* * *
White was the first color that greeted the Lancer, and even then it was fuzzy. He opened his jaws once, twice, trying to dislodge his tongue from the bottom of his mouth.
“He’s awake!” exclaimed a familiar voice, and Brokehorn felt more than saw the shifting of great mass.
“I can see that,” said a female voice, somewhat annoyed. “He’s going to want water, and you standing up like that will likely get someone trampled and give me more work.”
Brokehorn thought water was a fine idea, and thought to say as much. All that came out was a tired wheeze, his throat far too tight to make noise and activate his vox harness.
A warm hand touched his face, and he could see better now. A dark claw with a figure in white in front of him. As he focused, he saw it was a human woman who attended him. An older woman; her hair was flecked with silver, and she had many lines around her eyes. She found a smile for him though, and placed a hose into his mouth. “Swallow as much as you can, and if some of it runs out, well it’s no problem. Cleaning up is part of the job, and we certainly don’t mind doing it for heroes,” she told him.
He didn’t register what she said, as the feeling of cool water gushing down his dry throat was a wonder that captivated him. He drank eagerly, only stopping when pain deep in his gut forced him to. Brokehorn saw the nurse’s eyes squint and she nodded. “Pain?”
“Yes,” he managed, his voice still rusty. “In my stomach.”
The nurse nodded again. “That’s to be expected. I imagine the flesh there is still healing, even though they took the stitches out a week ago,” she explained.
“How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Nearly three weeks now. We... we didn’t think you were going to make it when they brought you here,” she admitted. “But here you are, and that’s what matters.”
“How bad was it?”
She shook her head. “I’ll let the doctor talk about that. I don’t want to get into specifics,” she told him. Brokehorn had a feeling that was her final word on that subject. “I’m sure your friend will want to talk to you about it though, so you can ask him. I’m Nurse Sera, and please don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”
“Is there food? Can I eat?” he asked her, trying to rise but pain forced him back.
There was a guffaw from above, and Sera looked up for a moment, scowling, before turning back to the Lancer. “I’ll see what I can get for you, but it’s likely going to be nutrient fluid for a bit until your gut heals up a bit more,” she told him, and then turned to the other being present in the room. “You have ten minutes with him, but he needs his strength. Don’t make me come in here and have you forced out again,” she told the Tyrannosaurus.
“I don’t think I have ten minutes of conversation in me,” responded Ripper.
The nurse shook her head and left, leaving Ripper and Brokehorn alone.
Brokehorn was able to take stock of his surroundings now. The two were in a cavernous, white room with one wall dedicated to a haptic chart of his vitals, which showed his improving medical history over different timelines. Above him hung a large piece of cloth; he couldn’t make out what it was, but didn’t care. Instead, he turned to Ripper.
“You just happened to be here?” Brokehorn asked.
“I did, but...”
“You were here every day?”
The Bladejaw nodded, opening his mouth several times before finding words. “It was bad. I arrived just as the other Khajal arrived and well, I finished off the two of the three survivors.”
Brokehorn tilted his head at this. “I killed six. I was nearly dead when those three arrived.”
“So you were. But the humans convinced themselves you killed seven, so that’s what they told Dhimion Cruzah,” explained Ripper. “They survived, though some were injured when you rammed the truck. They were very effusive in their praise of your valor.”
There was another pause. “How bad was it?” Brokehorn inquired softly. This realization of his own mortality was a new thing to him.
“You died,” said Ripper. “I remember the lead medic telling me that as they began working on you.”
“If I died, why would they try to bring me back in the middle of an active battlefield? Especially when surrounded by Federation troops.” Triage procedures of the Dominion military prohibited resuscitation.
“Maybe they decided an effort was better than answering to an enraged Bladejaw.” Ripper responded.
The two Old Bloods locked gazes for a moment, and it was Brokehorn who spoke into the silence. “But why all that for a dinosaur you just met?”
“Because I think...” Ripper paused again, as though searching for the words. “We understand each other. Not just being Separated, but we understand the reasons we fight. Call me selfish but I was not ready to lose that, not after finding it so soon. I would not have the promise of a friendship taken away from me.” There was none of the light acerbic wit in Ripper’s words, and Brokehorn found himself touched.
“Besides,” said Ripper quickly, nodding toward the banner above them. “This is the kind of thing you don’t usually see at all.”
Brokehorn followed Ripper’s gaze. It was a banner – gold on black. There was a lion in profile, scaling what looked like a pile of dead hyenas. Red slashes were stitched all over the lion, who seemed to be roaring, likely for the final time.
“They give that to those who died in battle,” said Brokehorn, remembering what Ripper had said but speaking the words all the same.
“So you did. Your actions were heroic, believe it or not. The Order of the Fallen Lion, and you the only living member,” said Ripper. “I am impressed, not just for the deeds you accomplished.”
“What else would impress you?”
“That you did believe in the ideals we expressed before that battle to spend your life in pursuit of them,” said Ripper.
“That was the mission,” began Brokehorn.
“No, the mission was incidental. You died as true as you lived. So few beings ever do,” said Ripper.
A small door opened, and Nurse Sera stood there, her hands on her hips, glaring at the Tyrannosaurus.
