Hero! (42 page)

Vaun gestured with the gun. “I’ll count to three, and then I burn off your legs. One!” He knew that if it were him, he would jump on “Two.”

“Two!”

They jumped. The cave blazed with green light. There was no time for fancy disablement, and a Giantkiller wasn’t a scalpel, and it was not designed for use in a confined space. He flashed them totally away. The explosion recoiled, hurling him to the floor, scorching his face, banging his ears like mallet blows, splattered him with falling gravel, chunks of burning meat, and gravy.

H
E WANTED TO scream and tear off his skin. He needed to throw up and cough out his lungs and lie down and weep for a year; but he was driven by the frantic urgency of knowing that he must close the tunnel before anyone else came. He
must
not kill any more of his brethren.

Blade was barely conscious, half-stunned by flying rock, with his own blood streaming over the unspeakable soup that had sprayed all three of them. Somehow the other two bore him outside between them, staggering and reeling. The remains of the doorway curtains still smoldered, the floor was covered with debris, and the Brotherhood would be pouring up that tunnel like hornets any second now. Vaun could hold them off forever, but he must not. Somewhere in the bottom of his mind he knew he was being illogical about this, that he was planning to wipe out the whole hive before the day was out, but that was different. Mass murder was much easier than killing people you could see.

The night was cold, the ground glinting with frost in Angel’s eerie blue glare. The east was brightening, though.

His face smarted with burns, and he seemed to have twisted his knee again. His ribs ached as if they had been kicked and his ears sang.

Feirn moaned. “Gotta rest, Vaun!”

“No. Too close still.”

“Am awright,” Blade muttered, although his feet were dragging on the rocks.

Feirn collapsed, and he fell on top of her, and Vaun almost on top of Blade. The tunnel mouth was still too near for safety, but this would have to do, for the Brotherhood would start spurting out of there any minute. Trouble was, all he had was the Giantkiller, and hardbeams were not much good against rock.

As the girl tried to rise, he pushed her down again. “Cover your ears!” he snapped.

Blade made querying noises and she hugged him. Vaun knelt by a sizable boulder. With trembling, sticky fingers, he set up the Giantkiller on its tripod, and flopped on the icy stones to aim it. He set three seconds’ delay and maximum flash. He rolled away and put his head behind the boulder, shouting a final warning.

Maximum flash from a Giantkiller was a major disaster. He really thought he’d killed himself that time. Rocks rattled down like hail. He could smell burning hair, and when he fingered his scalp he discovered why. Ears ringing, ribs worse than ever…He tried to rise and sank back, groaning.

He had won a small respite. Certainly no one would ever come through that tunnel again. He hoped no one had been trying to. Of course, there must be other exits—he had no doubt of that—but at least now he needn’t stand here and hold off the brethren at gunpoint, shooting them down as they marched to destruction like a thousand Abbots. That was what he’d been afraid of.

He hauled himself shakily to his feet, just as Feirn rose also. She’d lost most of her hair, and she had a second-degree burn on her forehead. The rest of her face looked as if it had been punched a few times; her clothes were tattered beyond the limits of decency and even charred in places.

The sky was brightening. He was frozen and shivering uncontrollably.

Blade was on his knees, another nightmare scarecrow of burns and bloodstains, the remains of his uniform hanging on him in rags. From the way he was clutching his right arm, he had a broken collarbone. Could even Blade fly a torch one-handed?

They were a trio of corpses, but apparently all mobile.

Vaun spat to clear dirt from his mouth. “Let’s go,” he said.

A
SINGLE, PIERCING point of blue light, Angel stood high to the north. Dead ahead, dawn flared gold on the hills; the fugitives threw double shadows as they stumbled over the rocky ground. The air was still and bitter cold.

Vaun burned with intolerable anger. It hurt much worse than his physical wounds, for his body was numb, too frozen even to shiver. He could no longer feel the rocks under this thin-soled shoes or the sting of his burns; only his ribs still ached. He raged instead at his brothers’ futile deaths.

