by Richard Fox
“Check,” the more decorated man said, “make sure these are the right ones.”
The other went to the first kneeling villager and pushed the hood back. Lilith looked at the ground, her brow covered in sweat. The man waved his palm across her face, and a small holo with paragraphs of Akkadian script appeared on the back of his hand.
“This one is on the roster,” he said. “Pretty. Think the Primus will let us have a go at her? She’s so drugged up she won’t remember a thing.”
“You want to risk Lord Mentiq coming across anything like that? He’ll feed all of us to the menials if we spoil her. You know how long he cultivates them for just the right taste? Decades. This one…might be a special order for another overlord,” the leader said. “Get to the other two.”
“Shame.” The kadanu grabbed Lilith by the chin and lifted her face up. “I wouldn’t mind keeping this one for the barracks.”
Lilith’s chin quivered and she pulled back from his grip.
The kadanu let her go and moved to the next villager. He tossed the hood aside and found Hale looking up at him.
“Now!” Hale grabbed a fistful of the man’s armor and stood up. The kadanu looked at the armored Marine with a mix of shock and disbelief. With his other hand, Hale swung a hook into the man’s slack jaw. The power armor lent more force to the blow than an Olympic boxer could have ever managed and his armored knuckles crushed the man’s face.
Teeth and blood spat out onto the tarmac. Hale pushed the guard to the ground with a slight shove.
The decorated guard turned around and got two steps before the other cloaked villager, Standish, tackled him. Standish’s weight came down on the guard and knocked the air out of him. Standish grabbed the guard’s hair, pulled his head back then slammed him into the ground with a sickening crunch.
The sound of footfalls raced up the ramp as cloaked Marines stormed the shuttle. Hale heard muffled shouts and the slam of bodies against metal from inside.
He turned his attention to the guard he’d laid out. The man groaned, a puddle of blood forming beneath his wrecked jaw. Hale jammed his knee into the small of the guard’s back, grabbed his head with both hands and pulled. There was a pop as the spinal cord severed from the base of his skull. Hale let the body flop to the floor, limbs twitching.
“Clear inside,” Cortaro said. “Got six tangos down.”
“Egan, can you fly this thing?” Hale asked.
“Wait one, sir. Bit of a mess to clean up first,” Egan said.
“The clock is ticking. We need to—”
A high-pitched scream came from behind Hale. He whirled around, drawing his gauss pistol.
Lilith had blood on her fingertips. Her gaze went from the guard’s dead body to the bright blood, her skin pale and eyes wide open. She recoiled from the corpse and got up to run away.
Yarrow de-cloaked and caught her. He put a hand over her mouth and turned her away from the body.
She struggled and hit Yarrow’s chest with a balled hand. Her face twisted in pain as her hand bounced off the armor.
“Calm down, calm down,” Yarrow said. “It’s going to be all right. You’re safe now.”
She twisted her face away and her gaze caught on the body.
“What did you do to him? What happened?” she asked.
“We killed him. Had to,” Yarrow said.
Lilith became calm and Yarrow let her go. She approached the corpse slowly, then looked at the blood on her fingertips. She wiped them against her cloak, spreading a red stain.
“That’s…death?” she asked.
“What? You’ve never seen a body before?” Yarrow put a hand on her shoulder.
“No one’s ever died in the village,” she said. “Everyone that’s sick or old goes to the temple. I’ve never…”
“I’ve gotten used to it,” Yarrow said. “I hope you never do.”
Cortaro dragged a pair of dead kadanu down the ramp, their heads twisted to fatal angles.
“We’ve got graves already dug, sir,” Cortaro said. “Want them all in there now?”
“Strip off their uniforms. We may need them once we’re inside,” Hale said. “Dump all but three in the wood line.”
Yarrow guided Lilith around the body and turned her away from the ramp as Rohen brought more dead out of the shuttle.
