Battleground (54 page)

And Kakrekt, her hand now shaking, lifted the weapon and it hissed once more.

•   •   •

If only he had died at once,
Hanna thought later, over and over.

He seemed to stretch, arms flung high, reaching interminably toward cloud, and he swayed, bending now forward and now back as if his bones had dissolved to liquid, head lolling, feet rooted in the mud, but all his eyes were open and looked everywhere. She felt Gabriel's hand behind her head, urging her face to his chest, an instinctive gesture of one used to protecting children, but she resisted, even though she had seen enough horrors, as if she owed it to Kwoort to bear witness to the end of a millennium of life. So she saw Kwoort take two last staggering steps, convulsing, arms still flailing; then she did turn to Gabriel and close her eyes, but she heard the monumental crash, surely louder than a single Soldier's fall should sound. She heard someone moaning. She did not understand until later that she had heard herself.

Crushed in Gabriel's embrace she did not hear, either, the faint sound that made him tense and shift, looking upward; but she finally opened her eyes and looked up too, following Gabriel's attention, and saw the shadow that broke through the clouds:
Endeavor
's shuttle at last.

She heard Gabriel say to Kakrekt, “I would put that away if I were you”—he nodded toward the weapon, and Kakrekt made it vanish.

And now they will not have to go away,
Kakrekt thought.

Hanna whispered, “Oh, my God”—she had heard the thought.

The shuttle eased onto the plateau and wordlessly they began to climb upward again, holding tight to each other. They did not say anything to Kakrekt. She had not moved and did not speak either. They had made little progress when two figures appeared above them. “Keep going. Board the shuttle,” one said; they were machines, many-armed servos, and they started down the steep incline, surefooted, and passed them without stopping or speaking again.

“What—?” said Gabriel, starting to turn around and almost falling; Hanna saw blankly that he had picked up Kwoort's satchel without her noticing, and the weight, however slight, affected what was left of his balance.

“I don't care. Come on,” Hanna said. Another difficult step, and another: she had never been so glad for the Polity's rescue. “Come
on!”
she said. But Gabriel stayed where he was and she felt—
felt
, yes!—his uncertainty on the steep slope, and finally she turned around too and saw the servos' purpose. They went to the bodies of Kwoort and Woke Warrior and picked them up and started back after Hanna and Gabriel.

Kakrekt still had not moved. Telepathy had shut down again and Hanna could feel nothing of her thought. If Kakrekt was anxious or apprehensive there was no sign of it.

Something touched her arm and said, “Do you need to be carried?”

It was another servo. Gabriel said, “No, but let us hold on to you. Go slowly.”

From just below them Kakrekt finally called out: “Come back in a summer or two and see what I have done.” And she was not finished; there was another shout. “Nakeekt lied!”

Hanna stopped at this, and the servo obediently stopped too. She turned, but still she did not speak.

“Yes,” Kakrekt said, more quietly, but every word carried through the cold air and pierced Hanna's heart. “I get more information than you know. More than Nakeekt knows. Those leaves, prepared as she said—the distillate is a pleasant beverage. Nothing more. Was it difficult for you, deciding what to do? There was no need. It would have made no difference. It was your fellow-Soldier who made the difference, here and now, when he put the Holy One alone and unarmed into my hands. The Holy One never gave you what you want, but I will.”

Kakrekt lifted a hand, the one that had not held the weapon, and Hanna saw the communicator.

“You will return. I will be waiting,” Kakrekt said.

T
HE SHUTTLE WAS CONSIDERABLY
larger than the pod, but it seemed crowded with servos sent to dig or fight. Hanna—falling into a seat, steadying Gabriel (or being steadied by him) as he fell into another—saw one human being, Corcoran, in the pilot's seat, and shrank from the horror on his face as he looked at them. Possibly the servos looked more human than they did. It did not stop him from accelerating upward so fast that the layers of cloud blurred.
Now
he's hurrying, she thought. She must have projected it uncontrollably and unknowingly because he said, “Got what I came for, no reason to wait around. They blew up two transports, didn't they?”

And just as uncontrollably Hanna saw that she and Gabriel had been secondary objects. Soldiers—specimens—had been the first. Metra had held the rescue back deliberately, allowing them to remain in danger, looking for one last advantage without putting the shuttle at risk, probably with spyeyes transmitting the last flurry of violence—

And in that second's flash from Corcoran—oh, telepathy was back, all right, back with a vengeance—she knew that Metra had not done it all on her own responsibility. She had done it with Commission approval. Starr's approval.

Metra's voice came into the capsule, urgent.

“Maximum speed, at once. Incoming data indicate Commander Kwoort is still alive.”