How could they have been so stupid? The forgotten geniuses who had designed the brethren should have included more pliability. Such implacable stubbornness was a design fault in the whole genotype. Easy to say that a single unit was unimportant and only the Brotherhood itself mattered—he did not feel unimportant! White and Red and Brown and Yellow had not felt unimportant. They had wanted to die no more than he had wanted to kill them, but their chromosomes had insisted that they defend the hive’s interest to the death, as a poisonfang defended its young.

And now he must kill them all. Dice. Bishop. Little 516, and Tan—who would still be Gray until he next changed his shirt. Cessine, whom Vaun had never met…had probably never met. All of them.

He had made his choice. There was no doubt now which side he supported, or where his loyalties lay.

It was not necessarily the winning team.

The same intransigence that had forced his four brothers to die determined that the Brotherhood as a whole would never give up. There was probably at least one other hive somewhere; simple common sense would have made that a priority. Had he been Bishop, he would certainly have taken other precautions also. He would have set up secret depots of know-how and supplies at a dozen places around the planet. As long as even one unit remained operative, he would seek out one of those depots and set to work establishing another hive. In another forty or fifty years it would start all over. Infestation, Roker had called it.

And even if the Patrol was alerted and could act in time to scotch Kohab Hive before it was evacuated, even if it could find the other hive or hives, even if it could hunt down and kill every single unit on the planet, the war would be far from won.

The Q ship was still coming. Yes, knowing it was only a boat made the odds look less impossible, and it must shut down its fireballs momentarily to make a course correction. But a boat was nimble in a way no rock ever could be, and that brief window of maximum vulnerability was going to be very hard to find. Almost certainly that window was also intended to let the brethren signal what action they wanted the missile to take, what target would best suit their purpose. Losing Hiport was not the worst that could happen to Ult, for a meteor impacting an ocean was vastly more destructive than a land strike. What was the built-in default instruction?

He stumbled as a rock rolled underfoot; the Giantkiller banged painfully against his burns and bruises. The stab of pain cut through his numbness and brought him back to the present. Feirn, now, was in the best shape of the three. Blade was leaning heavily on her, and at times seemed hardly conscious, but Vaun’s offers of help had been refused.

He pummeled his wits to work. Something missing?

Two things missing. Pepods, and pursuit. To blunder into either would bring disaster, and yet the fugitives were instinctively staying on low ground, staggering along the gullies between the ancient hummocks of slag. They were still heading toward dawn, a little south of east; that was the right direction, but he should survey the terrain.

Croaking a wordless order, he veered up the nearest slope. Blade and the girl came stumbling after him. Frost-white rocks slithered underfoot. Vaun reeled onto the summit and sank down wearily to sit on a small cairn of rocks stacked there by some ancient unknown hand. He stared out blearily at the barren landscape.

The main saddle lay to the south. Northward was the closer hill, and the mine lay under that. If there were other exits—and there must be other exits—they lay in that direction. Far off to the east, the dawn’s glow shone on the frosty tarmac of the strip, making it shine like a promised jewel. That was the prize. The brethren knew that, too, First to the strip wins.

Blade had sunk to the ground and laid his head on his knees. He seemed to be concussed, and that was worrisome. Vaun needed Blade to take care of the girl if they had to split up. He needed Blade to escape if he got killed. He needed Blade to reduce the odds of that happening.

“Pepods!” Feirn said, pointing. She was upright, but swaying on her feet.

Pepods.

A sizable thicket lay dead ahead—in fact, there were pepods near the base of the slope, too close to the two humans for comfort. That could not be all of the vermin, though. Shielding his eyes from the dawn glare, Vaun peered at the distant strip itself. He decided there was at least one more thicket barring the way, but the range was too great for him to tell whether there were pepods near the hangar itself. If there were, then the two humans would not be leaving. It seemed unfair that the Brotherhood should have such an advantage in this deadly game—that insensate vegetables might thus determine the fate of a planet.

South? “Can’t see any to the south,” he croaked. He could use a drink. And food. And sleep. And his battered carcass ached and throbbed in a dozen places. No time for self-pity…“We’ll have to detour that way.”

“They’ll come from over there, won’t they, Vaun?” Feirn was gazing northward.

