Was Once a Hero (26 page)

“Why,
Johan?” she asked of the corpse.
 
“Why
die for me?”
 
To Fenaday’s surprise she
ran a gentle hand over the bloody face.
 
It flicked into focus for him.
 
Johan had always been special to Shasti.
 
He’d even heard a rumor of a romance but had dismissed it.

“We’ve
got to get back to the camp,” he yelled.
 
“We’re dead out here.”

“Fool.
 
I told you not to come,” she scolded the
corpse.
 
“You had a good job on
Mars.
 
You could have had a real life.
 
This is stupid, Johan. ”

Fenaday’s
skin crawled at her too reasonable tone.
 
He looked down at her through the pouring rain.
 
He could not see tears.
 
Her face seemed as calm as always, but her
eyes were bright and strained.

Behind
them, he heard more firing and screams.

“Shasti,
I realize he was something to you but we’ve got go.”

She
didn’t react, only stroked Johan’s face as the rain poured down.

“The
living before the dead,” he shouted at her.
 

He
reached down, seizing her arm, hauling her back from the body.
 
Shasti fell backward as he dragged her for a
step.
 
She convulsed with a scream of
rage and blurred into movement.
 
Fenaday
doubled over as the barrel of her tri-auto slammed into his stomach and stayed
there.

She
stood, glaring.
 
Death’s Angel, with her
weapon leveled, white knuckled, at him.
 
“Never,” she snarled, “never touch me like
that.
 
You go too far with me.”

Fenaday
fought for breath.
 
“Apparently, I went
too far in relying on you.”

He
straightened, backing away from the barrel.
 
She leveled it at his face.
 
He
saw hate and death in her eyes, and a coldness spread through him.
 
Her finger stayed tight on the trigger.
 
“Our crew is fighting back there,” he
said.
 
“Dying.
 
They need us.
 
But you stay.
 
You fight your
private war with the universe right here.
 
If any of us live, you can tell us how it went.”

He
spun and ran back to the embattled campsite, wondering if he would feel the one
that hit him.
 
They say you don’t,
Fenaday thought, but he no longer believed in
even small mercies.

He
came up on the campsite.
 
Telisan and
Duna were forming the survivors into a square, firing volleys in all
directions.
 
The robots became the
ramparts behind which the spacers stood.
 
Three of the HCRs stood shoulder to shoulder in the thick of the attack,
fighting with palm blades and kicks against the man-sized Shellycoats.
 
People raced toward the square, firing as
they ran.
 
Mourner and Yamata fled from
the side of the burned out
Farriq-Dar
,
Shellycoats in pursuit.
 
Fenaday realized
that Telisan could not see them from his position.
 
He sprinted forward, firing the last shots in
his laser.
 
Shellycoats flashed and
melted into fragments.
 
He reached the
doctors, covering them as they ran for the square.

The
Shellycoats came straight on at the spacers, only to be mown down by
disciplined fire.
 
Finally, the last one
fell; the wood of its substance burning.
 
The spacers stayed in the square for some minutes as the rain tapered,
making rushes to recover any wounded they saw, or to check bodies lying nearby.
 
More spacers appeared, breaking out of cover,
yelling out their names as they ran for the safety of the square.
 
The explosion had not caught as many as
Fenaday feared.
 
Firing pits and bunkers
protected most from the attack and the blast.

Fenaday
felt a hand on his shoulder.
 
He turned
to face Telisan.
 
Smoke stained the
Denlenn’s face and blood trickled from his hairline.
 
“Thee lives.
 
Good.
 
When I could not find you,
I feared my poor service ended.
 
What of
Shasti?”

Fenaday
turned away.
 
“She’ll show up.
 
She always does.”

Telisan
blinked, too startled to respond.

“Get
that barrier wire restrung,” Fenaday shouted.
 
“Mmok, position your robots on the perimeter to cover the wire
crew.
 
Connery, form a fire team to back
them up.
 
Rigg, pull two teams
together.
 
Collect all the wounded.
 
Fury, Karass, grab what you need and check
the shuttles.
 
I need barrier power and
shuttle guns.”

The
camp came back together quickly.
 
After
reestablishing minimal security Fenaday grabbed Mmok’s arm.
 
“Shasti’s out about a hundred meters that
way.
 
Send an HCR to bring her in.”

“What
the—” Mmok began.

“Shut
up and do what you’re told,” Fenaday snapped.
 
For once Mmok had the good sense not to push further.

Cobalt
returned in a few minutes with Shasti.
 
She carried Gunnar’s body on her shoulders, wrapped in a poncho.
 
Fenaday suddenly remembered another day, when
she had carried him in over some dangerous miles on Morok.
 
Now all he felt was a coldness and a distant
relief that she still lived.
 
The big
man’s corpse joined nineteen others stretched out beside the overturned shuttle
with its two corpses.

Telisan
walked up to Fenaday.
 
“I have the list,”
he said.
 
“Twenty dead: Gunnar, Dr.
N’deba, Nusam and his gunner, nine from the Landing Force, six of Rigg’s people
and an engineer.
 
Fifteen seriously
wounded, a quarter of the robots and Magenta were destroyed.”

“God,”
said Fenaday, “God.”
 
He turned away so
Telisan could not see his face.
 
I am supposed,
thought Fenaday,
to shrug it off.
 
Tough
privateer captain, that’s what I am supposed to be.
 
Twenty dead.
 
Twenty dead people.
 
A mother’s
pain, a father’s hopes, all gone.
 
