Was Once a Hero (31 page)

“I am
afraid it killed him,” she said, eyes downcast.
 
“When this voyage came up, he threw away everything he had gained.
 
I fear that I’m the reason he joined up.
 
Perhaps he hoped to restart things between
us.
 
Asking me for things I do not
understand and cannot give.
 
So you’re
right, it is both things.”

Fenaday
shook his head.
 
“I don’t think he’s
unhappy with his choice.”

She
looked back uncomprehending.
 
“He’s
dead.”

He
could find nothing to say to that.

“I
want to go back to what you and I were,” she said.
 
“You won’t see last night’s side of me
again.
 
I want you to count on me as you
did before.”

He
nodded.
 
“I never really stopped.
 
I guess my feelings were just hurt.”
 
Abruptly he leaned forward, taking her hand.
 
She looked away, but held tight to his hand.

“One
thing I’ve learned is that there are roads to places that no roads lead back
from.
 
Everything is different now,” he
said.
 
Emotion welled up in him.
 
He felt unbalanced, like a man reaching for a
handhold and missing it.
 

“Has
this Pard tried to kill you since you joined
Sidhe
?” he asked, switching back to firmer ground.

She
shrugged.
 
“Twice on Bandish, once on
Morokat.
 
I think he was behind our
troubles there.
 
I handled it.”

“Then
he knows where you are and will try again.”

“He
doesn’t pursue me full time,” she replied.
 
“It would be beneath his dignity.
 
But yes, he’ll try again.”

“If
we get out of this alive, we’ll deal with him,” Fenaday said, “together.”

“Make
no rash promises,” she warned.
 
“Pard is
the head of Denshi and deadly.
 
I bested
him once by sheer surprise and barely escaped alive.”

“It’s
been said and cannot be unsaid.
 
Besides,
I’m pretty formidable myself, you know,” he said with an ironic smile.

She
shook her head, looking him in the eye.
 
“You would look like a child next to Pard.”

“The
bigger they are, they harder they fall?” he added hopefully.

“Well,”
she said, with barest of smiles, “maybe we will get lucky.”

Fenaday
and Shasti walked back to the camp, side by side, talking quietly.
 
Duna and Telisan watched them return and
exchanged their version of smiles of relief.

“I
think our chances for survival just went up,” Telisan said.

Chapter Fifteen

Sidhe
slid closer in orbit to Enshar,
recovering her
Wildcats
.
 
The fighters’ running lights glinted as they
lined up for entry into her hangar bays.
 
With recovery complete, the frigate altered orbit with a quick burn of
engines.
 
Fenaday’s security protocol
allowed the starship’s engines to be used to change orbit, but the mutineers’
best efforts had failed to find a way to use them to break out.
 
She moved to an orbit sufficiently close for
a parachute drop on Barjan Field.
 

A
brilliant yellow escape capsule popped from the frigate’s side.
 
Inside it sat a Mark Nine one-kiloton warhead,
the largest the Confed Navy permitted a private warship.
 
The capsule fell through the atmosphere until
its onboard computer finished analyzing wind, height and trajectory.
 
A parachute deployed much later than would
have been the case with live cargo.
 
The
warhead, well secured and incapable of going off by accident, slowly sank
through the quiet of Enshar’s night.
 
At
a thousand meters, it disturbed a flock of migrating unbars.
 
The giant bird-like creatures squawked and
dodged the capsule.
 
The deadly load
landed between the wrecks of two in-system freighters on Barjan Field.
 
Emergency and rescue lights began their
automatic plea for help.
 
They pulsed
brightly at intervals.
 
On the half-hour,
a siren sounded for a few minutes.
 
Wildlife fled the area in alarm.

*****

“Barjan,”
announced Duna, pointing at the horizon with a small furred hand, “a city with
a longer history than some species, far larger even than your Tokyo or
Peking.”
 
He drew his otter-like body up
in evident pride.

Fenaday
and the others crowded the flight deck.
 
As the shuttles came in from the ocean, they could see the city in its
ruined majesty, stretching out in all directions back from the coastline.
 
From the air, it looked like a froth of
bubbles of different sizes and shapes, burying the low mountains of the
coastline. They could see domes of white and a variety of metallic colors
shining in the sun.
 
Shaftways lined with
windows and balconies allowed light to plunge into the depths.
 
Some of the domed exteriors showed rents and
signs of explosions.
 
Several new-style
towers visible in the distance looked ragged, uneven, as if they had attracted
some form of explosive weapons fire.

“The
mansions and the more desirable properties are down those shafts,” Duna
said.
 
“Barjan’s upper regions were
reserved for commerce, sanitation, industry, the poor and those young non-traditionalists
influenced by other cultures.”

The
shuttles approached the immense Barjan Spacefield, a proper complement to the
huge city.
 
Fenaday could not tell where
the city began and the space/airport ended.
 
They’d flown over the seaport side on the way in, passing over dozens of
half-submerged wrecks, long broken free of their moorings.
 
At the quays sat more vessels, including a
huge submarine transport lying on its side.

“Are
there undersea cities?” Fenaday asked Duna.

“Several
major ones and a number of other installations,” answered Duna absently staring
at the horizon-filling city.

Fenaday
imagined being hunted by Shellycoats through the streets of a city beneath the
sea.
 
The thought filled him with a deep
horror, as did the sight of the half-sunken ships.
 
Fenaday feared little in space or in the air,
but for some reason, the sight of a sunken vessel always made him uneasy.

“Radio
direction indicates we are nearly on top of the capsule,” called Bernard.
 
