by R. M. Meluch
The Itiri gave him a wide berth. In search of Jinin-Ben-Tairre—if he was still in the station—the warrior-priests divided and glided down the corridors where they saw the blood was warmest. Sound of life—terrified life—could be heard retreating before them. Children’s whispered shrieks and desperate scrambling sounded in the air vents.
Alihahd was eerie, transformed into someone else altogether. He was clad in the dress of an abhorred people that made him appear so strikingly one of them that it was hard to see him otherwise. Na′id square shoulders with epaulets, a tapered waist, full cuffed sleeves and trousers—the clothes made him a hated silhouette, and Alihahd carried himself differently in them.
He opened a wall panel, shut off the clangoring alarm, and turned up the air filters, all with the throwaway ease of one who has handled such controls many times. He swept down a corridor where the Itiri had not gone, stepping wide over the bodies in his path with little pause, wrath growing with each one, and he stalked out of view with the menacing military stride of a new master taking over.
Hall chose a different route, and Vaslav came with him, afraid of Alihahd. Layla struck out on a path of her own.
• • •
Claustrophobia and carnage.
Alihahd walked the ravaged corridors. The soft stick, stick, stick of blood on his bootsoles sounded loud in the dead quiet. He stepped over more bodies, human bodies, then paused to kneel beside one he thought was still alive. He touched his fingers to the neck.
Not.
He closed another’s eyes, rose. The mode of death this time—all down the corridor—was a long blade.
That would be a double curved sword.
Menin aeide Thea . . . He remembered snatches of a song of slaughter. Sing of the destructive wrath . . . It ran through his mind in rhythmic chant as he stepped over oozing dead.
. . . that hurled many brave souls of heroes to Hades and made their bodies a spoil for dogs and carrion birds . . .
From time to time he heard the scurrying of children. There was only one child’s body in the corridor—a little girl with a gun in her hand. The rest of the corpses were adults.
. . . and so the will of God was done.
A pain pushed itself into Alihahd’s consciousness. His jaw hurt. His teeth were clenched and the muscles in his face had been tensed into a deep, immobile frown for a long time now.
He made his muscles relax. His face ached.
He continued down the passage, paused again to bend over a twitching victim, not sure whether she was alive or this was rigor. An Itiri would have been able to tell at a glance if the body was still giving off heat.
He had just begun to crouch down when he heard heavy running footsteps from father down the curved passage.
A Na′id engineer came stampeding around the bend, then skidded to stop at the sight of a tall, blond figure bending over a bloody corpse. Alihahd looked up at him, showing his white face. The engineer screamed and fled.
Alihahd stood up. His chest felt tight, his breath constricted. The Na′id at his feet—alive or dead—writhed ignored. Alihahd stepped away until his back was against a door.
There were adults alive in this section. In past attacks, Ben killed all the adults. The butchery in Omonia was not finished yet. Alihahd held his breath.
Ben was still here.
Suddenly the door slid open behind Alihahd and he spun.
There was a movement directly before his face—Jinin-Ben-Tairre spinning with his sword raised, the sword striking down on the Na′id-clothed figure in the doorway.
16. Ghosts
THE BLADE DEFLECTED down Alihahd’s side in last-instant recognition, slicing flesh and nicking bone at the point of his wide shoulder, slashing open the full sleeve of his Na′id shirt.
Ben coiled back with his sword, and both men froze.
Alihahd gazed into feral eyes—dark pits that went down and down forever. He saw all the horror and hatred in them, and all the pain.
Less a man now than a maddened wild animal, Ben stared with half-sight. His consciousness did not register Alihahd, only a white face, a white man in Na′id dress, and the sight incensed him. His breath came audibly, a rough panting of rage. Then he blinked. His brows tightened together. True realization penetrated that this was Alihahd standing before him—
And Alihahd was not certain that Ben would not kill him anyway.
A trickle of blood wended down from Alihahd’s shoulder, prickling at the hair on his arm. The ragged flap of his sleeve hung loose from his cuff. Alihahd couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, even to save his life.