****
The cockpit of the Toth transport had a single seat with controls bolted into the center of the wide, flat room. Toth warrior pilots lay on their stomachs and used their four upper limbs to control aircraft. This one had been outfitted to accommodate a human-sized pilot with only two limbs and no tail to sit on.
Egan pointed to displays labeled in Toth script, grids interspersed with dots, his lips moving as he read. The view through the cockpit glass was clear, but looking around the ship allowed a semi-opaque view of the surroundings. Hale, wearing kadanu armor, looked down and saw the ground a few yards beneath his feet. The rest of the shuttle wasn’t like this, and he hoped Egan wouldn’t have any trouble flying the craft.
“Well?” Hale asked Egan.
“I think I’ve got it, sir. Most of this is automated but their overrides are a bit tricky. The controls are similar to what we found in the Toth ships but then it’s like some lazy engineer redid the layout and the translated Toth into Akkadian isn’t quite right—”
“How long until we’re airborne?” Hale asked.
“We can go now,” Egan said.
“Strap in!” Hale yelled behind him. “If our cover’s blown, can this thing reach the Breit or the Karigole island where our Mule’s waiting for us?”
“Let’s check the fuel.” Egan hit a switch and the lights inside the shuttle powered down. “Not that one.” Egan hit another switch and his control panel came to life. He read over the display and clicked his tongue. “We can make it back to the city…and that’s about it. They hobbled her. Just enough juice for a trip out and back.”
“Mentiq doesn’t like his people sightseeing. Figures. Let’s go,” Hale said.
“Cycling the engines.” A loud whine filled the cabin as Egan pushed a lever forward. The shuttle rose off the ground and cleared the tops of the surrounding trees.
“Here we go.” Egan grabbed a control stick set over his lap and pushed forward.
The shuttle shot backwards. Hale kept his footing thanks to his grip on the pilot’s seat. The tall trees surrounding the landing zone grew closer, their branches thrashing in the blast from the ship’s engines.
“Egan!”
The shuttle slowed, but the tail of the craft thumped into the trees. Trunks snapped in half loudly enough that Hale heard the crack through the hull. The shuttle rose into the air and wobbled toward ocean.
“Think I’ve got it now, sir,” Egan said.
Hale watched as the upper half of a broken tree tumbled down branches of its neighbors, sending a cloud of pollen and needles flying into the air.
“Any takeoff you can fly away from, right, sir?” Egan asked.
“Just figure out how to land this thing with a bit more finesse,” Hale said.
“No problem. Probably. Thirty minutes until we reach the city.”
Hale gave Egan a pat on the shoulder and went back into the cargo hold. All his Marines but Rohen and Bailey wore kadanu uniforms. Standish worked a brush against a bloodstained loin cloth.
Lilith, sitting on a bench with her knees pulled in to her chest, glared at Hale as he went over to Cortaro.
The lieutenant sat next to his senior NCO, leaned his head against the wall and shut his eyes. His nerves felt taut, like he was walking along the edge of a deep chasm. His hands went to his gauss pistol tucked into his stolen robes. His mind reran the final moments of the kadanu he’d killed.
“First time, wasn’t it, sir?” Cortaro asked.
“For what?” Hale didn’t open his eyes.
“Ending someone—Toth and Xaros aside. They’re different. Not the same as another person like you and me,” Cortaro said.
“He was a collaborator. Hostile. It was a legitimate kill,” Hale said curtly.
“No argument from me on that one. These kadanu pendejos know exactly what they’re doing, not like they’re some poor conscript on the wrong side of the battlefield,” Cortaro said.
Hale rolled his head to the side and looked at the gunnery sergeant. The Atlantic Union Marine Corps had fought low-intensity conflicts against the Chinese across the Pacific Rim since the end of the last world war. Most Marines in service at the time of the Xaros invasion had their combat action ribbon from one conflict or another. Combat meant killing, but it was rare that any Marine ever spoke about the experience…at least not to someone who’d been there with them or seen that same elephant on another battlefield.
“You sound like you’ve got a few,” Hale said.