Hanna froze. Next to her Gabriel whispered, “Thank God.”

But Hanna thought:
If only he had died at once.

OLD EARTH

S
HE WAS SLAPPED INTO
Endeavor
's sickbay so fast her head spun. She was injected with nutrients, someone cut off much of her hopeless hair, and she was admired as the only case of starvation the medics had seen outside textbooks; Gabriel, she was assured, was equally admired. All this she gathered in dozy fragments, finally surrendering to exhaustion and a sedative she did not want or (in her opinion) need. In another fragment she was walked carefully through
Endeavor
and transferred—somewhere—with measured haste, where the same things happened again, though she would not let these new medics shear off any more hair, the importance of retaining it swelling out of all proportion.

When she was allowed to emerge naturally from the haze she found that she and Gabriel were on the
Admiral Wu
. They were prescribed gentle exercise and slow progress with real food, combined with short periods of debriefing and long ones of rest.

There was time to assess the damage.

•   •   •

Hanna, as soon as she could leave sickbay, spent as much time as she could in a lounge reserved for important passengers. It was large (that was in its favor) and one wall looked out into space, giving the specious impression that there was an escape route at hand. She had not suspected how important that would be. She had not understood until now that during the long captivity in Wektt she had vigorously suppressed memories of other occasions, more brutal but much shorter, when she had been a captive. The
Admiral Wu
was moving fast; even given that a course, once painstakingly charted, could be retraced at enormous speed, it seemed to be proceeding too fast for comfort, and the staccato Jumps that made for rapidly shifting starscapes were disconcerting. All the same, Hanna would have slept in the lounge, if it had been allowed, just so that she would be reassured, when she opened her eyes, that she was no longer confined to the tiny room deep under Wektt.

She suspected she had become claustrophobic. Time would take care of it, she thought. It didn't seem important. She had, as she had said to Bella, gotten over worse.

•   •   •

Gabriel's default for damage control was prayer.

Should I not, Lord, feel penitent? It was my hand that disarmed Kwoort and left him helpless before his enemy, even though I pitied him, even though he was Your child as much as I. But all I find in my heart is sorrow, I find regret, but I do not find guilt. I live. A woman lives and goes home to her child. That must be enough.

Still there is need for penance. Show me what You would have me do. Lord, I listen . . .

Hanna touched him in one of these private intervals, but only once. He seemed to her remote in a way that eerily resembled trance. It was not detachment she sensed, though, but passionate engagement with . . . something.

How brave he was, she thought, after what he had seen, to still believe.

•   •   •

The two of them had a secret.
Don't bring it up,
she said in an urgent pulse of thought just before debriefing began, and the question in his mind meant,
What if they ask,
and she said,
They won't.

Later he came to see her in the lounge, which she had already begun to think of as her personal property. Uncharacteristically, he was frowning. He sat down next to her, leaned close, and whispered, “Is anybody listening?”

“Eavesdropping, you mean? Here? No,” she said in surprise. “Why?”

“Nobody asked me about
that
. What you told me not to tell them about.”

“That's because I never reported anything about it. It never seemed to be the time for it, when everybody was talking about negotiations. So-called.”

“But we've got to tell somebody.”

“Well, of course we do. Oh. No, no,” she said. “Did you think I'd keep
that
to myself? No! But,” she said, “it's too important for just anybody to hear about. I'm going to tell Starr. And I'm glad, I'll be so glad, when it's the Commission's secret, not mine.”

•   •   •

Eight days after they left Battleground—
Wu
pushing protocols and moving from Jump to Jump at battle-ready speeds—they were on Earth. Hanna refused to do anything until she had seen Mickey, though much of their reunion was given over to an explanation that sometimes people cried not because they were unhappy, but because they were so filled with happiness that it could not be contained.

After that she had to go and do something else. The path led, inevitably, to Starr Jameson. It always did.

“W
E'LL HAVE TO SEND
someone back,” he said. “Not you personally, I hope”—he wasn't promising, Hanna noticed—“someone else. But there's no hurry. We have enough to go on with for now.”

They were in the quarters Jameson had reclaimed, the commissioner's suite that was a kind of warren of its own, though this room, his most private office, opened out to water and sky and land. Hanna turned in her seat to look out at the river, merged flawlessly with interior space, just as she remembered. The water was blue today, like the gloriously clear sky above it. The last time she had been in this room with Jameson, not long before first contact with Zeig-Daru, they had hardly known each other, but on that occasion she had recognized the attraction between them for the first time. Now that she was physically in the same room as Jameson once more, she recognized something else. She might go away, but the attraction was not going to. In spite of her declaration of freedom, exasperatingly, she could not help wanting him. The bond between them might be attenuated, but it was not broken.

