Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 2 - Lasertown Blues

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Lasertown Blues
The Sand Wars 2
Charles Ingrid
To my editor, Sheila Gilbert, with many thanks, and to the wonderful Wollheim
organization.
Table of Contents
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART II
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
^ »
No suit, no soldier. It’s as simple as that.” The bullet-nosed D.I. looked
down the row of men who sat before him, their shoulders bare and sweaty
against a too white sun. “We can hand you a laser rifle, but you’ll never be a
soldier.”
It was not really as simple as that. It never was. Still, the men sat there,
covered in alien dust, and listened to the D.I. One, a man not-old and
not-young, shivered involuntarily, feeling naked under the Malthen sun, for
he hadn’t been out of his armor much in the last six weeks. His skin, also
too white, began pinking rapidly. They’d been shucked out of their armor
after days on patrol, drilled and exercised while their equipment had been
racked and taken away.
Young men, not much older than boys, flanked him on either side, their
gazes intent upon the drill instructor. But Jack Storm had been in this
situation before and though his jaw tensed along with the others, he didn’t
quite feel what they felt. He’d mustered up good enough to wear battle
armor years ago—now he only wondered if he was good enough to join the
Emperor’s personal guard. And unlike the others sitting in the rows in front
of and behind him, he wasn’t here out of any patriotic sense that he owed
his service to the Emperor. On the contrary. He felt keenly that the Emperor
owed him.
He was twenty years older than most of them. His body didn’t show it
though, for he’d spent seventeen of those years adrift in cryogenic
suspension. As he sat cross-legged in the courtyard and listened to the D.I.’s
voice bounce off the incredible, forty-foot-high walls that surrounded them
there on the parade grounds, the sweat dripped off his lean body and
puddled to the ground. His sandy colored hair slicked back darkly. His high
cheek-boned face was tanned, to the neckline, for the recruits only wore
their helmets half-time, and the Malthen sun was quick to darken their skins
any time they were exposed to it.
Jack squinched his pale blue eyes closed for a second, shutting out
everything. As quickly, he opened them, not liking what he’d felt for that
fraction of a second. The dead blue-black sleep of cryogenics, cradling him,
killing him, for seventeen years… He reminded himself that there were days
when that curse was almost a blessing. A forty-odd-year-old body wouldn’t
have made it through the last six grueling weeks.
The man next to him shifted. He tossed a smokestick butt into the dust.
“What’s he leading up to?”
“You’ll see,” Jack answered quietly. He resisted the impulse to look back,
and up two stories, to the offices overlooking the parade ground, where the
whippet-lean man would be watching today, as he had every day, the
volunteers in training. The man, a legendary mercenary hand-picked by the
Emperor to form this guard, had no name, just as Jack Storm had no age.
The Owner of the Purple knew Jack well—but even that friendship held no
sway with the D.I.
The D.J.’s arrogant gaze swept over them. “All right, men. We all know
only one out of every four of you will make it to the Emperor’s Guard. What
you don’t know is when or how that decision will be made.” He crossed his
arms over his gleaming silver chest. “Today’s the day. You’ve been graded
by your performance for the last few weeks. Today is wash out day. Your
suits were given to you and you were shown how to maintain them. The
final determination will be made based on the condition of your suits. They’re
being stripped down and evaluated right now.”
“Fuck,” muttered the redhead to Jack’s right.
The sentiment echoed inside Jack, too. They’d just come in off three
days’ patrol with no chance to charge or repair their gear. Just what the hell
did these people expect?
But under Jack’s first conscious dismay, a deeper thought channeled. The
corner of his mouth quirked up in a wry smile. The man who respected his
gear, who planned for and maintained a reserve, who could repair his suit
better than an unfamiliar mechanic—that was the sort of man Emperor
Pepys wanted at his back.
And that philosophy just might have been the death knell to all of Jack’s
ambitions. His suit was an antique compared to the equipment most of
these youngsters used. His suit was the forerunner, the prototype that this
new equipment was based on. His suit had gone to the Sand Wars and
come back.
And his suit was alive.
Jack gave an involuntary shiver as the D.I. boomed, “Dismissed!” How
deep into his suit could they delve? He licked his lips. They were dusty. He
tasted an alkaline tang. The farm boy left behind in his past told him this
soil couldn’t be fertile. It was a good thing they were soldiering on it instead.
A shadow fell over his thoughts.
A broad, callused hand reached down for Jack. He took it and got to his
feet.
“Cold beer?”
Jack shrugged, as someone in the milling group bumped him slightly.
“Why not. It’s going to be a wait. They’ve got over three hundred suits to
test.”
He fell in beside the chunky, dark-skinned man who’d stood over him.
He didn’t know Daku well, although he was in his late twenties, one of the
oldest volunteers there, outside of Jack.