Vaun grunted agreement. Pursuit would come from the north; common sense said not to detour north. There were more pepods to the northeast, anyway. That looked like the largest thicket of all, or perhaps they just happened to be displayed there by some trick of topography. The slaggy mounds were alive with them, but of course the brethren could run right through. Pepods were no obstacle to the brethren. Unfair, unfair!

“We’ll have to cut south to get round the pepods.”

Blade had apparently been listening. He looked up grimly, his face a mask of blood with two shocked eyes in it. “Feirn and I do, sir. You go straight.”

Vaun took a dead breath to fuel an admiral’s bellow, and then let it out slowly.

“Pepods won’t notice you, will they?” Blade mumbled.

“No,” Vaun admitted. As much as he hated the thought of separating, there was no possible argument against it. With a world at stake, it was every boy for himself now. “Yes. Devil take the hindmost, I’m afraid. You two cut around that way, and I’ll risk the pepods. Good luck, both of you.”

They were a pathetic-looking pair. If they were his reason for ratting on his brothers, then he had a strange set of values.

The girl had never had eyelashes. Now she had only one eyebrow and half her hair was frizzed away. She must be in considerable pain, but she was bearing up well—for a civilian. Two days ago her body had excited him almost to madness; she was a disgusting sight now.

Blade’s torpor was ominous, especially in a boy who had previously demonstrated such rigorous self-control. Courage could only push physical limits so far. He stayed hunched over to favor his useless arm; his face seemed thinner and longer under its mask of blood. Of the three of them, Blade was probably nearest the edge.

Vaun made a final scan of the landscape, trying to memorize the extent of the nearest pepod thicket, and the locations of the other two. He did not expect to see any of his brethren. They would stay out of sight and run like hell for the strip. First boy there wins. They were fresh and unwounded. They might have farther to come, but brethren were built for speed, as Tham had said long ago.

They would stay out of sight…

Too late that thought registered. He started to rise as Feirn yelled and hurled herself at him. They toppled over together, a sharp explosion snapped the silence of the morning. The cairn he had just left erupted and shattered in green light. He curled up tight as fragments thumped and clattered all around him; he yelped at a couple of sharp impacts.

It must have been a long shot to have missed, though. Vaun had won the Doggoth marksmanship medal five years in a row.

No more firing. Only the ringing in his ears spoiled the silence. He opened his eyes. “Thanks!” he said. “What did you see?”

There was no answer. He twisted around, and Feirn had gone. He pushed himself up on his hands and knees.

Blade was still there, lying with arms and legs spread at odd angles, facedown in a patch of red weeds. Where the back of his head should have been was a bloody rock. Blood and brains had splashed out all around, on the vegetation and the stones.

Strange that the one thing that was absolutely inevitable for everyone always seemed so unthinkable, and always came so unexpectedly.

The misfortunes of war! What good are all your medals now, Lieutenant? You worked like hell for them, you said, to be like Admiral Vaun, you said. But you forgot
luck
, Lieutenant. You didn’t put
luck
in your recipe, and Admiral Vaun was always a lucky shit—didn’t you know that? And you were an unlucky son of a bitch. Admiral Vaun went from mud hovel to the top of the dungpile in one big bound, but he didn’t do it with medals, he did it with
luck
. You won no medal for luck, did you?

You won’t ever see that strealer mounted, Lieutenant.

Suddenly Vaun retched. Heedless of aches and biting pains, he scrambled away from the corpse, moving on all fours, dragging the Giantkiller. He wriggled down below the skyline, until he felt safe.

Feirn was halfway up the opposite slope, trudging gamely southeast, hair on one side of her head blowing like copper flame in the wind. The other side of her scalp was bald. He hurried after her.

Poor Blade! Freak accident. That sort of thing was supposed to happen to the other guys, the bad guys, not to the good guys. But Red and Brown and White and Yellow hadn’t thought of themselves as bad guys. They hadn’t thought of Vaun as a bad guy, either. They’d wanted to help their unfortunate damaged brother. The crew of
Unity
hadn’t been bad guys. They’d been unlucky, because Prior had been unlucky.