So It Begins (40 page)

  “How did you hurt your head?” Her story sounded too bizarre. Were the boxes and the room figments of her imagination, or was she telling the truth?

  Her hand darted to her head. “Oh, I guess I must have cut it on one of the icicles. It stings,” she added quickly, almost as an afterthought.

  “Let me see,” I said. She leaned forward. The long gash ran from just above her left temple to the top of her skull. I could see little flecks of glass in the wound. “That looks like it had to hurt.”

  “I guess it did, but I must have been too scared to notice,” she said. “Anyhow, I ran and ran until I found a place to hide. After that I kept running from one spot to the next at night, so the things wouldn’t find me. Then I found the ’phone and made the call. I prayed somebody might come. Somebody.” She was quiet for a long while after that. “You, Sarge,” she added in a small voice.

  “The Shardies don’t usually let humans go,” I replied. “They make them into components, use human brains to help them win this war.”

  Her mouth formed a small “O” of horror. “That’s what they were going to do to me?” she cried. “Oh, my God!”

  “That’s why they sent me. We had to find out how you managed to escape and hear what you could tell us about the aliens. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You must be really brave,” she yawned and stretched. “I don’t think I could do something like that.” She hugged my arm. “But I’m not scared now that you’re here. I know you’ll take care of me.”

  “Get some sleep,” I said. “Just pick a spot.”

  She dropped the blanket next to me. “You can share,” she suggested, offering me a corner.

  “I don’t need sleep,” I replied. “I rest a different way.” No sense telling her that I could shut down the remaining organic component of my brain while the autonomic parts took care of surveillance and housekeeping. Better she remained ignorant of all the terrible things the surgeons did to me after the firefight. Better that she continue to think of me as a marine and leave it at that.

  I’d been going continuously through the past fifty-eight hours and needed some rest time. The diversions of the missile strike, the escaping ships, and hundreds of pieces of sabot shred gave me, at most, thirty hours more, before I expected to be found. Sleep and rest would steal many of those hours, leaving me only a narrow bit of time to complete my mission.

  Tashia had fallen asleep and was snuggled against my hip with one arm thrown across my waist. I could feel her soft breath against my left arm and her gentle movements as deep sleep relaxed tired muscles. At rest she looked so innocent, so peaceful, that one could easily imagine her snuggled in her own bed, dreaming of boys and dances, of family and friends, of loved pets and fond memories. But my imagination could only take me so far before brutal, ugly reality intruded.

  I heard a faint, nearly indistinguishable sound and went instantly on alert. I was at the mine’s entrance in under two seconds and tuned every sense to hyper-alertness. There! Near the horizon was a golden glow in the early dawn light. It moved right to left, possibly tracing the path I had followed to reach the village. Were they tracing me or was their track merely happenstance?

  If the former they would be here in a few hours. We had to move.

  Tashia groaned when I lifted her, but didn’t wake as we left the mine. Her weight was negligible, less than a full combat pack, but more awkward to carry.

  “What’s happening?” she whispered after we’d gone a few kilometers. “Where are we?”

  “Running,” I replied. “I think we’re being followed.”

  She stifled a cry, showing more wisdom than I expected. “The things,” she said. “They’re fast.”

  “So am I,” I replied. “They gave me really strong legs.”

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “I know you don’t look right. Are you a freak or something?”

  It was a fair question. I was hardly dating material and I doubt that my own mother would recognize me like this. She would probably disown me if she did.

  “Sort of like that,” I replied. “They had to rebuild me after the. . . . After it happened. It was touch and go. I almost died, they tell me. If I hadn’t given consent I would have, but they did ask me, and that was only after they told me my options. Live and be useful like this, or die. Some choice.”

  “But you chose life,” she whispered and squeezed my neck. “I’m glad.”

  “They gave me metal bones,” I continued. “Augmented my muscles, increased my metabolic rate, and did some fancy stuff to my head.” I laughed. “I can see in the dark and hear a pin drop a half kilometer away. My reaction time is five times that of a normal man’s and my endurance is practically unlimited. I could go a week without food or water if I had to, a month with water alone and no diminution strength either.”

  “And the downside is?” she joked. “It sounds like you’ve been turned into a superman.”

  “There’s the pain, for one thing,” I replied honestly. “It’s constant. I can’t laugh anymore, nor cry for that matter. Everything seems dead to me, no nuance or gradations. It’s like not caring any more, only I do care about things, like rescuing pretty little girls and helping the war effort.”

  She didn’t reply, but I got another hug.

  “Where did you say you got that jacket?” I asked casually. “There were no survivors of the Fourth Fleet.”

  “It was Dad’s,” she said. “I don’t know where he got it. Maybe he was a veteran or something.”

  “That’s a ship’s jacket, not something anyone would wear anywhere but on board. Do you know what happened to the Fourth?”

  “N-n-no,” she whispered.

  “The Shardies captured the ship and took prisoners,” I explained. “We found some of them on a captured ship, wired into the controls.” Then I added. “They weren’t dead. Not then.”