“Yes, sir. First one was a Chinese infiltrator trying to plant a bomb on a runway in Guam. Hit him from two hundred meters with my rifle. He bled out before we could get to him. Then there’s that mess on Indonesia. Bunch of untrained shitheads armed with AKs that thought they could rush my squad…I still have dreams about that.” Cortaro’s fingers went to his side where Hale’d seen an ugly mass of scar tissue.
“Do you ever forget about them?”
“No. At least I don’t. Some guys I knew lost count, but I think they’re lying. Thing like that’s going to stay with you. The Xaros are pure murder and the Toth want to eat us, but at least they’re not human. Makes taking them down a lot easier for me,” Cortaro said.
“You think…when this is all over, we’ll be done fighting ourselves?”
“I hope. But hope in one hand and crap in the other, see which one fills up first.” Cortaro chuckled at his own joke. “Lilith, I don’t think she likes you anymore. Civilians are like that. Back home, I had some cousins who’re all upset with what I did for a living. Dummies never realized I did it for them. I told them if they didn’t want me fighting the Chinese, they’d better go to Beijing and convince them to stop occupying northern Australia, Korea and Japan. I didn’t get any more Christmas cards from them after that.”
“So what do I do about her?”
“Nothing. She’ll come around on her own or hate you forever. Civilians aren’t Marines. I can’t figure them out sometimes.” Cortaro pointed to the two snipers still in their armor. “They’ve got all our cloak batteries. They can stay out of sight for a couple hours at least.”
Hale fished out a data slate from his robes and looked at the time.
“Nineteen hours until we have to get back to the Breit,” Hale said with a sigh. “Nothing’s ever easy, is it?”
“That’s why you get paid those big officer bucks, sir.”
****
Lafayette brushed dirt away from a stasis tube and looked at the Karigole woman sleeping within. She had two scars running down the side of her face, not unlike a pair Lafayette once had on his own face from a run-in with one of the dragon wolves on his home planet. He’d given up trying to keep his original features years ago and settled with a neutral prosthetic replacement. It wasn’t as if his brothers in the Centuria would have ever had trouble identifying him.
He attached a line from his gauntlet to the tube’s control panel just over the sleeper’s head and accessed the system. There were thirty adult Karigole in the village, each kept beneath the floors of the many huts. Hacking the programming was easy, but time-consuming.
“You are most astute for your species,” Naama said from the doorway, her hands folded over the slight bulge of her early pregnancy. She stepped aside and Lafayette saw Orozco walk past the doorway, a child hugging each leg and two hanging from his arms as they screeched in delight.
“Fee fi fo fum! I smell the blood of…you don’t know what an Englishman is,” Orozco said as he sauntered past the door.
“That one…seems simpler,” Naama said.
“Sometimes I wonder how humans mastered fire,” Lafayette mumbled.
“That is Teenut,” Naama said as she came closer. “She is a fine poet and an accomplished mathematician. Don’t judge us all by Steuben’s example. We were never a race just of warriors. We had a museum of the most lifelike sculptures. I took all my children there before they were weened and given over to their parents. My favorite was of a great hero looking down at a beast he’d just slain. I’d tell my children—”
“Consider your deeds. For it is not the battle, but the purpose,” Lafayette said.
Naama stepped back. “How do you know that?”
Lafayette put his hands on the side of his helmet, hesitated for a moment, then lifted it off his head. He knew what he looked like—a false visage of polymers meant to mimic his speech and emotions that bled through the neural interface, the exposed metal ligaments and tubes running blood from his brain to his artificial heart. The sound of his augmented voice might sound natural to a human, but to the keen ears of a Karigole, his words would carry a false tone.
“It is me, Mother. Baar’sun,” Lafayette said, using his true name. “I was badly injured but it is me. You would give me cyynt root porridge when I’d be good. You made me a—”
“No!” Naama twisted her fingers into a symbol to ward off evil and held her hands over her belly. “You are not Baar’sun. You are an abomination sent to harm this child.” She backed away from Lafayette and made for the door very slowly.