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” Ripper grumbled, turning away from her and heading toward the large doors on the other side of the room.
“You’ll...” Brokehorn began, and then forced himself to ask. “You’ll be here tomorrow?”
“I will,” promised Ripper. “Sleep well, friend.”
Brokehorn watched him go, and he was left alone with Nurse Sera as she went about her tasks. He was tired, but he had slept for weeks and had questions. “Nurse,” he said, and she turned toward him.
“Lancer, what can I do for you?” she asked him.
“The humans I saved, do you know where they are now?” he asked her.
She frowned, and gave a small shake of her head. “Hopefully they found their parents and are trying to recover, physically and mentally, but I truthfully don’t know. Children are tough though – they bounce back faster than you think.”
“That’s good then,” Brokehorn said, thinking of how the young humans had looked at him while he ripped apart the Khajalian. How many nightmares would that bring on?
Sera paused, visibly thinking, and then moved closer to Brokehorn. “May I ask a question?” The Lancer nodded for her to go on. “Why did you do that?”
“Because he was trying to kill me,” said Brokehorn, and then realized that he had been thinking of the Khajali that he had slaughtered.
“I know that,” began Sera, misunderstanding, “but you killed yourself saving human children. Why though? It’s obvious the Illurians don’t care – the ones who aren’t fighting, that is. So why do you? You could have left them to their fate and no one would have thought less of you,” she said. Her voice was soft, and she had moved closer to him, resting a hand on his crest and looking him in the eye.
There was only one answer he could give her that would be true, and
to voice it would be to accept his status as Separated and no longer simply Old Blood. “Because it was the right thing to do,” he said, meeting her gaze evenly. As he said it, he realized there would be no mate from the garden worlds for him. He would never be part of a herd of Lancers, and would remain forever ignorant of that which bonded his own kind.
For a second it was frightening, and then he saw Sera push tears away from her eyes, and smile down at him. “You are all so wonderful. Thank you,” she whispered at him, turning away. He felt the fear vanish at her sincere expression of gratitude, and instead it was replaced by a cocktail of emotions he had no name for. The dinosaur turned his head with some pain, to look at the banner that hung above him. He had traded away easy pleasures for the hard road, but so be it. It would not be a lonely road, at least, and some would live that otherwise would not.
His last thought before he settled back down to sleep was a human one. He had no regrets.
Sucker of souls
Kirsten Cross
“Is that as fast as you can run? Because fella, I’m telling you right now, it ain’t fucking fast enough!” Snarled from a frightened man way, way out of his comfort zone and desperately trying to appear in control of an uncontrollable situation so as not to ‘frighten the civvy’ as they stagger-ran.
Soldiers, even ex-soldiers who now got paid to babysit grave-robbing archaeologists, shouldn’t show fear. Ever. Even when they were faced with an enemy that apparently had powers well beyond those that could be controlled with a quick double-tap from a Glock.
Fuck.
This was gonna be one well-earned pay cheque. If he lasted long enough to collect the damn thing, that is. What they had just witnessed had challenged Flynn’s whole concept of what was worth seven hundred dollars a day plus expenses and what wasn’t. And this very definitely wasn’t.
“I’m sorry?” The archaeologist didn’t seem to get the barely controlled desperation, panic and outright ‘what the actual fuck was that?’ tone in his babysitter’s voice. Flynn was still in control of himself. Just.
When they stopped to catch a breath and take stock of their surroundings for a second, Flynn pressed home his advantage. “You bloody well will be if we don’t stay ahead of… whatever the hell that was.” The ex-soldier gave his charge a cold, emotionless smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
The archaeologist peeled off a pair of round spectacles and rubbed at them with the corner of his shirt. He perched the glasses back onto his nose and pushed them up to the bridge. His hands were shaking violently. He used the mundane act to try and ground himself while his brain attempted to process the carnage they had just seen. “I’m an archaeologist, Mr Flynn, not an Olympic sprinter.”
Colby Flynn turned his steely-cold, pale-green eyes onto the quivering academic, rammed home a new clip and primed his sidearm in front of the man. That always got their attention. Sliding the bolt back on the Glock 17 made that gloriously satisfying cher-chunk sound that all movie scriptwriters love. It acted as an underline, emphasising his determination to go down fighting no matter what. It also helped to make the archaeologist more frightened of Flynn than the thing that was currently snuffling and snarling its way towards them. And that was a good thing. Because it would mean the bolshy academic would now do what he was told for a change. “Good. That increases my chances, then.”
The bespectacled, owl-like man blinked curiously at Flynn. “What?”
“It means, buddy, that while mister bitey back there is chowing down and ripping your throat out like he did with your mate, he won’t be gnashing on me, will he?”
Oh no. Not again…
A snorting, snuffling sound that was so thick and black you could chew it like a piece of liquorice imposed on their momentary pause. “Seriously, will you just fuck off, you bastard!” Flynn abused the darkness and then emptied a volley of shots into nothing. Whether it actually made any real difference or not, he couldn’t tell. But whatever was back there yelped and snarled. Flynn hoped that the swarm of hollow-points at least gave the bastard cause to pause so they could focus on running again.
