War Games (9 page)

The elf’s fire had me pinned down; there was no cover to hide behind, nor did I dare try to move. I fired my own weapon into the forest in the general area where I’d seen the movement. Spent photonuclear cases bounced off my back. But I knew the elf had already swooped to another tree. He was more mobile than I.

I heard the Gunny calmly telling the rest of the platoon to hold their fire and wait for the elf to show himself again. As soon as his pulsar flashed, they were to sweep the section of forest with their beams. That the elf knew our tactics was the only thing saving me and the others caught in the open. The elf knew that as soon as he fired, a score of pulsar bursts would stab into his general area. So be had to shoot on the move, as he was gliding from tree to tree.

That made aiming his weapon a little difficult. But not difficult enough to suit me; clouds of rock vapor puffed around me where his shots hit too close for comfort.

The standoff began to get a little tedious.

Each time the elf shot from concealment, a salvo of return fire burst into the forest, shattering oxide wood into tiny slivers that drifted through a polymer mist like floating glitter. But the elf was quick enough to avoid getting hit by either the beams or exploding fragments, and fired again from another position. One elf was tying up an entire platoon of Corps combrids, while his comrades made good their escape.

But that was their plan, of course.

Trinks continued to moan in agony, clutching his belly. A combrid left the safety of the forest and darted across the clearing toward us. Pulsar fire traced a smoking path behind the weaving and bobbing course taken by the combrid. Amazingly, he wasn’t hit. Then I saw who
she
was. The combrid was the chimera. She dove beside Trinks and lay on the ground beside him. Her hands busied themselves. Fingers probed cleverly designed chinks in his combat armor. Hypodermic claws sought the veins underneath polymer-toughened skin and injected neuropeptides into sluggish blood. Endotalis flogged his failing heart, while endopamine toned blood vessels and raised blood pressure. Endosmin sealed leaking capillaries and endosteroid stabilized cell membranes. Endorphine obliterated pain.

When Trinks’s physiologic functions became stable, the chimera used two other claws. Endophetamine sent synthetic courage to his basal ganglia. Endocholine speeded nervous transmission to thrice normal and strengthened muscle contractions by augmenting depolarization potentials.

All of which meant only one thing to a simple grunt combrid: Trinks stood up with blue fire in his eyes. The same fire coursed in his veins. He was now three times as strong and fast as he had been. And many times braver. He feared nothing. He felt no pain. He could do anything. He was berserk–overwhelmed with fighting rage, like a vengeful Norse warrior.

Trinks charged across the clearing, running toward the trees from which the elf sniper shot. It didn’t seem possible a man could run that fast–his legs blurred with motion. A salvo of autopulsar fire streamed from the forest, but the puffs they made in the ground were behind Trinks. The eIf didn’t believe a man could move that fast either, and didn’t lead enough. In an instant, Trinks was across the clearing and among the trees. A moment later, I saw his pulsar flash. Light flared upward, silhouetted against a sky of mist. An elven scream sounded, then the elf appeared in the air over the clearing, gliding on taut pseudowings. Singed fur marked the sites of pulsar wounds. Pulsar beams stabbed from the surrounding forest. Only charred remnants of the elf made it to the ground. Most of him became smoke that mingled with the mists of Titan.

I found Trinks propped against the side of a tree trunk. He had his visor flipped up. He looked at me through half-open eyes, blurred by nictitating membranes.

“Did I get the fairy?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Good. You want to make sure to do whatever you need to do before the rush goes away.” He coughed blood and spat through his oxygen bubble on the ground beside him. There was a puddle of clot there already, like red pudding. “Horses, it’s good before it goes. I think I could have taken a whole company of the devils by myself. But the fire burns out too quickly. And when it goes, there’s nothing left.”

“You’ll be OK.”

“Sure. Keep saying it. I believe you. Sure I do.”

“Corpsman!” I yelled. Where was that cat-faced chimera?

“Pepper,” Trinks said, “that’s what she shoots into you. Hot pepper.” He looked beyond me. “Here she comes now. Sergeant Pepper.” He tried to laugh, but coughed more blood instead.

The chimera knelt beside him. Her fingers busied themselves again. Trinks closed his eyes.

I went back to the camp and helped the others “sanitize” the area. After a quick search and a photo session for the spooks at Corps Int, we set our own booby traps, leaving behind hundreds of needle mines that would detonate should an elf even glide over one in the air. A shaped charge of plastic explosive threw needles of isotope into a 180-degree hemisphere. Each needle was a miniature nuclear device consisting of an isotope sandwiched with a fission catalyst. When the needle struck something solid, isotope and catalyst collapsed together, reaching a micro-critical mass, which fissioned and exploded. The tiny nuclear explosions produced remarkable results, particularly if they occurred within a previously living body. Needle mines were alnlost as devious as elf tricks. Almost. We had to post signs around the area, warning it was mined. Didn’t want innocent civilians getting hurt. Frogging waste of time, all of it.

