by K S Augustin
“What’s the situation?” She couldn’t help but ask the question.
“All communications have been cut. All power is down. I’m sorry, Colonel, but I was unable to re-establish the perimeter. There are rebel reinforcements coming through from the west . We don’t have enough soldiers to man all the defensive cannons and most of the armaments are pointing the wrong way. The teams are trying to target rebel artillery positions but the enemy is highly mobile. We’re being overrun.”
Amid the dust and noise, Cheloi’s thoughts were crystal-clear. It was time to leave. And it was time to take Rumis with her. She would knock him unconscious if need be, but she was not leaving him to face the wrath of the Empire. Especially not when Koul, the next obvious scapegoat, was dead.
“Let’s go.” She raised her voice. “All of you. Get out of here.”
“Colonel—”
“That means you too, Rumis. You’re still with me. Let’s go.”
He hesitated, looking for a moment as if he would like to disagree then, with a tightening of his lips, he dropped the comms equipment he still held in his hand and moved towards her, shepherding the others out before him. Cheloi waited for him.
“Did Colonel Grakal-Ski find you?” Rumis asked her as they jogged toward the eastern exit.
“Yes he did. He’s concentrating on something else at the moment.”
There was a heavy whoosh and part of the corridor collapsed behind them, sending a rush of dust and air swirling through the tunnel.
“We go south-east. Rumis—”
“How did they break through?” he asked aloud. “How did they even find us?”
Cheloi decided not to answer.
They drew their weapons as they exited the complex and took a quick look around. Already the slightly uneven ground was riven with collapsed tunnels that both the Perlim forces and the rebels were using as trenches to hide in.
Cheloi stared towards the east, spotting the ledge halfway up the slope. That was where she, Rumis and Lith had conducted that first evening talk so many weeks ago. The space had its own mute bubble, which might offer a little protection from rebel scanners. If they could get there, they might stand a chance of surviving this. And the path up to that bubble was better camouflaged than most, meandering behind trees and clumps of long grass.
She pulled him along with her till they gained the cover of some boulders.
“Rumis, we’ve got to get to the eastern mute bubble.”
“Mute bubble?” He peered around the rocks. “What about the rebels? We should be fighting them.”
“It’s too late. We’ve lost.”
He looked at her then and frowned. “Lost?”
She shook her head. “Now’s not the time to explain. We both need to get out of here. I’ve arranged for transport.”
“But the landing pad is by the northern end and the rebels have already swarmed that position.”
“I don’t mean regular transport, Rumis.” She tugged at his sleeve. “Come on, we’ve got to get moving.”
Cheloi’s plan was clear. The moment they cleared the mute bubble, she’d activate the transponder in her wrist. In the three or so minutes of relative peace between the signal and the arrival of the ship, she would explain to Rumis the realities of the situation. If he agreed with her, all well and good. If he didn’t, she would stun him and take him to safety unconscious. Whichever way it turned out, he was coming with her.
The shooting in the caldera was as crazed as in any battle situation throughout known space and Cheloi kept her head down as she headed for her goal. Rumis tagged dutifully behind her. She knew she was in as much danger of being shot by a Perlim soldier as by a rebel. There were screams of agony, sounds of rocks and trees exploding and strangled cries for help, swiftly silenced. When they finally reached the escarpment, Cheloi gritted her teeth and started climbing. Her progress would have been quicker but she had to stop every now and then to pull her reluctant adjutant along with her. They didn’t speak, concentrating instead on staying hidden.
After five long minutes, she dared a look up the slope and was gratified to see they were almost halfway to the ledge. Not long now.
“Colonel….”
It was nothing more than a strangled cry.
They had just moved behind a stand of tall spiky grass when Cheloi looked back.
The fierce look of cajoling she had plastered on her face faded away, smoothed into slack-jawed horror as her eyes refused to take in what they saw.
“No,” she breathed, her eyes wide.
“…I….”
“NO!”
She screamed, uncaring of how far her voice carried. The sounds of battle, the cries of people, faded into oblivion. All Cheloi heard was the erratic thumping of her heart in her ears as she carelessly slid the two steps down to Rumis, sending a shower of dust down the slope.
He was lying on the baking earth, a wide black gash cut across his entire body, the centre a sticky bluish red with his oozing blood. The cut was so deep she could see into his body, to the purple sheen of his organs as they rose and fell in a bath of his own fluids. She put her blaster down and swallowed, helpless. There was no temp-suture that could fix this, even if she had thought to bring a basic medkit with her.
She lifted her hands. Made a move. Towards what? Bringing the torn edges of skin together with her fingers? Cupping the blood that spilt down the sides of his body and emptying it back into his body in some grotesque parody of bailing out a boat? She had seen the dying before, but never face-to-face with someone she…loved. She swallowed convulsively, her gaze darting all over his body and the surrounding ground, but there was nothing she could do.
With shaking hands and a shuddering breath, she smoothed back the hair from his forehead, tears forming in her eyes. With her other hand, she groped for his, holding it in a tight and trembling grip. He squeezed her fingers, and she swore she could already feel them get cold.
