Betrayer of Worlds (2 page)

A faint droning drifted Nathan’s way, and hints of metallic clanking. Over the plain below, in the far distance where jungle still hid the road, a cloud of brown dust now hovered.

Their target approached.

The aristos controlled space around Wunderland more completely every day. Nathan—and even more so, his former crew—had learned that the hard way. Snoopersats might intercept even the briefest radio whisper. And so from Nathan’s left, where Logan, the leader of this guerrilla band, lay hidden, the most basic of signals: a soft avian trill.

Get ready.

Nathan whistled an acknowledgment as best he could, not knowing what he tried to imitate. More “birdsong” to his right and from across the gorge. The guerrillas wore camouflage over their improvised armor; even with their whistles to guide him, he spotted no one. Seven answers in all, including Nathan’s own.

The crossfire would be deadly.

Reviewing what had passed for training—mostly “If it reflects, don’t shoot it” and “If you see them, assume they see you”—Nathan raised the laser rifle to his shoulder. (There had been a lesson, too, on improvising explosive devices from household chemicals. Making bombs scared the hell out of him, and he tried his best to leave that knowledge theoretical. Seeing his hands shake, others had built the explosives now hidden in the ravine far below.) Through the scope he followed the barely-a-path across the rocky plain below. Not-quite trees swayed where the road entered the lower jungle.

The first vehicles emerged: tractors, cargo floaters, flatbed trucks. Civilian vehicles, all. People jammed the truck beds, balanced precariously on the sideboards, plodded alongside on foot. Another few minutes would bring the caravan into the canyon. Into the trap.

Birds circled high overhead, indistinct against the suns’ glare. Their presence, perhaps, signified nothing.

In his mind’s eye they were vultures.

Cranking up the magnification Nathan saw more women and children than men. Everyone kept glancing fearfully over their shoulders. He saw a
few dogs and even a sway-backed horse. Here and there people clutched hunting rifles, but that didn’t make them the enemy. Who would venture into this wilderness unarmed?

He zoomed closer still, examined weary faces. Half the adults looked
old.
Boosterspice was plentiful, if pricey; to look old meant you were poor. Most men’s chins were stubbled, but of asymmetric, pointy-on-one-side/close-cropped-on-the-other beards, Nathan saw not a one. Only Wunderland’s aristos sported those ridiculous, high-maintenance affectations as symbols of indolence and leisure.

This couldn’t be the rumored garrison resupply convoy. Nathan waited for the call to stand down. Instead, from his left, a brief chittering.

On my signal.

Madness! These were civilian refugees. Poor farmers by the look of them and of their vehicles. Why the tanj ambush
them
? Nathan cleared his throat.

“Quiet!” Logan hissed.

For the first time since getting stranded, Nathan wondered if one side was any better than another.

Be honest, he chided himself. The second time. The first time was when two guerrillas marched a third, her face bruised, the cloth badge of the Resistance ripped from her blouse, out of camp into the jungle. Only the men, their expressions grim, had returned.

Nathan had chosen to believe they had sent her away. These people had pulled him from the wreck, whisked him away before Internal Security arrived. He owed the guerrillas everything, from the shirt on his back to his very life.

Now he wondered if he could live with the debt.

As the hum of engines swelled, Nathan’s mind churned. Join in the slaughter? Never. Stand by, doing nothing, and watch? How was that better?

There
had
to be another way. A warning shot to scare off the civilians? No. The laser beam between plain and cliff top would point back at him. That woman vanished into the woods outside camp . . . Nathan had a pretty good idea how the Resistance treated sympathizers. Or—

Probably no one was looking
up.
Nathan raised his rifle and fired. With a squawk a bird stopped its circling. Gravity here was scarcely half that to which Nathan was accustomed, and the bird, cut almost in two, fell in slow motion.

Splat
went the carcass, just ahead of the caravan.

