Alien Landscapes 2 (9 page)

“I will need my armor and my helmet if I’m going to do this right.”

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At first the armor felt rough and strange, but rapidly Barto adopted it as a second skin. The protective covering belonged, as much a part of him as his bones and muscles.

Looking at her soldier, Juliette wore a concerned expression, as if he had too easily stepped over the brink. Barto saw something unreadable deep within her brown eyes, a flush on her elfin face, as he picked up the helmet. He looked at her uncertainly one last time, then seated it firmly on his head. He pressed the side speakers against his ears, lowering the visor in place so that he looked at her through filters and scanning devices instead of his own eyes.

Barto drew a deep breath, stretching his chest against the breastplate armor plate. He flexed his arms against the hard bicep plates, the forearm protections, the gauntlets. His torso was solid and impenetrable. His legs and back, shoulders, hips, everything could withstand the worst that Arviq threw against him.

Barto was invincible.

“I must stop him before he leaves,” he said. “He’ll report the location of this place to HQ.”

Juliette hesitated, moved forward and then stopped, as if she wanted to embrace him but was afraid to. Barto was glad she didn’t. He didn’t want to get close to her, like this.

The tall chaperone Gunnar stood beside her, his face grim, and he drew her back. “Let him go now, Juliette. He has a mission.”

Barto turned and marched out of the room, summoning up his mental map of the underground civilian sanctuary. He would begin in Arviq’s quarters, where the point man had smashed his own room and broken loose. It would not be too difficult to pick up his former comrade’s trail. Barto knew how to track down a quarry.

Leaving the other inhabitants behind, he followed the tunnels. Most of the civilians reacted with fear when they saw him now. They hid within their own quarters or clustered together in the communal halls, though only one unarmed soldier had gone on a rampage. It was all beyond their experience.

All of these people cowered down here, helpless. And Barto was the only one who could protect them.

Though Arviq had not been able to retrieve his armor or his weapons, Barto did not underestimate him. A properly trained soldier could fashion defensive materials out of just about anything.

At the pried-open door, he stood motionless, assessing Arviq’s damaged room, saw how his comrade had wrenched open the barricade using a piece of the bedframe as a lever, how he had battered the walls with his bare hands. Barto saw blood, but knew that Arviq would pay no attention to such minor cuts and bruises. Not Arviq.

Barto had seen him through much worse.

One time on a reconnaissance and destruction mission, Barto and his point man had ventured into the crumbling ruins of what must have been an impossibly large building, now scarred, empty, and blasted. The structure had fallen into rubble with haphazard girders and broken glass protruding from poured stone walls.

They had chased several Enemies into the wreckage. Their senses screamed that it was probably an ambush, but still the two soldiers had followed, weapons drawn, confident that they could defeat their opponents. He and Arviq separated and traveled along different passageways, using their scanners to pick up infrared footprint traces.

Barto had proceeded cautiously, but Arviq, incensed and determined, charged through the darkened halls, knocking wreckage aside. Finally he had crashed down a rickety iron staircase that shattered into rust as he stepped on it. And he dropped through to the underlevels. . . .

When Barto had found him later, he saw that Arviq had broken his left leg in two places and had sprained his right ankle. His helmet visor was cracked and damaged—yet still Arviq had pulled himself along to find the Enemy. He certainly had.

Though severely injured and at an extreme disadvantage, Arviq had slaughtered both of the Enemy soldiers. . . .

From their missions together, Barto knew that his comrade was utterly relentless, feeling no pain and no fatigue. Nothing would stop him from escaping the underground enclave. He would never give up.

And neither would Barto give up. He was the only thing that could keep this civilian paradise protected and intact.

He strode out and moved briskly along the corridors. His bootsteps ricocheted off the metal walls. Arviq had smashed windows and thrown loose objects from side to side, leaving a painfully clear trail—until he had learned better and sensibly stopped his rampage.

Then tracking him became more of a challenge. Barto called up a detailed implanted map of all the underground corridors, which Juliette had added to the information systems in his helmet.