In the hoverbus, on the way back to base, the chimera held Trinks in her arms. The rest of us were quiet, each thinking our time would be coming. When turbulence buffeted the hoverbus and we were jostled, Trinks moaned with pain. His lips moved silently: Sergeant Pepper. Then the chimera would kiss his head, soothing away the moans. She murmured in his ear. Her whispers could not be heard by the rest of us. We didn’t know what lies she told him. I should have noticed the strangeness that had come to hide in her eyes. But I was preoccupied.

When we docked at base, everybody got up and filed down the aisle. I paused as I passed the chimera and Trinks, His eyes were closed. I touched her shoulder.

“How is he?” I asked, remembering things I should have left forgotten.

“Dead,” she answered simply, in a flat voice. Wrongness faded from her eyes.

“What happened? Why didn’t you do something?”

“I did everything I could. There was nothing more to do. He didn’t cry, nor hurt too much. He didn’t cry,” she said again.

I thought I saw a wet gleam behind her nictitating membranes, before I was crowded ahead by other combrids.

* * *

Later, I found the chimera standing alone at the base perimeter. Beyond the green-crackling force-field, bright forest gleamed in Saturn-light, hydrocarbon fog glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp. Dark flutterings marked the passage of elves among trees. Occasionally, when the elves revealed too much of themselves, pulsar beams stabbed into the murk as automatic sensors reacted to the disturbance.

“Sergeant Pepper,” I whispered.

“What?” she asked, turning to face me.

“Nothing. Only a name Trinks called you before he died. Sergeant Pepper. Short for Peppardine.”

“Or peptide?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. It didn’t matter now. “You did what you had to do,” I said. “And Trinks did get the sniper. I know that was important to him. You don’t like the elf that kills you to get away.”

“I’m glad then.” She turned away, bringing her hands to her face. She was crying. But I stared at her hands, thinking of the claws held within them. And I thought of the mind of a Lady in the body of a combrid. Ladies had their own peculiarities. So did chimeras. Trinks’s death had given me an idea. It was time for night games to begin. I was ready this time. I’d learned a little since I’d run away from my own nobility. I’d been afraid of it for a long time. I found you couldn’t run away. You had to use it to your advantage.

I had never told anyone but Vichsn I was the scion of old Earth nobility, son of Lady and Lord. I’d never mentioned the endless rituals of pain my parents had performed before I killed them, except to her. She knew too much about me. The spooks might trace me through her when I deserted. I knew what had to be done. But I didn’t have the stomach for it. Perhaps there was another way. I wondered.

I touched Firiel’s shoulder. I saw something at the edge of the forest I wanted her to see. It was time to start playing the game.

She took her hands away from her face and looked up. I pointed to the trees beyond the force-field. A small shape was hurled into the air in our direction. Almost immediately autopulsar beams stabbed out. One of them hit the shape. It fell to the ground smoking.

“What was that?” she asked.

“An elf baby.”

“What do you mean? A baby ...” Her eyes widened in mock surprise.

“When one of their babies dies, they throw the corpse out like that, knowing the computers controlling our autopulsars can’t distinguish between the living and the dead. Then they claim we shoot innocent babies, and have the charred remains as proof. Elves have no scruples. They use what they have. What else is a dead baby good for?”

Suddenly she was holding me tight. Her sobs were muffled against my chest. I stroked her back, trying to smooth away the hurt. She almost had me fooled. “What kind of a mother could do that?” she asked.

“A practical mother. They’re not like us.” I lied. They were the same. “But you’ll get used to it.”

“Will I? Is that what happens? Do you become cold with no feelings? Is that how you protect yourself? By not caring?”

“You guessed it.” What else could I say? She was right. But she’d known that all along. She hadn’t fooled me.

I walked her back to her quarters. Fog deepened. Mist swirled, mixed with hydrocarbon snow. In the forest, elves wailed in mock mourning of their dead baby.

At her door, she paused. This time I saw it in her eyes.

She invited me inside.

* * *

Waking, the chimera stirred against me. Her eyes were dilated wide in darkness. She saw that I too was awake.

“A dream?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ve been having a few lately.”

“What do you dream?”

“Tonight about babies.” Her voice softened. “About my baby.”

“Your baby?”

