The Man Who Never Missed (6 page)

“Me,” Khadaji said.

“Excuse me?”

“Me. I’m the leader of the Shamba Freedom Forces. In fact, I’m the whole army.”

Creg’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “I don’t much care for jokes, mister—!”

Khadaji took a deep breath, centered the flickstick in his mouth, and blew, hard. There was a paper tube inside the thinly packed flickstick and inside the tube, a single dart of fluroproj-transparent plastic, just in case. The dart tore through the tip of the smoldering flickstick and across the desk, hitting Befalhavare Creg’s throat. The poison took him, one knee snapping up into his desk, throwing him forward. Number twenty-three-eighty-eight, Khadaji thought. He wouldn’t be able to top this one.

He stood and walked to the door, slid it aside and was out. He locked the door behind him. The Lojtnant looked startled.

“Time to go,” Khadaji said.

“That didn’t take long.”

Khadaji shrugged. “Who are we to question the C.O.?”

“I should check with him—”

“I wouldn’t. He told me he wanted a few minutes to think about what I told him. No calls short of planetary emergency, I think he said.”

The Lojt nodded. “All right. This way.”

It would take five minutes to get back to the Jade Flower; it would probably be another twenty or thirty minutes after that before anybody seriously tried to disturb Befalhavare Creg; there would be another few minutes of confusion after he was found before the chain-of-command collected itself enough to check the recording and figure out what happened; finally, a few more minutes would elapse before troopers stormed the Jade Flower, looking for the Shamba Scum. He could figure on an hour, at least. Plenty of time.

Inside the Flower, Khadaji found Sleel. “Clear everybody out,” he said. “We’re closing.” “Huh?”

“The Jade Flower is going to close. Tell Anjue to start herding the troops out; I want the place cleared in fifteen minutes.”

“But—but—”

“Just do it.” Khadaji was aware of Sleel’s stare at his back as he walked toward the drug room. He rapped on the densecris window and got Butch’s attention. “What’s happenin’, Boss?” “Open up, Butch.”

The reaper locks snicked open and the thick stainless steel door swung wide. The chief pubtender stood in the doorway. “Somethin’ up?”

“Go help Sleel. We’re closing for a little while. I want everybody outside.” “What’s the deal?”

“Not to worry, Butch. Somebody will be asking for me soon—tell them where I am.” He walked into the drug room and started to cycle the door shut.

“What is it, Boss? You in some kinda trouble? Listen, me ‘n’ Sleel can hold ‘em off if you—”

Khadaji smiled. “Thanks, Butch, I appreciate it. But you do what I told you, that’ll help the most.” The door swung closed. Khadaji walked over in front of the dispensing window and stood framed in it. He saw Butch and Sleel both look at him, and at least a dozen troopers saw him before he opaqued the window. The crystal faded slowly to black. Alone in the room, he took a deep breath and slowly sat on his heels in the kneeling position called seiza. He had at least three-quarters of an hour, plenty of time for a short meditation.

His mind would not be still. It had been over ten years since he’d learned the first of the calming procedures he’d used from that point. They had become almost automatic in that time, his control was nearly perfect. Zazen, kuji-kiri, throndu, point-contraction, mantra, mandala—he knew them all, cages for the monkey brain. But the monkey was elusive this time. And it had a larger, fiercer cousin, a beast which slept in a deep and black cave in the back of Khadaji’s mind. The monkey’s nervous chattering of doom awoke the shaggy creature. Death? It said, red eyes narrowing. No. I will fight Death and kill him! I am not ready to die. Never.

Khadaji sighed. Too many years, too much preparation had gone into this; too much was stirred for him to calm himself now. Instead of being lulled, his mind was preternaturally alert, filled with thoughts and desires and memories. He saw quietly, but his head was full of storm; epinepherine surged through his blood and washed over his shores in pounding waves. Khadaji remembered.

He remembered it all.

Chapter Six

THE WOMAN EXPLODED into a shower of blood and torn flesh as the slugs from his carbine smacked into her. The look of surprise on her face, of puzzlement, touched him. She had not known she could be hurt, that she could die. It was there on her face as she fell, the amazement. Among the thousands of them charging across the harvested wheat field, Khadaji saw her face clearly. But the look was on other faces in the background. Wrong, the look said. This isn’t right, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, those dying expressions said—

“Khadaji, get your quad to the left, three hundred degrees! There’s another wave coming!”

