Tropic of Creation (32 page)

Nazim curled her lip at the huddled private. “He means they can dive-bomb, sir. Floating rats, is what they are. There’s no birds here, you notice?”

A dark swarm of the creatures sailed over the crest of the hills, swooping in toward the pinnacle. The bot erupted with pulses of fire.

“Kill ’em, doggie, kill ’em,” Vecchi shrieked as a pack of choppers glided down on them, riding a thermal. Rats began dropping onto them, and the bot was firing into the bunker and the air at the same time, as Eli shouted, “Nobody move!”

The bot was a crack shot, picking off the rats in mid-leap as they sprang for the nearest victim, which was Vecchi. From his screams, Eli thought the bot had hit him, or more likely, that Vecchi had moved into the bot’s line of fire.

The swarm passed, leaving dead and dying choppers behind. Nazim and Eli methodically finished them off. Vecchi was rolling on the ground, jabbering, “Here doggie, doggie!”

Nazim pressed a boot into his middle. “Nobody chomped you, so shut up.”

From under his arms, where Vecchi was still shielding his face, came the muffled rant, “We should of had us the magic lamp. We’re all rat food. No way we’re gettin’ to the
Lucia
, not without the lamp!” He peered out under his arm. “But its gone. Blew to hell and gone, along with the general’s brat …”

Eli slowly turned to regard him. “What was that?”

“The lamp; oh, they don’t like those bright city lights.…”

“That’s true, sir,” Nazim began, but Eli waved her silent.

He knelt by Vecchi. “Tell me what you know about Sascha Olander.”

“The brat?” Vecchi asked in surprise. “Dead. They’re all dead, like I said.”

Eli grabbed him by the collar. “When I ask you a question, you’ll give me a clear answer, soldier.”

Vecchi sneered into his face. “Clear, you want clear? Dead, that’s all.”

Eli slapped him. “That’s not all. Answer me.”

Vecchi paused. “Untie me?”

Eli turned to Nazim. “Next order of mine that Private Vecchi doesn’t obey, shoot him.”

Nazim grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“Fell!” Vecchi blurted. “She fell; the lightning struck her. Right in the middle of the path. I’m not lying. There was a storm, and she exploded right on the path. It knocked her into the valley. Sir!” He looked wildly up at Nazim’s steady rifle barrel. “Her and the lamp that keeps the critters away.”

“You saw her body?”

“Yes. She was fried right to a crisp.” At the look on Eli’s face, Vecchi began to babble, “Black and charred, sir, and sorry. I was up on the next ridge, and I looked down, and saw her standing there, and then lightning come and struck right at her. Then up comes a hummer and kills Lemon with an arm as long as a shovel, and another was crashing after Sergeant Juric, and I was pumping it full of shells, but nothing stopped it, and Pig came running up behind me, but all I remember is, I slipped and fell off onto a ledge and when I crawled back up they were all gone.”

“Took your time getting back to the ridge, did you?” Eli asked softly.

Vecchi’s breath stank as he gaped at the Captain. “No, sir, no such thing …”

“Figure he’s lying, sir?” Nazim cocked her rifle.

Eli did indeed. And hoped to God. But even if Sascha weren’t struck by lightning, what chance did she have, on her own in this place?

“What about Sergeant Juric and Private Platis? Did you see their bodies?”

Vecchi bit his lip, considering. “Not exactly. Saw lots of body parts. Some of ‘em could’ve been them.” He looked at Nazim. “Make her point somewheres else, Captain. You can trust me.” He blinked, in a parody of innocence.

Eli gave the merest nod to Nazim, who sighed deeply, moving off to scan the flanks of their bunker.

Evening was coming on, draining color from the valley. Then, in the far distance, Eli thought he could hear gunfire … gunfire. There
were
more.

Nazim said, “You hear guns now and then. Sometimes, it’s pocks, their weapons. I didn’t hear our guns until asshole here decided to use us for target practice.”

Vecchi protested: “That’s not it, not target practice, no, sir! But the hummers morph into humans. You could all be monsters. Even me!”