A movement behind Ben broke Alihahd’s trance—a man with a gun shouldering his way through the circulation vent and taking aim at Ben’s back. Ben’s Itiri awareness must have failed him, for it was Alihahd who sang out, “Behind you!”
Ben dropped into a spinning crouch, drawing and firing his taeben.
The Na′id gun clattered to the deck, and the dead man slid out of the vent and flopped on top of his weapon in a heap. From the narrow passage from which he’d come sounded the hasty scrambling of a companion retreating.
Ben didn’t chase the survivor. He turned back to Alihahd, all his weapons lowered, his dark eyes full of wonder, wordlessly asking why Alihahd had warned him.
“I do not know,” Alihahd answered harshly as if the question had been spoken aloud. His voice was thick and he was shaking. “I will assume there is a reason for this.” The carnage he meant. There had to be a reason. Alihahd gave him the benefit of a gigantic doubt, but let it be known he granted this grudgingly.
Only then did Alihahd look down to inspect his own wound. He touched his cut arm and shoulder with his opposite hand, assessing the extent of the damage, which turned out to be minor. It would leave a pitted scar in his shoulder.
Alihahd turned to go. The light touch of two fingers on his unhurt shoulder stopped him. Alihahd paused, startled by the contact. He turned his head to look back.
Ben sheathed his sword and holstered his taeben. He drew his dagger slowly as if it were painful to him and held it to his own leg. In his pause, Alihahd saw Ben fighting down great fear as if he intended to cut himself. But Ben slashed open his trouser leg and he turned for Alihahd to see.
A blue tattooed number marked his thigh, the brand of a Na′id child conscript.
Bitterness rose in Alihahd’s throat. He swallowed. The bitterness stayed.
Why hadn’t he guessed? Aliens had not been the ones who taught Ben to kill. They had merely perfected it.
Shock, hatred, and all the rest of it subsided into weary sickness. Alihahd reached back his hand and bade Ben come. “Well, let us be on.”
Ben put his bloody hand into Alihahd’s and padded after him on silent feet. It was like leading a leopard from its kill on a leash made for toy dogs. The leopard meekly put himself under Alihahd’s authority.
What made Ben think he could turn to Alihahd? He could, and knew it. So you see that in me, thought Alihahd.
Alihahd wished someone had been there to take his bloody hand.
He led Ben back to the Topaz and broadcast three words through the space station’s public-address system: “I found him.”
With that, the Itiri came gliding back like ghosts. Not one of them saluted Ben. One did not talk to the dead.
Layla did. She callously saluted with her dagger. “Good job,” she said and boarded Topaz. Ben masked reaction if he felt any.
Alihahd took Ben to a solitary unlit compartment on board Topaz. Neither of them wanted the light. Ben walked into the cabin slowly, then circled back and abruptly offered his sword to Alihahd, hilt first.
Alihahd regarded the sticky hilt in surprise and quiet distaste. “I do not want it,” he said, almost chiding. What was he supposed to do with it?
Ben let it drop at Alihahd’s feet, withdrew into the s
mall space, sank to the deck, folded his legs under him, and shut his eyes.
Alihahd closed the door on him and left him there. It occurred to Alihahd only outside that maybe he was supposed to execute Ben. Maybe the Itiri expected it, too.
They were all mistaken.
Alihahd went back through the air lock to re-board Omonia Station.
Vaslav was returning to the lock, a green cast to his face, cringingly following Harrison Hall, who carried himself with the jaunty air of a man taking a stroll on the mountain, no more affected by the mass murder of the Na′id than Layla had been. He stepped over the bodies in his path. Vaslav skirted them.
Corners of a smile disappeared into Hall’s mustache on seeing Alihahd. Whatever grim possession had held Alihahd in its grip earlier had released him now. Alihahd looked like Alihahd again.