“Jasper, Wilks, Reno, the Lojt says cover three hundred, stat!”

“Why are they still coming, Emile?” Reno was almost sobbing. “We’re blowing them to fuck and they ain’t even armed! They’re fucking crazy!”

“Goddamn fanatics,” Jasper cut in. “They don’t think they can die, their leader’s told them they’re invincible. Well, we’ll show the stupid ratholes—” He triggered another blast of his carbine, waving it back and forth at hip level like a water hose. Three hundred meters out, four or five of the attackers went down, human wheat in the field used to grow a different crop.

“Stupid fuckers, stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!” Jasper screamed as he fanned his weapon back and forth. All around them, other quads burned the air with blasts from their carbines, firing a locust-cloud of explosive bullets at the oncoming enemy. Thousands of the attackers dropped, so many they were stacked two or three meters high in places, with others climbing the hills of human debris to keep coming. Those were cut down as well, until the mounds of dead grew higher still—

“Why don’t they stop?” Reno was crying, pointing his empty carbine at the sea of people, clicking the firing stud over and over. “Why don’t they stop? Why?”

Khadaji felt gray, he felt as if a barrel of sand had been poured over him, ground into his eyes and nose and mouth and muscles. His arms ached from the weight of the carbine, the stink of electrochem propellant filled his nostrils, the roar of the explosions seemed continuous, even through the mute-plugs in his ears. But he kept firing. And firing. And firing…

—exploded into a shower of blood and torn flesh. “—your quad to the left, three hundred degrees—!”

“—Goddamn fanatics—.”

“—stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!”

Khadaji turned away from the slaughter and dropped into a squat over the dry ground; he ejected the magazine from his weapon, drew a full one from his belt and clicked it into place. The sensors in the carbine noted the load. There was a quiet whine as the first round cycled into the firing chamber. He felt as if he had been dipped in lead; the smallest movement was hard, straightening and turning took the energy of a ten klick run. He moved in slow motion, a man standing in thick lube gel to his neck. He pointed his weapon in the general direction of the attackers—there was no need to aim—and triggered it. The Parker carbine vibrated in his hands, sending explosive bullets to join the killing. It seemed to him as if he’d been born to this foreign world, as if he’d lived his whole life here, firing and loading and firing and loading and firing, as if he would surely grow old and die here. His chronometer must have stopped, it showed that only an hour had passed since the first wave of fanatics—yes, Jasper was right—fanatics had swept toward the foam-blocked positions of the Confed’s Jump-troops. Only an hour? He had never fired for a solid hour before. Sometime during that period, a supply robot had issued him a new weapon; dozens of the anodized aluminum dins ran back and forth behind the line, dropping new belts of loaded magazines and replacing burned-out weapons, so the firepower would not slacken.

And still they came. There must be millions of them, he had never seen so many people in one place, all moving with such singleness of purpose. They weren’t even armed! The dead were piled into mounds of warm flesh, there had to be two or three hundred thousand of them covering the field, withering lower under the explosive spray of a ten kay at full throttle.

Why? Why did they walk into certain death, never pausing?

His weapon clicked dry. Mechanically, he turned, squatted, and reloaded. The machinery of his carbine whined again, telling him it was ready.

Why are we killing these people?

Khadaji stared at his weapon. The barrel was hot, smoke rose from it in thin tendrils into the cooler air. The weapon seemed alien, suddenly, a strange instrument whose function he couldn’t understand. The gravity was a standard gee, the air carried enough oxy, but this was not his world. The bright yellow sun was hotter than his own; the smells of planet Maro were different from those of San Yubi. Ten thousand of the Confederation’s finest had been sent here, to spend ammunition and time target shooting.

No. Those weren’t targets out there. He was shooting people, people who laughed and cried and ate and fucked and he was killing them. In the name of any god which might have ever existed, why? What could justify that? What had they done to deserve to die? Because they opposed the confed? Because the confed wanted order on this world? It was insane!

“Khadaji, what’s up? Your weapon jammed?”

The voice of the centplex’s commander, Lojtnant Hogan, blared from the transceiver over Khadaji’s left ear.