Move! For fuck’s sake, move!” Flynn spun the archaeologist around and shoved him hard. “I’ve got your back. As long as you stay in front of me.” Flynn put his mouth next to the sweating man’s ear. “And yet, you’re… still… here?”
The archaeologist suddenly developed a surprisingly-fast turn of speed for a Cambridge academic.
Normally, Flynn wouldn’t give anyone a head start. This wasn’t a school egg and spoon race where the ‘special kids’ got to jog a few steps before everyone else set off, and it was the ‘taking part that mattered, not the winning, little buddy’. This was a slime-covered stone corridor lined with spluttering, flickering lightbulbs that had been Jerry-rigged by Micky Cox – an ex-REME armed with a screwdriver, a happy disposition, and a real ‘MacGyver’ approach to fixing shit. Their only source of light was being produced by a wheezing, 40-year-old generator with carburettor problems combined with mile upon mile of gaffer-taped cable. And there wasn’t some happy-clappy teaching assistant cheering them on. There was a five-hundred-and-seventy-year-old psychopath with a taste for blood, violence and carnage just a few turns behind them. And he – or it, whatever the hell it was – was playing with them, the sick, twisted little bastard.
Flynn needed the archaeologist alive. What was in professor brainiac’s balding little noggin might just keep him and his team in one piece, if he could get the egghead to the safety of the citadel’s old armoury that was currently doubling as a control centre for the dig. Damn it, if he was going to be paid to babysit an academic, he’d make sure the son of a bitch stayed alive.
The twisting, turning corridors were slick with algae. These dungeons and corridors were built well below the natural water table and a musky, foetid atmosphere permeated every inch of the subterranean labyrinth. Rivulets of water seeped down and followed the channels between the huge blocks of granite. There was no mortar holding these blocks together. Stone like this didn’t need cement to keep it in place. These tunnels – deep under what would have been a massive, imposing castle – had thousands of tons of masonry and rock pressing down on them.
Back in the comfort of the hotel, the archaeologist had told Flynn and his team a rambling account of the supposed history of the citadel. It was, as Gary Parks had said, a ‘two-bottle tale’. The bottles in question had been filled with the local hooch, a paint-stripping, intestine-melting liquor that would probably lead to blindness if you drank too much of the damn stuff. Flynn was a practical kind of guy and, right up to the point when that… thing… had come wailing through the door, took a pretty pragmatic approach to concepts such as the ability of true evil, despair and pain to impregnate the very walls of a building. So he listened patiently about how the stones were held together with the screams of the damned, long since dead but not necessarily buried. The archaeologist had gone into great detail about how the terror of the inmates had been etched into the stone with scrabbled, ripped fingernails and bloodied stumps. It had become as real as any painting; an everlasting memory of the evil that had happened in this dark and savage place. He recounted grisly details of how every cell had been occupied with frail, frightened prisoners, their minds shredded and tattered by the constant screams, yowls and cries for mercy that echoed throughout the underground chambers. When the guards came for them, they’d begged. Oh, how they’d begged! They crawled on their bellies. They pleaded. They called to their God – who utterly abandoned them to their fate and the whims of their sadistic captors.
The archaeologist spared no details in his story. He explained how the peepholes allowed guards who got a thrill from watching the suffering of others to observe the prisoners’ slow and painful deaths as starvation and disease took hold. How they would watch as the rats started chewing on the dying when they became too weak to shoo them away, taking bets on which part of a prisoner’s body the rodents would go for first. Apparently, it was always the soft tis
sue – the genitals, the face, the eyes. Once the body had been reduced to gnawed bones and a sticky, stinking coating of vitreous fluid on the stone floor, the door was opened and a new occupant took residence. Except one.
Like freaked-out boy scouts telling ghost stories around a campfire, Flynn and his team had leaned in. After all, everyone loves a good ‘haunted castle’ story, don’t they? The archaeologist risked permanent sight damage by pouring himself another glass of hooch and had continued with his tale.
This cell, he explained, had no door. Instead massive stones had been seconded from other parts of the castle and used to wall up the doorway, leaving just the iron-barred peep-hole through which guards occasionally pushed a hissing, squawking cat. This unique prisoner, brought back home to this dark and terrifying castle after rampaging for years across Europe, liked his food still kicking. So they gave him cats because it seemed to be the one thing he… it… feared. That was their torment – giving him something they knew full well he detested, but was so starved and emaciated that he had no choice but to overcome his revulsion and feed on whatever screeching titbit the guards tossed through the barred gap.
The isolation was a torment, too, especially for such a brilliant, bright and diamond-hard mind. The knowledge that the stinking, festering cell littered with the bones of cats and rats was to be his everlasting tomb – a tomb that was designed for the living, not the undead – had warped his already-twisted mind beyond evil, and beyond any form of redemption and turned it from a ‘he’ into an ‘it’. That’s why the priests had brought it back here. Even they were afraid of it; afraid of what it had become. Afraid of what it could do, especially after Death had supposedly claimed its putrefying corpse and it had reanimated, sending at least three of those same priests to early and very violent deaths.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 16
