“Looked like she was chewing a wasp while she said it, mind,” said Otto.
“What do you think of our chances against the Hadenmen? ” said Owen.
Colonel Hand grinned nastily. “Don’t you worry, boy. Hadenmen will die just as readily as anyone else, if you stick your knife in the right place and twist it. Besides, if a shitty disease and a rotten planet like this couldn’t beat us, a bunch of walking appliances with attitude isn’t going to do it.”
Owen nodded, made his goodbyes, got up, and moved on. He thought he’d enjoyed about as much of the Colonel and Otto’s company as he could stand. But for all the old soldier’s venom, Owen couldn’t help thinking that maybe he had a point. Lepers were the dark, unspoken secret of the Empire—the forbidden subject that was never openly discussed. No cure, no hope, so just dump the poor bastards out of sight where the rest of us don’t have to look at them. Owen had known about Lachrymae Christi vaguely, but it had never occurred to him to do anything about it. Leprosy was something that happened to other people. But now, having had his face rubbed in it, he vowed to do something about it. Something. Assuming he and they survived.
He rounded a corner and saw Moon, sitting alone, his shoulders shaking as tears ran jerkily down his face. There was no one near him, no obvious cause for his sorrow. In fact, those few lepers near him seemed to be trying their best to ignore him. Owen hurried over to the crying augmented man, and then stood awkwardly over him, not sure what to do.
“Moon? Tobias? What is it? Has someone said something, done something? . . . Dammit, if anyone’s been having a go at you, I’ll rip his lights out!”
The Hadenman stopped crying abruptly and looked up. “Oh, hello, Owen,” he said quite calmly. “There’s nothing wrong. No one has upset me. I was just trying out the emotion, to see what it felt like. Please, sit and talk with me.”
Owen frowned, shrugged, and sat down next to his friend. Moon wiped his face with a cloth, quite unself-consciously. Owen looked at him. “So . . . nothing’s wrong? You’re all right?”
“ I don’t know. I confess I’ve become very confused of late. This is my second life, Owen, and many things are still new to me. Memories of my first life are always returning, but jumbled, distorted, like the actions of someone else seen dimly on a holoscreen. I can remember doing things, but not why I did them, or how I felt while doing them. I spent most of my first life living among humans, developing human traits, but most of that is lost to me now. I have emotions, I . . . feel things, but they are strange, puzzling things, because I have no frame of reference to put them in. I’m like a blind man seeing colors for the first time. So I laugh and cry, savoring their unfamiliar flavors, trying to discover what separates them, and how they relate to the world I live in. I see the lepers here, living and fighting and dying so bravely, and I think tears are appropriate, but it is hard to be sure. It’s very hard to be human, Owen. I don’t know how you manage it so effortlessly.”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” said Owen. “You just need to practice. That’s how everyone learns. And yes, tears are appropriate here. If I had any left, I’d shed them. But I’ve seen so many people die, fought in so many desperate last-ditch battles, it’s hard for me to find room for such emotions. I have to be strong, unmoved, because everyone else needs me to be strong for them. I’d love to have the luxury of being weak again, Moon. To have someone else be strong, be the hero, so I could lean on them. It’s hard work being a living legend.”
“Yes,” said Moon. “I remember you being a hero. You risked your life to open the Tomb of the Hadenmen after I failed. After I deserted you, leaving you and the others to fight the Empire while I went off on my own, convinced it was my destiny to reawaken my people. I was wrong. I won’t let you down again, Owen. I’ll never desert you again.”
“Of course you won’t,” said Owen. “I never thought otherwise.”
“There are more new things in me, apart from my emotions,” said Moon. “ I recently attempted to run a diagnostic on my tech implants, the internal mechanisms that made me an augmented man. To my surprise, I found most of them to be missing. My body has absorbed them. But I am as strong and fast as I ever was, my senses as clear, my thoughts as sharp. It’s as though I don’t need the tech to be more than human anymore.”
“It’s the Maze,” said Owen, nodding. “When you passed through with the rest of us, it put its mark on you too.”
“I am neither man nor Hadenman anymore,” said Moon, frowning. “I’m becoming something else. Something different. My eyes still glow and my voice still buzzes, but perhaps only because I expect them to. You’re further down the road than me, Owen. What am I becoming?”
