Blood of Denebria (Star Sojourner Book 4) (15 page)

“Suppose I take Wolfie and Chancey and go meet them,” I said. “If it's Roothe, we can tell him his people are scattered in the desert, trying to make it home.”

“And if it's the traitors?” Joe said.

The rest of the team had gathered around us. Huff was feeling better and was on his feet.

I shrugged. “Shouldn't be a problem if we have to make a quick getaway.” I grinned. “Remember, spears against stinglers?”

“Have you considered,” Joe said, “that the Northwestern Village may have traded with the BEMs for something a little higher tech than spears? Those people are capturing their own kind and bringing them to the BEMs as slaves. They must be getting well paid for their trouble.”

“I say we avoid them altogether,” Chancey said. “Head north, then cut west around them.”

“I'll second that,” Wolfie said.

“I will third it,” Huff said.

Bat walked his horse up to Joe. “Captain, I'm willing to ride down there an' talk to those boys. If it's Roothe, he might be able to save a bunch of his people wandering around out there in the desert.”

Reika rode up and threw me a worried look. “Jules, you're not thinking of going down there, are you?”

“It might save a lot of Denebs out there in the desert, Ree. What if it were Terrans? Would we hesitate to make contact with the caravan?”

She looked at Joe.

Joe shook his head. “Sorry, Jules. I can't spare you. If it's not general Roothe, it could be dangerous to –”

“I'm sorry,
too,
Joe!” I turned Asil's head west and pressed his sides. “C'mon, Prince.” He leaped ahead and stretched his legs out across the sand.

“Jesus Christ!” I heard Joe yell. “Wolfie! Get him.”

I knew what was coming. Our sharpshooter Wolfie would hit me with his sidearm set for stun. I leaned over Asil's shoulder and felt a tingling in my wrist and leg as we outran Wolfie's mare. If that wasn't General Roothe at the head of the caravan, I'd swing Asil away from them and they'd never catch me. If it was Roothe, he might just save a lot of his people.

I glanced back. None of the team was following me. I saw the caravan leader raise his arm. Behind him, the horses were reined in.

I pulled up Asil about a hundred feet away from the leader. He was too short and slightly built to be the general. He turned to another Deneb who rode behind him and said something.

The other shrugged.

Uh oh. Bad mistake, Jules,
I thought. “Cousin!” I called, “I was sent to you by Older Brother and Bountiful the Profuse.”

The leader sat stiffly in the saddle and watched me.

“May I approach?” I asked.

“Keep your hands over your head,” he called, “and approach.”

I lifted my arms away from my stingler and tapped Asil's sides lightly to put him into a slow walk. “I have an urgent message for you,” I called.

I smiled as I lowered my shields and conjured a red coil of telepathic power. I forced it to grow and spin, hotter and faster into that tight fist that would explode in a thrown mind link and catch him like a bug in a web. This was going to give me a bad headache, dammit, but if it hit its mark, I'd sublimate the crotefucker's thoughts and impose my own will on his mind. I had to make him my puppet in one blast of the link. If I controlled him, I could free the slaves. If he had time to alert the others, I might not make my escape. I knew the heat inside my skull was burning brain cells, but I forced the small tornado to grow.

When I was about twenty feet away from him, and felt as though my head were ready to explode, I threw the coil the way a baseball pitcher flings a ball.

BEM invasion imminent,
I sent.
Mother ships approach. This area targeted for annihilation of Nomadic groups as example to all Denebrians. Missiles whine overhead. Nuclear explosions turn sand to glass. Only safety. Northwest Village. Race back, cousin. The sky is full of missiles! The ground shakes and explodes!

His round mouth opened into a doughnut circle. His nose slits flared. Long, creased fingers crept up to his throat. I had the bastard by his balls, if he had any.

“My message is only for your ears,” I said aloud as I approached.

He gargled in his throat.

I leaned toward him and whispered, “Flee while you can, cousin. And tell your people to flee. The BEMs at headquarters sent me to warn you. Attacking BEM ships are overhead right now.” I jabbed my finger at the sky and squinted. “There. And there. And there!”