They all pressed against the windows,
searching for it.
 
Fenaday saw the bright
yellow capsule first, pointing it out to Fury.
 
The shuttles sank to the concrete of the field.
 
This time Fenaday didn’t tax the engines by
running them for a possible escape.
 
The
damaged shuttles couldn’t take the strain, and in truth, they had nowhere else
to go.

The
Dakotas’
still functional ramps
dropped.
 
In a well-rehearsed drill, the
remaining robots, led by the three HCRs, came out, forming a perimeter.
 
The ground troops followed warily, taking
cover around the shuttles or behind the robots.
 
In a deliberate display of nonchalance, Fenaday and the command staff
sauntered out of the shuttles and into the open.

Sweat
popped out on his forehead as Fenaday stepped into the enervating heat of the
spaceport apron.
 
He unsealed his shirt,
glad he had left his leather A-2 jacket in the shuttle.
 
Shasti walked beside him.
 
She’d torn the sleeves out of her shirt.
 
Her well-muscled arms cradled a bipod-mounted
tri-auto, the same heavier caliber the HCRs used.
 
He admired the way the shirt stretched over
her chest, then mentally kicked himself for being distracted from the task of
surviving the day.
 
He wondered if she
had noticed.

Telisan
had noticed and he smiled to himself.
 
The Denlenn was an essentialist, having seen so much cut short in the
war.
 
He lived for the moment.
 
A pity,
he thought, not for the first time,
that
there are no Denlenn females along.
 
He found human females attractive enough, but there were compatibility
problems in physiology and psychology.
 
He sighed.
 
Two particular faces
occupied his mind, a female and demi-female of his species.
 
He wondered if he would ever see them again.

The
spacers stood in a circle, surveying the evidence of their unknown enemy’s work
on the field.
 
Some ships were scorched
and flayed open as if by a tremendous heat, perhaps the whips of lightning from
Duna’s ancient stories.
 
Carbon scoring
defaced the hulls and the concrete apron.
 
Glassy trails lay melted in the permacrete.
 
In the far distance the remains of a large
vessel rested where it careened into the ground on that fateful day.
 
Her shattered inner structure resembled an
enormous ribcage.
 

Telisan
followed Fenaday’s gaze.
 
“At least it
was quick on her.”

The
permacrete apron stretched before them, littered with smashed helicopters,
aircars and lesser modes of transport, as if they’d been struck down in a
single instant.
 
The characteristic
debris piles typical of a Shellycoat attack were curiously absent.

Fenaday
raised field glasses to the city beyond.
 
Several fires burned in the distance, trailing plumes of smoke into the
bright blue sky.
 
He didn’t know if these
were natural or the result of some power short or failed machinery.
 
Batteries, solar power and self-repairing
machinery had kept Barjan full of mechanical movement since the Enshari
perished, but it was a dance of the dead.
 
Out in that foreboding city, robot domestics tended rooms filled with
bones of their masters or perhaps, cleaned them away as mere refuse.
 
Repair robots without central direction
attempted to keep the city lights working.
 
Gradually, each hit a problem only solvable by the living and
failed.
 
Still as seen from orbit, many
machines continued to move in the city’s bowels.
 

“The
amount of mechanical and electrical movement in Barjan,” Duna said, “makes me
doubt that the EMP effect was used near the city.”

“Let’s
hope so,” Fenaday replied.
 
“It will be
hard enough to get a ship operational without having to replace the computer
system as well.”

Fenaday
turned his eyes away from Barjan’s ruins and walked over to the nearest crashed
vehicle.
 
The others trailed him.
 
Shasti gestured to Brian Connery and Daniel
Rigg, who spread their squads out further to cover them.

They
examined the wreck of a small helicopter.
 
The black and orange machine lay badly crumpled, though there had been
little fire.
 
Human and Enshari bones
rested intermingled in the cabin; the remains were in poor shape from animals and
heat.

“Christ,”
Mmok said, “can you imagine what this slaughterhouse smelled like for the first
few weeks?”

“No,”
said Fenaday quietly, “I thank God I can’t.”

“The
bodies are all gone to bone or less by now,” said Shasti, as if to reassure
him.
 
Fenaday smiled to himself.
 
She knew he was somewhat squeamish, at least
by her standards.

Over
twenty spacecraft lay in this section of the port.
 
They ignored four more, smashed onto their
sides by the attack or perhaps, merely toppled by storms.
 
These were clearly shattered and beyond
hope.
 
Of the others, about half were
military, or of a commercial type for rough, semi-prepared fields.
 
The rest sat on the field, in vertical take-off
cradles like the ones on Mars.
 
Several
of the nearest ships were burnt out hulks.
 
One more looked as if it had been in the advanced stages of a refit
never to be completed.
 
A few promising
prospects existed: a small in-system sloop and a huge liquid-hauler—both looked
undamaged.
 
Fenaday made a mental note of
their positions.

“All
right,” Fenaday said, “enough sightseeing.
 
Let’s get that nuke and find the Terran Embassy.”

Mmok
pointed to an area between two badly damaged in-system freighters.
 
“Signal came from there,” he said
laconically.
 
Mmok stripped out of his
shirt and tossed it to Cobalt.
 
His one
cyborg arm gleamed as the sun bounced off metal and polymer, contrasting with
his pale white face and other natural arm.

They
walked into the shadow of the freighters, grateful for the shade, and spotted
the capsule immediately.
 
Mmok unsealed
the hatch, cutting off the lights and siren before it could blare again.
 
The warhead and the detonation kit were
bundled in with additional supplies.