“Jammed?” The word was as meaningless as the chunk of deadly plastic, spun crystal and metal that he held.

But the Lojt misunderstood. “Supply is on the way. Hold on for a minute.”

Khadaji became aware of his breathing. The damped noise of the constant firing faded from his consciousness; the yelling of the troopers dwindled, the screams of the dying trailed off, and all he could hear was his own breathing. In, out, a little hoarse, but it was steady. His heartbeat was slow, a gently throb under his skin. He felt as if he’d been wrapped in a thick blanket, he was warm, comfortable and alone. He stood slowly and turned yet slower, to look at the sea of dead and about-to-be-dead.

Why?

Because.

The invisible blanket was removed. All the sounds and sights and smells and tastes came back in a rush. The stink of death, of explosives, the cries, the blood. Everything burst upon him in that moment. He knew! He understood why! He could not have said it, there were no words, but the Realization burst from his innermost being. It was all right. ALL RIGHT! Not good, not moral, but he understood it, all in a single cosmic flash which lasted only a second. It was more potent than any psychedelic he’d ever taken, stronger than anything he’d ever felt. Emile Antoon Khadaji suddenly and without any logical or apparent reason knew just who he was, exactly what his place in the universe was. He knew who he was, and so he knew too what he must do.

He grinned and put his left hand on the top block of foam, then vaulted over it and began to run toward the approaching mob. The sunshine warmed him; the smells were fine, now.

“Buddha! Emile, what the fuck are you doing—?”

“—Khadaji, get back here—!”

“—pull your fire or you’ll hit him—!”

“—slipped his drive—!”

As he ran, Khadaji tore the transceiver from his ear and tossed it away. The voices from the radio went with it. The explosive bullets screamed and whined past him, but they didn’t matter. He would be hit or he wouldn’t, it was all the same, it didn’t matter in the overall scheme of things, whatever was right would happen…

A tumbling bullet nicked his left boot, ripping the heel away, and he stumbled, tripped and fell. He managed to turn the fall into a shoulder roll, came up and kept running. Without the heel, it was a lopsided run, he nearly fell again, but he kept going. He was fifty meters out and nearing the first of the dead. Another fifty meters and he would be there—

A body near him jumped under the impact of a slug and an arm blew away from the corpse and bounced from Khadaji’s chest as he ran. He didn’t slow. He could see the faces of the attackers now, dull, almost like plastic dolls, showing no fear or emotion as they moved toward their goal. They didn’t have a chance of reaching it, of course, he knew that. They would learn it as they died; only then would the vapid expressions change in sudden surprise.

He passed the first of them. They ignored him. His uniform seemed to make no difference, they could not focus on a single man. He began to strip the lightweight gear away, still running.

When he was down to a thin coverall, he finally slowed to a walk. There were still thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, all moving opposite the way he now walked. Those in front of him moved to let him pass, as if they knew he was a man with a mission, as if they could somehow see he was a man on fire.

He walked on, not knowing where he would go, what exactly he would do, only that he was going to do something. He had no money, no way to get off the world, no way to live. He had known only the military and he was done with that now. But he didn’t worry. He had no cares and no problem was too big for him to solve, he knew he had the answers somewhere within him, he had only to look.

Somewhere within him, he would find a plan.

Chapter Seven

THE MEMORY OF it was still strong as he wandered about the streets of Notzeerath. A few kilometers away, three-quarters of a million people had died violently only days earlier, but there was no sign of it here. There was no fear of the Void in these people, he understood that now. They were believers in soul regeneration, of being born anew after each cycle. Their High Priest was considered a god and they would march into the teeth and claws of death for him. Many had. More would. Khadaji was wrapped in his personal Realization still, and so he understood. He knew whatever answers he needed would come to him—he was operating totally on an intuitive level for the first time in his life. He didn’t worry about the Military looking for him. They would surely think he was dead—walking into the fanatics as he had, he should have been torn to pieces. They wouldn’t even look for his body, among all the others. He stood on a corner, awash in the sensual input of the city: six-wheeled vehicles with alcohol-powered engines rumbled by on hard plastic tires; people shopped at an open-air fruit and vegetable market; the steady thrum of a broadcast generator vibrated from the plastcrete through his bare feet. He had thrown his boots away.