Blood of Denebria (Star Sojourner Book 4) (21 page)

“Jules.” Reika reached out a hand but didn't move forward. “They killed Weed.”

“Oh!” I said. “Weed. Oh, God. I'm sorry.”

“You're
sorry
?” Joe broke my grip on his wrists and hit me across my left cheek. “Not as sorry as Weed.”

I found myself on the floor, holding my head, which felt as though a minor explosion had taken place. “Dammit,” I muttered, “why don't you ever let me explain?”

I got up and staggered to a chair, holding my cheek. “The hive mind was tracking me.
Captain!
” I told Joe. “I led them away from the team and the SPS.”

Huff came and sat beside me. I stroked his back. The gentle contact always calmed both of us

Joe put a hand to his head and swayed. I've rarely seen him look so tired. He even seemed defeated, which scared the hell out of me.

He returned to his chair and sat down stiffly. “Alpha has dispatched a group of government officials to Tau Ceti to demand that the BEMs cease their aggression against Denebria.”

I pulled my chair closer. “Do you think they can turn back the invasion force?”

“I think the BEMs will attempt to conquer and hold Denebria,” Joe said. “I think they'll sign all the goddamn peace treaties Alpha lays on the table. But until the Worlds Alliance backs up the demands with boots on Tau Ceti, the BEMs will have a free hand on Denebria.”

“What about the people in the line of fire tomorrow morning?” I looked at General Roothe. “Have they been warned?”

“Our people are on their way to shelters,” General Roothe said. He seemed subdued.

“Where's the SPS?” I asked.

“It's hidden here,” Bat said. “We showed the general how to get in touch with Alpha.”

“Suppose we give DABs a helping hand?” I said.

The group waited.

“We're directly under the garrison,” I told them. “Those are BEM generators you hear.”

Joe looked at Wolfie.

“We could blow the garrison to hell,” Wolfie said.

“That's what I'm thinking,” I added.

General Roothe looked from me to Joe. “You can do that?”

“General,” Joe said too softly, “why didn't you tell us we were under the BEM garrison?”

“You didn't ask,” the general said.

Joe wiped a hand across his eyes.

“Captain,” Bat said, “what about the BEM HQ?” I'd love to see that slaughterhouse go back to being a sand.”

We were silent as we waited for Joe to speak.

He leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Joe?” I said. “Are you all right?”

He sighed and opened his eyes. “The garrison first. Then the BEM HQ. We stock up on provisions from the sous at the hideout, then move on to our objective in the desert.” He shrugged. “That should keep us busy for a while.”

“We can offer you troops,” General Roothe said. “How many people do you require?”

Joe shook his head. “This is better accomplished as a platoon. “You're going to need every soldier you've got, General. When…
if
you kill a BEM, make sure you take his weapons and whatever else he's got that you can use against them.”

The general nodded. “I would have lived in different times,” he whispered.

“Jules,” Joe said.

I looked up.
What the fuck did I do now?
I thought.

“I shouldn't have hit you.”

“No, you shouldn't have. But what the hell.” I touched my cheek. “What's one more welt?”

He smiled, but I had the distinct feeling that Joe had been pushed beyond his limits. At sixty-seven, he just couldn't regain his strength and endurance as quickly as the rest of the team.

I slid Chancey a look.

He lifted his brows and nodded discreetly.

I glanced at Reika. She shook her head slightly. Wolfie returned my glance with a look that said
What the hell is your problem?

Wolfie, Reika, and Chancey set the explosives at strategic locations throughout the warren while General Roothe and his officers evacuated their families and took the SPS. The rest of the team waited outside with the horses. The farmhouse, the barn where I'd taken cover, the corral, were all dark and deserted. The village itself was silent, except for pleasure craft that picked up refugees and flew them to shelters.

Roothe had gotten word to Korschaff to evacuate, but there were other villages, archaic farming lands, including South Village, that had no communications. There would be deaths, many of them. I thought of the animals left behind, and the planet's wildlife. It would be an ecological disaster.

Voices within the tunnel.

Reika, Chancey and Wolf trotted out wearing their backpacks and mounted their horses.

“How long?” Joe asked.

“Twenty minutes,” Chancey told him.