She looked at me. “Didn’t you know? My
dead
baby. I was once a Lady of Telluride. Lords must have heirs. It’s expected of them. But babies die, don’t they? They die all the time.”

“Just as Lords do?” She hadn’t touched me with her claws. I’d wanted her to earlier, but she wouldn’t. I thought I knew a way. Vichsn had given me the idea.
They killed their lovers,
she had said. “How do Lords die?” I asked, smiling.
How do children become orphans?

She looked at me closely. “The usual ways,” she said. “Don’t you read the scandal sheets? With overdoses. Or smashed in the wreckage of racers. Or trampled beneath the hooves of ponies. They drown sometimes. The usual ways.”

“And sometimes they kill each other. Duels? Arguments?”

“Sometimes.”

“Jealous fits of rage?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s simpler out here.” I took her hand. “The elves kill us. Or we kill them. That’s all.” I pressed the tip of her index finger. A claw slid out of its sheath. “Let me see how it feels?” I asked.

A blue drop of peptide formed on the tip of her claw.

“Not yet,” she said.

“When?”

“Later. There’ll be time for that. I don’t want it to be like that now.”

“How do you want it, then?”

“I’m not sure.” She took her hand out of my grasp. Five claws gleamed. “But not that way now.” She kissed me, slipping her tongue into my mouth. I tasted bitter endolepsin. But it could not affect me that way. Digestive enzymes destroyed it. She had to kiss the CNS stud on my head. In that way, the neuropeptide could gain ingress to my brain. She bit my nose, then laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“I just had a silly urge. Quite tempting, really.” She laughed again.

I waited for her to continue.

“Do you ever have any
animal
thoughts?” She smiled at the profanity.

“Don’t be vulgar. They don’t use that much xeno-DNA in our hybridization. Do they in yours?”

“Apparently. Sometimes the urges are overwhelming. Mostly feline. Cat-thoughts are so delicious.” She put her arms around me. I felt claws scratch my back. “I pounce on little mice,” she said. “I bat them with my paws. Sometimes I let them think they can get away, but as they dart across the floor, I reach out and hook them with my claws.”

“And when you tire of playing with them?” I asked.
The game had begun.

“Cat-thoughts are so delicious.” She smiled in the dark. “I bite off their little heads.” She laughed. I’d heard that kind of laugh before. “They can’t cry without their heads.”

Eventually we slept again.

It was my move.

BATTLE LIGHT
cast a green glow from panels in the ceiling of the hoverbus. The camofilm covering our combat armor matched both the intensity and hue of the light, as it would any illumination. The result was like a surrealistic mutaholo—blurred shapes blended into background; movement could not be distinguished from the flickerings of shadow. Fuzzy images came in and out of focus: visored helmets talked to each other; gloved fingers checked battle gear; bodies clad in skintight polymeric armor dangled from acceleration harness. Combrids in full battle dress appeared as insubstantial as wraiths—ghosts to be exorcised with incantations. No more noticeable than specters haunting dreams.

But any elf terrorist that was fooled by our camouflage was dead himself. Elves knew how dangerous apparitions could be.

The whine of the hoverbus’s gravturbines sent an ache into my teeth. For some reason, their particular frequency resonated within the matrix of my tooth enamel. The resulting vibrations hurt like termites burrowing into wooden dentures. I clamped my jaws tight. Sometimes the pressure helped. This time it didn’t. So I tried to think about something else. That was easy enough. I had plenty else to worry about. Like how to keep the spooks from capturing a terrorist without being burned for treason myself.

I’d had a real shock at the briefing that morning. I was still too numb to think properly. The spook briefing officer told us we were going on a mission to capture the notorious renegade, Grychn Willams. The name sound familiar? That’s right, the same Grychn I knew as a child. The same Grychn who’d helped me kill my parents. The same Grychn who knew all about the timestone. That’s what worried me. The spooks had been after the sailor for the timestone. That information would be in their computer files. When they started interrogating Grychn, she’d eventually tell them about me and the timestone, along with everything else in her mind. Spook interrogations went that way. The correlation would eventually be made. Once they started looking, I’d be easy enough to find, umess I’d already deserted. Then they might be able to trace me through Vichsn.

If the spooks were after me, I may as well kiss all my plans good-bye. No empire. No sycophants. No courtesans. No freedom for very long.

So I had to make sure Grychn wasn’t captured alive. Dead would be OK. As long as I didn’t have to kill her. I didn’t want to start answering questions about why I wanted her dead.

I stared through the transparent floor. Crystalline forest passed rapidly beneath the bus. Elves lurked somewhere among glass trees.