She knew that for his part he was not shocked by how she looked, which was better but still bad. Nor was he repelled by her emaciation, as he had not been by her pregnancy. She felt his desire to take her in his arms, take her to his home just as he had when she returned, battered, from other missions. He wanted to give her all she needed to get well and more; he wanted to give her everything he thought she should want.

This time she would not allow it, bond or no bond. And the first thing she said was a reminder of all the reasons why she would not.

“That's what the delay with the shuttle was about? To make sure you got what you wanted?”

“We needed a Soldier out in the open, alone and isolated from a population center. Kakrekt gave us two. She'll gloss over their disappearance for her own purposes. Whether Kwoort will ever be conscious again is questionable, but he doesn't have to be. The other can be dissected down to the cellular level and beyond. If we can't get what we need from those two specimens there's always Kakrekt. Willing to trade.”

“I don't think so,” Hanna said.

He waved a hand with uncharacteristic vagueness. He seemed, Hanna thought, to be divided. He thought Battleground was sorted out, and now that he had Hanna in front of him again in the flesh (what was left of it), he would like to return to his peculiar brand of courtship. She was almost sorry that she had to tell him sorting out Battleground was about to become the least of his concerns.

She said, “We could help Kakrekt to the knowledge she wants, but when she's gone, who else will want it? And she won't remember much longer that she wants us to help her change the world. She'd never do that anyway. No one will.”

“A world is a hard thing to change, but it can be done. What makes you so certain this one can't be?”

“It will be in my final report,” Hanna said. “About what I saw in the breeding ground. The facilitators weren't just taking nourishment. They were pumping in fluids at the same time. This is a guess, but I'll bet you. When you dissect poor Woke I bet you'll find something missing from her ova, or whatever she has, and the same from Kwoort's sperm: great big chunks of Soldier DNA. That's what the facilitators carry and that's how they've evolved their power—they're a delivery system for the rest of the DNA. Making more Soldiers is their only function. The Holy Men don't know the mechanism, but they understand it can't be fought. And the facilitators are mindless.
They
control Battleground. Kakrekt never will.”

He might have questioned her further, but then she said—she had to take a deep breath first—“There's something else.”

He knew every shade of her voice. He did not ask what she meant. He only waited.

“Somebody else made Soldiers,” she said. “To fight, maybe. Well, of course to fight. What else can they do? Somebody took a native mammal—if Soldiers are even native—and bred a sentient species just for that purpose. The physiologists told me there are traces in the genetic makeup. That was the first hint I got. And there's other evidence. Memories of artifacts that don't have any referents in this civilization. Whispers handed from Soldier to Soldier down through centuries. A portrait in an ancient, overgrown—something. Maybe a temple, or an administrative structure. I said ‘ancient,' but it's not all
that
old if Kakrekt's people could just stumble on it. The face in the portrait wasn't a Soldier. It wasn't like anything else we've ever seen.”

He saw the implications immediately. “Are you sure?” he said, but it was not necessary. He knew her; he knew she would not have said so if she was not sure.

She nodded, and watched his eyes lose all warmth. A few minutes ago she had been talking to a man. Now he was all commissioner.

He did not move while she described the physiologists' findings, the overgrown structure Kakrekt had shown her, the stories Nakeekt had compiled. His attention did not flag. He would retain every word.

She finished, “What kind of creatures would do that? Why would they need enormous numbers of completely expendable fighters who aren't afraid to die, who only live to die? The creators didn't care what might happen when Soldiers got old, about the increase in intelligence and self-will, or maybe they didn't even know. They might have expected Soldiers all to die before they reached that stage. Possibly, if they didn't die, they were slaughtered. I don't think,” she said, “we want to meet beings who would do that.”

But humankind was moving inexorably outward, and Hanna knew as well as he did that an eventual meeting might be unavoidable.

Jameson's gaze turned inward. Hanna did not have to read his mind to know what he would think, because she had already thought it. That meeting should be avoided as long as possible.

And the creators, even if they had been gone for centuries, might return to Battleground. There must be not even the slightest trace of humankind there for them to find.

After a while Jameson said, “We'll have to get back everything you left behind. Kakrekt has the communicator you gave Kwek. What else?”

“Gabriel left a translator at That Place. That's all. We went into Wektt the last time with nothing but the clothes on our backs. And not nearly enough rations,” she said with some resentment.

“Are you sure that was all? Kwoort took a weapon from you when you arrived. We know what happened to that. But you had com units, didn't you? And he took those too?”

“Yes. I forgot . . .” Hanna rubbed her face. She still tired easily. It seemed she could not trust her memory yet, either. “Maybe Kakrekt can put her hands on them. She might not want to return them, but I suppose . . . I suppose you can get them one way or another.”