Joe turned his horse east. I rode between Reika and Bat as we followed. Huff, as usual, trotted in front of Asil. Wolfie was riding point, though what he expected to run into up ahead, only Wolfie knew.

Dawn was lifting her head above the high plains as we rode, and branding the bellies of stray clouds with fire when we heard the blast behind us. We looked at each other. Chancey smiled.

Joe, riding ahead, turned in his saddle. “Good work.”

“Let the crotefuckers celebrate
that,
” I said.

When we reached the cliffs and our hideout, we put the horses out to graze and rest by the swift-running stream and ate our last meal from the chef, a mixture of different mock meats, vegetables, rice and potatoes.

“The packets are empty,” Reika told us.

“From now on,” Chancey said, “it's grubs and larvae.”

“And digestall,” Bat added.

Trouble was, we had precious little left of that either. Joe still carried the poison test-kit in his saddlebag, but first we'd have to find nourishing plants.

I stopped eating and glanced at Wolfie. Would we be reduced to killing and eating wild animals? The thought disturbed me.

Joe fell asleep halfway through his meal. Bat, sitting beside him, grabbed his arm as he started to fall. “Whoa,” Bat said and eased him down to the ground.

Chancey left the cave and came back with a blanket from behind a saddle. He covered Joe, stared at him and rubbed his chin. “I'm thinking we should ask Joe to wait for us here.”

Reika nodded. “He's reached the end of his rope.”

“He'll never go for it,” I told them.

“Well, Reika said, “if he insists on coming, we have the travois, if he needs it.”

“
We
might need it,” Bat said, “if we have wounded.”

I studied Joe, so weary in sleep. “I think he'll be the one to make the decision.”

“We might have to make it for him,” Wolfie said and took a bite of mock lamb.

Joe opened his eyes and sat up.

“You've been listening,” I said.

He rubbed his red eyes. “Wolfie's right. I'm turning over the command of this operation to him.”

We glanced at each other.

“Then we meet back here,” I asked Joe, “after we blow up the BEM's HQ?”

“That's up to Wolfie now,” Joe said.

“We meet back here.” Wolfie finished the last of his food.

“Jules,” Joe said.

“Yeah?”

“I wouldn't count on Wolfie being as gentle as I was if you disobey his orders.”

Wolfie threw aside his empty dish. “You disobey my orders under fire,” he told me, “I'll execute you on the spot.”

I looked at Joe.

He raised his eyebrows.

Huff growled deep in his throat and stared at Wolfie.

A blast from the west shook sand down the walls in rivulets. The BEMs were attacking Northwest Village.

“And so it begins,” I said.

“Let's saddle up.” Wolfie walked outside.

“Joe,” I said, “can I get you anything before we leave?”

He patted my cheek and sighed. “I'm not dying, kid. Keep your mind on your work. I'll be fine.”

I took his hand and kissed it. “Take care of yourself, Dad,” I whispered and walked outside.

We were too far east to see Northwest Village huddled under the BEM barrage. But we heard the distant Harpy shrieks of missiles, the muffled thuds as they hit. I pictured the village like a stricken animal lying beneath the predator's teeth.

* * *

The sun hid behind a blanket of dark rain clouds that drenched the sand, the horses, and us as I lay on the crest of a dune and peered through rain-splattered graphoculars that gave an impressionistic view of the BEM headquarters below. To our right, a shuttle stood poised on a runway. To our left, Denebrian children ran and splashed through puddles in the fenced killing field, so innocent of what awaited them. The adults talked in groups. Some lay on higher ground that was still dry.

I lowered the graphoculars and wiped rainwater off my face. I had spread my bedroll across Asil's back and neck and cinched the saddle over it. We had raingear, given to us by grateful Denebrian slaves we had rescued. But they were bright yellow, and we looked like giant chickens in them. Not great camouflage. We left them in our saddlebags.

Wolfie ran low along the flank of the dune and slid down beside us. “They've got people posted there, there, and there.” He pointed to three small dunes west of the fenced field and threw back wet, scraggly hair. His bony face and long nose ran rainwater. “They think we'll approach from the west.”

But we had circled to the south, far enough from the BEM's HQ so that Bountiful could not detect me in a tel link.

“They must have heard that their garrison is now a hole in the ground.” Reika wiped her eyes under the helmet. Her olive skin was lustrous and wet. She winked at me and smiled.