Hall came to stand with him, his weight casually on one foot. He swept one side of his coat open and back to tuck his hand into his hip pocket. He glanced about him for something he did not actually expect to see. “God damn,” he said.
“Mr. Hall?” Alihahd prompted. He pushed back the sweaty bangs that stuck to his forehead, and unfastened some of the buttons of his double-breasted shirt so that the outer flap fell open. Blood still oozed from his shoulder and wetted the tattered edges of his torn sleeve.
“There isn’t a damned ship on this station that’s flight-worthy,” Hall said. “The hangars are a mess. He’s blown off half the locks. He hit all the ships—including his own. It seems this was the last stop. There is no way off this station, Captain, except the way we came.” He nodded through the lock toward Topaz, which would take them straight back to Iry.
Ben had been appallingly thorough. He hadn’t even left himself an out. What had he intended to do?
“It looks like I go back to Iry, Captain,” Hall sighed. “What about you?”
Alihahd hardly heard him. He was still thinking of Ben. He wants someone to kill him. Ben had destroyed his own ship Singalai because he intended to die here. Dying was not so easy sometimes. Now begins the real horror. Alihahd looked down at his own hands, and marked how easily the blood seemed to get under the nails and stay there. He could not seem to keep it off.
“Captain?”
“What?” Alihahd said, summoned out of his thoughts.
“You coming or staying?”
The Itiri pilot of Topaz had come to the hatch and was also waiting for Alihahd’s answer.
Alihahd frowned. He was off-planet at last, on familiar if ravaged ground. He could not turn back, having come so far. It was only a matter of time before Na′id ships would come to Omonia. Alihahd might be able to blend into their ranks if . . . there were many ifs.
Alihahd beseeched the Itiri, “Give me a few minutes.”
The pilot lifted his chin. “Be thou quick.”
Alihahd gave a single nod and ran toward the station dispensary. Up ahead of him all along the way he heard the furtive whispers and scuttling of a flock of preteen girl conscripts taking cover at his approach. One made the wrong move and blundered square into him. She lurched to a flailing halt, a splay of gangly adolescent limbs with distended mouth and eyes. She screamed, “Nazi!” and she sprinted away on her long legs.
No matter who said it, the sound of that epithet never failed to cut like a dull blade.
Alihahd busied himself searching through the dispensary stores for melaninic. Vitiligo was a common condition among the Na′id, and their installations always had a supply of the drug. Alihahd found it and seized up the bottle of pills in his fist with grim relief. Half of his problem was solved. He could melt into the Na′id ranks with his skin a respectable shade of brown. He was not going to be called a nazi again. It was not his fault he was born blond, blue-eyed, and pasty white.
He left the dispensary and quickly made his way over the stiffening bodies in the corridors to the com center. He lifted a corpse out of a chair and sat down at the controls. He switched on the transceiver without video and immediately received a signal from a ship captain trying to make contact with the silent space station. “This is Sharru Sennacherib. Please acknowledge, Omonia. Where is your ID signal? What is your status?”
“Sharru Sennacherib. This is Omonia,” Alihahd answered. “It’s a disaster.” That statement carefully told nothing.
“Omonia, elaborate,” the captain demanded. “Are you in immediate danger?” The woman’s voice was familiar.
“Sharru, everyone is dead. When can you be here?” Alihahd infused some calculatedly disjointed panic into his too calm, too military voice. Because he thought he knew the woman, and she might recognize him if he spoke clearly. Wide as the galaxy was, voices such as his that were clear, deep, and cultured with correct speech were rare.
Despite his precaution, the woman’s reply was tainted with curiosity. “ETA twenty minutes. Omonia . . . Who is this?”
And all at once Alihahd knew her. No mistake. This will not work.
Alihahd disconnected the transmitter and sat back in his seat, his thick lips pressed together in frustrated thought. He could not bring himself to retreat. Not now—when he was actually on board a Na′id station, with melaninic in his hand.
But this ship captain knew him. No matter the disguise, he could not slip past her.