“I don’t know,” said Owen. “Perhaps something we have no name or even concept for.Yet.”
“I feel something when I consider this, Owen. I think . . . I’m scared.”
“We all are. The unknown is always scary. But no doubt the caterpillar fears becoming a butterfly, even as its instincts compel it to construct its own cocoon. We have no control over what’s happening to us, so . . . enjoy the ride. And remember you’re among friends.”
“I have observed the lepers. If they can face their changes with such courage, so can I.” He looked sideways at Owen. “ I think . . . something new is developing in me. I can . . . sense things. Things not apparent to anyone else. It’s not telepathy. More like empathy perhaps. Either way, believe me when I say we’re not alone here. There’s something else out in the jungle. Something hidden and very powerful.”
“The Hadenman army? ”
“No. I’d know my own people. This is alive, but it’s like nothing else I’ve ever encountered. It thinks slow thoughts, but it’s growing angry. And it knows where we are.”
“Does it have a name? An identity?”
“Oh, yes,” said Tobias Moon. “It’s the Red Brain.”
Hazel d’Ark had joined up with her two alternate selves, trading gossip over their respective Owens, when a single leper woman approached them, limping tiredly into their path. The three women stopped abruptly rather than run her over, and the leper woman dropped to her knees before Hazel.
“Forgive my impertinence, blessed one, but you are Hazel d’Ark, the liberator of Golgotha? ”
“Well, yes,” said Hazel. “Though I didn’t exactly do it alone. Was there something you wanted?”
The leper pushed back her cowl, revealing a face half eaten away by rot. Patches of bare skull showed through the sparse remaining hair, and her teeth showed clearly where her left cheek should have been. Up close, the smell was appalling, though Hazel and the others tried hard not to show it. The leper woman produced one gray hand from under her cloak. It was skeletally thin, and only had two fingers on it. The leper woman held it out in supplication to Hazel.
“You have been touched by God, lady. You have worked miracles. I have seen it on the holo. So work one more miracle, for me, I beg you. Heal me.”
Hazel fell back a step, shocked. “I... I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“You have healed your own terrible wounds. You are blessed by God. Only lay your hand on me, and I too shall be healed, I know it.”
Hazel looked to Bonnie and Midnight for help, but they were stunned too. Hazel looked back at the leper woman before her, and didn’t have a damned clue what to say. So in the end she reached out a hand, her flesh crawling, and laid it firmly on the leper’s bowed head. They both waited a few moments, but nothing happened. After a while the leper woman sighed, and got to her feet again.
“Thank you for trying, lady. My faith was not strong enough. I won’t trouble you again.”
She pulled her hood back over her ruined head, and limped slowly away. Hazel looked after her, and then back at her hand. She rubbed it hard against her side and then stopped, almost guiltily. She realized there were other lepers, watching her.
“ I would have helped her if I could.”
No one said anything, and after a while Hazel walked on. Bonnie and Midnight followed her, some distance behind.
The Hadenmen attacked just after first light. The rain was coming down like it had a grudge, but the augmented men didn’t even seem to notice. They came streaming into the clearing from all sides, forcing their way through the packed tree-line by sheer brute force, wood splintering and cracking under their servomotor-driven strength. The guards in the watchtowers sounded the first alarm, and lepers went running to the walls to defend the Mission. Hundreds of Hadenmen came marching through the rain in silence, attacking without challenge or war cries. They strode endlessly out of the jungle, tall and perfect like living gods, graceful beyond hope, with the sun burning in their eyes and energy weapons in their hands.
A fusillade of arrows rained down on them, mostly glancing off their internal armor. When the arrows did pierce flesh, the augmented men merely pulled them out and let them drop to the ground. They opened fire with their hand disrupters, punching holes in the wooden outer wall, concentrating their fire to create holes large enough to enter through. The wooden wall burned briefly here and there, but the driving rain soon put it out. And then the Hadenmen reached the outer wall, and the first few broke through into the compound beyond, and it was all hand-to-hand fighting after that.