Wearily, Eli turned from Vecchi, thinking maybe the private
had
gone void, and wishing like hell he’d found somebody other than William Vecchi. Beside Eli, suddenly the bot looked like it had turned on a lightbulb inside itself. Light sprayed out of a hundred cracks in its surface.

“That’s what it does at night, sir,” Nazim said. “The critters don’t like bright light. At night, it keeps them away. Some of the predators make bright light; it attracts insects, and its a pretty good sign of poison. I think some
of the animals avoid the bright light, ’cause they think of poison. The dog’s got it figured out.”

Eli pulled out his satchel of food, throwing it to Nazim. “Eat some of these.”

“Sir?”

“I’ve been eating them, they’re OK.”

Nazim paused only a moment before stuffing her mouth full. Vecchi watched, knowing better than to ask.

“Sascha carried a lamp, you said?” Eli was looking into the valley.

“Yeah, and it was a good bright one, too, sir,” Vecchi said in a calmer voice.

The first shadows of evening flowed over the valley, turning the rivers from gold to gray, the patch of woods into a wall of obsidian. The primary sun had sunk behind the hills, leaving the dwarf star commanding the sky like a minor officer in over his head. It threw a reddish tincture over the land, and over Eli’s hands as he held his weapon. Here and there, dots of light bloomed in the valley. They might have been campfires or bunker lights if this were a different planet. But on Null, he knew them for wandering creatures, hoping to attract a meal. He found himself following the lights with his eyes, thinking he might see a young girl, against all odds, the last survivor.…

His chest felt heavy enough to crush him. The thought of passively keeping watch through the long night oppressed him. He had spent too many passive hours, longing to fight, his arms sore from the tension of holding back, thinking of his people under ambush while he ate his meals and paced and conducted verbal duels with the queen of DownWorld … and learned to be friends with her servant.

Somewhere in the jungle was Maret, a friend—but if the story of the war fleet was true, his enemy once again.

The second sun set, sprouting more roving lights in the valley.

“Tell me about Baker Camp, Corporal.” Eli crouched into the makeshift bunker, facing out with his gun.

From the darkness came the pummeling buzz and chatter of the night’s insects. Amid them, Eli listened for snapped twigs, the tread of predators. Nazim’s voice was so soft, it formed merely a thin net over the jungle’s noise.

“It started slow, sir,” she said. “And got worse.” Her voice sounded very young. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen—and already a seasoned soldier. When had CW started recruiting children? Sometime, no doubt, in the last decade of the war, when losses took young lives faster than the eight worlds could replenish them.

“Worse …” Vecchi mumbled, low, chomping on some of the polyps from Eli’s satchel.

“We had three years of boredom,” Nazim said, “boredom so bad we thought we’d go void. Now, what I wouldn’t give for some boredom. That’s what they say, isn’t it? A soldier’s life is pocking boredom in between moments of sheer terror?”

“Tell your story, Corporal.” He said it kindly, knowing she didn’t want to tell it, maybe not in front of Vecchi, maybe not to anybody.

“Yes, sir.” Beside Nazim, the bot had opened its seams, spewing more light and creating the look of a fragment bomb frozen at the moment of detonation. All Eli could see of Nazim was her crew-cut hair, its white stubble bright in the bot’s glare.

“We lost twelve in the woods. Lieutenant Roche ordered us into Charlie Camp, we were going to debark on the
Lucia
, once Captain Marzano brought it in. She was going to land it next to Charlie. I guess she never did.”

Vecchi snorted. “She took the
Lucia
and bopped. Sure! Why wouldn’t she? Think she cared about a bunch of patches like us?”

Nazim’s voice sounded forty years old. “I sure hope I
don’t sneeze and pull the trigger accidental, in your direction.”

“You heard her, Captain. If she kills me, it’s premeditated.”

“Can’t court-martial someone for a sneeze,” Eli said. “Go on, Corporal.”

“So we took the southern route, hoping to find a place to ford the rivers, and steer clear of the woods, where we couldn’t see more than a couple yards in any direction. Charlie Camp said they’d wait for us. We were worried they wouldn’t. We talked about it all the time, how they’d give up on us. We kept watching the western sky. If we’d seen the
Lucia
take off, we would’ve lost it, right then.