“So they think they're going to ambush us,” Chancey said. “The poor bastards.”

I glanced at Huff, waiting at the bottom of the dune with the horses, and waved. He waved back.

Reika and Wolfie opened their backpacks and took out small air drones. As they activated them, the display windows lit up and announced: ARMED.

“This is almost too easy,” Wolfie said and wiped his face.

“What about the guards behind the three dunes?” Bat asked. “The Denebrians are between us and them.”

“Can't be helped.” Wolfie put the armed 'bots into his backpack. “We take them out too.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Before you blow up the compound, we've got to get the Denebrians out of there!”

Wolfie lowered the display visor on his helmet. “Why don't we just tell the BEMs we're coming?”

“Wolfie,” I said, “Joe would've
never
agreed to this!”

“Reika,” Wolfie said, “you and Bat hit the shuttle and the compound's east wings.”

She nodded.

“We'll take out the main buildings,” Wolfie said, “and the guards at the dunes.”

“Reika!” I said as she slung her backpack over her shoulder. “You're OK with this plan?”

“He's right, Jules,” she told me. “We have to sacrifice the few to save the many.”

“There are
kids
down there,” I told her. “Chancey? Bat? We freed them once from the field. We can wait until night and do it again.”

“Man,” Chancey said, “I don't like this any more than you do. But if we wait until night, the BEM invasion force could have a squad or two over here to protect their HQ. And anyway, the trolls can see just as well at night, remember?”

“I can't be part of this,” I said. “There are
families.
”

“Jules, it'll be OK, babes,” Reika said. “We're going to wipe out their communication center.”

“And a lot of Denebrians with it!” I told her.

“I know how you feel.” Reika snapped down the display visor over her eyes. “But they're not humans.”

I stared at her, too shocked to answer.

She put her hand on my arm. “Just do your job, OK?”

I brushed off her hand and saw her lips tighten.

“Chancey,” Wolfie said. “Stay with me. After we soften them up, we go in for mop up.”Your job, superstar," he said sarcastically, “is to make tel contact with any BEM survivors and relay their location to us.” He slapped a comlink into my hand. “You hunker down right here. If I come back and you're gone, you'd better stay gone.”

“Bat?” I said.

“He's the captain on this one, Jules. In the military, the officer is law. I'm sorry.”

I sat behind the crest of the dune with the comlink held loosely in my hand and watched Reika and Bat move closer to the shuttle. Wolfie and Chancey ran low, toward the guards behind the three dunes. The Denebrian children's chatter as they played inside the fenced killing field rang in my ears. Perhaps it took the military mind, I considered and stared at the dappling sand, to deal with the death of the innocents as a necessary consequence of battle.

I closed my eyes but could not block out the synchronized explosions that thudded through my chest like the heartbeats of war.

The children's chatter changed to shrieks and mixed with the anguished wails of adults. Even the BEM's high keen as they died struck my mind like arrows. My eyes and throat burned from acrid smoke that drifted overhead. I wiped rain and tears from my face. I was too far, too far to comfort the children as their kwaiis bolted from their torn bodies.

“Great Mind.” I dug my hands into the heavy wet sand. “Why do you allow such agony?”

But only the roiling smoke and leaden clouds stirred over endless sands.

Huff looked up at me from the bottom of the dune. I shrugged and put the link in my jacket pocket. I was too far to probe for survivors, Denebrians or BEMs. I trudged to the crest of the dune.

The killing field was a blasted hollow in the sand. A few posts smoked and jutted at angles, but I saw no movement and felt no stirrings of minds within that collapsed pit. The BEM HQ was now a series of mounds. Sparks and sporadic flames spurted from the sand. The shuttle crouched like a great broken spider on its runway. The three dunes where BEM guards had laid their trap for us were flattened.

I waved to Huff and he started up the dune with the horses.

Perhaps I was still too far to mindlink with anyone left alive, Deneb or BEM. I trudged through soft sand that left no footprints; breathing acrid air that burned my throat. The team was somewhere ahead, lost in swirling smoke. There is a stillness that speaks of the eternal places, the geth states between lives. I felt it here among the great sweep of desert. I wiped my watering eyes, assailed by tears and rain and stinging smoke. I was soaked down to my socks. If I wanted camouflage, the wet, clinging sand provided it.