Arviq was running blind, by instinct, just trying to escape, but his movements displayed a pattern. On the map gleaming inside his visor, Barto could see the best paths, learn where to go . . . where to intercede.

Arviq didn’t have a chance against a fully armed, fully outfitted soldier, like Barto.

He marched along, his senses tuned to a high pitch. He moved carefully in case the other soldier had set up some kind of booby-trap or ambush. That was to be expected. Arviq must know Barto would come after him.

Because the other soldier was without his armor, his bare feet left a trail of infrared images on the clean floorplates. The marks were old and fading, but still identifiable with Arviq’s genetic signature: droplets of sweat, skin particles, even stride length gave evidence of his passage. The other man was still bleeding from one of the cuts he’d inflicted upon himself in escaping from the room; occasionally a telltale crimson droplet reinforced Barto’s tracking.

The control voice returned, insistent and self-confident. It comforted Barto, who had lived his conscious life hearing the words: “KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY!” He no longer felt so alone.

According to the map display, Arviq had made it to within several hundred meters of the long access ladder that led up a shaft to the outside—the battleground where their squad had been killed.

But Barto also knew he had cornered his quarry.

At an intersection of the dimly lit corridors, a framework of girders and support beams held up the ceiling. The place had been long-abandoned by the underground civilians.

Barto’s visor-sensors detected a large smear of blood at floor level in a corner, as if Arviq had rested there . . . or as if he had encountered an Enemy, and they had struggled, hand-to-hand. The blood was fresh, wet, warm in IR

—like a sign emblazoned there to draw his attention.

Too late, he realized the ambush. From the shadowed support girders above, Arviq let out a loud cry and dropped on top of him. Though he had no armor and no weapons, the other soldier crashed down upon him with brute force. Barto might have found the conflict absurd if Arviq hadn’t been so determined, so passionate—if the other man hadn’t been his own comrade for so long.

Arviq wrapped his left arm in a vice-lock around Barto’s neck, trying to wrench the helmet off his head. With his other hand he tried to grab one of the ID-locked weapons sealed in armored holsters on Barto’s hips.

Barto rose up like a tank, as if his armor gave him stimulus and energy, though Juliette had told him his artificial adrenaline pumps were disconnected from the suit.

Inside his ears, the helmet commanders shouted, ‘KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY! DON’T LET HIM ESCAPE!” With a weird disorientation, Barto thought the voice sounded like Gunnar’s.

Without letting go, Arviq fought like a wild thing, clamping his knees on either side of Barto’s armored chest, trying to tear the helmet off. When Barto staggered backward, slamming his comrade against the metal wall, Arviq let out an explosive exhale of pain and surprise. Barto recovered his balance and slammed him against the wall a second time.

Arviq struggled, but would not let go. He continued pounding with naked fists against the impenetrable armor.

“Come with me!” Arviq shouted loudly enough to penetrate the heavy ear coverings, to break through the harsh command voice. “Let’s go back to HQ. Back to our lives, Barto! We don’t belong here.”

Barto bent over and butted him against the wall, hearing ribs crack this time. Arviq’s grip finally loosened. He wheezed in pain, coughed blood. “Let me go then. Just let me run from here. I’ll leave.” Arviq slumped to one side and scrambled to his feet. Blood from his raw wounds smeared Barto’s scuffed armor.

“Can’t let you do that,” Barto answered. “You must stay here. The commanders gave their orders. Defy them, and you’re a traitor.”

Arviq stood up, glaring at him. His face was uncovered, his emotions unmasked. “This isn’t what we were made for. We are soldiers. War is our life. Not this . . . where we’re pets on display.” Barto had never really studied his comrade’s face before. “What happens when they get bored with us?”

Barto pressed his gloved palm against the hilt of his ID-coded blaster weapon. The device detected its proper owner and released its grip in the holster. Barto yanked the weapon free, held it in his hand.