“Took us three days to get across two rivers. The bridges had to be wide enough because of the bastards in the water. Sometimes they just threw barbs up. People fell into the water, paralyzed. The worst thing was, we couldn’t drag them out. We couldn’t get near the water, so we watched them float until something grabbed them. That was the worst thing I ever saw, worse than the Great War, and I saw some fights there. We had to hold some of our own back, from running to help. I saw older guys cry that never did in battle.”

She stopped for a long while. Eli held the silence, and for once so did Vecchi. He couldn’t prevent the thought that the men that still knew how to cry died first. That could mean, in the long run, that a long war left only the cruel and the numb at the end. And the inept. It was possible that Vecchi was all three.

“We all died the next day,” came Nazim’s whisper.

“See, I told you she was a ghoul …” Vecchi muttered.

“All but three of us. It was raining so hard we could hardly see. Everybody was trekking across a funny round crater, with steep sides, like a meteor impact site. We three were the last to go over the gully ridge. All of a sudden the
mud was boiling, kind of with what looked like walruses, different sizes of them, twisting out of the ground, grabbing people. We were shooting like crazy, but it was like shooting into a can of worms; we couldn’t hit the things without hitting our own. The dog threw down a sonic, and that stunned everything. Then we tried to pull out our guys—but they were chewed up bad.…” She stopped, turning to Eli, as though he were passing judgment. “Sergeant Addi told us to go on. He lost both his legs below the knee. We didn’t want to. But the crater began to stir again.”

Vecchi sneered. “So you left them, didn’t you, you black runt?”

Nazim’s answer came quietly. “We didn’t want to. The sergeant, he ordered us to, before he died.”

“Son of a bitch,” Vecchi whispered.

“But we could hear their screams, all the while the bot was building us a bridge over the next river. It was a good bridge, but from then on, I was alone.”

After that they were all quiet for a time.

Finally Vecchi piped up: “So now I guess you wanna hear Charlie Camp’s story.”

“No, Private,” Eli said. “I don’t.” He’d listened to Lieutenant Roche’s log, and he didn’t want Vecchi’s whining voice soiling the hard, honest story. It had been bad enough to hear a brave man’s version. “I’ll take the first watch. Sleep if you can.”

The other two settled down as best they could, as the stars snapped into view like exploded kernels of corn. Oddly, there were sources of light everywhere: the stars, occasional photophoric animals in the valley, the powerful lantern of the bot—but the light didn’t illumine anything. It was dark as space.

Eli was sure Nazim would not sleep quickly. After a few minutes, he said into the dark, “You did well, Corporal. I’d have been proud to be at your side.” And he wished he had been.

When Eli awoke the next morning, the muzzle of Nazim’s rifle was pointed at his shins. It was a casual pose, maybe the gun was aimed at him, maybe Nazim was just careless where it pointed.

Vecchi was staring at him, as though Eli had been the subject of a long conversation.

“So, Captain,” Nazim said, her face blank, “where
have
you been all this time?”

V
od looked nervously at the fine rug hung over the portal, closing off Zehops’ den from the way. A rug hung in that manner meant a recent death; in gomin sector it might mean an
upcoming
death: his own.

Zehops noted his gaze. “We need secrecy. The rug may help for a while.”

The airy cloth of the gomin robes felt strange against Vod’s ribs. If Nefer’s troops discovered him now, he doubted he would pass for one of Zehops’ dwellers.

She picked up his cast-off digger clothes, bundling them together. These she handed to another gomin, saying, “Get rid of these, Aarn-as.”

Vod said, “Leave my clothes. I may need them.”

Zehops was very outward with her sarcasm. “Afraid you’ll become a gomin without your digger clothes?”

Before he could respond, a gomin ducked in from the way. Breathlessly he said, “They’re coming.”

Vod looked up in alarm. “They know I’m here?”

Zehops conferred in low tones with the messenger, who left as he had arrived, on the run. Turning back to
Vod, she said, “Not everything revolves around Vod Ceb Rilvinn these intervals. They’re coming to assault gomin.” She gave him a challenging look. “It might be dangerous to be in those robes. What tends to be worse, Vod fleeing Nefer, or an unnatural in Red Season?”