He turned his horse with a cry. “The village,” he screamed. “Back to the village. The BEMs are going to blow up the desert.” He kicked his poor horse's sides hard. The horse grunted and leaped into a gallop. The column of horses behind him broke as the riders tried to follow, crashing into each other. One of the horses screamed and went down. He struggled to his feet, without his rider, and pounded across the desert, stirrups flying. The slaves ran and stumbled to escape the galloping horses.

I unholstered my stingler, aimed at the fleeing leader's back, and pulled the trigger.

He threw up his arms, rolled backward off the horse, and lay motionless in the sand.

“There's your invasion,” I said and holstered the weapon.

* * *

“Come here, Jules,” Joe said too softly and strode toward me as I comforted a slave Deneb who'd been trampled in the chaos, and waited for Bat to arrive with his little black bag,

I stood up. “Uh, I don't think so.” I backed away. “It turned out all right, Joe.
Look.
We freed them!”

He kept approaching. “Come here.”

I shook my head and backed away into Chancey, who wrapped his arms around me in a gorilla grip.

Huff whined from behind Joe.

“Captain,” Reika called on a pleading note, and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“Take it easy, Joe,” I said as he continued toward me.

Bat shook his head, opened his saddlebag and took out his little black bag while Wolfie held our horses' reins.

I gasped as Joe grabbed the collar of my jacket. I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth. “Not my left cheek!” I groaned as I waited for the blow. I felt a light tap on my right cheek and opened my eyes.

Joe stood before me, looking grim. “I swear to Jesus Christ and Brahma, the next time you disobey my order, I'll flatten you.” He nodded to Chancey, who let me go. I turned and stared at Chancey, my fists clenched, my body tense. He shrugged and walked away.

“You know, Joe,” I said, “I volunteered for this mission at your urging. I'm not part of your military team!”

“You are now, kid. And this is not a democracy. The team leader is law.”

“Your law!” I strode away.

Bat went to the wounded with his bag.

Reika and Wolfie rode into the desert and returned with the leader's horse and those of two soldiers who'd been dragged off their mounts and killed by the slave Denebs. Huff went searching under rocks, as much, I think, to look for fresh meat as to be away from humans and our senseless disputes for a while.

After Bat treated the three most seriously hurt, he helped the Denebs tie them to travois behind the horses and three Denebs mounted and left for a village, about fifty kilometers to the southwest, they said, to bring back more horses and help for the others.

* * *

Late that evening, while the rest of the team slept, Bat and I sat near a small fire Joe had allowed in the darkness, and sipped coffee. I picked up a branch from a pile beside me and threw it into dying flames. The fire sparked and brightened.

“Not a bad day's work,” I told Bat.

“I wouldn't let Joseph hear ya'll say that.”

“He won't hear it from me, or I'll be needing one of your pain pills.” I glanced at Joe, asleep on his bedroll. “Sometimes he scares me. I think he's still capable of beating the hell out of me if he gets really pissed and puts his mind to it.”

Bat shook his head. “Do you understan' how much he cares about you? He worries himself sick that ya'll gonna get yourself killed.”

“He's got a funny way of showing it.”

“Some people don't know how to express their concern with anything but anger.”

“You were ready to go and talk to the caravan, Bat.”

“Only until Joseph gave the order not to.” He put down his empty cup. “A lot o' those turncoat Denebs are headin' back to the Northwestern Village. Will they know ya'll a telepath?”

“No. I killed their leader.” I picked up a branch and tapped off insects that scurried around it. “He was the only one who might've surmised it. The others think I gave him a message from the BEMs. If anything, the village will figure I'm working for the BEMs.”

“Unless the BEMs meet up with the Villagers and tell them we're the enemy.”

I rubbed my eyes. They stung from the smoke. “Yeah. There's that.”

“I guess we'd better keep our powder dry.”

“Powder?”

“Oh, it's an old saying.”

“You know, Bat, it bothers me. I…”

He glanced at me and waited.

I ran a thumb over the rough branch. “I never killed so easily. First the BEMs in the field, and now this turncoat leader.” I stared at the hot, snapping flames. “I wanted them dead.”

“Well, they were the bad guys.”

“Thing is, does that make it all right to enjoy killing?”

He thought for a while. “I don't know, Bubba. Ya'll could think of it like stompin' on roaches.”

“I don't do that, either.”