We were skimming a zigzag course through the hydrocarbon mists of Titan, trying to stay at treetop level. In that way, we hoped to avoid detection by both elven sentries and electromagnetic sensors. Before elf gunners could plot a four-space probability fix in which to lob a minimissile, we wanted to be in a different air sector altogether.

Swirling mists shrouded crystal trees. The passage of the hoverbus disturbed the clinging fog and lifted wisps into curlicues in our wake. Sunlight sparkled from the facets of leaves uncovered by haze.

The radianuclear industry was dependent on the forests of Titan. Only here were the conditions right for the growth of living crystals to occur. Sure, they could be grown in a lab. But they cost a lot more that way. Radianuclear crystals found application in industry, medicine, transportation, communications, and weaponry. The Terran economy required a cheap, abundant supply of them. Unfortunately, that fact was not unknown to the elven guerrillas. They tried to put pressure on the Colonial Government by disrupting the harvest of crystals. It was a big-stakes game, amounting to billions of credits. More than a few lives had been lost over the dispute. C’
est la vie!
Cheap, I mean.

Before the day was over, a Terran renegade was going to have to die. I had to make sure of that. I had no choice.

The fog lifted momentarily. Linear color dazzled my eyes, as sunlight ricocheted from crystalline surfaces. An image flashed: firelight was caught and held in amber eyes. The memory hurt just a little before I pushed it away. There was no point in thinking about things that might have been. The Grychn I knew had been on Earth. We weren’t on Earth now. We were on Titan. And Titan was about one billion kilometers from Earth. Someone once said you could never go back home. I believed that as surely as I knew distance was more than linear measurement. Combat hybrids never went home. Not even in body bags. They burned you on your garrison world. That was Corps tradition. Theoretically, you signed up for a specific tour of duty. If you survived your tour, theoretically you got to retire with a nice bonus and pension. There was a catch, of course. Being a combrid was the most dangerous job in the System. Almost as hazardous as being a terrorist. One rarely survived the combrid experience. That too was Corps tradition. Was I going to buck tradition? You’re damn right I was.

You played the game. You cheated if you could get away with it. The Corps could kill you, but they couldn’t make you not want to live. That meant my old childhood sweetheart had to die. It was me or her. I was looking out for me.

Other combrids sat beside me, cradled in acceleration harness. We were all standard combrids; we looked enough alike to be siblings: all of us were two meters tall and about ninety kilos of mass; our skin was black with antiradiation pigment granules; nictitating membranes could close over our eyes to protect them from cold and vacuum. In a sense, we were siblings—we shared the same xeno-genes that had been inserted into our cells to make us hybrids. Whatever our appearance before going into hybridization tanks, when we emerged we looked the same as every other combrid. It was more efficient that way. The military loved uniformity.

Peppardine sat in the back this time. There was a distant look in her eyes as she waited. I knew the same look was mirrored in mine. But for different reasons. My games with her would have to wait. A childhood game needed finishing.

Waiting to go into combat was always hardest on the nerves. The actual fighting was easy by comparison—you didn’t have time to think too much then. But when waiting, dark memories were free to surface.

While you waited, there were a hundred things you couId do to occupy your thoughts to try to keep lost images away. Helmet sensors could be calibrated; circuits could be checked for neutron leaks. You could plug your cyborg stud into the battle computer of the hoverbus, and fight mock wars with it, to condition synapses and reflex loops. Its program even let you live once in a while, so’s to keep your spirits up. Weapons could be field-stripped. Photonuclear clips could be checked to insure they’d feed properly. You could do all those things and many more. But you didn’t. Because you were leaving the killing behind.
Adios,
glory.
Au revoir,
valor. Just one more and you’d be through with it. Maybe two at the most. The death game had complicated rules—you were about to begin another stage of it.

Yet you couldn’t rid your mind of the old images. You knew it was better to let them come now, to get their torment over with. Nights could be spent in other ways. There were other passions, other thrills.

I looked about the cabin, but I was too preoccupied even to think about arranging a liaison. And that was usuaIIy the easy part, the arranging. The hard part was making sure you came back. And making sure the one with whom you’d arranged your liaison came back also. After that, no problem. Combrids were always wired tight with blood lust after a firefight .

But I had other worries now. Like what to do about Grychn. If she were captured alive, all my plotting would be for naught.

Life sure was a bitch.

But what the hay, nobody made
me
sign on with the Corps. It wasn’t a choice between the Corps and the cyborg factories. I’d made another choice. No sense having regrets over what might have been. Besides, I’d got out of worse situations than this.

