a backfire.
Jack shivered. His flanking viewscreen blinked for attention. He licked his lips and the air shuddered in his lungs. He opened up his com. “Tanks on the ridge,” was all he said before he signed off.
“Shit!” That was Abdul. “Going out, commander.”
The bronze suited figure split away, carrying five others with him. Kavin said, “The rest of you stay in formation. We need to open this wedge up. Anybody wants to retreat, let ‘em go.”
The Bythians fought as if they had not heard, or perhaps not believed, tales of the slaughter from the day before. Or perhaps the twenty-two Knights they were able to pull down gave them hope as the morning wore on. Jack only knew that they kept the wedge open and sometime after the sun rose in midheaven, the Bythians finally broke and ran… but not before leaving some four thousand dead and wounded behind.
A living corridor of Knights had been opened up between the hovercraft and the Walker field camp, and it had become obvious that the Walkers were going, regardless of what the Bythians did.
The smoky sky cleared gradually as did Jack’s target screens. He toggled on, just as Rawlins whispered hoarsely, “They’re pulling out.”
Jack found himself on one knee without remembering how he’d gotten there. The chamois at his back was soaked with sweat. His running nose had dried and crusted on his upper lip. His eyes felt swollen and burning. He found the water nipple and took a brackish drink.
*We won, Boss,* Bogie growled in his ear.
“Yes.”
He stood. His gauges were dangerously close to showing a red field. He’d expended an incredible amount of power on the Bythian army. He might not have made it till nightfall.
The Walkers ran from their camp, carrying only what they could hold in duffels, their faces pale, and their own eyes swollen. They slipped and fell more than once on the bloody pathway.
Jack sighed and pushed away the inquisitive spark of life that tried to touch his mind. He was weary.
***
Bogie retreated. He felt clawed and shredded, but triumphant. That other tha
t had engaged with him existed no longer. He’d outlived it. Now he knew that it had intended to devour Jack. That it existed only to eat, live, kill, and die. He had no name for it and did not know if Jack, who nurtured him, had one either.
He only knew that it had come very close to killing him. Such a death, he sensed, was far different from sleeping the cold sleep.
And yet it made him aware that he was not yet living, either. Not dead, but not alive, and the time was approaching when he might have to take steps to realize his potential.
Those steps could be the death of his host. He sensed it. In many ways, Bogie was not that different from the microbe he’d killed.
The thought saddened him. Inside the chamois, he clung as close to Jack’s body warmth as he could, for Jack gave him the only semblance of life he had experienced thus far. He was more than grateful. He might not yet have achieved flesh, but Bogie had regained most of his soul.
Chapter Twenty Five
Twenty-two Knights dead, with another six unaccounted for,” Kavin told the pale new ambassador. “And thirty-eight hundred Bythians. All because your field team wanted to look at a religious ruin that obviously meant a great deal more to the natives than the pile of stones it looked like!”
“We’re on the same side, commander,” Colin answered, with a great deal more color in his voice than he had in his face. “We had permission to investigate the site.”
Jonathan cleared his throat, and Colin added, without looking, “We find out now that the Bythians are so divided as to be unable to grant such permission.”
“Too late.”
“It would be wishful to think that this came about because of Thrakian instigation.”
“Yes.” He stood, in ambassadorial robes that were much too big for him, and Jack decided he liked the old dark blue Walker robes better. “Gentlemen, we’ve put word out that the skirmishes have been isolated incidents. Violence engendered by offensive actions taken by the Bythians. It is possible they will believe us when we say we are not here to war on them, only to protect ourselves.” He stepped down from the interviewing dais. “It’s equally possible they won’t.”
Kavin saluted then. “Ambassador.”
“Commander.” Colin inclined his head and left the audience room of the Embassy.
Jack trailed behind, weary to the marrow of his bones. Even his teeth hurt, and with that vague thought, he remembered the second of the battles he’d fought that day. What had been happening? Had he gone mad? Or had Bogie? Or perhaps something had happened to Amber. He put a hand out and caught the man in front of him by the elbow. “Let me have a skimmer.”
They stopped at the porch. Jack heard movements behind him… WP guards and embassy staff, but he paid no attention to them.
Kavin rubbed the brow over his right eye as though it ached. “We haven’t found anything.”
“I need to look.”
His commander paused for a long time as though searching for the words he wanted. Then, he said slowly, “I need someone to take a closer look at the sites on the printouts Colin gave us.”
Unspoken: Someone who might known a Thrakian sand crèche when he sees one.
“I’m your man.”
“Right. I’ll tell Lassaday.”
There were humans waiting on the steps when they came out, sitting in the sun, startling because of the lack of tattoos on their skin and their smell of sweat.
Kavin stepped over them as the small, compact old man looked up, “Captain Storm?”
“Yes.”
“A word with you.”
The man came from Merchant’s Row. His prosperity spoke just as his bodyguard did not, both a kind of body language Jack understood. Jack looked up as Kavin hesitated. “You go on. I’ll be there.”
The silver-haired man nodded and walked out into the street.
The merchant rubbed his hands together. He had misshapen knuckles—arthritis—something Jack had seen on frontier planets, away from the frequent overseeing of medical care. Once begun, it was a difficult disease to remedy.
“What can I do for you?”