“Mmm,” he said, already thinking of something else.

Hanna said it for him. “Equipment is tangible. There is also memory.”

He met her eyes across—again across, still across—an official desk, their positions unchanged.

“How many do you think you will have to assassinate?” she said.

He heard accusation in her voice. Instead of answering directly, he said, “You were prepared to collaborate with Kakrekt in eliminating Kwoort, were you not? How is that different, except as a matter of scale?”

“I never really had to decide,” she said quietly. “Events made it unnecessary in the end—and Nakeekt cheated anyway. What she sent Kakrekt wouldn't have killed Kwoort.”

“But you considered it.”

“I considered it.”

Something hurt in her chest. She heard Arch say:
Does the word ‘corruption' mean anything to you?

“You wouldn't have to kill anybody,” she said. “Kakrekt . . . Nakeekt . . . Tlorr . . . they're all aging. They'll forget soon.”

“Maybe in Wektt and Rowtt. But at That Place?” he said. He watched her closely. He would know there had been time, in the journey to Earth, to think the situation through. “Nakeekt will be writing everything down, filing it away in her archives. And what of her lieutenants? What of the rest of the Soldiers there? Soldiers don't go to That Place unless they've reached a certain level of development. You can be sure that even if Nakeekt is gone, others will remember. And they'll write things down too.”

Silence stretched between them. Jameson would not break it.

Hanna said finally. “I thought what you're thinking. But then I thought, there's another way. Could you bring them here, the people from That Place? If not to Earth, to a colony. New Earth, perhaps?”

“Nova. They've decided to call it Nova, at last report. Unless they've changed their minds again.”

Hanna ignored the digression. “You want to study Soldiers. If it's that or killing all of them . . .”

A longer silence this time, while he considered the possibilities.

Finally he said, “There would be problems, but advantages too.” Hanna only nodded, but she felt herself relax a little. It was enough that he was willing to consider it, and she did not doubt that if he approved, he would be able to convince the rest of the commissioners. And she thought that on reflection he would approve. Thousands of living subjects who could be studied in comfortable surroundings would be a tempting prospect.

It was not ideal. All the Soldiers who lived at That Place would be torn from their home, their way of life dissolved; they would be sundered from the younger peers who might have joined them one day. There was a chilling parallel to the history of Hanna's own ancestors, exiled from Earth.

But it would forestall mass murder. Hanna had not been able to think of any other course that would.

She had one more thing to say. She had to, though she said it without hope.

“Starr . . . I want to go home.”

“Go, then.” He smiled. “Zanté and Thera insisted on showing it to me. It's beautiful, and you've hardly seen it.”

“No, I mean
home
, to D'neera. I know I can't stay, because of Mickey, but—just to be free to go there, to leave Earth when I choose—Do you think the Commission would pardon me now? Haven't I earned it?”

He took in a long breath and let it out. He said almost helplessly, “Oh, my dear . . . you've earned it, certainly. But after what you've just told me, especially . . .”

It was not going to be good news; she knew that before he got up and came to her. He held out his hands, wanting her to stand up so he could hold her, but she did not move, and finally he let his empty hands drop.

“Battleground will be interdicted,” he said. “We would have done that in any case, because Soldiers' inability to travel in space is sufficient reason for withdrawal. We meant to continue dealing with Kakrekt, though. Now . . . whatever we do there, we'll have to do it and get out as quickly as possible. If there's a chance of the creators returning, humans will not go near Battleground again. Maybe, if there are results from the research someday, we'll be able to present the mission as a qualified success. But not yet. The best we'll be able to say for some time to come is that it wasn't a complete failure. And your part . . .”

Hanna looked back at the river. She was not going to meet his eyes.

“They'll tell me,” he said, and there was genuine sadness there, “that you didn't really play a large part in what success we can claim. They'll tell me you just did your job.”

Neither of them moved for some seconds that felt like years. Finally Hanna did get up. She was preoccupied with thoughts of captivity, the varieties of it. She meant to walk away from Jameson without another word, not for the first time but maybe for the last.

He said behind her, “Are you sure you ought to be alone? I could come with you—”

“I won't be alone.” She turned to face him, to speak after all. It was a large room. She seemed to be looking at him across the space of light-years again. “Thera and Mickey are there. And Gabriel. I want Gabriel to go through my program and then I want him working for Contact. He'd be the perfect liaison for a group of displaced exiles on Nova. I trust you have no objection? I can have that reward, at least? And he's going to live with me until he's ready to move on. I'm not even going to ask if you object to that.”

She turned once more, and was gone.