So what if I was flying at treetop level in a hoverbus with thirty-nine other combrids. So what that in a few minutes more there was a reasonable certainty that I or one of my buddies would get killed. I still had a chance. That was more than I would have had on a prison farm in Antarctica. I still had my empire to build. All I had to do was to take care of a couple of loose ends. Big deal!

Blue eyes caught mine. Delight was trapped in their retinal reflections. Vichsn smiled, running the pink tip of her tongue along the edge of her teeth. The swellings and curves of her body were accentuated by skintight armor: taut breasts, rippling muscles, smooth buttocks, flat belly. She closed her eyes and touched her tongue to her nose. I knew what she wanted—a liaison tonight after the mission. Combrids were always horny after missions. Sex helped get rid of other tensions. But she’d have to look elsewhere. I was too worried about another loose end to be interested in sex. Besides, I needed a little variety. After all, I’d just taken a tumble on the wombskin with Vichsn the night before. Not that she wasn’t good. There was a certain joy in her carnality. Her exuberance amazed me. I was ready for a change, though. I knew just what I needed. She was sitting in the back. Besides, I didn’t want Vichsn to feel too secure about our relationship. A little jealousy would stir things up nicely. But I would have to be careful to produce just the right situation. Then the rest would take care of itself. If only Grychn could be taken care of so easily.

The door to the forward cabin opened. Red nav light mingled with green battle light, producing a brownish murk. A spook stepped through. The door closed behind him, shutting out the red. He walked slowly down the center aisle. I shivered involuntarily. Spooks gave me the creeps—my guilty conscience, I guess. This one even looked halfway human. His name was Colonel Kramr. He wore loose-fitting coveralls of camopolymer, bloused around gauntlets and boots, with a crimson beret covering his bald head. The silver skull of Corps Intelligence was pinned to the beret. I assumed he was the same spook who had briefed us earlier. Not that you could tell by looking at his face. He could wear any face he wished. Or any body. The spooks of Corps Intelligence were chameleons—they could assume the guise of almost any other hybrid. Multihued pigment granules mixed intradermally to give their skin any desired color. Feathers, hair, fur, scales, tooth and nail could be grown or shed. Subcutaneous fat could be molded to produce various physiognomies. All were under conscious control. Spooks could change their appearance at will. Spook fieldmen infiltrated the various hybrid guerrilla groups—if their disguises weren’t perfect, they didn’t live very long.

Kramr now looked like an ordinary combrid: his skin was black as obsidian; ocular membranes ringed his eyes like silver monocles; his scalp was bald with the skin convoluted into ripples as though wires were buried underneath. Not bad. He had only made one mistake. Who ever heard of a combrid being a commissioned officer? Officers were Lords and Ladies, not grunt combrids. A trivial point, but valid. Anyway, Kramr’s face truly was a mask—only in death would neural control relax and the spook’s real face appear. Until then, no one would know his actual visage. Lover or enemy, both would have to be content with masks,

I doubted if Kramr had any lovers. I’d heard stories about him. His ruthlessness was notorious. He’d torture information out of his own brother in order to advance the Terran cause. They said his zealousness was a result of his being a synthetic personality. His real persona had been stripped away and replaced with artificial memories and feelings. A real company man, all right. I briefly wondered what crime he’d paid for with his own identity. Did he even remember what he’d done? Probably not.

Spooks usually didn’t go on missions with us grunts. When not under cover, they normally remained in seclusion in their orbital spook houses, plotting schemes for us grunt combrids to carry out. Kramr going with us meant the spooks wanted to catch one renegade Terran pretty badly.

And why not?

Grychn WilIams was no common elf guerrilla. Elves were captured every day. There was only one Grychn. Besides being the scion daughter of Lord General Willams, she was rumored to be a lieutenant of Dr. Maizay, the leader of the elven rebellion. Grychn had been a gadfly to the Corps for over two years. Not only did she engineer particularly devious terrorist attacks, but she was the darling of the left-wing press, with her flamboyant beauty and noble heritage. And the public was still titillated by rumors of interspecial sex. Especially when the paramour was a child of royalty.

The Grychn I’d played with as a child had grown up to be much more famous than I. But that would change eventually. After I recovered my timestone,

No one knew Grychn and I had once been lovers. I can keep a secret. So can Grychn. She’d been keeping our secret for almost ten years now. How do I know she’d kept the confidence? I’m not bound by electronic chains in a cyborg factory, am I? Proof enough.

A long time ago she said she loved me. Maybe she still did; at least the memory of a preadolescent boy with whom she could share the anguish of trying to grow up amid the petty games of cruelty of the idle rich. I suppose she was hurt when I ran away. I don’t know. I never looked back. You’ve only got one chance with me.