But
gone to where?
 
Where do you go to when
the dark comes?
 
Did a kindly god greet
them?
 
Or is it just the dark?

“Captain?”
Telisan asked, concern in his voice.

“I’m
all right,” he said, his voice thin and strained.

Fenaday
drew a deep breath and turned to Mmok.
 
“I remember Creda saying something about the things regenerating, about
coming back from being killed.
 
Put your
crab robots in the middle of the Shellycoat debris.
 
Order them to fire on any pieces of material
that rise off the ground but shouldn’t lift under the ambient wind.
 
Maybe they are easier to disrupt if they are
shot early.”

“Hope
you’re right,” grunted the older man.
 
Mmok turned to subvocalize to the HCRs and stopped, clearly startled.
 
The movement caught Fenaday’s eye.
 
He looked in the same direction.

Verdigris, Vermilion and Cobalt stood behind them,
looking down at the remains of their sister, Magenta.
 
The wind stirred their monofilament
hair.
 
It was macabre, as if they were
mourning.

Fenaday
and Mmok walked over to the battle-damaged robots.
 
The HCRs should have been on the perimeters,
per their last order.
 
Apparently their
programs were more flexible than Fenaday realized.
 
The HCRs looked up at their approach.
 
Smoke stained the artificial faces and the
hair they used for antenna and for cooling.
 
They might resemble dolls, but the spacers owed their survival to them.

Mmok
stared at them, as if having difficulty believing his eyes.

Fenaday
called out to one of the nearby LEAFs.
 
“Morgan.”
 
The man, dirty and
bandaged, but otherwise whole, hurried to him.

“Yes
sir.”

“Magenta
goes into the grave with everyone else,” Fenaday said.
 
“Handle the body properly.”

Mmok
snorted.
 
“You’re a proper maudlin
Irishman, Fenaday.
 
It’s just a machine.”

“You
heard me,” he said.

Before
Morgan could do anything, Mmok turned to the HCRs.
 
“Vermilion, retrieve Magenta then follow this
human.
 
Take his orders regarding
disposal of the parts.”

Vermilion
bent down to retrieve the identifiable parts of Magenta with apparent
gentleness.

“What
the hell,” said Mmok sardonically, “she ought to be carried by her own.”

Fenaday
turned and nearly walked into Shasti.
 
They stood eyeing each other for a few seconds.
 
Her face betrayed nothing, remaining icy and
remote.
 
He nodded at her.
 
She said nothing.
 
He did not know when she’d arrived, but
realized she was back in her accustomed place behind his left shoulder.
 
It might be a tacit apology.
 
Still, all he could remember was the look in
her eyes and the whitening of her hand on the weapon’s pistol grip.
 
His ribs still ached where she had slammed
the barrel into him.
 
The cold spot in
his chest did not warm either.

Fenaday
moved about the camp, resetting their defenses, checking on the wounded.
 
Dawn broke.
 
Its warmth brought relief from the night’s cold rain.
 
Shasti and Fenaday traveled the camp in
frozen silence.
 
Seeing this, Duna and
Telisan exchanged troubled looks.

*****

Far
above the embattled camp site, the frigate
Sidhe
had watched the battle, helplessly. Perez heard the panic and confusion
over the tactical net and cursed his inability to help.
 
The fight was far too close to the camp for
the starship to fire.
 
Scanners could
barely cut through the storm.
 
Flaring
weapons fire was all he could see of the battle.
 
Then one of the shuttle’s engines gave off an
infrared bloom.
 
The bridge crew sat
spellbound and watched as
Farriq-Dar
exploded.
 
As the battle ended on their screens,
casualty reports began coming.
 
All three
shuttles had been hit.

At the
back of the starship’s spade-shaped bridge, one of ASATs standing security
watch slipped out the pressure door.
 
Sergeant Diron Naks quickly made his way to the quarters of Lt. Katrina
Micetich.
 
He buzzed insistently.
 

Micetich
opened the door.
 
“Diron, what are you
doing here?
 
I thought you had watch?”

“Let
me in,” he hissed.
 
“It happened.
 
They were attacked.”

Micetich
paled.
 
She grabbed his arm and pulled
him into her cabin.
 
With so much of the
crew off the ship, the remaining spacers had moved into unoccupied cabins for
the rare pleasure of privacy.
 
The two
young people embraced fervently and kissed.
 
They’d fallen in love on the outbound voyage.
 
Both volunteered for the mission, but now, in
love, they were reconsidering the risks of the voyage.
 
While only the landing force stood at risk,
they were content to sit it out in orbit.

“What
happened?” she breathed when they pulled apart.

Naks
described the disaster planetside.

“You
know what this means,” he finished.

“Yes,”
she said, “with the shuttles damaged, Fenaday is going to bring us down.”

“The
fool,” growled Naks.
 
“It’s probably a
trap to get him to do just that, to bring us in range to be finished off.
 
If we go down, we’ll be wiped out like all
the rest.
 
We’ve got to protect
ourselves.
 
This isn’t our fault.
 
No one said anything about Enshar when they
asked for volunteers.
 
They tricked us.”

“Yes,
darling, they did,” she agreed.
 
“Get our
people together.
 
We’ve got to move
now.
 
We have to get Perez first.
 
I’ll call him here as soon as you get back.”

He
raced out the door, and the mutiny began.

Chapter Thirteen

On
the planet, the landing force made flight preparations, shifting the wounded
into the shuttles and drawing in their perimeter.