Not far down the corridor, he could see the tarnished rungs that rose up the dark shaft. It would take so little for Arviq to scramble up the ladder, pop the heavy hatch—and be out, all alone on the blasted battlefield. Without armor or weapons, he didn’t have much chance of survival—but Arviq seemed desperate enough to take that option.

Arviq gathered himself up, glared at his former comrade and stepped away. “I know what I am, and what to do.” With the back of his hand, he wiped a smear of blood from his mouth. “Which one of us is the traitor, truly?” He turned and, moving slowly, not threateningly, took a step toward the ladder, the escape.

Barto raised the weapon. “Halt.”

Arviq turned to look at him with flinty, determined eyes. “I’m dead down here anyway. If I can’t get back onto the battlefield, then you may as well blast me now.”

Barto powered up his weapon.

The other soldier took two more steps down the corridor.

Inside the helmet, Gunnar’s voice shouted, “KILL THE ENEMY! DON’T LET HIM ESCAPE. YOU MUST PROTECT US. KILL HIM!” Barto leveled the blaster at the target.

Then he heard another voice—Juliette’s—muffled and distant, but coming closer. She cried out, running down the long-abandoned corridors toward him. “Don’t shoot, Barto. You must learn not to kill if you’re going to stay here.”

“Kill! Kill!” Gunnar’s voice bellowed.

Arviq turned as Juliette appeared, all alone, her elfin face distraught. Then he used the moment of distraction to a dash toward the rungs.

“KILL!” shouted the voice in Barto’s ears again. And he did.

Depressing the firing stud, he blasted his former comrade in the back as he ran. Arviq had no armor, no protection whatsoever. The bolt flared out and incinerated him, turning the other man into a smoking pile of burned bones and cooked flesh that fell in a heap on the floor, as if still trying to run.

“No!” Juliette cried out, but it sounded like a pout. Barto turned to see her standing there. Her expression was stricken, and then even more terrified as he faced her, the charged weapon still in his hand. “I wanted you to stay here with me,” she said. “It’s a better life, but you’ve got to learn not to kill. Stay away from violence. You’ve earned it. You could live here with me in peace and enjoy your life, escape the horrors of war.”

“They’re not horrors,” Barto said in a flat voice. He refused to take off his helmet. He was a soldier now, fully armed, ready to fight. “It’s the only thing I know.” He holstered the warm blaster. “I can’t stay here as a prisoner of war.”

“But you’re a free man among us,” Juliette pleaded, refusing to come closer. She seemed as much confused as saddened. She couldn’t understand why he would make this choice.

“I am still a prisoner,” he said. “War holds me prisoner.” He stood at attention, as if the feline spies were watching him from the shadows. “I must live by fighting, and I must die by fighting. I have no way to escape that.”

He understood now that this place, despite its comforts and its new experiences, could not possibly be for him. Not for a soldier.

He didn’t begrudge Juliette her civilian life, her pampered existence—and if these people were indeed the commanders in the war, if he was a soldier charged with protecting them, then he must go back and do his duty until death inevitably claimed him on the battlefield. And if he should happen to survive, then he would grow old and train other soldiers until the war was won and the Enemy completely vanquished.

There was nothing else for him to do.

Juliette watched him with despair, then a flash of anger in her brown eyes. Finally, her slender shoulders drooped in defeat. She said nothing else, just watched him with a flush in her cheeks.

Barto didn’t know what he had really meant to her . . . if he had merely been a trophy from the battlefield, something that increase her prestige among her people—or if she had really cared for him, in a way.

At the moment it didn’t matter. It was irrelevant information.

Leaving his dead comrade behind, sad that the bloodhounds could never retrieve Arviq and take him back to where he could be buried with full military honors, Barto climbed the rungs of the ladder.

It was a long way to the surface, but when he released the hatch and climbed out under the open, bruised sky, he stared for a long moment. He breathed the burnt air, studied the roiling dust from distant explosions.

He lifted his visor to stare out across the stricken field with his own eyes, then he shut the hatch behind him, sealing Juliette and her world underground, keeping her secret safe. And then he strode off, heading in the direction of his HQ.

It would feel good to get back to the business of fighting once again.

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