Having the woman eliminated did not even enter consideration. Alihahd would not kill another human being, not in defense, not in war. Never again. He had sworn. He could not do it, or everything he lived for was nothing.
Harrison White Fox Hall came to the com center, paused to make sure Alihahd was not transmitting, then he said, “Time’s up, Captain. They want a decision.” They, the Itiri.
Alihahd put his hand over his eyes, chasing down every possibility and squeezing his brain for more. So close. The same answer returned again and again. He rose, tapped Hall’s arm, too disappointed to speak, and they ran together back to the Topaz.
• • •
Alihahd slouched down low in his seat aboard the spaceship, the length of his wounded arm resting flat on the armrest, his other arm flung loosely across his abdomen. Emotions were several and jumbled, fear of the Na′id twined through everything.
Was it possible for the Na′id to figure out what had hit Omonia Station from the tangled evidence left behind? An ungodly hecatomb, the wreck of Ben’s two-hundred-year-old ship, a distress call in a voice that sounded like someone it could not be, and Ben’s footprints in blood. Those could be identified by the Na′id computer if it searched the database of the dead. Na′id were singularly negligent in checking the rolls of the deceased. They assumed a person could not act simply because the computer thought he was dead. Someday they would learn not to be so certain.
And on top of the physical remains at Omonia would be the stories stricken children told of a semihuman juggernaut, of Itiri warrior-priests, and of a nazi.
Alihahd remembered all the people who had encountered him and had seen his face. There would be other stories, too.
Into his thoughts Harrison White Fox Hall strolled down the aisle of the spaceship that had once been a passenger craft, and he let himself fall into the seat across from Alihahd. He slung one leg over the armrest and took out his pipe. As he lit it, his beautifully sinister orange eyes slid sideways.
Alihahd made an extremely convincing Na′id onboard Omonia. Gone for the time had been the worn-out, pacifistic, sometimes wet rag of a man flagellated with self-doubt and guilt. Left behind had been a soldier to be feared. Hall admitted to being impressed, and even a little frightened—as near to frightened as Hall could feel. There was considerable strength left in Alihahd. And madness.
At this moment, Alihahd was some kind of hybrid creature. He had returned to his customary docile brooding, but he was still in Na′id dress, and some vestige of the commander—the mad one—lurked just below the restored calm. Hall had seen the insanity before, b
ut not its power. And still not its source, the horrible goad from the past that drove Alihahd to heroism and despair. Memory of cowardice? Something was not right with that image.
Hall spoke between languorous puffs on his fox-head pipe. “You’re subdued, Captain.”
Alihahd sat up. “Should I not be?”
Hall fanned away the gray billows wreathing his head. “Where’s your righteous indignation?” Alihahd was always so piously magnanimous to any human foe. He ought to be saying something eloquent for the slaughtered Na′id.
Alihahd shook his head. “No.”
Hall pointed at him with his pipe’s mouthpiece. “You hate them after all.”
“He has a number,” Alihahd said, his gaze directed down at the deck between them.
“What was that, Captain?” Hall cocked an ear, better to hear Alihahd’s soft murmur.
Blue eyes lifted to Hall’s. “Ben-Tairre. He has a number. A blue one.”
“That’s a boy soldier, isn’t it?” Hall said.
“Yes.”
This was interesting. “You’ve forgiven him already,” Hall said.
Alihahd slumped back in his seat. His shoulder hurt. “I was thinking.”
“Yes,” Hall prompted.
“At his age and that number sequence, he would have to have been a trainee roughly sixteen years ago. In fact, he was most likely assigned back there at Omonia.”
Alihahd wondered what they’d done to him to make him come back at them like that. “Had he remained with the Na′id, he would have been assigned to an army—in all probability to one of the three armies that fought the Jerusalem campaign. He might have been butchering Jews and Arabs and Christians for Shad Iliya instead of butchering Na′id at Omonia today.”
“Maybe he was in Shad Iliya’s army,” Hall said.
Alihahd felt a shock, then reason returned. “No.”
