Comrades in Arms (5 page)

— 12 —

With Click leading the way, they entered the hulking lump of buildings that was the Jaxxan military base—neatly organized but crowded structures, large and small, with flat walls slanted at hard-to-interpret angles. The buildings were dark, the passages between them narrow, the architecture strange and disorienting to Rader—everything based on oblique angles rather than perpendicular walls.

The Jaxxan military base, as with the human outpost on the other side of Fixion, had started out as a basic forward station, a testing ground for a possible colony, before the war broke out. But no hopeful colonists had ever arrived, and now the temporary city was a bizarre collage of trading posts, refectories, warehouses, arsenals, administrative hives, and command posts.

He and Click had to make their way through the middle of it at night, skirt any populated sections, and reach the landing field, where they hoped to steal a small in-system craft.

Rader used his suit sensors to scan for danger, while coaching Click in how to keep himself from being seen. Somehow, the alien couldn’t grasp the technique of searching for cover. However, after countless switchbacks and false starts, Click had become lost in the tangled streets. He sounded dismayed. “I was assigned to the System Holystal project out in space. I spent very little time in this settlement.”

Rader scanned ahead. “We’ll figure out a viable route to the landing field.” He and his companion moved from alley to alley until they had lost all sense of direction.

Disoriented and impatient, Click stepped into a wide intersection to get his bearings while Rader took a reading to determine how far they were from the ships. The Deathguard’s sensors detected movement in the shadows, forms converging on them with high-sensitivity detectors of their own. He knew this wasn’t right.

He heard a voice hiss, a
human
voice, here in the middle of the Jaxxan base. “That’s him! The Deathguard—and the deserter!”

A laser rifle etched a molten line across the flat tan wall of a nearby building. Rader jerked Click back into the dark alley as a freshly formed green energy-web hurtled toward them. The shimmering threads sliced off the corner of a structure.

The hunters surged out of their cover, humans
and Jaxxans
tracking them together. Before Rader could grasp the implications, he used his laser rifle to kill one—a Jaxxan, he thought—and scatter the others.
One down
. Synthetic adrenaline juiced him, and he fell into full defensive mode. He dragged Click with him down to the end of the alley and blasted a hole through the thin wall so they could push their way into a side street.

They dashed through the maze of passageways, glad for the darkness. Deathguard reflexes kicked in, filling him with a sense of heightened danger. Without saying a word, Click ran along beside him, in shock. From behind, they could hear shouts and noises as the hunter squad continued their pursuit.

Rader was amazed to realize that the Earth League and the Jaxxan military had cooperated to hunt them down. It would take all his skills and energy to avoid capture and keep Click alive. He focused entirely on their escape.

Suddenly his insides jerked, and he felt pressure building up in his brain as the Werewolf Trigger activated: KILL. KILL.

“Click, get out of here!”

The Jaxxan stumbled next to him. “But where should I go?”

“I’m dangerous! Get away from
me!
” Rader shoved him off to one side, hunching over in his futile attempts to control himself. “Quick, dammit!” Click stumbled off, running but woefully clumsy.

The Deathguard’s implanted weapons systems activated, his laser rifle became part of him, and his head exploded with red noise, the alarm voice pounding against pressure points in his brain.

The whole world around him became a target, and the enemy lost its distinct form. He didn’t know for sure what it was he must KILL, but he had to KILL it anyway. The berserker alarm told him to.

Gripping his laser rifle with reinforced gloves, he leaped out into the street, taking pot-shots at buildings, shooting at shadows in windows. Rader’s shout was amplified by his helmet speakers—and from his scream, the hunter squad pinpointed his location.

He looked ahead down an alley, studying details through light-amplification sensors. A vague memory jumped into his mind. Someone had gone that way, indistinct—the enemy? He bounded between the angled buildings, paying no heed to the movement behind him.

Rader breathed with mechanical rhythm, peering into the shadows with heightened senses. His cyborg systems increased his metabolism, supercharged what remained of his biological tissue.