The lepers up on the catwalks kept up a steady rain of arrows on their enemy, and now and again an augmented man crashed to the ground and did not rise again, an arrow in his eye. Other defenders poured boiling oil on the Hadenmen climbing through the holes they’d made in the wall. Those few defenders with energy weapons picked their targets carefully, and cursed the long two minutes it took for their guns to recharge between shots. Inside the wall, defenders rushed to meet the intruders, and held them in place by sheer weight of numbers.
Owen and Hazel fought side by side before the largest hole in the outer wall, and every Hadenman that came within reach of their weapons died. They swung their swords with far more than human strength, and the heavy steel blades sheared cleanly through internal armor and implanted steelmesh to pierce the more vulnerable organs beyond. And fast as the augmented men were, Owen and Hazel were faster. They stopped the invaders in their tracks, and step by step they pushed the Hadenmen back out into the clearing, kicking aside the bodies of the fallen to get at their inhuman foes.
Bonnie Bedlam and Midnight Blue danced among the augmented men, laughing and singing as they killed. Bonnie threw herself into the thick of the combat, cutting everything within reach, ignoring the injuries she took herself. The wounds healed so quickly she barely felt the pain, and wouldn’t have cared if she had. She was death and destruction, and nothing could stand before her. Midnight teleported back and forth across the compound, blinking in and out of existence just long enough to strike down an enemy and be gone again. She seemed to be everywhere at once, and everywhere she was a Hadenman fell.
The two Sisters of Glory came howling out of nowhere, swinging their swords too fast for the human eye to follow. They viciously cut the Hadenmen, darting in and out again, slashing at vulnerable joints and unprotected throats. Sister Marion strode stiff-leggedly into the thickest part of the fighting, lurching and swaying and somehow never where her enemy thought she would be. She brought her sword around in a long, sweeping arc, cutting right through a Hadenman’s glowing eyes, and then finished off her blinded prey with a knife to the heavy veins at the top of the thigh. Blood splashed her uncanny witch’s outfit, and looked perfectly at home there.
Sister Kathleen swung her sword with both hands, cutting a path through the enemy through sheer determination. She ducked and darted, bobbed and weaved, elusive as mercury, leaving dead men in her wake.
Colonel William Hand went to meet the Hadenmen with grim purpose and some satisfaction, glad at last to be doing what he was meant to do and did so well. He roared and chanted old battle cries as his sword rose and fell in simple butchery, and his heart was glad. The augmented men tried ganging up on him, but Otto was always there to watch his back, hacking the long legs of the Hadenmen and bringing them down so his knife could reach their throats and faces. He laughed and sniggered as he killed, reveling in the destruction of such perfection of form.
And everywhere, inside the Mission and without, the lepers fought as best they could, with guns and swords and sharpened farm implements, anything that came to their gray and rotting hands. Anyone who could stand came out to fight, throwing themselves at the enemy with the calm desperation of those who knew they were dying anyway. And perhaps also because they were determined to preserve the few things in their life that still had value and meaning to them. The Mission, their homes, and the Saint who had come to give them hope when they thought they had lost it forever.
They would fight for the Mission, but they would die for Saint Bea.
Slowly the Hadenmen were forced back out of the Mission and into the clearing beyond, though many died on both sides in the process. The greater open space favored the augmented men, giving them more room to move, and exploit their strength and speed, so the defenders stuck close to the outer wall, guarding the open holes, refusing to be tempted farther. And still the Hadenmen came streaming out of the surrounding jungle, hundreds and hundreds of them, tall and perfect, and perfectly deadly.
A group of Hadenmen felled one of the trees with their energy weapons, and used it as a great battering ram against the main gate of the Mission. As long as the gate held, the lepers were safe from the main force of the augmented men, and both sides knew it. The heavy wooden gates shuddered under every blow, the great steel hinges groaning loudly. The guards in the watchtowers rained down arrow after arrow at the straining Hadenmen, but even when one fell, another was immediately there to take his place. The gate began to bow inward as the massive weight of the tree slammed into it again and again. After a while the constant back and forth motion of the Hadenmen churned the ground beneath them into thick mud, and the weight of the tree sent them slipping and sliding in the treacherous morass. And then Owen and Hazel arrived to save the day.