The people on foot turned and ran, zigzagging, back toward the trees. Engines raced. Vehicles jerked into reverse or turned off the road to circle back. Maybe he had saved a few—

Crash! A tractor and a truck collided, blocking the way into the jungle.

“Now!” shouted Logan.

From both canyon rims guerrillas opened fire. Laser beams, silent, scythed down three men before anyone below noticed. Then: screams. Curses. More bodies crumpling. Chaos.

It was a massacre, sickening—

Sudden motion
behind
the slaughter. Sleek and sharklike, three antigrav gunships burst from the jungle, their charge spookily silent. Laser cannon blazed bloodred. As the gunships neared, their railguns let loose.

The guerrillas launched their only two surface-to-air missiles. One hit. Trailing smoke, its engine stuttering, a gunship arced down, down, down. . . . It smashed—
boom!
—into a cliff face, and the ground shook. Across the gorge two men more brave than sane (“If you see them, assume they see you!”) kept firing. The remaining gunships spewed their own missiles.

No one could have survived those blasts.

“Fall back!” Logan shouted.

At least Nathan, his ears ringing, decided that was the order. He was already slithering backward, away from the precipice and deeper into the jungle, as quickly as he could.

He had done what he could for the refugees. The thought offered no comfort.

The caravan was doubly bait. The militia had used civilians to entice the Resistance. The guerrillas, just as callous, had attacked the refugees to lure an aristo patrol into reach.

Blam! Blam-blam!

More
missiles. The ground slammed Nathan, flung him high into the air. He came down stunned. Through the underbrush, backlit by explosions, he glimpsed a profile. It loomed over him, well over two meters tall. What with the low gravity, most Wunderlanders were gigantic.

One of the guerrillas. Cody something. Was he here to help Nathan or kill him?

“Come on,” Cody growled. Maybe he hadn’t seen Nathan warn the refugees. “Time to go.”

As Nathan struggled to his feet, another blast bounced him off a tree trunk. His left arm and some ribs snapped. And something molten had spattered his camo. It ate through the cloth, through his body armor. The bellow of railguns swallowed his scream.

Cody sprayed first-aid foam over the hole in Nathan’s vest and his side went numb. The Wunderlander helped Nathan to his feet and together they staggered into the jungle.

A yellow oval gleamed on the sloping roof. Not a sun, Nathan gradually decided. The glow of a lamp, reflected on . . . what? How long had he been staring at the glow and why were his thoughts so fuzzy?

He looked around. He was flat on his back on one narrow cot among many. All the cots were filled, most by people wearing bloody bandages. He remembered the jungle being eerily quiet. Now that dubious honor belonged to this . . . ?

First-aid ward, he decided. In a futzy
cave.
Geological time later, he figured it out: body heat. Snoopersats would zero in on any camp this size in the wild.

He didn’t remember getting here. Cody had carried Nathan out, then.

Had anyone else among the guerrillas made it? Nathan sat up, the better to check the other beds. He noticed his cast before trying to put any weight on that arm.

But he had forgotten about the ribs and the burn. He gasped. The one person standing—a medic?—was tweaking the flow rate on a drip bag. She turned her head. “Be with you in a minute, soldier.”

Drip bag. Cast. Bloody tanj bandages! Blurry though his mind was, it hit Nathan: this was medieval. He should be asleep, oblivious, within a computerized cocoon dedicated to healing him. But did the guerrillas even have autodocs? He couldn’t recall seeing any.

He had felt fine until he sat up. Now all he felt was the throbbing in his side. Pain was so . . . archaic. Finagle, he couldn’t remember when autodocs came into general use. Well before his time, and he was 130. He didn’t know how to deal with pain. No one did anymore. His head spun and his breathing raced—

“Careful.” The medic, her sweat-dark hair gathered in an untidy bun, caught Nathan as he toppled. She helped him lie back down, then squirted something into his IV. “Here’s a little something for the pain.”

“Wait,” he said, a moment too late. Maybe that tardiness was no accident. The first wave of relief kicked in and it felt familiarly wonderful. “How much of this stuff have I . . . ?”