A brilliant shooting star, gift from the Fixion Belt, whistled over his head in a final flash of glory.

Rader leaped forward, unable to control his actions. He saw a Jaxxan ahead of him, running, stumbling along. A vague, distant voice tugged at the back of his mind, telling him that this wasn’t the real enemy … but the Werewolf Trigger drowned the rational voice.

Click.

The lone Jaxxan let out a chitter of fear and ran along a perpendicular alley, straight toward the landing field, still trying to reach the ship they needed. He reached an open construction area where skeletons of oddly angled buildings stood among piles of naked plastic-alloy girders.

Rader launched himself into the construction area like a jungle fighter. Shadows surrounded him, but he paid them no heed. Ahead, he saw the alien, the enemy. Recognition flickered in his mind for a moment—but the clamor forced it away.

KILL

No!

Click stumbled among tangled wires and slabs of polymer concrete in piles for assembly crews. He stopped short against a half-constructed wall, wheezing in the thin air.

Rader stepped victoriously over a girder, then leaped down in front of the cornered target. He pushed the laser rifle close to the Jaxxan’s large black eyes.

But the alien refused to use his energy-web. Click merely regarded the weapon’s blunt barrel.

KILL KILL, the voice of the Werewolf Trigger insisted.

No!
No!

Rader’s will struggled against a fortune of scientific conditioning. He had to fire, had to destroy. The command pulled harder at his mind, building in intensity, tearing him apart.

KILL KILL

No!

The Deathguard swung his weapon up and went wild, blasting buildings, slicing through support struts, destroying anything but Click.

Jumping away, he charged back in the direction he had come—and ran abruptly into the hunter squad. They reacted, but the Deathguard was too fast. The Werewolf Trigger ordered him to KILL—and this time he didn’t resist. He left two dead human soldiers and one Jaxxan in the wake of his fury, then dove into cover, racing through the construction site.
Four down
.

The six remaining members of the hunter squad took only a second to regroup. Leaving the three bodies where they had fallen, one of the Jaxxans motioned to the others, and they stalked after the Deathguard.

As soon as he escaped the scattered hunters, the Werewolf Trigger lapsed into quiescence, and Rader’s thoughts, intelligence, self-control flooded back into his mind.

He heard shouts from behind as the hunters called to one another. They were still out of sight, but with his amplified senses, he could hear them split up to approach him from different directions. However, Rader had an advantage now as calm calculation returned to him. The others expected him to act like a rampaging berserker.

He had to damp his emotions, draw them back into himself so that his turmoil wouldn’t become a beacon that declared his hidden presence to the empathic Jaxxans. Rader sought refuge in the darkness beneath an outside stairway, and his non-reflective, camouflage armor helped him melt into the shadows, turning him into a shadow himself.

He breathed methodically, forcing rigid control back into his body, imitating Click’s holystal meditation. Click! He didn’t
think
he had killed his comrade. Rader closed his eyes, ignoring the marching feet and hushed voices that hurried closer, then moved past him.

When the team had passed, he emerged from his sanctuary. Instead of pursuing the hunters, he crept toward the landing field and their way off Fixion. Click would have gone to the ships—he hoped.

Across twenty meters of open concrete, a small short-range cargo vessel rested, as well as six larger personnel transports and a bulbous fuel tanker. One lonely Jaxxan guard stood at the open door of the small cargo ship.

On the perimeter of the landing field, Rader spotted Click’s ill-concealed form in the shadow of a building. At least the alien was trying. The Deathguard silently made his way over to his friend, keeping so well concealed that even Click didn’t know he was there until the last moment.

The Jaxxan froze, then realized that he no longer sensed the raging, killing beast inside the Deathguard. Rader spoke in a whisper. “I’m in control now, but the rest of that squad is still after us. It won’t be long before they realize I’ve doubled back. Let’s get that ship!”

He knew that if they could get off of Fixion, they could lose themselves in the debris of the asteroid belt, travel slowly, hopscotch from rock to rock, and reach the observatory asteroid. Beyond that, Rader didn’t care.