“Rumis,” she whispered through bloodless lips.
“Will we prevail?” he asked in a choked whisper as his body started shaking. She knew he was going into shock.
She met his cloudy brown gaze as openly as she could. “Good will come of this, Rumis,” she told him. “Believe me.”
He nodded once and looked like he wanted to say more. He licked his lips….
His mouth was still open when he died. She knew he wanted to relay a message to his family but it expired with him. His grip slackened and his eyes lost that bright spark of life that she had cherished so much. He was reduced to a piece of meat, staring sightlessly up into the pale hot sky.
Cheloi swallowed again as tears streamed down her face. With a sob, she grabbed blindly for her blaster and continued up the slope, scrabbling and slipping as she choked in clouds of dusty air, oblivious to the continuing carnage around her. The sounds of immediate battle were trapped distantly at the end of a long tunnel, too far away to touch her.
She stumbled into the bubble and activated the transponder in her wrist with a savage jab, sorry when she didn’t draw blood. She didn’t want to look down the slope to where Rumis’ body lay, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t sure whether she was happy or sad when she saw nothing but a body-shaped blur through the interference, a wide line of darkness slashing through its—his!—middle.
She kept watching, Rumis reduced to an abstract cipher through the bubble’s filter, and thought she saw his blood form a stream and trip falteringly down the slope. A dark red ribbon in the bright morning sun.
She only closed her eyes when she felt the tingle of the extraction ship’s displacement device lock on her and begin transport.
Chapter Twenty
The moment she was displaced to the Fusion evacuation ship, Laisen knew she was through with her job. That resolve hardened to cold steel by the time she met up with Copan a week later.
After having him in her subconscious for almost three years, she was startled when she saw him again in person. She noted furth
er signs of his ageing. He was a bit thinner, his large knuckles even more prominent, his hair a bit greyer around the temples. Or maybe he had always been like that. The Fusion’s longevity treatments were legendary and three decades hardly made a difference to someone’s appearance. Maybe some bright coder had brushed up his avatar before inserting him and his blue practice room, complete with non-functional clock, into the middle of her neurons.
Despite her private reservations, she had no real grounds on which to object when they removed the construct module and forwarded the information to Copan. She had never had one of those devices in her head before, which might have explained her feeling of violation during removal, made more complete by the clinical and aloof operating procedure. She stayed under observation for a day and a half, staring at the ceiling. She relived Rumis’s moment of death. She wished that, out of all the memories she took away with her from her Menon mission, that was the one the Fusion would somehow botch up and end up erasing while they tinkered with her brain. It was a futile hope. As she ran through the recollections of the past three years, coached by post-recovery questions and exercises, she was depressed to note that they were all intact. She would have to live with her memories of Rumis until the day she died.
At the start of the mission, with no previous experience to guide her, she had viewed the AI construct as nothing more than a tool. Now she felt as if she had unwittingly forwarded a most intimate diary to a stranger. She hadn’t been talking to this Copan while she was trussed and bleeding, believing she was about to die in Drel’s underground chamber. And it wasn’t this Copan who had encouraged her to have sex with Lith. When she walked into his real office on the real Tatrex four days after the operation, she felt as though an important slice of her life had been passed to an impersonal panel, to be flicked through and discussed by people she didn’t know for purposes she could not subvert. And when she saw the subtly different Copan, the feeling increased.
“Laisen, please have a seat.”
His smile was the same but Laisen couldn’t shake the feeling of disconnectedness. She sat down without returning the greeting. The chair creaked as it took her weight, the sound an uncanny echo from her mind.
“It’s been a long time,” Copan began with a sad tilt to his lips. “I gather from the construct that a lot happened.”
“It did,” she agreed, eyeing him brazenly. “So what would you like to talk about first?”
“Lith is the obvious choice. But let’s talk about Rumis.”
Laisen couldn’t help it. Her fingers tightened on the armrests.
“You reported, and despatches from the Perlim have confirmed, that a Rumis Swonnessy was found dead at the Nineteen’s headquarters.” He paused. “You were trying to displace with him, weren’t you?”
And she saw again her adjutant’s empty eyes.
His blood seeping into the dry earth.
The scent of metal and death.
“I know you told me not to,” Laisen replied quietly, “and I know it’s against all protocols, but I couldn’t help it. Rumis is, was, like a brother to me.”
But Copan was already shaking his head. “Why do you think we have these rules? Do you consider yourself the only agent who’s contemplated such an action?” He paused, searching her face. “The results are disastrous. We put those protocols in place for a reason. Before they were enforced, most of our mission rescuees committed suicide within a year due to anger, resentment and disassociation. It was almost a foregone conclusion, so we had to be firm: no evacuation of non-Fusion personnel.”
“Fusion technology keeps advancing in leaps and bounds.” Her voice was sullen. “There could have been some way to make it work.”
She moved in her chair, uncomfortable with her thoughts, not wanting to admit that Copan was right. She knew it herself, which was why she kept silent that morning as she dragged Rumis up the eastern escarpment. She could have told him aboveground, or even in their underground headquarters, who she really was, but she knew what he would think. It was only her stubbornness that made her cling to a lie, where Rumis would be grateful and she could continue mentoring him. In reality, Rumis would have killed her. In anger, in disbelief, in utter despair, but ultimately as a loyal Perlim officer. He could have done no less.