Rank hadn’t been allowed in basic training. Daku might be a five star
general or a civilian. He’d worked, trained, shoulder to shoulder with Jack
for weeks without a word. Now Daku looked across his shoulder at Jack. An
unreadable expression flickered over his dark face. His broad nose wrinkled
slightly at the bridge. “Worried?”
“Yeah. You?”
Daku nodded. “Although,” he observed, “there are some who should not
wonder at their fate. Those that used their equipment roughly, figuring it
will go to scrap, while they are chosen and go on to new suits and new
ranks… well, for those, it will be a foregone conclusion.”
They were buffeted by the ranks of the trainees as they reached the
double doors to the outside. Daku took the crowding good-naturedly, even
as Jack shrank back a little. He disliked crowds.
Jack changed quickly in the locker room. He wore a pair of serviceable
gray pants with many pockets, and a loose, flowing shirt. Daku wore dark
colors, as dark as he was, and as Jack joined him, he reflected briefly that he
wouldn’t want to meet Daku in one of Malthen’s back alleys. Hover taxis
were waiting outside the lockers… in response to the scores of calls from the
training grounds, a fleet of them had come to meet the obvious need.
He and Daku picked an automatic unit and got in. Daku paused, his
finger poised to punch coords into the computer board. “Where?”
Jack shrugged. “Wherever.”
Daku punched out a series and they sat back, speeding downhill from the
Emperor’s rose-pink complex, toward the belly of the beast known as
Malthen, the city for which the planet had been named.
***
Daku waited until after the second round of beer had been served, then
he leaned forward in the quiet bar. The booth creaked a little under his solid
weight.
“And what about you? You don’t seem worried.” Jack flicked a nail
against his cold glass. The neat scar along his right hand, where the little
finger had been sheared off, ached. It served as a reminder that the frost of
cold sleep could injure, even kill. He wondered what the other volunteer
wanted from him—why Daku had singled him out. Even as Daku had been
assessing him, Jack had been weighing the dark man. This was not a cheap
bar. None of the other trainees had come here. Nor was it a street bar, filled
with mercenaries and other outlaws, or street toughs. Jack looked up,
wondering just how friendly he wanted to become with this potentially
dangerous man. For a moment, he wished he had the Purple with him, but
the commander had agreed their friendship would be off-limits during
Basic. The Owner of the Purple had recommended Jack to Emperor Pepys
himself, and gotten him the appointment to the training program. From
there, Jack’s fate was in his own hands—just exactly where he liked it.
A man walked in the front door of the bar and stood a moment,
half-shadowed. He drew first Jack’s glance, and then Daku’s. Daku’s mouth
quirked. “Just a Walker.” Jack stirred in the booth. The man was armed,
discreetly, but heavily, and that nagged at him.
Walkers were a radical sect that had sprung from the old Terran religion
called Christianity, and they were dedicated to finding anthropological and
archaeological proof that Jesus Christ went on to walk other worlds. Still,
Jack had never seen an armed one before. The sight tugged at his mind. A
militant Walker would be everybody’s concern. The man spoke softly to the
bartender and then faded into one of the back rooms.
Daku grunted. Then he emptied his glass. “Well, Jack, you’re taking it
coolly. I might almost think you’d been through this before.”
To keep his companion placated, he murmured, “There’s a lot at stake,
but sweating won’t make it happen.” He had no intention of telling the dark
man that he had been through all this before. He wasn’t listed in any of the
Dominion computer records. Nothing existed to designate him as the last
fighting survivor of the Sand Wars on Milos except his battle-scarred
memories, and he intended to keep it that way. It had been twenty years
ago, ancient history to most, but not to him. Not to a man lost in cryogenic
sleep and hooked up to a military debriefing loop, where he relived every
step of the Sand Wars in dreams to which there had been no end—no end to
the point where he’d lost nearly every other memory of another life, of his
existence before he’d become an infantry Knight. He existed now for one
reason and one reason only. Revenge. All he had to do was keep finding the
pieces and putting them together. He hoped this man was one of them.
“That is true,” Daku replied. He lifted his glass and took a long draft of
beer.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw a young woman come into the bar.
She was lithe and graceful, and had the quickness of a street acrobat. Her
tawny hair, wild about her pretty face, and her sleek, dark blue jumpsuit
bespoke her reason for being in a bar this early. She had all the earmarks of
a high-class prostitute. Jack frowned as her gaze flicked his way and then
passed him by, as she went to the bar rather than a table and sat.
Daku set the glass down. “So where have you come from, with such high
hopes,” he prodded.
Jack looked back to him. So this was going to be a show me yours and I’ll
show you mine session, he thought briefly. He hesitated only slightly before
pulling out a photo and slapping it down on the table, and answering, “I
rangered there.” He watched for the other’s reaction.