He drifted off before finishing the question.

Across the worlds of Human Space, people disdained the Wunderlander aristos. Running a blockade to deliver medical supplies to freedom fighters was noble. Running a blockade to sell medical supplies? That dimmed the luster, but it was still in a good cause.

Wasn’t it?

Things were less black and white viewed up close. Wunderland’s civil war, like all civil wars, was nasty. It sundered families. It offered no quarter and expected none. It recognized no civilians, no innocents, no neutral parties. Benefit of the doubt was a scarce commodity—

A nonexistent commodity once you’d bled DNA all over a wrecked blockade runner.

Through a drug fog Nathan struggled to make sense of things. He had not set out to be a smuggler, any more than he had set out to be a master chef, a mechanic, a pilot, or any of the other things he had been. No career, no hobby, no marriage could last for a century. He had had honest, if mercenary, intentions buying a share of the med shipment. Joining
Clementine
’s crew thereafter was simply prudent, just protecting his investment.

He had deluded himself, of course.

A respite from the dull routine yet another career had become? Of course. A way to get beyond Paula Cherenkov dumping him? Running the blockade was that, too.

Sinking back into hazy oblivion, Nathan confronted a harder truth. He ran—still—from far older demons.

The trail had gone cold long ago.

Cold trail: a carnivore’s metaphor. A human’s metaphor. Nessus was neither.

“Nessus” was a label of convenience, something humans could pronounce. His true name—given enough pairs of vocal cords to enunciate it properly—sounded like an industrial accident set to waltz time. Or so, at least, a human had once described it. A long time ago . . .

Humans had called Nessus’ kind Puppeteers before, more than a century earlier, they had withdrawn from Human Space. More often than humans realized, a few Puppeteers returned. The galaxy was a dangerous place and humans made excellent cannon fodder.

Cannon fodder: another human metaphor. Nessus had spent much of his life among humans, when even a day among aliens did not speak well of him. No sane being left Hearth, separated himself from the herd. By setting hoof on Wunderland, Nessus was, by definition,
in
sane.

He had learned to embrace insanity. The full measure of his madness was that he had even come to
like
humans.

Perhaps insanity—and a well-chosen human agent—might once again avert disaster for the trillion and more Nessus had left behind.

Nathan went up and down the aisles of the hospital ward. He emptied bedpans, took routine med scans, distributed water, and dispensed pills. His duties distracted him from the tightness in his side, where the burn had healed badly, and kept him busy and his conscience clear. The work kept him, without killing anyone, in the good graces of the Resistance.

“Hey, Big Nate.”

As the only one vertical, Nathan was taller than these Wunderlander giants. Under the circumstances, you found humor where you could. “Hi, Terry. How are you doing today?”

A chain of wet coughs: fluid in the lungs. “Just great, Big Nate. You can’t tell?”

Nathan patted the man on the shoulder and moved on to the next patient. He topped off the water pitcher sitting on the floor beside her cot. “How’s it going, Maeve?”

“You tell me,” Maeve said. She had a stern face, the kind that seemed locked in to a scowl, but that was only a guess. She had little reason to smile.

Nathan waved his scanner over her. Indicators lit, mostly green. He paged down and saw more green. “I’m no doctor, but I’m guessing you’ll be out soon.” With only one kidney.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m ready for a pill.”

Hadn’t she heard him? But of course she had. The “doctors” here couldn’t properly treat half of what they encountered. Instead, they drugged their patients to the eyeballs. “It’s too early,” he lied. Because you don’t want to end up like me.

And because the fewer painkillers I dole out, the more I can keep for myself.

By the time the doctors had released Nathan, he’d been hooked. He could get drugs here. Irony of ironies, lots of these meds had been salvaged from
Clementine.
He recognized the batch numbers. Drugs flowed from the government to the black market to the Resistance. If the two sides could manage to trade, tanj it, why couldn’t they
talk
?