Copan sighed at her apparent intransigence. “He’s being called a deserter.”
“A—?” Laisen’s head jerked and her eyes narrowed in pain as the words struck home.
Of course. With the way it looked, it was the obvious conclusion. Rumis’s body would have been found high on a ledge on the opposite side to the action. Koul’s would have been discovered in the communications relay room. Protecting the equipment perhaps?
Result? Rumis deserter, Koul hero. She couldn’t save her adjutant in life and now it seemed he was irredeemable in death. She swallowed a lump of grief but it kept rising in her throat, bitter bile to choke on for the foreseeable years.
“Senior Colonel Cheloi Sie is believed to be vaporised and at the bottom of a maze of collapsed tunnels.”
“You’re punishing me,” she accused, her voice thick.
“I’m debriefing you.”
Laisen jerked her head but said nothing.
“The captain of the Dare to Live told me you’re thinking of leaving the service.”
That was the name of the stealth ship that had evacuated her from Menon IV. It was so ironic, Laisen almost went into an hysterical fit right there on the displacement coils. She thought she had pulled herself together but noted that the small crew watched her intently for the rest of the voyage. Obviously, she was not as convincing at feigning sanity as she’d thought.
The captain, a brusquely cheerful man whose name she didn’t bother remembering, managed to trap her into several brief conversations, but Laisen was adept at avoiding most other contact. She remained in her cabin for almost the entire trip and kept the door locked. She never answered any chimes from would-be visitors. She spent much of the shipboard time eating, watching vids or sleeping, and deliberately avoided initiating the Copan construct.
On the couple of occasions she and the captain met, she remembered uttering bitter words to the effect that she and the Fusion’s covert intelligence service were going to part company as soon as possible. He’d obviously sent that little snippet along when he delivered her to Tatrex.
“We’ve discussed me leaving before.”
Copan’s voice was puzzled. “Have we?”
Yes. No. No, not with this Copan, but with the other one, the one in her head. But that wasn’t quite right either. She had meant to bring up the topic but never did. The capture by the rebels had cut short that resolution.
“Perhaps not,” she conceded. “But I meant to.”
Suddenly, it was all too complicated. Skeins of plots that she had previously been able to keep effortlessly apart were now tangled into a hopeless mess. People she had spoken to were either artificial, dead or missing. (Lith, where are you? Did you get away?) Right now, the most important task of any she accomplished in the past twenty years seemed trivial, minuscule, barely above a childish prank.
“And what would you do if you left the service? Transfer to another section? Leave the intelligence service altogether?”
“Leave.” Laisen was firm.
“And go where? The Floks Nine Semi-dyson? You haven’t been back since Eys died.”
Laisen looked at him sharply but didn’t say a word.
“Your experiences would be highly valuable if you remained with the service,” Copan continued, “even if it wasn’t with the active deployment teams.”
“I’m too old,” she said. “Too tired.”
“We wouldn’t put you in deep-cover assignments. Not if you didn’t want to.”
And that too was an issue. How could Laisen be content with an analysis or policy position, working beside people who’d be dropped into covert assignments she had refused? She was also afraid that the constant lure of danger and excitement would p
rove too much. Perhaps, in her current frame of mind, she’d be able to resist it for a year, but not much longer than that. And what if she went back to missions and got an attack of conscience at an inconvenient moment? Again.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Do you know if Lith Yinalña managed to escape?”
“We’re tracking her movements now.” Copan’s voice was noncommital.
“You didn’t know she was Fusion, did you?” Laisen asked wolfishly and was amused by the barely-disguised discomfort on his face. “How did they get past our intelligence, Doctor? I thought we were watching the Free-Perlim Council closely. I even had briefings on them. How did Nils and his little band of confused freedom-fighters get past the mightiest body in the galaxy?”
It was only a small act of defiance and it didn’t last. The Fusion was relentless in its efforts to rehabilitate her and even Laisen’s reservations and spirited sarcasm weren’t allowed to stand in its way.
Copan kept repeating that the mission was considered a complete success. Two of Menon’s top commanders were out of action—the real Cheloi Sie was dead and the would-be tyrant Grakal-Ski was also dead. Territory Nineteen was in tatters, their experienced command structure gutted. The entire region had been claimed by rebel forces, cutting the imperial force in two. It was the ideal outcome.
The Perlim Empire was now caught between salvaging an impossible guerilla war and containing the pinpricks of distraction along the protracted Perlim-Fusion border. In the Fusion’s opinion, the ultimate downfall of the Empire was still at least a decade away, but an important first step had been made and Laisen had been an integral part of that.
As for her disillusionment, she was met with a soft understanding that continually absorbed her outbursts of pain, giving nothing back. Copan understood her anger and considered that a natural outcome from such an extended mission. He was so understanding, so compassionate, so willing to open himself up to every criticism Laisen could throw at them that she felt more incensed at the end of each of their sessions.