The merchant pulled a sliver of fabric from under his jacket. “I’m to give this to you. If you want to know more, you’re to go to the Tavern of the Forked Tongue, Eastside.” Even as he slipped the rag tatter into Jack’s hands, the bodyguard got between them and slipped the merchant away.
Jack let them go as he peered at the fabric. He recognized blood at its edges. Then he held it close. A long, tawny hair was imbedded in the bloodstained rag.
Amber!
Jack looked up, but the two men had disappeared.
Amber stared the lizard down. It watched her through its clear inner eyelids, feet clutching a hot rock. Her stomach knotted painfully and she could hear it rumbling. She’d eaten only once—some kind of eggs, she’d no idea what—and her fever burned like wildfire throughout her body. But even though she still wanted to die, Amber had no intention of starving to death. This was the first lucid moment she’d had since diving headfirst into the pack of surfas. She could not remember what saved her—blue bolts of power had danced upon the back of her eyes and when she’d come to, she was stumbling around in the foothills, her only injury a livid wound on her left wrist. And now she was hungry.
“Come here, breakfast,” she clucked.
The creature’s tongue flicked out, tasted the air, and withdrew. She shuddered in spite of herself. Her fingers clenched the sharpened stick it had taken her half the afternoon to fashion. The lizard moved its head. Now. She had to strike now or forget it.
Amber lashed out. The sensation of the writhing, impaled body gagged her and she dropped her booty in the dust, where it wiggled to death. She swallowed, hard. “Oh god,” she said, and grabbed up the stick again. “Please don’t let it taste raw.”
Amber had long since shed her overjacket, weapons belt (empty) and spare waterskin. She stood, trembling from cold and fever in the blistering sun, and watched a cloud boil up.
“Dear god,” she said. “Let lightning strike me.”
She watched the storm brew, and smelled the difference in the dry air. Her ears even popped once as the pressure changed. She leaned on her killing stick. Her feet hurt but if she took her shoes off, she knew she’d never get them back on. She was hot, so hot she could feel her skin sloughing off her, fried and cracked. Her skeleton ached and keened through the holes in her skin. Still sane after all these years…
The bones of the earth rolled and crackled under her. Rock and stone, polished and jumbled by eons of wind and rain, stretched around her. She might be the only person in the world.
Amber sagged. The stick failed to hold her and she dropped to her knees. It fell away from her and bounced to a stop a boulder or two away from her. She knelt dumbly and stared after it. Should she get it or not?
She shook her head. Her lank and knotted hair obscured the vision of one eye. Irritably, she tossed it back.
“Am I still sane?”
Her voice echoed and Amber laughed at her quavering tones.
“Probably not!”
The air thundered. The wind lashed down at her as the storm broke. But it was not water it held. It rained dust at her, gritty and searing, tearing at her until she huddled close to the earth and tried to pull her blouse over her face, just so she could breathe.
It passed that quickly, its fury meant to be spent elsewhere. She looked up and spat. Grit speckled her teeth and dry tongue. She would have cried, had she had enough body water to do so.
Amber retrieved her killing stick and began to stagger over another hilltop. Perhaps she would find water there. At the rounded crest, she stopped, and then dropped to her stomach.
A tiny river cut through the hills. She blinked rapidly. Green trees and brush hugged its banks, greedy to keep its water a secret. And someone else was there.
In the brush, she saw a uniform jacket. A man lay there, probably napping in the late morning sun.
Who the hell would be ou
t here?
But she recognized the jacket as her pulse jumped wildly. That was Jack! She’d know that jacket anywhere.
Amber had slid halfway down the crest before she remembered that she’d killed him. She put her feet under her and crumpled at its base with a sob, pushing her filthy face into her hands. The river ran by close enough to smell, even through her dust-choked nostrils.
The Bythian wearing the uniform jacket stood up. The Omnipotent Hussiah smiled at her.
“Be welcoming, Lady Amber. I have been waiting for you.”
She gulped down a sob and looked up. He’d shed his headdress and the Knight dress jacket looked ridiculous over his native blouse and trousers. His green eyes glinted.
“Get away from me!”
The High Priest tilted his head. “Our world is rigorous,” he said. “Do not turn away help you will need to live.”
“I don’t want to live! I’m a killer.” And Amber turned her face away in her shame.
The Bythian made that grimace of a smile. “No, my lady. I have been watching you. You have done much to make sure you do live. And all for a being who has lied to you.”
She was pulled by his stare. She could not keep from looking at those hard emerald eyes. “Lied?”
“To you. And if we continue to let him live, he will be lying to all my countrymen.”
“Jack’s alive?”
“Did you truly think you struck him down? No. You shielded him even as you struck at him.”
“How—how do you know…”
The High Priest stepped forward until he towered over her, and she lay huddled on the ground looking up, up, until it felt as though her neck would break. “You think he will not have you if you are a killer?”
Amber stifled a groan.
“And I have looked into his mind. He will not. I am not pretending I know much of your offworld ways. But I can purge you. This gift I am offering you.”
She thought wildly, grasped at what she had heard Colin talk about, what the High Priest had talked about before. He looked down on her now and it was as if he tugged on her soul, tugged at it before tearing it out of her skin. “Can you… can you take away what makes me kill?”
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