“No. No…it is me beneath all this. I swear it.” Lafayette took a step toward her. “I thought you were lost with the rest. That you’re here must be providence, a gift from our ancestors.”
She spat in the dirt and ran from the hut. Lafayette heard her shouting to the children and the young ones scampered away from Orozco.
Lafayette dropped his helmet into the dirt and went to his knees. His reflection didn’t waver, the prosthetic unable to match what he felt inside.
“What was that all about?” Orozco asked as he came in. “I thought you…oh, I get it.”
The big Marine came over and crouched down beside him.
“You’re not all right, are you?”
Lafayette shook his head.
“C’mere.” Orozco wrapped his big arms around Lafayette’s slight shoulders and hugged him.
“This is a…hug? Something meant to make me feel better?”
“Yeah, what do Karigole do?” Orozco let Lafayette go.
The Karigole pressed his knuckles to Orozco’s temple. Orozco mirrored the gesture.
Lafayette picked up his helmet and shook dirt out of it before he put it back on his head.
“I have work to do.” He went back to the stasis tube.
“What do we do about—”
“Work!” Lafayette snapped.
CHAPTER 16
The shield dome over Mentiq’s city smeared sunlight over its surface, casting a twisted reflection of the sun and clouded sky above. A steady stream of Toth landers merged into a long queue of craft slowly filing through a single hangar entrance on the east side of the city just below the shield dome. Ships flew out of the city and angled up into space from an exit on the opposite side.
Hale stood next to Egan’s cockpit, his fingers drumming on the headrest.
“Well?” Hale asked. “How do we get in?”
“I assume we hail the flight control tower or—” The controls lurched out of Egan’s hands and the shuttle banked to the right. It flew beneath the line of waiting ships toward the open hangar.
“Or we wait for the autopilot to engage,” Egan said.
“Shuttle Arru, this is Primus,” came from a speaker on the control station. “You’re nine minutes late. The bazaar has a strict timetable and one that we can’t fool around with. I had to bribe the flight master to get you to the front of the line and I will take that money out of your pay with interest! Get the product loaded up as soon as you land and report to my office.”
Hale reached over Egan’s shoulder and hit a button to key the mic.
“Acknowledged,” Hale said.
�
�Lots of VIPs here this time, no more screwups!” The line went dead.
The shuttle swung beneath a ship that was nothing more than several off-kilter cubes connected by a single axis and slowed. Several banks of crystalline cannons guarded the hangar entrance, and more weapon emplacements circled a stone wall running around the city.
A pair of Toth dagger fighters hovered over the waiting ships. Hale watched as the fighters angled toward a shuttle as large as a Destrier and jetted toward it. The serrated edges came perilously close to the large ship, which held its ground.
Like dogs nipping at a cow, he thought.
Their shuttle passed through the hangar, and Hale finally got a look at Mentiq’s city.
A palace of jagged towers dominated the center. Twisted spires like long seashells touched the underside of the dome, a single reptilian face with gigantic glistening jewels for teeth embossed on each spire. The palace within the spires looked like it was made from pure gold. Mosaics featuring an alien that looked like a larger—and much fatter—Toth menial were on each wall and the roofs, all depicting the large alien beatified by adoring Toth and other alien races. Hale picked out more than one human figure in the artwork.
“This guy’s not real humble, is he?” Egan asked.
The shuttle banked to the side and over a cluster of several large inverted funnels the size of apartment buildings and made of what looked like a single piece of glass. More of the structures were spaced out across the city, all far from the magnificence of Mentiq’s palace. One building resembled a terraced pyramid, wide and squat. The shuttle turned toward it and joined an orderly line of airborne traffic floating above the city.
The spaces between the larger buildings were a mess of tangled streets and low buildings in various states of disrepair.
Hale turned back and saw a wide open field in front of the main gate to the palace with pale-white stages laid out in an orderly fashion across the grassy surface.