Daku sucked in his breath as his fingers pulled the photo closer. “Where
did you get this?”
“I bribed a member of the survey team.”
“It’s not a pretty sight.”
Jack didn’t respond. It wasn’t. The sight of a once verdant, beautiful
planet reduced to a char was beyond description. To Jack, the only hope in
the photo was that the dark blue seas and vaporous clouds still remained.
“This place was firestormed.”
“Yes.”
Daku pushed the photo back. “The only one I’ve heard of recently was
Claron. No warning.”
“No reason.” Except perhaps to wipe out Jack. A nerve ticked along his
jaw line. First Milos, to the Thraks, and then Claron, to firestorm. Vengeance
needed, twice over.
“There’s always a reason. We just don’t know it yet.” The dark face paled
a little. Then Daku said, “That was a bad affair.”
“Yeah.” Bad was an understatement. Memories flooded Jack, memories
of waking up to a firestorm inferno and escaping while an entire planet
burned. He pushed them back. “Where are you from?”
“Africa Two,” the man said and it was Jack’s turn to feel surprised. The
all black planet rarely dealt with the Triad systems. Segregated by choice
and desire, African Twos were seldom friendly toward other systems. It
seemed vastly out of character for a citizen to be interested in serving
Emperor Pepys as a guard. Daku sensed his reaction and said, “I don’t like
Thrakian warships in our space.”
That was a philosophy Jack could second. Despite treaties, enemies
should stay enemies. He did, holding up his glass. “Death to all Thraks,” he
said softly, proposing treason in his toast. He cared little if he revealed
himself. It was the threat of Thrakian swarms that had made him leave his
farm on Dorman’s Stand and volunteer for the army in the first place. He
had little enough memory left of his family and home planet.
“Amen,” answered Daku and they drained their glasses.
“Ever see a Thrakian sand planet?” Daku asked casually.
Jack had. He’d been there on Milos, fighting, while the Thraks
terraformed the planet into a vastness of dunes, sands to be filled with their
eggs for hatching. But he couldn’t answer without giving himself away. He
took a long draught of beer before answering, “No.”
“I have. Dorman’s Stand, one of the last to go under. It’d eat away at
you, tell you that. A dead planet now, for all that it’s a nursery to Thraks.”
His home. His family. His fields and orchards, ground to dust and sand.
His hand clenched around his beer glass, and to distract himself, Jack
watched the amber-haired blonde at the bar shrug off a potential customer.
Her gaze flickered briefly over Jack. He cleared his throat, hoping that Daku
hadn’t noticed. He checked his watch as his drinking companion began to
slip his card into the table slot to order another round of drinks. He held up
his palm. “That’s enough for me. I want to get back.”
Daku looked up. He smiled pleasantly. “But there’s no need to worry,
Jack. You won’t be going back. I’ve been sent to turn you back into the clay
we are all made of. Dust to dust.”
He looked into a needle-nosed palm laser. Jack reacted before he knew he
was going to react. He dropped down, kicked the table up into Daku’s teeth,
and rolled out of the way of the spray of fire. The blonde at the bar
screamed and tables rang as they overturned, the area clearing as customers
hit the deck.
As Jack dove into a shadowy corner and skidded into a crouch, Daku got
to his feet. Blood poured from his upper lip. The palm laser shook.
“You won’t get out of here. It’s not my job to let you go.”
Jack ducked as laser fire crisped the booth behind his head. He kissed the
floor as sprinklers went on and a fine mist drifted down in response to the
assault. He could hear Daku move to another position.
The blonde crawled over to Jack and slipped him a handgun. “What
would you do without me?”
“Live alone,” he said. “Now find a corner and stay the hell out of the
way.”
She gave him a pout and crawled past him as ordered.
“I suppose you won’t tell me who hired you.” Jack paused and calculated
possible moves.
Daku just grinned. The blood from his lip stained his jowls a dark purple,
giving him a feral look. He pivoted around, spraying deadly fire as he
moved. But Jack had already jumped six feet to the left. A shielding table
melted into a puddle of plastic which smoked and a choking smell filled the
air.
Daku crouched, believing he was out of Jack’s sight, and mopped his lip
with the back of his hand. He checked the charge in his gun. Jack watched
him uneasily, knowing that he could end it all right there except that he was
against shooting a man in the back, and he wanted to know why he was a
target.
Jack dove for his enemy. He barreled into the assassin, sliding him out
onto the floor. “Who hired you? Who did it?” He knew it was a mistake the
moment he wrapped arms about the other. Daku bunched his shoulders
and Jack felt the massive strength of the other as the killer’s muscles flexed.
He wasn’t going to be able to hold on long enough to save his life.
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