He brought his laser rifle up, aimed. “I’ll get rid of the sentry.”

But Click’s bony arm stopped him. “Wait, there is a better way.” He hunkered down and concentrated on the sentry. Even through his armor, Rader felt a tingle in the air; his sensors registered an energy buildup. A galaxy of lights flickered in the deep universe of Click’s black eyes.

The sentry flailed his angular arms as a half-formed energy-web folded over him. The sentry clawed at the dimly sparkling strands, searching for his unseen attacker—a Jaxxan attacker.

Leaving their hiding place, Rader and Click rushed across the landing field toward the Jaxxan cargo ship. When Click spoke to the sentry, Rader was surprised to hear the menace in his comrade’s usually timid voice. “Do nothing unwise, or I shall be forced to complete my web.”

The Jaxxan guard did nothing unwise.

While Rader kept his laser rifle pointed at the sentry, Click scuttled forward and activated the hatch. “Can you fly this ship?”

The insectoid head bobbed up and down on its stalk of a neck.

“A hostage and a pilot,” Rader said. “Good enough.” He did not know what they would do with the sentry once they reached their destination.

Click chittered his instructions to the sentry. “You will fly on a random, evasive course. The humans have an observatory asteroid located on the far edge of the Belt. It must be in the database.”

Rader detected movement in the construction area, the hunter squad picking up on them again. “They’re coming. Get inside the ship—now!”

With a victorious outcry, the hunters charged across the landing field. Rader shoved Click through the cargo ship’s open hatch as one of the human soldiers braced for a careful shot, but chose the wrong Jaxxan. He burned a large hole in the alien sentry’s back.

As he tried to escape, Rader’s left leg suddenly collapsed, and he sprawled on the ramp. The attackers raced toward them, shouting, and he rolled, trying to assess the damage, sure that a laser blast had cut through the armor, ruined his cyborg leg systems. Using his good leg, his elbows, and his gloves, he hauled himself to the hatch.

Click had turned back to help him, and an energy-web glittered against the hull, smoking and sparking. Rader yelled, “Leave me—get to the control room!”

Instead, the Jaxxan grabbed his arms, dragged him the rest of the way into the ship. As soon as he was clear, Click sealed the hatch.

Rader looked down to see how much damage the shot had done to his leg, but he saw no burned hole, no melted slag of armor or shorted-out cyborg parts. The leg had simply failed.

Click dashed away from the hatch and scrambled up a thin-runged ladder to the control deck. Rader called after him, “You
can
fly this type of ship, can’t you?”

Click pointedly did not answer, and Rader stifled a groan.

***

The cargo ship rose jerkily, leaving behind a whirlpool of displaced air. The hunter squad watched in anger and defeat. After the vessel zigzagged in a drunkard’s flight from the landing field, the soldiers watched the flares of its engines dwindle into Fixion’s thin atmosphere.

The human captain stared at the sentry who lay sprawled on the still-warm pavement. “He’s dead. We can’t interrogate him for any intel the two deserters might have revealed.”

The Jaxxan leader shook his head. “Not too late. We will implement a post-mortem interrogation.”

He removed equipment from his belt pack—a probe, a diagnostic reader, two long wires, and a skull splitter. Jamming down hard, he broke the chitinous shell of the dead sentry’s head, spreading the hard faceplates to expose the soft, contoured brain. “We should still be able to access the chemical memory of the last few moments he experienced.”

The Jaxxan unfolded the screen, then dipped the sharp probe wires into the dead alien brain. Static washed across the screen accompanied by surreal images, colored patterns, old memories. He worked quickly before the memory-storage chemicals dissipated, the neurons deteriorated.

He touched different sections of tissue with the probe wires, moving urgently, until he found a blurred image of Deathguard Rader and his Jaxxan companion. He zeroed in, turned up the volume on the receiver, and heard their words, relived their last conversation, studied everything they had said.

The Jaxxan captain got the information he needed before the chemical traces crumbled into disjointed fragments and incomplete sentences. It was enough. He looked up at his comrades. “Now we know where they are going.”