“Oh.” He put his hand on my knee and stood up. “The questions you're asking don't have answers that I know of. Think I'll turn in. The way things're goin', who knows what tomorrow will bring.”

“Sleep well.”

He nodded and shuffled to his bedroll. Within minutes, he was snoring.

I sighed. Now I was the only one still awake. I stared at the flames.
Questions without answers.
What did the life of any living being mean if we just reincarnated somewhere else? Did that give us the right to take a life? I'd seen so many die these last few days. The good and the bad. That child back at the death camp… And then Reika and I coupling in nature's coercion to make a new life. And Bountiful, killing hundreds of Denebs and pumping out thousands of eggs at a time. I threw the branch into the dying fire and stared at twisting flames that ate the wood in a rage to live.

* * *

“Oh my God,” I murmured as I topped a ridge and brushed back the towel I'd made into a headdress. Windblown sand wailed between dunes like a premonition as the desert gave way to high plains terrain of up-thrust pink granite cliffs, scrub brush and stunted trees. Beyond the plains, a range of ragged blue peaks milked clouds and left nothing for the baking land below.

“You know,” I told Reika, who rode beside me, “Denebria's as close to Earth as any planet I've ever been on, but damn, those could be the San Juan Mountains of my home state.”

“Colorado?”

I nodded, tapped Asil's sides and we started forward. Huff trotted beside me, dragging his wheeled left leg.

“You doing OK, Huff?” I asked him.

“I would do better without the whatchamacallit on my leg. I think I lost my fur.”

“The whatchamacallit?”

“I asked Chancey what do you call it.”

“And he said a whatchamacallit, right?”

“I would be in joy to take off the whatchamacallit, Jules.”

One of these days, Chancey and I were going to have it out.

“Now, Huff,” I said, “We agreed. A few more days.”

“I will have no fur in more days. It is behind me as I walk.”

I reached down and patted his back. “You'll grow new fur, even whiter.”

He mumbled something.

My ankle had healed with doc's pain-healing pills and the scrapes on my palms were almost gone.”

I watched cloud shadows undulate like dark mats across lime-green meadows dotted with horses, or maybe those were native wild animals. Forests of conifers clung to the mountains' rocky flanks. Below, a silver stream splashed over rocks as it meandered across the plain, a gift from the peaks, with crowds of yellow flowers hugging its banks. Ponds and lakes appeared as we rode, like Cyclops's eyes that stared at an indigo sky.

All this,
I thought, and the Denebs of the Northwestern Village still made a pact with the devils for whatever trinkets they offered.
Blood for trinkets!

“Jules?”

“Yeah, Ree?”

“What're you thinking, babes? You look troubled.”

I shook my head. “Wherever you go in the known worlds, Greed still kicks butt.”

“Maybe the average villager doesn't know what's going on. It wouldn't be the first time.”

“Or doesn't want to know, as long as the trinkets keep flowing.”

She smiled, wrinkling the olive skin around her full lips. “If we're successful in our mission, the flowing trinkets will come to a sudden stop. And so will the slave trade.”

“Let's hope, Ree. Let's hope.”

We continued across the open plains toward a cliff with tumbled boulders at the base. The late afternoon sun grew hot on my neck. My sweater stuck to me and I felt sweat trickle down my back. Asil was lathered. But the team had agreed to rest where the boulders would provide shade and protection from air surveillance. Once, in the early morning light, the sun had glinted off the silver hull of a BEM ship heading northwest. But it was too high to see us and before we could react, it was gone over a butte.

I wiped an arm across my face. I wouldn't be sorry to leave the desert behind and start the climb into cool mountain air, where we could wash off the blowing sand and the sweat. I patted Asil's shoulder and wondered if he also looked forward to a good washing down. Reika patted her sorrel's neck.

“What was it like where you grew up, Ree?”

“Mostly I grew up in a boarding school. My parents were too busy partying to pay much attention to me.” She shrugged. “They never wanted kids. During weekends, I'd watch the other kids run to their parents and get into ground cars and leave for the weekend.”

“They didn't visit you?”

“On holidays, when the casinos were closed and their friends were with families.”

“I'm sorry, Ree.”

“Oh, don't be, babes. I have more
family
in the military than I ever had at home. And I get to see the worlds.” She turned in the saddle. “Joe told me that you were an orphan.”