  “But Dad wore it all the time. He didn’t tell me about his ship or the aliens or anything. I was just cold and wanted something to wear so I wouldn’t be so scared and cold and all.” She began sobbing. “I didn’t mean to do anything bad, Sarge.”

  “I know, honey. I didn’t think you knew about the jacket. That’s why I told you.” Not the only reason, I added, to myself.

  I checked the time. Twenty-two probable hours left, much less if they were really trailing us. Not much time either way.

  “We’ve got to signal soon,” I said. “The target’s not far from here. Think you can walk for a while?” I set her down. I wasn’t tired from carrying her slight weight, but I did want to have both hands free should anything happen.

   “Give me another of those candy bars and I think I could run there.” Her laughter was like tonic to my ears. It had been so long since I’d heard a young girl laugh, so long and so far back in my past that I had forgotten how wonderful it could sound.

  I fished out two bars and threw her one. “They’re a little chewy without something to wash them down, but maybe we can find some water.”

  We moved with the wind, moving as quickly as Tashia could manage in her condition, burning energy fast to reach the target in the shortest amount of time. I couldn’t move as quickly as I wanted, but had to match Tashia’s comparatively slow pace. With the augments in my legs and the hyperventilation of my lungs I could outrun a cheetah if I had to.

  Even with the bar’s energy boost, she could probably outrun a house cat, if it was tired and old.

  “Are you going to call the fleet?” she asked. “How are they going to get us without the things knowing about it?”

  “Fleet has ways of landing undetected,” I lied. “Stealth, charged ice, snowflake, and owl’s wing tech for the most part. The stuff is so good, the Shardies wouldn’t even know we were here.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “I never heard about all that!”

  “There’s a lot you wouldn’t know,” I said, as I started the timer buried in my abdomen. I stuffed three more G-rations into my mouth to provide the energy I needed for the high-speed signal burst. The SIGINT boys high above would be waiting for anything sparkling within a hundred kilometers of the target location, just in case I didn’t make it all the way.

  “We are going away, aren’t we?” she said, panic rising in her voice as she nervously scanned the area. I checked. Whatever that golden glow had been it wasn’t detectable any more.

  “There was a lot of debate about sending someone down here,” I said, as the timer activated the signaling process, storing the data I had collected, along with my conclusions for the burst. “Fleet thought you might be exactly what you said—a poor little survivor who managed to sneak away from the Shardies. On the other hand, they suspected that it might have been just a false signal to lure us into a trap.”

  “But it wasn’t a trap,” Tashia said. “I really did use the ’phone. I really did run away from the things.”

  “There’s the matter of the jacket.” That damned, cursed, incongruous jacket that had no reason to be on this or any other planet.

  “No, I told you. It was Dad’s,” she cried. “You have to believe me!”

  “Then Fleet wondered if there was the possibility that you might not be human any more: That the Shardies wanted to loose a new horror on us, with a new way of using humans.”

  Tashia patted herself. “No, no. I’m me! Look at me. I’m as human as you, maybe more than you. Here,” she threw open her jacket to bare herself.

  I looked at the small mounds of her budding breasts, the ribs showing under her thin skin, and the little blue veins that ran across her chest.

  I gently tugged the sides of her jacket together. “I know, Tashia. I believe you. I never doubted that you weren’t human, not for an instant.”

  I could feel the heat building up inside of me as my I processed the G-ration into the squirter’s storage unit. “I’ve recorded everything you told me,” I went on. “Earth will hear it all and probably interpret more from what you said than even you know.”

  “But I’m not one of them,” she cried. “I ran away. They didn’t p-pro-process me like you said.”

  I thought about her escape, the improbable discovery of the ancient ’phone, and surviving on fish captured with her bare hands. Taken together they were improbable, but not impossible.

  She might not be a conscious Shardie agent, might not even know if she was one, but there was that jacket, those glimmers of glass in her head, and those unexplainable gaps of time and memory. What had they really done while she slept in the box?

  Tashia was sobbing. “I did so escape, just like I told you. I ran away. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I know.” Oh God, I remembered the sound of her laughter, her curiosity about me, her desire to get back to her family and friends. It was all so . . .
human
.

  “Listen, Tashia,“ I said. “The problem is that even if you really are one hundred percent human, they still couldn’t risk rescuing you.”

  “But they could examine me, see if anything is wrong, see if those things did something to me. They could do that, couldn’t they?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t they?”

  “They could,” I replied softly. “But they won’t. The important thing about sending me here was to get whatever information you could give us. That’s what’s important—the information.” Yes, that and the fact that, despite all odds, a little girl, a human girl, had escaped to tell her tale. That fact alone would give everyone hope that we could find a way to fight back and, hopefully, win.

  The heat was so intense that I knew the mission’s end was near. In a few seconds everything within fifty meters would be consumed in an intense blast of encoded coherent light that would tell the watchers overhead all that I had heard and seen. The blast would leave scorched ground that looked like a rocket had taken off. The Shardies weren’t the only ones who could use misdirection.